Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

CHAPTER 8 Transition

I did not enjoy being secretary of defense. As soldiers would put it, I had too many rocks in my rucksack: foreign wars, war with Congress, war with my own department, one crisis after another. Above all, I had to send young men and women in harm’s way. Visiting them on the front lines and seeing the miserable conditions in which they lived, seeing them in hospitals, writing condolence letters to their families, and going to their funerals took a great toll on me. In Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals, she wrote of President Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, who, after making a decision that would lead to a soldier’s death, was found “leaning over a desk, his face buried in his hands and his heavy frame shaking with sobs. ‘God help me to do my duty. God help me to do my duty!’ he was repeating in a low wail of anguish.” I wrote out that passage and kept it in my desk.

I wrote earlier that my time as secretary had two themes, war and love—the latter referring to my feelings about the troops. Sometime in 2008 I began telling troops in the war zones and elsewhere that I felt a sense of responsibility for them as if they were my own sons and daughters. I did not exaggerate. Nothing moved me more than a simple “thanks” from a soldier, and nothing made me madder than when I learned that one of them was being badly treated by his or her service or the Pentagon bureaucracy. My senior military assistants spent a huge amount of time helping individual young men and women in uniform who encountered indifference or neglect when faced with a problem; usually I would learn of such things in a letter sent to me, or see something in the media, or hear something in a meeting with troops. Whether it was getting new washing machines for a remote forward operating base in Afghanistan or helping a young Marine with post-traumatic stress cope with the bureaucracy, no problem was too trivial. I wanted those troops to know I would do anything to help them—and I hoped that word would spread. I also wanted to set an example: if I could make time to try to help a single soldier, then by God so could everyone else in authority. I knew my overwhelming love and sense of responsibility for the troops, along with my deep conviction that we had to succeed in these wars, would lead me to stay on as secretary if asked by a new president.

After my initial months in the job, Gordon England gave me a small countdown clock, ticking off the days, hours, and seconds until noon on January 20, 2009, when I could set aside my duties and return home for good—as the label on the clock said, “Back to the real Washington,” a reference to my home in Washington State. Journalists and members of Congress were always surprised when I could tell them exactly how many days I had left as secretary; I carried that clock in my briefcase and consulted it often.

With the election in 2008, we were facing the first presidential transition in wartime since 1968. I was determined to minimize any chance of a dropped baton and began planning for the changeover as early as October 1, 2007, when I asked Eric Edelman to tell the Defense Policy Board, chaired by former deputy secretary of defense John Hamre, that I wanted them to devote their summer 2008 meeting solely to transition issues. Sometimes there was a temptation by an outgoing administration to try to solve all problems before Inauguration Day, but this would be my seventh presidential transition, and I had yet to see a new administration that did not inherit problems.

Early in 2008, there was press speculation that I might be asked to stay on as secretary at least for a while to ensure the smooth handoff of the wars, no matter who was elected president. At the end of March, when I attended an eightieth birthday party for Zbigniew Brzezinski, he said he had told the Obama campaign that if Obama won, he should keep me on. I stared at Zbig and said, “I thought you were my friend.” Press inquiries about whether I would stay if asked increased as the spring went along, and I usually would just pull out my countdown clock and show the questioner how long I had left. I devoted a fair amount of effort to quelling such speculation, often saying, “I learned a long time ago never to say never, but the circumstances under which I would do that are inconceivable to me.” During those months, I was clear both privately and publicly that I did not want to remain as secretary, did not intend to try to stay, and wanted only to go home at the end of the Bush administration.

My strategy was to be so adamant about not wanting to stay on that no one would ask. Because I knew that, if asked, I would give the same answer I had given President Bush in November 2006: With kids doing their duty fighting and dying in two wars, how could I not also do mine? I maintained a disciplined, consistent, and negative response to questions on this throughout the presidential campaign, with one private lapse. In an e-mail exchange in early April with my old friend and former deputy secretary of state for Bush 43, Rich Armitage, I let my guard down: “The best part of the job [secretary of defense] is the same as at Texas A&M: the kids. They blow me away. They make me cry. They are so awesome. Only they could get me to stay.” I then caught myself, and added, “Okay, that’s really highly classified. Because if Becky saw it, she would kill me.”

Even as I was trying to build a wall that would prevent me from being asked to stay, I was aware of the gossip and rumors circulating about me—and Mike Mullen. My press spokesman, Geoff Morrell, learned in late May 2008 from his contacts that the Obama campaign had “taken aboard” Mullen’s argument that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan simply wouldn’t allow for a months-long interregnum. Morrell was told that Obama wanted a bipartisan cabinet and that my staying in place would show foreigners that U.S. resolve would be undiminished; it would also reassure the domestic audience that Obama could be trusted on national security. There was some criticism on my own staff, once again, about Mullen’s “aggressive” legislative and public affairs “campaign.” I believed that his being seen as holding an independent view of things would be helpful with a change of administrations because he and Petraeus would then be better able to stand up to a new president if he wanted to do something drastic in Iraq. As I told one of my senior aides, “Admiral Mullen is fundamentally in the right place on Iraq and Afghanistan.” President Bush clearly wasn’t as confident as I was about Mike’s views on Iraq, because repeatedly over the ensuing months I would hear from various folks at the White House their concern that the chairman was already “positioning” himself for the next president.

In mid-June, there were several press articles about my efforts to organize a smooth transition, and speculation intensified about my being asked to remain in place for a while. Mullen and I often discussed how to handle the handover. I established a transition Senior Steering Group, chaired by my chief of staff, Robert Rangel. I did so to ensure that the vast preparations routinely undertaken by the Defense Department had coherence and coordination—and would be under my control. Mullen’s involvement was important because he would still be in his position in a new administration and would be central to continuity and a smooth transition. Senior Pentagon civilians had to be prepared to remain in place beyond Inauguration Day so a new secretary wasn’t sitting in his office virtually alone; that had been the case with Secretary Rumsfeld in 2001 as he waited for everyone else to be confirmed. Meanwhile one of Obama’s senior campaign advisers, Richard Danzig, was quoted in an article as saying, “My personal position is Gates is a very good secretary of defense and would be an even better one in an Obama administration.” In the same article, a McCain adviser said that McCain likely would ask me to stay on for several months to ensure a smooth wartime transition.

On June 18, there was a near disaster. Joe Klein, writing a piece for Time magazine, was told by Obama that “he wanted to talk to Gates about serving in his administration.” Klein told my press spokesman, Geoff Morrell, that, and Morrell told me. I was really upset. I told Geoff that publication of such a quote would render me useless and impotent for the remaining six months of the Bush administration. I told him to tell Klein as much, and that if he ran the quote, I would issue an unequivocal statement saying there were no circumstances under which I would stay on beyond the end of Bush’s term. Klein agreed not to run the quote because, he told Morrell, he didn’t want to hurt that prospect. In the end, the Time story had Klein asking Obama if he would want to retain me as secretary and Obama responding, “I’m not going to let you pin me down… but I’d certainly be interested in the sort of people who served in the first Bush administration [Bush 41].”

About the same time I heard from John Hamre that it was too late for me “to avoid being on the short list for SecDef for either Obama or McCain.” I e-mailed him back on Sunday, June 22:

In the midst of all this press speculation and to-ing and fro-ing, a most bizarre episode occurred on the last day of June, when I took a telephone call from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He told me that he was the one who had talked Obama into running for president (a lot of people were claiming that) but there was no candidate for vice president. Reid said he was thinking about me, and that was the reason for the call. It took a lot of willpower for me to keep from bursting out laughing. He asked me if I had a public position on abortion; I laughed, saying no. He asked if I was a longtime Republican. I said, actually no; I hadn’t been registered with either party for many years. He asked how long I had been an academic. He wanted us to keep all this very private between us. “Possibly nothing will come of it,” he said. I couldn’t figure out if he was serious, if it was just idle flattery, or if he was delusional. It was so weird, I never told anybody, in part because I didn’t think they’d believe me.

Washington, D.C., is always an ugly, jittery place in the months before, and weeks after, a presidential election. People outside government who want inside are jockeying for jobs in a new administration, and people on the inside are maneuvering to stay there—or beginning to look for new jobs outside. Sharp elbows and sharp tongues are everywhere. Gossip and rumors flow around town as freely as liquor at a lobbyist’s reception. Even senior career officials and civil servants are tense, knowing they will soon be working for new faces with new agendas and will be forced to prove themselves anew to people who will be suspicious of them because they served with the preceding administration.

On July 15–16, I chaired the last Defense Senior Leadership Conference of the Bush administration, a gathering of the service chiefs, the combatant commanders, and the department’s senior civilian leaders. We spent a lot of time on the prospective transition. I said that terrorists had tested the previous two administrations early—the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 came a month after Clinton took the oath of office, the 9/11 attacks less than eight months after Bush became president—so it was important that Defense be watchful well into 2009. I warned that a full civilian leadership team wouldn’t be in place for some time after the inauguration and said I would try to persuade Bush 43 to allow us to brief both candidates after the conventions. The chairman and others spoke about trying to establish contact with the campaigns. I reminded them that in preceding transitions, the incumbent presidents’ practice had been to funnel all contact with the campaigns through either the national security adviser or the White House chief of staff, and that the only organization allowed to brief the candidates before the election had been CIA. This presidential campaign would be more complicated for us, though, because both candidates would be sitting U.S. senators with security clearances and Senate staff authorized to ask for briefings. McCain sat on the Armed Services Committee, both Obama and Clinton on the Foreign Relations Committee. I said we had to be very careful about responding to their offices’ requests lest we cross the line between their legitimate needs as senators and their desires as candidates. Rangel’s Senior Steering Group for the transition would be the sole point of contact.

An example of such complications came less than two weeks later. Obama was going to Iraq, and on his return trip, we were informed by one of his staff, a retired Air Force major general named Scott Gration, that the candidate wanted to visit the U.S. military hospital at Landstuhl, Germany. All American wounded—and many of our coalition partners’—in both Iraq and Afghanistan were flown to Landstuhl to receive further treatment and stabilization before being flown back home. Gration said two campaign staff members would accompany Obama to the hospital. He was told that under Defense Department directives, the senator was welcome to visit the hospital with personal Senate or committee staff, but no campaign staff would be allowed to accompany him. There was a dustup with Gration, who I thought at the time was just trying to insert himself into the senator’s visit and was not actually speaking for him. In any event, Obama ultimately decided not to visit the hospital because he didn’t want there to be any perception that he was using troops—especially wounded ones—for political purposes.

About the same time, McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, attended a National Guard event in Alaska. The press asked Morrell why she was allowed to do so. He pointed out that as governor of Alaska, she was the commander in chief of that state’s National Guard.

Every day was a political minefield. The situation was not helped by rumors about my staying. These rumors were fed by occasions like Obama’s meeting with the House Democratic Caucus during the last week in July, where Representative Adam Schiff asked him if he was considering having me stay on for at least a few months. According to the magazine Roll Call, there were “quite a few moans and groans” from Democrats present, presumably appalled by the idea of keeping on a Bush appointee. In early September, the same publication suggested that McCain might keep me.

In September, Mike Mullen came close to inadvertently setting off a political bombshell that, in my opinion, would have seriously damaged him, the military, and the Defense Department. I wrote earlier that one of the few major disagreements I had with Mike and the chiefs was their nonconcurrence in my National Defense Strategy, specifically my view that we could take some additional risk in terms of future conventional capabilities against other modern militaries in order to win the wars we were already fighting. The usual practice, once the NDS is published, is for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to issue his own document, the National Military Strategy, intended to describe how the uniformed services would translate both the president’s National Security Strategy and the NDS into military planning and resource needs. I read a draft of the NMS closely and could see that Mike was plainly distancing himself and the chiefs from several fundamental elements of Bush’s National Security Strategy. A key component of that strategy for years had been “winning the long war,” a phrase encompassing the war on terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mike made no reference to it. The draft, however, did imply that our forces were unable to respond to multiple military contingencies, just the opposite of what he and I had been telling Congress. Mike also omitted any reference to promoting democracy, walking away from Bush’s “freedom agenda.” He told me he wanted to issue the NMS in early or mid-October.

To me, his timing was terrible. On October 5, I handwrote him a long letter stating my reasons:

On the substance of the NMS, I objected strongly to omission of any reference to promoting democracy. I thought Bush’s freedom agenda as publicly presented by the administration was too simplistic in that real, enduring freedom and democracy must be based on democratic institutions, the rule of law, and civil society—all of which are the work of decades. As with Jimmy Carter’s human rights campaign, the only countries we could meaningfully pressure to reform were our friends and allies; the worst offenders, including Iran, Syria, and China, ignored our rhetoric. But I reminded Mike that promoting democracy around the world had been a fundamental tenet of American foreign policy since the beginning of the republic. “What has differed,” I wrote, “has been how to accomplish or pursue that goal, and a new administration probably will approach it differently [from] the current one. But it will not abandon the goal.” I concluded that omitting the goal from the NMS entirely—and in a way obviously intended to be noticed—“seems to me to go too far.”

Mike made some modest changes in the military strategy document and agreed to hold it until after the election.

On October 14, President Bush made his last visit to the Pentagon to meet with the chiefs and me in the Tank. It was a reflective session, with each of the chiefs talking about how his service had changed during the Bush presidency. Mullen led off by saying the period had represented the biggest change in the U.S. military since World War II. We now had the most combat-hardened, experienced, and expeditionary force in our history, and if we could keep the young leaders, we would be ready for the future. He said that our forces were more balanced, more innovative, more agile, and better integrated and organized than ever before. I chimed in that the biggest danger to the military in the next administration would be pressure from Congress to reduce the number of soldiers in order to buy equipment. George Casey talked about the transformation of the Army from a force trained to fight Cold War–type set-piece battles to smaller “modular brigades” able to operate more flexibly; he also talked about changes in equipment. When Casey said the Army had gone from eight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in 2003 to 1,700 in Iraq in 2008, the president exclaimed, “Really? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Admiral Gary Roughead told Bush that in 2001 the Navy could put only one-quarter of our carriers to sea at once, but now we could put half of them out. He summarized the Navy’s contributions in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as success in developing shipborne ballistic missile defenses. Cheney asked about the Chinese missile threat to our carriers, and Roughead told him, “We’re making progress.” General Conway said the Marine Corps welcomed the increase in force levels that I had recommended and that the president had approved, and he said the Corps would achieve the new ceiling in three years rather than the earlier estimate of five. He said the Marines had no equipment issues. He reported on success with the Osprey aircraft (a program Cheney had tried to kill because of cost overruns and development problems in the early 1990s when he was secretary), and the vice president, with a chuckle, wished the Marine Corps the best with it. Finally, General Schwartz reported that the Air Force would grow from 300 UAV pilots to 1,100, underscoring that the service finally had embraced the future role of drones. He closed by asking the president and vice president to visit a bomber or missile base, before leaving office, to give a speech on the importance of nuclear deterrence. Finally, Admiral Eric Olson talked about Special Operations Command (responsible for training and equipping unconventional forces such as the SEALs and Delta for all the military services), which at 55,000 he said was 30 percent larger than in 2001. He said special operators woke up that morning in sixty-one countries doing their jobs. The president and Olson both observed that these elite units had suffered a high casualty rate. (Olson’s predecessor had told me eighteen months earlier that Delta Force had suffered 50 percent casualties—wounded and killed.)

Before Bush concluded the meeting, he said he didn’t think the current strategy of being able to fight two major regional conflicts at once was useful any longer because we “likely won’t have to do that.” He went on: “If that is the standard for readiness, we will never be ready.” He also said that we needed to focus on “nation-building” where “we have torn the nation apart and have a responsibility, but I’d be damned concerned about it in other places. Resist the next group that wants to do this—that is the State Department’s responsibility, even though you [the military] may do it better.”

No one in the Tank that day knew that the odds of my continuing to lead those same senior officers under a new president were increasing. The Obama camp had reached out to me privately. On July 24, Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island told me he was leaving shortly for Iraq with Obama, would be spending a lot of time with him, and wanted to know whether, if Obama was interested in my staying at Defense, I would consider that. I told Jack, one of the handful of members of Congress whom I truly respected, that “if he believes the nation requires me to stay, I would be willing to have that conversation.” A second call came on October 3, when Reed asked if I would be willing to meet with Obama. I told him that I didn’t think it would be appropriate for me to meet before the election but would be willing to meet afterward. In the meantime, I told Reed, I would prepare some questions to focus a potential postelection conversation.

After the call with Reed, I asked Steve Hadley to tell President Bush I had had a feeler from Obama about staying on. Steve called back to say the president was very pleased and hoped that, if I was asked, I would stay because it would greatly benefit the country. I called Reed on October 15 to arrange delivery of my questions, and a few days later, Robert Rangel handed them to him in a sealed envelope.

On October 29, Reed told me the questions had elicited a very positive reaction and even more interest, on the part of Obama, in having a conversation with me. He said that Obama had asked whether I wanted the answers in writing, whether I wanted him to brief Reed, who would then brief me, or whether the questions were to serve as the basis for a conversation. I said the last. Reed responded that Obama “will want to talk right after the election.” The more I thought about these contacts, the more I realized how extraordinary they were, truly unprecedented. Perhaps the most unusual aspect was a prospective appointee sending the prospective president-elect a list of questions to answer. Potential vice-presidential candidates, prospective cabinet members, and other possible appointees were always the ones who had to answer the president-elect’s questions or the questions his minions prepared.

My questions might have seemed somewhat presumptuous, if not impertinent. But Obama and I were both embarking on uncharted waters in the middle of two wars. There was no precedent, since the creation of the Defense Department in 1947, for a sitting secretary to stay on in a newly elected administration, even when the same party held on to the White House. As we contemplated such a historic move, I wrote Obama, “I think it would be more complicated than it might seem. The questions… are intended to help both of us think it through.” If this relationship was to work and benefit the country, we needed to understand each other clearly at the very beginning. I needed to know I could ask hard questions and get straight answers and that he would welcome straight talk and candor. And frankly, because I did not want to stay in the position, I felt free to press him both on my role and on the tough issues we would face. What did I have to lose?

A few days after the election, I was given the telephone number for Mark Lippert, one of Obama’s closest aides, so we could set up a meeting with the president-elect. I contacted Lippert and asked him to work with Rangel on the arrangements. Like my interview with Bush, this meeting was to be highly clandestine. We agreed to meet at the fire station near the General Aviation terminal at Reagan National Airport on November 10.

That day Obama was headed back to Chicago. His plane was on the tarmac at the airport. My staff was told I was “behind closed doors” in a private meeting while I stepped into the private elevator from my office to the underground parking area, climbed alone into the backseat of an armored Suburban, and headed for the airport. The meeting was set for three-thirty p.m., and I arrived a little early. All the fire trucks had been moved out of the station so both our motorcades could enter. After we did, the doors closed. The empty, spotlessly clean firehouse seemed cavernous. I was escorted to a small conference room that had been meticulously prepared by one of Obama’s aides for the meeting. There was an American flag in one corner. On the table were bottled water, almonds, two bananas, two apples, and a bottle of green dragon tea. I sat at the conference table thinking about my path to this meeting. I had a pretty good idea how it was going to end, partly because I knew that if he asked me to stay, I would agree. I had e-mailed my family the day after the election and foreshadowed what was to come: “Regardless of one’s political leanings, yesterday was a great day for America—at home and around the world. The land where dreams come true. Where an African-American can become president. And where a kid from Kansas, whose grandfather as a child went west in a covered wagon… became the secretary of defense of the most powerful nation in history. Big decision coming at some point in the next few days. Pray it’s the right one. But there is a debt to the Founders that must be paid.”

Obama arrived about twenty-five minutes late. I heard a commotion outside, and then he was in the room. It was our first meeting. We shook hands, he took off his suit jacket, and I took off mine as well. He got straight to business, pulling from his suit pocket his copy of the questions I had sent. The first question was pretty simple: “Why do you want me to stay?” He said it was, first, because of the excellence of my performance as secretary, and, second, because he needed to focus over the next six months or so on the economy and needed continuity and stability in defense matters. My second question was: “How long do you want me to stay?” I had added parenthetically that I thought about a year would be optimal to get the full Obama team at Defense—and elsewhere in the national security arena—confirmed and fully knowledgeable in their jobs. Saying “about a year” would not make me a lame duck but would not lock in either of us. Obama replied, Let’s leave it completely open publicly, with the private understanding of about a year. My third question: “We do not know each other. Are you prepared to trust me from day one and include me in your innermost councils on national security matters?” He answered, “I wouldn’t ask you to stay if I didn’t trust you. You’ll be in on all the major issues and decisions—and the minor ones, too, if you want.”

My fourth question was who the rest of the national security team would be. (I’d long believed that on the national security front, presidents should look at the key positions as a package—will it be a good team? I’d seen too many administrations where the senior leaders—especially secretaries of state and defense—disliked each other or couldn’t work together.) He was, I thought, very open with me. He said he couldn’t appoint Chuck Hagel (a former Republican senator from Nebraska) to a senior position if I stayed, so he was thinking about Jim Jones (a retired Marine general and former supreme allied commander Europe) for national security adviser or secretary of state. He mentioned Hillary Clinton for State, noting that she respected me but that her husband’s many different commitments were a potential complication. I told him I thought Jones would be better at the NSC as opposed to State because placing a retired general there would convey the image of the militarization of foreign policy. (I was wrong in making that point. Two generals who became secretary of state—George Marshall and Colin Powell, the former a hero of mine, the latter a good friend of many years—had never been seen as “militarizing” foreign policy; quite the contrary.) I said the director of national intelligence should be somebody he trusted implicitly, someone with no policy agenda.

The fifth question was about how to avoid my isolation (as a holdover) in the administration and in the Department of Defense. Above all, what would be my role in the selection of appointees in Defense? In the questions I sent to Obama, I had written that I didn’t see how I could enforce accountability unless appointees knew I had a role in their selection and that I could fire them. I added that I knew the civilian leadership needed to be an Obama team and that I would be open to his and his advisers’ recommendations, but that I would need the freedom to reject a candidate. Also, because we were at war and needed to keep the department running smoothly, I asked if I would be able to keep a number of incumbents in place until the Obama nominees were confirmed. He said that might be possible.

The sixth question concerned the deputy secretary of defense and his role. I recommended John Hamre, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who had served as deputy secretary in the Clinton administration. I told the president-elect I didn’t think Hamre would take the deputy’s job again without a good chance to succeed me as secretary. “My highest priority for any alternative candidate would be management experience, preferably in a large enterprise,” I said. Obama said he would take a run at Hamre about being deputy secretary and mentioned Richard Danzig (secretary of the Navy under Clinton) but said, whatever the case, he would consult closely with me. He said he’d like to get Jack Reed, but Rhode Island had a Republican governor who would appoint his replacement in the Senate. He went on, “How did Rhode Island end up with a Republican governor? I took that state with sixty-five percent of the vote.”

My seventh question was whether I could keep two or three current appointees, at least for the duration of my tenure. I mentioned Pete Geren, secretary of the Army; Jim Clapper, undersecretary for intelligence; and John Young, undersecretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics. Obama said that at first glance all seemed strong, and he would consider it. I also said I would want to keep my current immediate office staff and press spokesman.

The eighth question was: “Do you foresee any major change in the level of the defense budget for the first year of your administration?” He replied that he had campaigned on a strong budget for defense, but that was before the economic crisis: “I can’t make tough decisions on domestic agencies—antagonizing my supporters—and leave Defense untouched.” I reminded him of the deep cuts in Defense after each conflict going back a century and that recovery from those cuts was only at great cost in both blood and treasure. I also mentioned what I had told Bush 43, that there would be moves in Congress to cut troop levels in order to protect jobs at home associated with the procurement of equipment and weapons—a huge mistake, in my opinion. Obama assured me there would be no deep cuts, but Defense had to demonstrate discipline and make tough decisions.

The last substantive question I had asked posited that the two of us were probably “in the same place” on Afghanistan, but I needed to know “if there is some flexibility in how we achieve your goals in Iraq in order to best preserve the gains of the past eighteen months and so Iraq does not go south in 2009–10.” Obama said he was prepared to be flexible. I asked him if he agreed it was important to go after violent extremists “on their ten yard line and not ours.” Obama answered, “Yes. I’m no peacenik.”

We had been talking for fifty minutes. Finally, I said to him, “If you want me to stay for about a year, I will do so.” He smiled, stuck out his hand, and replied, “I do.”

At the end of the written questions, I had offered him some reassurance: “I have asked you some far-reaching questions. In turn, I want you to know that should I stay, you would never need worry about my working a separate or different agenda. As I have with other presidents, I would give you my best and most candid advice. Should you decide on a different path, I would either support you or leave. I would not be disloyal.” I repeated that promise at the end of the meeting, and I kept it for the next two and a half years.

The following three weeks were awkward, to say the least. I told President Bush almost immediately that I had been asked to stay. I was worried he might think ill of me for being willing to work for someone whose entire campaign had focused on attacking him and everything he had done in both domestic and foreign affairs. To the contrary, Bush was very pleased. I suspect he figured that the chances of preserving what had been gained at such high cost in Iraq were improved if I remained secretary of defense. I had told only three people about the meeting (other than Becky)—Rangel, Lieutenant General David “Rod” Rodriguez (who had succeeded Chiarelli as my senior military assistant in July), and my confidential assistant, Delonnie Henry. I was convinced that no one else knew but didn’t take into account the analytical skills of my other two military assistants who, watching the president-elect’s motorcade on television arrive at the airport and then veer away from his plane to a building, checked the peephole in my office door, saw that the office was empty after a so-called private meeting had run far beyond the allotted time, and concluded I had sneaked out to meet with Obama. Happily, they kept it to themselves. After the meeting with Obama, I told Rangel, press spokesman Geoff Morrell, and Henry that I wanted them to stay on with me, if they were willing. Rangel is a rock-ribbed Republican who had been staff director of the House Armed Services Committee when the Republicans were in the majority, but he and other key members of the core front-office staff, including Ryan McCarthy and Christian Marrone, all agreed to stay with me. They would be loyal to the new president and good team players within the administration, but that’s not to say there wasn’t periodic private muttering “inside the family” about some of the new White House staff, politics, domestic policies, and the incessant attacks on Bush—whom they had all loyally supported and served well. When I told Mike Mullen I would be staying, he seemed both pleased and relieved.

On November 12, when the Obama transition team leaders showed up at the Pentagon to get down to business, awkwardness set in. I was traveling overseas. No matter how well organized, well intentioned, and cordial a transition team is, its arrival in a cabinet department after an election always has the aura of a hostile takeover. We’re in, you’re out. We’ll now fix everything you screwed up over the past four or eight years. Often smug arrogance is plainly visible behind the smiles. Fortunately, the leaders of the Obama Defense transition team were Michèle Flournoy and John P. White, both of whom had served in the Defense Department during the Clinton administration and were at once knowledgeable and straight-shooters. What they did not know was that Obama had already asked me to stay, and so this transition would be like none other in the history of Defense. Rangel told them the Pentagon would support their efforts. He said our department wanted to focus on their needs and had dedicated staff and office space to support them, along with materials to help the new team in their first months in office. Rangel also told them that a number of appointees were prepared to remain in place while key Obama nominees went through the confirmation process, although that was completely up to the incoming administration. He suggested that they appoint a senior person to join our front office who could quickly get up to speed on issues and crises we were dealing with, observe the decision-making process, and thus be able to understand better the situations around the world that Obama would inherit on January 20.

Upon my return, I met with Flournoy and White on November 20. Afterward Flournoy sent Rangel a list of questions regarding current operations and possible contingencies. They wanted an overview of current military operations globally; how we had been balancing risk between Iraq and Afghanistan and other challenges around the world; our strategy and operations for combating terrorism; future contingencies that Obama should know about before January 20; the cyber threat; options for dealing with Iran; options for dealing with Russia; and planned changes in U.S. global military posture. She asked that we proceed with staff discussions at the “secret” level, which would allow for informed discussion of most issues but nothing too sensitive. The challenge for me and my staff, at this point, was that we had no idea who from the transition team would end up in senior Defense positions; I had no intention of briefing sensitive military contingencies or operations to individuals who were in the building in November and December but might not be after January 20. Also, high-level security clearances would have to be obtained. Bush and Steve Hadley had been very specific about not opening the door to the transition team on current counterterrorism, intelligence, and Iran- and Pakistan-related operations.

I agreed to Flournoy’s request with several caveats: I did not want the transition team briefed on the reviews of Afghan policy and strategy still under way; we would ask the Joint Chiefs for a list of operations that could be discussed at the secret level; and we would identify key operational plans—without getting into the specifics—that should receive priority attention by the incoming team. I told Rangel to let Flournoy know that any discussion of Iran options “would be incomplete” at the secret level.

My most important communication during the transition, though, was a long e-mail I sent on November 23 to John Podesta, overall head of the Obama transition effort, on the practical transition challenges associated with my staying on. First I told him that once I was publicly named, the transition team should report to both him and me, so I would know what issues, options, and recommendations they were framing and have an opportunity to shape what they were doing—or add my own thoughts for the president-elect. I said I understood that this would be Obama’s Defense Department and that, apart from my personal front-office staff, speechwriters, press spokesman, and the rest, the only senior appointee I wanted to try to persuade to stay on was Jim Clapper. I said my sole criterion for potential appointees was competence to do the job. I wanted to interview those being considered and then make recommendations to the president-elect for his decision. As I had told Obama in our firehouse meeting, “If I am to lead the department and hold people accountable, the senior-most officials need to know I recommended them… for their jobs.” I recommended, as I mentioned earlier, that I be authorized to ask incumbent appointees to remain in place until their successors were confirmed (which could take months). This was a rare if not unprecedented step. Virtually always, political appointees of the outgoing president are expected to leave by January 20.

I received a response from Podesta within a few hours. He saw no problem with the joint reporting arrangement for the transition team and, on personnel, thought the process I had proposed was fine. He promised a decision on Clapper within a few days. He said they might want to deal with incumbents on a case-by-case basis and would probably prefer to name some people as “acting” officials. The one place he pushed back a bit was on the press spokesman. He said he would need to get back to me because, when it came to dealing with the press, “the Obama team tend to be control freaks.” I e-mailed him back that Morrell was nonpolitical and “I feel very strongly about keeping him.” “I think I’ve been very flexible in terms of personnel,” I wrote, “but I trust this guy to do and say what I want, and I want him to stay.” Podesta quickly came back, “I’ll smooth the way.” I wanted Morrell to stay not only because of his competence in his job and his remarkable network of journalist friends and others around Washington, who were willing to tell him confidential tidbits they were hearing from their colleagues and government officials, but because he was one of the handful of people I could count on to criticize me to my face, to tell me when I had given a poor answer to a question, to question my patience (or impatience) with others in the Pentagon, and to question a decision. He was also one of the very few around whom I could let down my hair and be myself, vent without worry of a leak, and just relax. He could make me laugh as well. Frankly, I could not imagine continuing in my job without Rangel, Henry, and him.

At the firehouse meeting, Obama had told me that he intended to name his economic team first but hoped to name the national security team before Thanksgiving. As it turned out, the announcement was set for Monday morning, December 1, in Chicago. Becky and I spent Thanksgiving at home in the Northwest and flew to Chicago on Sunday. The next morning we drove to the Chicago Hilton and met the new team for the first time: Hillary Clinton, secretary of state–designate; General Jim Jones, national security adviser–designate; Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security–designate; Eric Holder, attorney generaldesignate; and Susan Rice, ambassador to the United Nations–designate. Jones was the only one I knew.

The president led off, and then each of us was given a minute to speak. I was the only one to clock in under a minute and my message reflected my innermost feelings:

I left Chicago immediately after the press conference and flew to Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, home to Minuteman ICBMs and B-52 bombers, to deliver a previously planned message to airmen on the importance of their work. Minot had been part of the problem that led to my firing the secretary and chief of staff of the Air Force. I wanted to give the airmen there a pep talk. The visit was a tonic for me. Seeing our men and women in uniform immediately after the press conference was a vivid reminder for me of why I had agreed to stay on.

I gave my own press conference the next day to make clear I had no intention of being a “caretaker secretary.” Lita Baldor of the Associated Press asked me a question I had never been asked publicly: Are you a registered Republican? I realized immediately that if I said I was an independent, I’d make two presidents angry—the one who first appointed me assuming I was a Republican, and the new one who wanted a Republican on his national security team and believed it would be me. I said I was not registered as a Republican but had always considered myself to be one. She also asked if I was resetting my countdown clock, and I said I’d thrown the damn thing away because it was obviously useless. I said the president-elect and I had left open the question of how long I would serve. Another reporter wanted to know how effective I could be working with a new civilian team who were all strangers to me. I reminded him that I had come to the Pentagon in December 2006 to work with a bunch of strangers, and that had seemed to work out okay. I said I was impressed by the president-elect reaching out to talk to Mike Mullen and also by Michelle Obama’s desire to work with military families.

Much of the rest of that week, I huddled with my core staff working on what Gates 2.0 at Defense should look like, and what my priorities should be for the next eighteen months or so (I was thinking in those terms by then). I said I didn’t want to make Jimmy Carter’s mistake of having too many priorities: MRAPs could be taken off my plate now, but not ISR and certainly not the effort to better serve wounded warriors, which I thought was still a mess.

I had deep concerns about the acquisition of equipment, which I believed was a “tar pit.” We had a shipbuilding strategy that seemed to change whenever the Navy secretary or chief of naval operations changed. A joint service acquisition process had to be created to avoid competing budget priorities or duplication. We needed to balance the development of advanced technologies with the ability to buy larger numbers of ships, planes, and other equipment. We had to get on top of the acquisition process, I warned, because if we didn’t, “the Congress will fuck it up.” We didn’t need more studies on how to acquire more effectively—we had rooms full of those, and they hadn’t done any good. What we needed, I said, was to focus on decision making, execution, and negotiating skills. I said we needed to show the new administration a path forward on closing Guantánamo, because in my view they were underestimating “the legal and political complexity of bringing detainees to specific states.” This would require legislation; also, “pure law enforcement is not the way to go.”

On the transition itself, I needed help on relationships with a totally different set of players in the national security arena. What was their thinking on issues such as Gitmo, acquisition, the budget? My staff and I laughed—sort of—about how I would deal with all the big issues I had punted to myself. I wanted the transition team to work for me as well as the president-elect, and I wanted to make sure my fingerprints were all over their final report to him, rather than have a paragraph tacked on at the end. I appointed Ryan McCarthy from my office to join the transition team to make sure that happened.

On Friday night, December 5, over martinis, steak, and red wine, a proven formula for deep thinking, my core team and I agreed that I would minimize my overseas travel for the first ninety days of the administration so I could get to know and establish strong relationships with the new national security team and focus on the 2010 budget.

I said that former deputy defense secretary John Hamre had heard from Paul Volcker that Obama would keep defense spending at a pretty high level for the first two years and then the ax would come down (a very prescient forecast, as it turned out). I intended to spend more time on the budget process and to be more involved on program decisions. I wanted the final say on big issues like the F-22 fighter and C-17 cargo plane production. And I wanted the service secretaries to wear two hats—to serve in their traditional role as advocate for their service, but also to remember that they worked for me and for the president and had to support what was best for the department as a whole and for the country. I said I thought our goals in Afghanistan were “too ambitious for us to achieve.” I suggested we focus on creating an Afghan government that could prevent al Qaeda and others from once again attacking us from a safe haven in Afghanistan and leave more ambitious governance and development goals for the long term. We needed to concentrate on the south and east in Afghanistan, areas where the Taliban were strongest. I think all of us assembled agreed I had to continue to press forward on wounded warrior care and, more broadly, on medical care for all wounded, military families, and veterans. Finally, we discussed the need to accelerate planning for the closure of Guantánamo.

The next day the schizophrenic nature of my life during those weeks was highlighted when I attended the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia. The preceding Monday I had shared a stage with president-elect Obama. On Saturday, I was walking around a football field side by side with George W. Bush as he waved to tens of thousands of cheering fans, troops, and families. During this period, a journalist asked me if it was difficult working for two commanders in chief. I responded that there is only one commander in chief at a time, but being at the beck and call of current and prospective presidents did involve some awkwardness in terms of getting to meetings each scheduled.

The following week Mike Mullen and I went to school on Barack Obama. I wanted to know how he approached decision making, how he dealt with advisers, and how he looked at the world. We spent time with several people who at least claimed to have some insights into the new president. We called the sessions “Obama 101,” and our professors were Scott Gration (the retired Air Force general who had been an Obama campaign assistant), Richard Danzig (secretary of the Navy under Clinton), Robert Soule (also in the department under Clinton), and Flournoy. They said that Obama “pushes the envelope” in terms of the broader context in foreign policy: How does all this fit together? What does this achieve? What does this cost me? He was oriented toward diverse views, they told us. All of them urged us to read his book Dreams of My Father. They said he was a good listener and placed great emphasis on accountability. He was, they said, skeptical on missile defense and “way ahead of you” on Gitmo. Danzig referred to Obama’s power to win over foreign constituencies and asked whether he should speak to the Islamic world.

Assuming they were to be advisers to him, I urged them not to go to the lowest common denominator in discussions with the president but to force debate. If all his advisers agreed, it would be harder for him to disagree. Use the NSC interagency process, I suggested, to strip away turf issues in order to get to the real issues and have a productive discussion. When Gration said the president wanted to revoke “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Mullen said he had heard to the contrary. I said we would have to address it, but the president would be better off to deal with it when our forces were not under so much stress. On Guantánamo, I said straightforwardly that closure wasn’t as simple as they thought. At the end of the meeting, I told the group assembled that with regard to the presidentelect, “we will be totally engaged to make him successful.”

I received a copy of the transition team report on December 11. There was a two-and-a-half-page executive summary for the presidentelect and a seventy-one-page report for the secretary of defense. We had twenty-four hours to comment on the draft, and I decided not to offer any comments. Among other things, there were a number of pejorative statements in the report about the Bush administration—for example, “Restore wise, responsible, and accountable presidential leadership on national security”—that I did not want to appear to endorse. Flournoy and White acknowledged that the report would have little value for me—except as a statement of Obama administration priorities—but would serve as a guide for incoming senior personnel. I thought to myself: Well, actually, I will serve as the guide for incoming personnel. I did find the issue summaries useful for insight into the Obama team’s views on defense matters.

An additional paper I received contrasted my public positions on specific issues with those of the president-elect. We were close on Iraq after the signing of the Status of Forces Agreement, and in sync on Afghanistan, more funding for the State Department, counterterrorism efforts, increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps, use of the National Guard and Reserves, aiding wounded warriors, procurement, and even, to a large extent, the defense budget. We were characterized as being in disagreement on the need for a new nuclear warhead (indeed, I had given a speech in October 2008 at the Carnegie Institute of Peace on the need for nuclear weapons and modernizing our current weapons; one of my staff who lingered afterward overheard some of the Carnegie folks saying that I had just ensured I would not be asked to stay on by Obama), and clearly he was more skeptical of missile defense than I was.

The first meeting of the new national security team was at the transition team headquarters in Chicago on December 15. The meeting space was like any other high-rise office building—lots of cubicles and a modest conference room. When I walked in and saw coffee and doughnuts, I thought I would get along just fine with these folks. The traffic coming in from Midway Airport was awful, and Hillary Clinton was late. She had dispensed with a police escort complete with lights and sirens, clearly having an elected official’s sensitivity to ticking off everyone on the road. I did not have that sensitivity and was one of the first to arrive. In addition to those who had been present at the naming ceremony—Obama, Biden, Clinton, Holder, Napolitano, Jones, Rice, and me—we were joined by Mike Mullen, director of national intelligence Mike McConnell, Rahm Emanuel (White House chief of staff to be), Podesta, Tony Blinken (Joe Biden’s national security adviser), Greg Craig (White House counsel to be), Mona Sutphen (deputy chief of staff to be), Tom Donilon (Jones’s deputy to be), Jim Steinberg (deputy at State to be), and Mark Lippert and Denis McDonough (both to be at the NSC).

I thought carefully about how to approach this and subsequent meetings. I had observed enough presidential transitions to know that, for a holdover at any level, the worst thing to do in the early days is to talk too much and especially to voice skepticism about new ideas or initiatives. (That won’t work—that’s been tried before and failed.) An experienced “know-it-all” is truly a skunk at the garden party. So I spoke infrequently, usually only on questions of fact, and when asked. We sat at tables arranged in a hollow square, and Mullen and I sat together opposite the president-elect. All the men were in coats and ties.

Obama began by describing how he wanted the discussion to flow and his style of seeking information and opinion. Biden urged everyone to be willing to challenge assumptions. The transition team had prepared papers sent to us in advance on most of the issues to be discussed, providing a brief summary of each, campaign promises that had been made, and key issues. I thought the papers were of good quality, matter-of-fact, and devoid of campaign rhetoric. In retrospect, the one on Afghanistan was particularly interesting, observing that two lessons learned were the need for more military and civilian resources and the central role played there by Pakistan. The paper identified troop levels as a key early decision for the new president. In light of later developments, the last sentence of the transition’s Afghan paper was remarkable: “From the beginning of the new administration, the president and his top advisers will need to signal firmly that the United States is in this war to win and have the patience and determination to do so.”

Turning to the agenda, Jones gave a tutorial on the National Security Council and the interagency process, followed by an hour of discussion on Iraq. We then had an hour on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Pakistan was described as the “biggest, most dangerous situation.” During lunch, we spent an hour on the Middle East. We concluded with a discussion of early action items, including foreign travel, initial meetings with foreign leaders, national security themes for the inaugural address, new executive orders and Guantánamo (the most extended discussion), special envoys and negotiators, and early budget issues. Obama wanted to move promptly to close Gitmo and sign executive orders on interrogations, rendition, and the like, to signal a sharp departure from the Bush administration. Greg Craig, soon to be White House counsel, described the need to be both thoughtful and careful with the executive orders, noting that more than a third of those signed in the early days of the Clinton administration had had to be reissued because of mistakes. There was considerable discussion on whether to set a deadline for Guantánamo’s closure. I argued in favor of a one-year deadline because, as I had learned at Defense, a firm deadline was necessary to move the bureaucracy.

All in all, I thought it was a good first meeting. There had been minimal preening by new people trying to impress the president-elect (or one another), and the discussion was, for the most part, realistic and pragmatic. I would have to ignore the many jibes aimed at Bush and his team, which hardly diminished over time, and comments about the miserable shape U.S. national security and international relationships were in. I knew that in four or eight years, another new team would be saying the same things about these folks. I also knew from experience that, when all was said and done, there would be far more continuity than the new team realized in its first, heady days.

The second meeting of the national security team took place on the afternoon of January 9, 2009, in Washington. Among other things, we turned to the Middle East, Iran, and Russia. The format was the same as in Chicago, with McConnell and Mullen providing ten-minute briefings followed by discussion. Particularly on Iran and Russia, there was a lot of discussion of the shortcomings of the Bush administration’s policies and the need for a new approach to both countries.

Biden asked to meet with me privately after the meeting. We met in a small conference room, and he asked me for my thoughts on how he should define his role in the national security arena. I said there were two very different models—George H. W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Bush’s staff had attended all interagency national security meetings, including the Principals Committee, thereby keeping him well informed, but almost always he shared his views only with the president. Cheney, by contrast, not only had his staff attend all lower-level interagency meetings, he routinely attended Principals Committee meetings and meetings of principals with the national security adviser. He was open about his views and argued them forcefully. His staff did likewise at other meetings. I told Biden I would recommend the Bush model because it more befitted the dignity of the vice president as the second-highest elected official in the country; and more practically in Washington, if no one knew what he was advising the president, no one could ever know whether he was winning or losing arguments. If he were to participate in all meetings below those chaired by the president, then he was just another player whose scorecard was public knowledge. He listened closely, thanked me, and then did precisely the opposite of what I recommended, following the Cheney model to a T.

On December 19, Hillary Clinton joined me for lunch in my office at the Pentagon. I thought it important that we get better acquainted, and she readily agreed. We ate at the small round table that had belonged to Jefferson Davis. I told her about the sordid history of relationships between secretaries of state and defense and the negative impact that had had on the government and on presidents. I told her that Condi Rice and I had developed a strong partnership, and it radiated not only down through our two departments but across the entire national security arena. I said I wouldn’t try to compete, as had a number of my predecessors, as principal spokesman on U.S. foreign policy, and that as in the Bush administration, I would continue to press for more resources for the State Department. I hoped we could have the same kind of partnership I had had with Condi. Hillary had been around long enough, both in the White House and in the Senate, to understand exactly what I was talking about, and she readily agreed on the importance of us working together. Indeed, we would develop a very strong partnership, in part because it turned out we agreed on almost every important issue.

In mid-December and early January, I received guidance on who among the Bush appointees needed to go on January 20, who would be asked to stay until successors were confirmed, and who would be asked to stay on as Obama appointees. The transition team wanted Gordon England out on the twentieth. The president-elect and I both tried hard to persuade John Hamre to take the deputy secretary job, including, on my part, trying to lay a serious guilt trip on him for not saying yes, but he had commitments that he said he simply could not break. Bill Lynn, an executive with Raytheon and senior Defense official in the Clinton administration, was selected to take England’s place. Edelman had already indicated he would be leaving, and Flournoy was chosen to be his successor as undersecretary for policy. Bob Hale was picked as the comptroller (the money manager), and Jeh Johnson as general counsel. I quickly developed very high respect for Flournoy, Hale, and Johnson, and we would work together very closely. Johnson, a successful New York attorney, proved to be the finest lawyer I ever worked with in government—a straightforward, plain-speaking man of great integrity, with common sense to burn and a good sense of humor. Flournoy would prove to be every bit as clear-thinking and strong as Edelman, a high bar in my view. Lynn and I would have a cordial relationship, but there was something missing in the chemistry between us. Bill’s earlier experience in Defense, I thought, had made him very leery of bold initiatives, and I never had the feeling he supported, or believed in, much of my agenda for changing the way the department did business.

Except for those positions, I was given the go-ahead to ask most Bush appointees to remain in place until their successors were confirmed. I could not remember anything like that happening before. It was proof, in my view, that the new administration didn’t want discontinuities that could prove dangerous when we were engaged in two wars. Three Bush appointees were asked to remain indefinitely: Clapper as undersecretary for intelligence, Mike Donley as Air Force secretary, and Mike Vickers as assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict.

On January 19, Bush’s last full day in office, the core national security teams for both presidents gathered in the Situation Room so that the old team could brief the new one on the most sensitive programs of the American government in dealing with terrorism, North Korea, Iran, and other actual or potential adversaries. After some banter about which side of the table I should sit on, the remainder of the meeting was quite somber. I believe that, in broad terms, there weren’t many surprises for the Obama team, although some of the details were eye-opening. I had not heard of such a conversation between administrations in past transitions—although presidents-elect received such briefings—and it was, I thought, a mark of Bush’s determination to have a smooth transition and of the receptivity of the new president to such a meeting. Such cordiality was uncommon.

In the run-up to the inaugural, I became a real thorn in the side of those planning the great event. The Secret Service had overall responsibility for security, coordinating the efforts of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan police, the U.S. Park Service police, and the National Guard. As the inauguration neared, and speculation grew that upward of four million people could end up on the Mall, it seemed to me that the number of police and national guardsmen being assembled—as I recall, about 15,000 in total—would be woefully short if anything went wrong. Any number of events apart from a terrorist attack could spark a panic, and with only two or three bridges across the Potomac River, there could be a disaster. If there was trouble, the bridges would be jammed with people trying to escape, making it impossible for military reinforcements to get into the city. I kept pushing to have a significantly larger number of the National Guard called up and on standby at local military facilities. Those responsible kept telling me they could have large reinforcements called up within hours at more distant locations; I kept telling them that if something went wrong, they needed people fifteen to thirty minutes away. The organizers did agree in the end to increase the number of Guardsmen nearby. Fortunately, of course, nothing bad happened.

Simultaneously serving two administrations became even more weird in the two weeks before the inaugural. On January 6, the armed forces held a farewell ceremony and tribute for President Bush at Fort Myer, an Army post just across the Potomac from Washington. Appropriate to the occasion, my remarks paid tribute to Bush’s accomplishments in the defense and military arenas—a record my new boss considered an unending litany of disaster. Then on the tenth, the entire Bush clan—and thousands of others of us—gathered in Newport News, Virginia, for the commissioning of the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush. It was a wonderful day and a bittersweet occasion in that it would be one of the last public ceremonies at which Bush 43 would be present as president.

All the events associated with both the outgoing and incoming administrations were complicated for me by the fact that I had seriously injured my left arm. My first day home in the Northwest during Christmas break, there had been a snowstorm. I missed working outdoors and so bundled up and set about attaching a snowplow blade to my lawn tractor to clear our rather long and steep driveway. The blade was heavy, and as I lifted part of it, I heard a pop. I was sixty-five, and any physical exertion was accompanied by pops, but there are routine pops and there are not-so-routine pops. I knew this was the latter. But after a couple of minutes, the pain went away and I continued on with my chore. My arm was mobile and didn’t hurt, and though I couldn’t lift much, I decided I wasn’t about to ruin my vacation with a bad-news diagnosis. So I postponed seeing a doctor until I returned to Washington, D.C. There I learned that I had popped the bicep tendon right off my forearm bone and that surgery was required. I checked my calendar and said I could probably work it in during February. The doctor said, How about tomorrow? We compromised on the Friday after the inaugural.

As I said previously, Barack Obama would be the eighth president I worked for, and I had never attended an inauguration. I intended to keep my record intact. For all events where the entire government will be present, one cabinet officer is selected to be absent to ensure continuity of government in the event of a catastrophe. I was able to persuade both the Bush and Obama staff chiefs that I was the only logical person to play that role during the inaugural. After all, I provided perfect continuity—a Bush appointee who would still be focused on the job on the morning of January 20 and the only Obama appointee already confirmed and in place.

I reported for work under a new president the following Monday. Wearing a sling.