In a
flurry of leaks, advance excerpts and reviews, Robert Gates has put the
President and his White House on the kind of political griddle he professes to
abhor.
In
his book, Gates says he “bristled at what's become of congressional hearings,
where rude, insulting, belittling, bullying and all too often highly personal
attacks on witnesses by members of Congress violated nearly every norm of civil
behavior. Members postured and acted as judge, jury and executioner...in a
permanent state of outrage or suffered from some sort of mental duress that
warranted confinement or at least treatment for anger management.
“I
continue to worry about the incessant scorched-earth battling between Congress
and the president (which I saw under both Bush and Obama) but even more about
the weakening of the moderate center in Congress.”
No
one will argue with that, but in view of excerpts from Gates’ memoir, questions
arise about his own anger management, not only over Congress but White House
colleagues like Vice-President Joe Biden, “a man of integrity,” who “has been
wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the
past four decades.”
Say
what? Is this the same Biden who, as a Senator, appeared regularly on Sunday
talk shows, to criticize and question the misbegotten war in Iraq that Gates
was helping the Bush Administration to conduct?
The
political flood of finger-pointing that he has unleashed will go on for a while
but, in a back-handed way, Gates may have done a service for those who question
the sanity of our continuing investment of so much blood and treasure in the
Middle East by bringing the issue front and center.
The
propriety of his doing it now is another issue entirely. For a man who entitles
the book “Duty,” his timing raises questions that infuriated John F. Kennedy
when he was in the White House.
In
1962 when former speech writer Emmet Hughes wrote a tell-all about his Eisenhower
days, Kennedy was appalled. According to Ted Sorensen, Kennedy thought Hughes
"had betrayed the trust of Republican officials by quoting their private
conversations against them" and told his White House staff, "I hope
no one around here is writing that kind of book."
No
one did. Both Sorensen and Schlesinger wrote doorstop volumes about JFK’s White
House tenure without a hint of gossip. Loyalty did not stop at his death.
We
live in a different world now, but reading Gates’ unbuttoned book, it would be
wise to remember that it is the work of a man who, although he says he “silently
wept” at night for troops in Afghanistan, served all his “Duty” as a Washington
spook, not in combat.
Whatever
else he says about Obama’s White House, the people Gates is excoriating in his
untimely memoir had actually been trying to stop their bleeding while he was still micro-managing
it at the CIA and in the White House.
1 comment:
The book by Mr. Gates has worse timing than the book by Emmet Hughes. Gates' memoir came out while his president was still in office; while Hughes' "The Ordeal of Power" came out well after Ike left office.
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