Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

I had been the secretary of defense for just over two years on January 21, 2009, but on that day I again became the outsider. I had crossed paths with a few of the older Obama appointees over the years, but I didn’t really know well anybody in the new administration, and I certainly had no one I could call a friend—with the possible exception of the new CIA director, Leon Panetta. In the new administration, there was a web of long-standing relationships—from Democratic Party politics and from President Clinton’s administration—about which I was clueless. The contest between Hillary Clinton and Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination further muddied the picture for me because there had been appointees from the Clinton administration who had supported Obama and thus earned the enmity of the Clinton crowd, and to say the least, there were lingering resentments in the Obama camp toward Hillary and those who had supported her. The “team of rivals” approach worked a lot better at the top than it did farther down the totem pole.

In addition to being the outsider, I was also a geezer in this new administration. While I had been just three years older than Bush, Obama was nearly twenty years younger than me. Many influential appointees below the top level in the new administration, especially in the White House, had been undergraduates—or even in high school—when I had been CIA director. No wonder my nickname in the White House soon was Yoda, the ancient Jedi teacher in Star Wars. Those appointees, drawn mostly from the ranks of former congressional staffers, were all smart, endlessly hardworking, and passionately loyal to the president. What they lacked was firsthand knowledge of real-world governing.

Because of the difference in our ages and careers, we had very different frames of reference. My formative experiences had been the Vietnam War, the potentially apocalyptic rivalry with the Soviet Union, and the global Cold War. Theirs had been America’s unrivaled supremacy in the 1990s, the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bipartisanship in national security was central to my experience but not to theirs.

A number of the new appointees, both senior and junior, seemed to lack an awareness of the world they had just entered. Symbolic of that, I noticed at our first meeting in the Situation Room that fully half the participants had their cell phones turned on during the meeting, potentially broadcasting everything that was said to foreign intelligence electronic eavesdroppers. I mentioned it to Jim Jones, the new national security adviser, after the meeting, and the problem did not recur. But as Mullen and I returned to the Pentagon that day, I spoke my favorite line from the Lethal Weapon movies: “I’m getting too old for this shit.”

As for the senior members of the team, I had met Vice President Biden a few times on the Hill but don’t recall ever testifying in front of him or having any dealings with him. Biden is a year older than I am and went to Washington about six years after I did, when he was elected to the Senate in 1972. Joe is simply impossible not to like. He’s down to earth, funny, profane, and humorously self-aware of his motormouth. Not too many meetings had occurred in the Situation Room before the president started impatiently cutting Biden off. Joe is a man of integrity, incapable of hiding what he really thinks, and one of those rare people you know you could turn to for help in a personal crisis. Still, I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades. After one meeting at the White House, Mullen and I were riding back to the Pentagon together, and Mike turned to me and said, “You know you agreed with the vice president today?” I said I realized that and was therefore rethinking my position. Joe and I would disagree on many issues over two and a half years, especially Afghanistan, but the personal relationship always remained cordial. While Biden had been in Congress a lot longer than Vice President Cheney, both were very experienced politicians, and I found it odd that they both so often misread what Congress would or would not do. More about that later.

After our December lunch together, I was confident that Hillary and I would be able to work closely together. Indeed, before too long, commentators were observing that in an administration where all power and decision making were gravitating to the White House, Clinton and I represented the only independent “power center,” not least because, for very different reasons, we were both seen as “un-fireable.” A personnel decision by the president, however, soon complicated life for both of us.

The president wanted Jim Steinberg, who had been deputy national security adviser under President Clinton, to become deputy secretary of state. Having been a deputy twice myself, I suspect Jim did not want to return to government as a deputy anything. (My deputy secretary at Defense under Bush, Gordon England, had before that been secretary of the Navy. He once told me that “being secretary of anything is better than being deputy secretary of everything.”) In order to persuade Steinberg to accept the offer, Obama agreed to his request that he be made a member of the Principals Committee and have a seat in National Security Council meetings as well as one on the Deputies Committee. As far as I know, no deputy had ever been given an independent chair at the principals’ table.

Steinberg’s presence on the Principals Committee gave State two voices at the table—two voices that often disagreed. Steinberg would often stake out a position in the Deputies Committee that was at odds with what Hillary believed, then express that position in meetings of the principals and even with the president. Let’s just say that having two State Department positions on an issue was an unnecessary complication in the decision-making process. And I suspect the arrangement caused Hillary more than a little frustration, especially since—as I understand the situation—Steinberg, despite having been in her husband’s administration, had not been her choice to be her deputy. Hillary had been promised she would have freedom to choose her own subordinates at State, but that promise was not fully kept, and that would be an ongoing source of tension between her and the White House staff, especially the politicos.

(Those on the National Security Staff [NSS] who bridled at Defense having two seats at the table forgot that the National Security Act of 1947 establishing the NSC specifically named the secretary of defense as a member and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as an adviser. There was no mention of the deputy secretary of state.)

My experience working with Hillary illustrated, once again, that you are never too old to learn a lesson in life. Before she joined the Obama administration, I had not known her personally, and what views I had were shaped almost entirely by what I had read in the newspapers and seen on television. I quickly learned I had been badly misinformed. I found her smart, idealistic but pragmatic, tough-minded, indefatigable, funny, a very valuable colleague, and a superb representative of the United States all over the world. I promised myself I would try never again to form a strong opinion about someone I did not know.

I did know Jim Jones, the new national security adviser, but only through a few phone calls and having met perhaps twice. After I had turned down the job of director of national intelligence in January 2005, I was asked to call Jones—a four-star former commandant of the Marine Corps, he was then commander of European Command and supreme allied commander Europe—to try to talk him into taking the position. (That struck me as a bit odd.) I reached him on his cell phone in a restaurant in Naples. He was polite but not interested in the job. After he retired in the fall of 2006 and I became secretary a few months later, he conducted a review of the Afghan security forces and wrote a report on them at the behest of Congress and then, part-time, worked with the Bush administration to strengthen the Palestinian security forces on the West Bank and improve their cooperation with the Israelis. I had not been impressed with his Afghan report, and his demands for active-duty Marines to support him in the Palestinian project were insatiable.

Still, I was relieved by Jones’s appointment as national security adviser because no one else in the White House at a senior level had been in the military or knew much about the military. Nor, apart from Jones’s deputy at the NSC, Tom Donilon, did the senior people at the White House have any executive branch experience in national security affairs, except perhaps as midlevel staff in the Clinton administration. It took only a matter of weeks to see that Jim was isolated in the White House. Unlike so many others there, he had not been part of the campaign and was not an old friend of the president’s. The NSC chief of staff, Mark Lippert, on the other hand, had worked for Senator Obama and was his sole foreign policy aide at the start of the presidential campaign. Denis McDonough, the new NSC head of strategic communications, had also worked for Obama on the Hill and then became his chief foreign policy adviser during the presidential campaign. Both McDonough and Lippert had an independent relationship and rapport with the new president that Jones could not hope to have. Obama also gave them ready access, making Jones’s position all the more difficult.

Early on, after one of my weekly meetings with Obama, Jones complained to me that the briefing memo the president was using for my meeting had been prepared by Lippert without Jones’s knowledge. On the NSC staff under Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, such a breach of protocol and process would have been a firing offense. I can only imagine how Jones, after a lifetime in the Marine Corps—the most hierarchical organization there is—felt about repeated violations of the chain of command. Meanwhile Donilon had a close relationship with the vice president, and he and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had been friends for a long time. Jones also had to deal with a number of others on the White House senior staff—Emanuel, presidential counselors Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, press secretary Robert Gibbs, and others—who weighed in independently with Obama on foreign policy issues. Perhaps a dozen people, including Jones’s own subordinates, had more access to the president than he did and were invited to offer opinions on national security matters, often in his absence. Indeed, one White House official was quoted in the Financial Times as saying, “If you were to ask me who the real national security adviser is, I would say there were three or four, of whom Rahm is one, and of which General Jones is probably the least important.”

Things boiled over during the president’s first foreign trip, for the meeting of the G-20 in London on April 2 and the NATO summit in Strasbourg and Kehl (border cities in France and Germany) on April 3–4. Jim told Hillary and me several days later that at both summit meetings, others in the White House—he did not name names—were advising the president on foreign policy issues that they knew nothing about. With disdain, he described how one naïve White House staffer at a NATO summit reception persuaded the president to collar the Turkish and Armenian foreign ministers together to try to get them to work out their problems—in plain view of everyone. Since the two countries have one of the world’s most bitter, intractable, and long-standing adversarial relationships, the effort was predictably unsuccessful and embarrassing. Jones vented that he had told Tom Donilon to return to Washington after the G-20 meeting, but other senior White House staff told Donilon to travel with the president for the entire trip, which Jones discovered only when he saw Donilon in the hallway of their hotel at the NATO summit. Jim said it was hard to get decisions on scheduling presidential travel and that Donilon and Lippert and others in the White House were constantly doing “end runs” around him.

The next morning Mike Mullen called to tell me he had talked with Jones, who was ready to quit. When I told Hillary about it, she was very worried Jim might indeed resign.

When I saw Jones alone late that afternoon, he said, “Yes, it can’t go on like this.” He lamented that he had no personal bond with the president, maybe because of their age difference. He described his difficulties in the White House and confided that he had seen the president alone only once since inauguration day. He complained again about Lippert and Donilon, telling me he had told Lippert he wanted something done, and Lippert, who was a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve, had pretty much ignored his retired four-star-general boss. “Rank insubordination,” Jones called it. Jones said the president had told him he would be the last voice he heard on national security issues, but it wasn’t true: “There are too many cooks, and I can’t go on.” I told Jim he was the glue holding the national security team together, the only person in the White House in the national security arena, other than the president and vice president, with gravitas and an international reputation. It would be a “catastrophic blow” for him to leave. I told him I was prepared to talk to the president if necessary: “We can’t afford to lose you.” Jim called me the next day to say he had arranged some time alone with the president and believed that things would get sorted out. He seemed upbeat, thanked me for our talk, and said it had helped a lot.

After this crisis, the national security process in the White House did get more orderly and somewhat more disciplined. Jim would survive at the White House for nearly two years, though he was never a good fit there.

Rounding out the major players on the national security team were CIA director Leon Panetta and the director of national intelligence (DNI), Dennis Blair. Panetta and I had gotten to know each other as members of the Iraq Study Group. There were some raised eyebrows at Leon’s appointment, given his lack of experience in national security and unfamiliarity—except as OMB director—with the intelligence business. Based on what I had learned about him on the ISG, I had no problem with his appointment. I knew that most CIA directors had no previous experience in the business—in fact, up to that point only three career officers in its history had become director of central intelligence (Richard Helms, William Colby, and me). What counted was that Leon was smart and tough, had run large government organizations before, and above all, knew Congress—a perennial deficiency at CIA. And he plainly had the confidence of the new president and a long-standing friendship with the secretary of state. Occasionally Leon would doff his CIA hat and offer the president some hardheaded political advice on contentious national security issues; I thought he had more insight into the political realities in Washington than anyone at the table, including Obama and Biden. He was very careful about making clear when he was speaking not as CIA director but personally. His respect for the CIA professionals, his quick wit and easy laugh, and his wisdom and common sense made him a welcome addition.

I first met Blair in the mid-1970s, when he was a young Navy officer on assignment as a White House fellow and I was on the NSC staff. A Rhodes scholar, he was described to me then as one of the smartest officers in uniform. We would have little further contact until the Obama administration. Denny was a retired four-star admiral, his last position being commander of Pacific Command, responsible for military operations covering about half the earth’s surface—about as close as you can get to being an imperial proconsul in the modern American military. Mike Mullen and I got along fine with Denny, but his relationships with others on the team and in the intelligence community were scratchy from the beginning. He actually believed that he was the boss of the U.S. intelligence community, with authority over most, if not all, its constituent elements, including CIA. In reality, despite the understandings and accommodations that Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Jim Clapper, former CIA director Mike Hayden, and former DNI Mike McConnell and I had reached in 2008, the DNI still did not have the statutory basis or political clout to assert complete authority over others in the intelligence community. If the freewheeling White House national security staff was a headache for Jim Jones, the national intelligence apparatus was a nightmare for someone who had been a four-star admiral and combatant commander. As I would often comment, the job of DNI is less akin to a chief executive officer than to the powerful chairman of a congressional committee—there are some inherent authorities, but mostly you have to persuade people to go along with you. Denny wasn’t much into persuasion.

Unfortunately, his first big clash was with Panetta, who was both politically and bureaucratically savvy and determined to earn loyalty at CIA. Blair provided just the opportunity to do so. An earlier DNI proposal to designate the senior intelligence officer in capitals abroad—the CIA “chief of station”—also as the DNI representative had predictably languished at CIA for a year. The CIA had always filled this job. Implicit in the proposal was the notion that chiefs of station would be appointed by the DNI and might or might not be CIA officers. In the spring of 2009, Blair unilaterally issued a worldwide directive simply implementing the proposal. (As a former director of central intelligence, I thought Denny was crazy to make such a frontal assault on the agency and its new director.) Panetta immediately issued his own worldwide cable countermanding the DNI’s directive, at which point Blair sent a letter to Panetta ordering him to retract his cable. A relationship that had begun as fragile had become poisonous. Leon prevailed, making it clear to all that the CIA director had more clout in the White House than the DNI did.

Blair did not have good chemistry with the president and other members of the national security team. He had a tendency to offer his views in meetings forcefully and with a certain finality, including on policy matters on which he shouldn’t have taken a position in the first place, and that displeased the president. According to Jones and others, Obama also did not like the way Denny conducted himself in the morning intelligence briefings, often interjecting his own opinions. I could read the body language in the Situation Room when he spoke, and it was pretty clear that his only friends in the room were Mullen and me, and maybe Hillary.

I would spend a lot of time with two other Obama appointees, both in the White House. I had never met Rahm Emanuel, the new chief of staff, who was hell-on-wheels and became well known for terrorizing everyone, even cabinet officers. Armed with an inexhaustible supply of “f-bombs,” he was a whirling dervish with attention deficit disorder. Jones told me once that Rahm would have an idea at ten in the morning and expect it to be implemented by four in the afternoon—regardless of complexity. I enjoyed Rahm. He made me laugh. He was a political animal to his core and often a source of considerable insight into politics and Congress. He was also far from the first bombast I had worked with in the White House. I would have some very serious differences with Emanuel over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (the law concerning gays in the military), the budget, and Afghanistan, but we got along personally. After I dropped several “f-bombs” of my own on him during a heated argument, he said admiringly that he didn’t know I could talk like that and seemed to treat me with new respect. Actually, he—and everyone else in the Obama White House—always treated me with great courtesy and even deference.

The one other White House player I want to mention is John Brennan, whom Obama appointed assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism. Brennan was a career CIA officer and one of the few who had served in senior positions in both the analytical and the operational sides of the agency. I don’t recall ever having met him at CIA, although during his early years as an analyst, he must have worked for me. Obama had wanted to nominate him to be CIA director, but his role at CIA during the Bush years resulted in significant pushback from the Hill, and so he ended up with a White House appointment that did not require Senate confirmation. In White House meetings I attended, Brennan would offer an opinion only when asked directly by Jones or by the president. Brennan came to have great influence in the Obama White House and, as best I could tell, was quite effective in his job, playing a central role in the grievous damage done to al Qaeda. (He would become CIA director in Obama’s second term.)

A new phenomenon for me was the appointment of “special envoys” to work on important regional problems—Ambassador Richard Holbrooke for Afghanistan and Pakistan, former senator George Mitchell on Middle East peace, and retired Air Force Major General Scott Gration for Sudan. The Clinton administration had used special envoys or “representatives” to deal with difficult and time-consuming foreign policy issues such as the Balkans, where Holbrooke had rendered successful service in a brokered deal (the Dayton Accords) that brought about peace, if an uneasy one. Personally, I think the idea of high-profile personalities working on sensitive issues outside normal channels is a mistake because it leads to bureaucratic conflict in Washington and confusion abroad as to who speaks for the president.

Holbrooke’s success in the Balkans in the 1990s had been a one-off due to the unique combination of the nature of that conflict, the leaders involved, and Richard’s skills and personality, both aptly suited to the Balkans. His “in your face” approach seemed unlikely to work with countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the leaders, culture, and political conditions were not susceptible to the Holbrooke style. Hardly had he been appointed before conflict arose with the National Security Staff (as the National Security Council staff was restructured and renamed in order to give it a broader range of responsibilities, including homeland security), Holbrooke enjoying Hillary’s steadfast support. The president’s curtness in addressing Richard made clear he was not Obama’s cup of tea, further limiting his influence and effectiveness. Holbrooke soon alienated both the Pakistani and Afghan leaders and would become a peripheral participant in the war discussions, despite his valuable insights and strong team.

Mitchell came to his new appointment with success as a mediator in Northern Ireland under his belt, not an inconsiderable achievement. His chances for achieving success in the Middle East were slim. As we saw in the Camp David Accords in 1978, which led to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty signed in early 1979, only when both the Israelis and their Arab interlocutors are strong politically at home and willing to compromise is progress toward peace possible. In early 2009, those conditions did not exist. There was a weak Palestinian government on the West Bank composed of reasonably pragmatic politicians, and Hamas extremists in Gaza who were determined to destroy Israel. In Israel, the administration had to deal with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leading a right-wing coalition government, who was unwilling to take meaningful steps toward a two-state solution. The Obama team was divided between the old Middle East hands, including Dennis Ross, who thought we should proceed step-by-step in the process with great caution, and those like Jim Jones and me, who preferred a bolder approach in which the United States would sketch out what a comprehensive agreement might look like so both sides could evaluate what they might have to give up and what they might gain. The balance tilted to the old hands, and George would shuttle endlessly back and forth to the region, with nothing to show for it. Scott Gration encountered an intractable situation in Sudan, and a split in our own government on how to deal with the regime there, but he did help secure a peaceful referendum that led to the creation of South Sudan.

That was the new core team. Then there was the president himself. Interviewers would persistently ask me to compare working for Bush and Obama, and how I could work for two men who were so different. I would remind people that Obama was the eighth president I had worked for, each very different from the others. Career officials, at least those lacking a partisan agenda, learn to adapt to different presidential styles and personalities. I did not have a problem making the transition from Bush to Obama.

My relationship with Obama would become quite strong, but it was always a business relationship. That had been true as well with Bush, although, as I mentioned earlier, he did invite Becky and me to Camp David on several occasions, none of which panned out. Obama would occasionally say we ought to get together for a martini, but it never happened. Until my last night in Washington as secretary, when he and Michelle hosted a small going-away dinner for us in the family quarters of the White House, we did not socialize. Just as I was not into mountain biking and so missed my sports bonding opportunity with Bush, I was a foot too short, too athletically inept, and too old to be considered for the Obama presidential basketball team, nor did I play golf. So, our two and a half years together were spent almost exclusively in the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room.

Although Obama to my mind is a liberal Democrat and I consider myself a moderately conservative Republican, for the first two years, on national security matters, we largely saw eye to eye. As with most presidential transitions, there was considerable continuity in this area between the last years of the Bush administration and the first years of Obama’s presidency, as loath as partisans on both sides were (and are) to admit it. The path forward in Iraq had been mostly settled by the 2008 Strategic Framework Agreement with the Iraqis, and Obama essentially followed the path Bush had agreed to in December 2008, ending the war “responsibly,” as he put it. Obama had campaigned on the need for more resources in Afghanistan, and he clearly was prepared to go after al Qaeda aggressively. For the first year we worked together, he was supportive of robust funding for Defense. We had a strong foundation for a productive partnership. On some lower priority issues, as I will examine later, while I might disagree, I was willing to acquiesce or be supportive—as I had been in the Bush administration. Nobody in Washington wins on every issue, and as long as I was comfortable on the big stuff, I would be a team player on other matters. I don’t recall Obama and I ever discussing his domestic policies, and that was probably just as well.

I found the president quite pragmatic on national security and open to compromise on most issues—or, to put it more crassly, to cutting a deal. So on some major contentious issues, as I will describe, I would hold my cards close and then try to pick the right moment to weigh in with an alternative to proposals on the table that would provide him with a solution we both could support. Usually, as I had done with Bush, I would preview my thinking with the president in private; most of the time I had confidence that he would ultimately agree to my proposal. I would later read that some on the National Security Staff were annoyed with my hanging back from stating my views in meetings, but I knew that my recommendations would carry more weight at the table if I was selective about when I expressed them, though there were occasions when I remained silent because I was undecided on an issue and simply wanted to listen to help me make up my mind. I usually went into meetings having spoken to Clinton, Jones, and others, so I had a pretty good idea what they were going to say. A meeting in the Situation Room was never just another gathering for me: outcomes were important, and I always had a strategy going in. More often than I liked, there were two or three such meetings a day, and all that strategizing required a lot of energy.

One quality I missed in Obama was passion, especially when it came to the two wars. In my presence, Bush—very unlike his father—was pretty unsentimental. But he was passionate about the war in Iraq; on occasion, at a Medal of Honor ceremony or the like, I would see his eyes well up with tears. I worked for Obama longer than Bush, and I never saw his eyes well up. Obama could, and did, express anger (I rarely heard him swear; it was very effective when he did), but the only military matter, apart from leaks, about which I ever sensed deep passion on his part was “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” For him, changing that law seemed to be the inevitable next step in the civil rights movement. He presumably was also passionate about health care reform, but I wasn’t present for those discussions.

Where this lack of passion mattered most for me was Afghanistan. When soldiers put their lives on the line, they need to know that the commander in chief who sent them in harm’s way believes in their mission. They need him to talk often to them and to the country, not just to express gratitude for their service and sacrifice but also to explain and affirm why that sacrifice is necessary, why their fight is noble, why their cause is just, and why they must prevail. President Obama never did that. He rarely spoke about the war in Afghanistan except when he was making an announcement about troop increases or troop drawdowns or announcing a change in strategy. White House references to “exit paths,” “drawdowns,” and “responsibly ending the wars” vastly outnumbered references to “success” or even “accomplishing the mission.” Given his campaign rhetoric about Afghanistan, I think I myself, our commanders, and our troops had expected more commitment to the cause and more passion for it from him.

Having said that, I believe the president cared deeply about the troops and their families. He and Mrs. Obama, from the moment he was elected, were committed to helping our men and women in uniform. Michelle in particular, along with Jill Biden, the vice president’s wife, devoted enormous time and effort to helping returning soldiers find jobs and to helping their families. The president visited military hospitals, encouraged the wounded, empathized with their families, and consoled those who had lost a child or a spouse in combat. And he would ensure that significant additional resources flowed to the Veterans Affairs Department and that it was protected from budget cuts. I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission.

Obama was the most deliberative president I worked for. His approach to problem solving reminded me of Lincoln’s comment on his approach to decision making: “I am never easy when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north, and bounded it south, and bounded it east, and bounded it west.” As Obama would tell me on more than one occasion, “I can’t defend it unless I understand it.” I rarely saw him rush to a decision when circumstances allowed him time to gather information, analyze, and reflect. He would sometimes be criticized for his “dilatory” decision making, but I found it refreshing and reassuring, especially since so many pundits and critics seem to think a problem discovered in the morning should be solved by evening. As a participant in that decision-making process, I always felt more confident about the outcome after thorough deliberation. When the occasion demanded it, though, Obama could make a big decision—a life-and-death decision—very fast. He once told me that one reason he ran for president was because he was so bored in the Senate. I never saw anyone who had not previously been an executive—and especially someone who had been a legislator—take so quickly and easily to making decisions and so relish exercising authority. And like Bush, once Obama made a tough decision, I never knew him to have a second thought or look back.

I always thought Obama was “presidential.” He treated the office of the presidency with respect. I rarely saw him in the Oval Office without a coat and tie, and he always conducted himself with dignity. He was a man of personal integrity, and in his personal behavior—at least to the extent I could observe it—he was an excellent role model. We had a relaxed relationship, and frequently, in private, I would tease him, occasionally asking him, when he was beset by big problems, “Tell me again why you wanted this job?” His broad smile is well known, and I saw it often; what is less well known is how fast it can disappear, giving way to a glacial look. It dawned on me one day that the only other person I had worked with who changed expressions so dramatically and quickly had been Margaret Thatcher. It was no fun to be on the receiving end of such a change from either of them. (Like everyone else, I saw more glacial looks than smiles from Thatcher.) I often wished both Bush and Obama would be less partisan, but clearly the political world had changed since I retired the first time in 1993. I thought Obama was first-rate in both intellect and temperament. You didn’t have to agree with all of his policies to acknowledge that.

Less than two weeks after the inaugural, at the end of his weekly meeting with Mullen and me, the president asked me to remain behind for a private conversation. He asked me whether everything was going okay. I told him I thought the team was off to a good start, the chemistry was good, and the principals were working well together. (The problems I described earlier had not yet surfaced.) As Obama had done before on several occasions with all the principals, he encouraged me always to speak up and to be sure to give him bad news or to express disagreement (as if I needed encouragement). He concluded with what I thought was a very insightful observation twelve days into his presidency: “What I know concerns me. What I don’t know concerns me even more. What people aren’t telling me worries me the most.” It takes many officials in Washington years to figure that out; some never do.

A few months after the inaugural, the president convened a weekend “retreat” at the White House for the cabinet and senior White House staff to talk about how to accomplish his objectives. I was asked to participate in a panel addressing “Working More Effectively to Achieve the Administration’s Priorities.” I could already see a president and White House staff, as so many before them, seeking total control and trying to centralize all power—and credit for all achievements—in the White House. I decided to address this bluntly and to have a little fun. I told the cabinet secretaries and senior White House staff there were two realities to keep in mind. First, no one in the White House other than the president could execute any policy or action; only the cabinet departments or agencies could do that. How well the White House staff understood this would determine whether things got done at all, and with or without enthusiasm and speed. If the president’s staff didn’t respect the role of the cabinet secretaries and make them partners in policy making, implementation would suffer. Second, outside of the Office of Management and Budget, no one in the White House had to testify before Congress on policy or budgets. The cabinet secretaries and agency heads had to “own” the president’s policies when it came to dealing with Congress, and the White House staff ignored this at its peril. Would a secretary’s testimony be enthusiastic or tepid? “You can get very insulated against reality in this building.”

I then talked about how the White House treated the cabinet day to day. I said cabinet secretaries frequently got calls from someone saying that “the White House wants” this or that, and that personally I often suspected the calls came from a fresh-faced junior staffer with a new White House pass who probably had his secretary call the dry cleaners saying “the White House is calling”; I referred to such people as “sniffing at the hems of power.” I told the assembled cabinet and White House staff that when my office told me the White House was calling and wanted something, I ignored it. A building didn’t make telephone calls. I said that, as a cabinet officer, I expected to be contacted only by a very senior White House person.

Finally, I had two warnings for my cabinet colleagues. First, there are too many staff assistants who think the way upward in their careers is to set their boss’s hair on fire with lurid stories about the depredations or encroachments by other cabinet departments or the White House staff. The only way to defuse this kind of internecine feuding, I said, is for top officials to get to know and trust one another. Cabinet secretaries and senior White House staff working on the same issues need to have regular personal contact to build relationships, and if that is the case, staffs will soon realize that it is not career-enhancing to try to get their bosses into bureaucratic battles. My second warning was that at that very moment, one or more people in each of my colleagues’ departments or agencies were doing something that was illegal or improper or engaging in behavior that they, as the boss, would hate. The key, I said, was to have mechanisms in place to find such people before they did too much harm. This warning, a couple of cabinet secretaries told me later, was the one that really made them sit up and take notice.

As I looked out on all the new appointees at the White House in mid-2009, I was struck by how diverse they—like their predecessors—were in their motives for joining the government. Some were acolytes who idolized the new president, had worked unbelievably hard for his election, and were totally devoted to him on a personal level. They were prepared to sacrifice years of their lives to try to make him successful. Others were “cause” people, individuals who had worked for him and were willing to serve under him now because of one or another specific issue—or the entire agenda—and saw him and their service as a way to advance policies they believed in. Still others had been successful in their careers and saw an opportunity to give back to the country by working for a man they supported, or simply wanted to do something different for a while. Still another group were just political “junkies”—they loved the political life, and working in the executive branch after eight years on the Hill or “in the wilderness” (outside government) was like a fresh tank of oxygen. And then there were a small number whose arms had to be twisted personally by the president to get them to abandon the comforts of private life in exchange for grueling hours and the opportunity to be all too often flayed personally and politically on the Hill and in the media.

I had been lucky financially when I reentered government in late 2006. Under the ethics rules, I had to sell all the stocks I owned in early 2007, at the very top of the market. However, those joining the Obama administration in early 2009 who owned stocks, and there were quite a few, had to sell at the bottom of the market. A number of those people took huge losses in their personal finances, and I admired them for their patriotism and willingness to serve at great sacrifice. I would disagree with more than a few of these appointees in the years ahead, but I never doubted their love of country (although, as in every administration, there was also ample love of self).

My most awkward moment in my early days working for President Obama occurred about three weeks after the inaugural. I called Bush 43 to tell him that we had had a significant success in a covert program he cared about a lot. There was so much anti-Bush feeling in the administration, I figured no one else would let him know. During our brief conversation, he asked how things were going, and I said just fine. Bush concluded by saying, “It is important that [Obama] be successful.” I said, “Amen.” To my chagrin and deep embarrassment, the next day Obama told me he was going to call Bush and tell him about the covert success. My heart in my mouth, I told him that was a great idea. As soon as I hung up the phone with Obama, I called 43 to tell him 44 was going to call and that I hoped Bush wouldn’t mention that I had called. I knew I should have given 44 the chance to call. I never talked to Bush again about government business.

MY NEW AGENDA AT DEFENSE

By 2009, I had come to believe that the paradigms of both conventional and unconventional war weren’t adequate anymore, as the most likely future conflicts would fall somewhere in between, with a wide range of scale and lethality. Militias and insurgents could get access to sophisticated weapons. Rapidly modernizing militaries, including China’s, would employ “asymmetric” methods to thwart American’s traditional advantages in the air and at sea. Rogue nations like Iran or North Korea would likely use a combination of tactics. Accordingly, I believed that our post–Cold War strategy of being prepared to fight two major regional conflicts at the same time, which determined much of our military’s force structure, was outdated. We needed to sustain and modernize our strategic and conventional capabilities, but we needed also to train and equip for other contingencies.

Working for Obama, I was determined to use the additional time I had been given to shape forces, budgets, and programs along these lines. As the full extent of the country’s economic crisis became apparent, I knew the defense budget was too fat a target for Congress and the president to ignore. I decided to try to preempt a crude, counterproductive, and potentially dangerous grab for defense dollars by showing that we could clean up our own budgetary and programmatic stable. My hope was that if the Pentagon could boldly demonstrate a willingness to reduce bureaucratic overhead and waste while enhancing military capabilities, we might suffer only a glancing blow from the coming budgetary train wreck. I was, shall we say, overly optimistic.

My priorities were clear: to continue taking care of the troops and their families; to achieve greater balance between preparing for future large-scale conflicts and supporting the fights we were already in and most likely to face in coming years, using the budget process to effect that rebalancing; to tackle the military acquisition process and weed out long-overdue, over-budget programs and those that were no longer needed; and to do all I could to enhance our prospects for success in Afghanistan. The first three priorities meant continuing my war on the Pentagon itself, the second and third meant more war with Congress, and the fourth would involve war with the White House. It was clear that every day of my entire tenure as secretary would involve multifront conflict. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Like both Obama and Bush, I bore easily.

With regard to taking care of the troops, during the fall of 2008 I had heard of a considerable disparity in the time required for medical evacuation from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan—the standard in Iraq was one hour, in Afghanistan it was two hours. As I addressed the matter, I learned that non-U.S. NATO medevac helicopters didn’t fly in “low illumination”—dusk or dark—or in bad weather or into “unsecured” landing zones. Of course, these were most of the times, places, and situations in which medevac would be needed most. Just as troubling, I learned that when U.S. Air Force helicopters in Afghanistan were needed for medevac, the request had to be approved by a senior commander, which caused added delay when every minute counted.

On November 12, I sent the chairman of the Joint Chiefs a memo asking for “a concerted effort” to get the medevac standard in Afghanistan down to one hour, carrying out “this task with a sense of urgency and priority.” Much to my surprise, Mike Mullen, the Joint Staff, and both civilian and military medical bureaucrats pushed back hard that this capability was not needed. Given that the survivability rate of the wounded exceeded 95 percent and that Iraq and Afghanistan shared similar medevac death rates of 4 to 5 percent, they saw no need to take measures to speed up medevac in Afghanistan. The Joint Staff surgeon, a one-star admiral, argued that with improvements in battlefield medicine, the two-hour standard was sufficient, and the chairman supported him. The Air Force was also opposed to a sixty-minute standard; the Navy was ambivalent. Only the Army and my own staff supported the change I was pushing. The bureaucrats had crunched the numbers, and that was that.

Their response really pissed me off. I told the senior military officers and civilians in one meeting that I didn’t care what their statistics showed, that if I were a soldier who had just been shot or blown up, I’d want to see that medevac helicopter as fast as possible. I told them that if a soldier had been deployed to Iraq, he expected the wounded to be picked up within an hour. Why would he accept something less in Afghanistan? I said this medevac problem was about the troops’ expectations and their morale, and by God, we were going to fix it.

The interim solution was to immediately add ten helicopters and three forward surgical hospitals in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan, where our troops were most heavily engaged in combat. By late spring, another fifteen helicopters and three more hospitals had been added. In January 2009, 76 percent of medevac missions in Afghanistan took longer than an hour; by July, that was down to 18 percent.

In May 2009, I visited the surgical hospital and helicopter medevac unit at Forward Operating Base Bastion in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. One of the surgeons there told me that prior to the additional medevac assets, they often could not save the life of a soldier or Marine who had lost both legs; now they did so routinely. Those doctors are very special people, and the medevac crews are unsung heroes who fly into places and in conditions that would take your breath away to rescue their comrades-in-arms. We had just needed another little war inside the Pentagon to give them the tools to do their jobs most effectively.

About the same time the medevac issue emerged, the need for an MRAP-like vehicle designed for the unique conditions of Afghanistan became clear. With a casualty rate less than half that of the M1A1 tank and about one-fourth that of the Humvee, the MRAPs had proven their value on the flat terrain and relatively decent roads in Iraq. But these same vehicles were too heavy, hard to maneuver in a rugged landscape—they had virtually no off-road capability—and too wide for the narrow and usually primitive roads of Afghanistan. So again, under constant pressure from my office (and me), the MRAP task force—and industry—quickly designed a lighter, more maneuverable vehicle, the MRAP-ATV (all-terrain vehicle). We signed the initial production contract at the end of June 2009. The first MRAP-ATVs were delivered to the troops in Afghanistan in early November. The speed with which all this took place—less than a year—as with the original MRAPs, simply could not have been achieved through the regular bureaucratic process. And once again Congress had come through with the money.

A controversial issue affecting troops and their families arose early in the Obama administration. Since the Gulf War in 1991, the press had been prohibited from being present and photographing the flag-draped caskets of service members killed abroad when they arrived at the military mortuary facility at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The military services felt very strongly that these “dignified transfers” should be private, and they even discouraged families from traveling to Dover to witness the rite. Some of the media, on the other hand, argued that this policy was a politically inspired effort to prevent the American people from seeing the “real cost” of our wars abroad. Others contended that these returning heroes should be publicly recognized and honored. I disagreed with the no-media policy, but when I looked into changing it in early 2008, the resistance inside the Pentagon from both military and civilians was so strong, I dropped the idea.

Then on February 9, 2009, at a press conference, the new president said he wanted the matter to be reviewed. The next day, based solely on reading what he had said, I again directed a review of media access to the transfer of fallen service members at Dover and told a press conference of my own that I had done so. I said I thought a change made sense if the needs of the families could be met and privacy concerns satisfied. I imposed a two-week deadline for the review.

The review evoked a wide range of responses. Several groups representing military families and families of the fallen were opposed to any change in policy, I think fearing a media circus. The Marine Corps adamantly opposed any change. The Air Force and the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness—the civilian component of the department responsible for such matters—thought no action should be taken until data on family and service members’ views was gathered. The Army and the Navy supported a change but with complete deference to the wishes of the families: if a family wanted no press coverage, that was final; if they were agreeable to media coverage, then it would be allowed at a respectful distance. Those opposed to a change were, I believed, sincere in their concern that asking the families about media coverage only added another tough decision at an incredibly difficult moment in their lives. The formal recommendation that came to me on February 19, reflecting a “universal consensus,” was to delay any decision until service members, family members, support groups, and other interested parties had been heard from. I gave them a week to do so.

Political scientists, historians, and reporters are often completely unaware of events or experiences unseen by the public eye that influence important decisions. I often reminded colleagues that presidents and other senior officials listen to a wide array of voices other than those in official government channels. In the case of my decision on Dover, an HBO movie, Taking Chance, released that February, had an important impact. The story follows a Marine lieutenant colonel (played by Kevin Bacon) as he escorts the remains of Marine Lance Corporal Chance Phelps from Dover to his hometown in Wyoming, ordinary Americans making gestures of respect all along the way. After seeing the film, I was resolved that we should publicly honor as many of our fallen warriors as possible, beginning at Dover.

On February 24, Mullen and I briefed the president on the results of the review and outreach, and with his strong support, two days later I announced at a press conference that, having heard from the services and organizations representing military families, I had directed that “the decision regarding media coverage of the transfer process at Dover should be made by those most directly affected—on an individual basis by the families of the fallen. We ought not presume to make that decision in their place.” For families wanting media coverage, it would be allowed at a respectful distance. For other families, the transfer would be private. The person designated by the fallen service member as the primary next of kin would speak for the family, although our long-term plan was to offer service members the opportunity to choose for themselves whether they would want media present for their return should they be killed. The transfer of Air Force Staff Sergeant Phillip Myers of Hopewell, Virginia, on April 6 was the first to be photographed by the media under the new policy. I attended Myers’s funeral at Arlington on April 27.

It seemed to me that some families would want to greet their fallen child or spouse when he or she first returned to American soil at Dover. Defense Department policy was to discourage families from doing so, although some families made their way to Dover anyway, paying for their own plane reservations and hotel accommodations. I decided we should make the arrangements and assume the cost for the families who wanted to go. The Air Force outdid itself in implementing this decision. In January 2010, a new Center for the Families of the Fallen, a six-thousand-square-foot space with a comforting, serene environment, opened at Dover. That spring construction began on a small hotel as well as a meditation center and adjoining garden for the families. By 2010, some 75 percent of the families of returning fallen service members were going to Dover to be present when their hero returned to America, and about 55 percent allowed media coverage.

I made my first visit to Dover on March 16, in the middle of the decision process. As was often the case, the chartered Boeing 747 carrying the remains arrived at night. As we were waiting for the transfer to take place, I asked my staff how the four service members had been killed. I was emotional that night, and when I was told that the soldiers had been in a Humvee that was hit by an IED, I turned on my staff and through clenched teeth angrily demanded, “Find out why they didn’t have their goddamned MRAPs yet.”

Uniformed in fatigues and white gloves, the Air Force honor guard that would carry out the transfer marched by us, and we fell into line and cadence with them to move planeside. The night was cold, with wind and rain. The plane was bathed in floodlights, and the side cargo door was open high above the ground, allowing us to glimpse the first two plain aluminum flag-draped transfer cases. I had told my staff to arrange for me to be alone with the four, so I climbed the front steps of the plane and was escorted to the rear cargo area and the four fallen. They were Army Sergeant Christopher Abeyta, Specialist Robert Weiner, Private First Class Norman Cain, all from the 178th Infantry Regiment, and Air Force Staff Sergeant Timothy Bowles from Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska. Alone with them, I was overwhelmed. I knelt beside each for a moment, placing my hand on the flag covering each case. Tears flooded my eyes. I did not want to leave them, but I finally sensed the chaplain move close behind me, and so I rose, returned to the tarmac, and saluted as, one by one, with extraordinary precision, respect, and care—even tenderness—the honor guard transferred each case to a waiting vehicle. There was complete silence on the plane back to Washington.

A month later I was visiting wounded at Walter Reed. I walked into one room where a young soldier was sitting on his bed holding a copy of that day’s Washington Post with a story about my March visit to Dover, including my intemperate question about why those four service members had not been in an MRAP. He read aloud from the story what I had demanded of my staff, and then he began to cry as he told me, “Your MRAP saved my life.” I managed to keep my composure—barely. I didn’t fully appreciate at the time the emotional toll my duties were taking on me.

Another issue I had tried to resolve early in my tenure was stop-loss, the practice of keeping soldiers on active duty after their scheduled service was completed. I knew that the practice was allowed by the contracts soldiers signed, but I considered it a breach of faith. Stop-loss was obviously unpopular among the troops, but it was also unpopular in Congress. Jack Murtha, chairman of the Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, pushed through legislation providing special compensation of $500 a month for the time any soldier was stop-lossed, retroactive to September 11, 2001. Ultimately we estimated there were some 174,000 eligible claimants, and Congress appropriated over $500 million for the retroactive pay.

A significant number of those stop-lossed were sergeants. Senior Army officers argued that their mustering out would deprive units of their experienced enlisted leadership. More than 14,000 soldiers were stop-lossed at one point. The surge in Iraq made ending the practice impossible in 2007 and 2008, but it remained on my to-do list. I returned to the issue early in the Obama administration. Thanks to the drawdowns in Iraq, Army chief of staff General George Casey and Pete Chiarelli came up with a plan to end stop-loss, which I announced on March 18, 2009, two days after my visit to Dover. Units of the Army Reserve would begin mobilizing and deploying without using stop-loss in August, the National Guard in September, and active duty units in January 2010. The goal was to reduce the number of those in stop-loss by 40 percent by March 2010, 50 percent by June, and to end the practice altogether by March 2011. The Army met these goals, and I was very proud of that.

There were a number of other matters affecting men and women in uniform and their families that remained high on my priority list. We still had to do better in getting needed equipment to the field faster; more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) was always on the list. We needed to keep improving the special units on active duty posts and bases—warrior transition units—created to provide a home for wounded troops while they recovered before returning to active duty or leaving the service. Ever more focus needed to be placed on post-traumatic stress and the shocking rise in suicides. We needed to expand and sustain programs for child care, family counseling, and others helping families. And we needed a much greater effort to eliminate sexual assault, a criminal act that destroyed trust, morale, unit cohesion—and lives.

Occasionally, amid so many issues and problems affecting our troops that wore me down, there would be an incident or moment that made me laugh or raised my spirits. Two such occurred in the first few months of the Obama administration. One morning in May, on the front page of The New York Times, there was a photograph of a soldier firing his rifle at Taliban attackers from the ramparts of Firebase Restrepo in Afghanistan. An Associated Press photographer had captured Specialist Zachary Boyd defending his firebase dressed in helmet, body armor, flip-flops, and pink boxer shorts with little red hearts in which were printed “I love New York.” I burst out laughing. “Any soldier who goes into battle against the Taliban in pink boxers and flip-flops has a special kind of courage,” I said publicly. “What an incredible innovation in psychological warfare!” I loved that picture so much that an enlargement hung on the wall outside my office for the next two years.

For inspiration, I would turn again and again to Lieutenant Jason “Jay” Redman, a Navy SEAL who had been shot seven times and had undergone nearly two dozen surgeries. He had placed a hand-drawn sign on the door to his room at Bethesda Naval Hospital. It read:

I met with Jay and his family in early February 2009, when he returned to Washington to donate his sign to the hospital. I drew great strength from young Jay Redman and from so many like him I encountered. Their example kept me going.

I mentioned earlier our need to prepare for future potential large-scale conflicts against other modern military powers while preparing for and fighting the conflicts we were already in or most likely to face in the years ahead—combating insurgents, terrorists, smaller rogue states, or groups taking advantage of chaos in failed states and humanitarian disasters. This had been at the heart of my disagreement with the Joint Chiefs over the National Defense Strategy.

I resumed the dialogue on these issues with the senior military and civilian leadership of the department in early January 2009, before Obama was inaugurated. It was the last gathering of the Bush Defense team, and the night before we began, the president and Mrs. Bush invited the chiefs and combatant commanders and their wives, along with several wounded warriors, to the White House for a wonderful, if poignant, farewell dinner. The next morning we got down to business. The assigned reading was my speech at the National Defense University—which had subsequently been adapted and published in the journal Foreign Affairs—where I had laid out my views. I led off our meeting by saying that I was “determined… to ‘operationalize’ the strategic themes I have been talking about for the past two years.” I warned that the strategic environment facing us had altered dramatically with a change in administrations, domestic and global financial crises, waning public support for increased defense spending, a strategic shift from Iraq to Afghanistan, seven years of constant combat operations and the resulting stress on the force, and resolve by Congress and the new administration to “fix” defense acquisition.

Circumstances had presented us with an immensely difficult bureaucratic challenge. In 2009, we had to carry out four complex, difficult periodic assessments required by Congress (the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Nuclear Posture Review, the Space Review, and the Ballistic Missile Review), all intended to shape Defense planning and budgets. We also had to execute the FY2009 budget, get approval of the FY2009 war supplemental, build the FY2010 budget and supplemental within a few weeks, and by fall develop the FY2011 budget. For a bureaucracy as ponderous as ours and the long lead times to complete each of these endeavors, this was a staggering agenda. I told the senior military and civilian leadership of the department we did not have the time to do all these things sequentially, and so even as the congressionally mandated reviews were being drafted, we needed to use them to help shape the budgets. I made clear this presented us with an opportunity to use these parallel processes to accelerate the strategic and programmatic changes that needed to be made. I asked for their opinions and ideas on how to proceed. I posed some tough questions:

My first opportunity to translate some of these ideas into action actually had occurred in the fall of 2008 while preparing the FY2010 budget. Members of Congress from both parties had complained repeatedly about the wars being funded through “supplemental” appropriations, outside the regular “base” budget of the Defense Department. It took me a while to realize this was political bullshit. Most members of Congress loved supplementals because they could irresponsibly hang all manner of parochial, often stupid, and militarily unnecessary expenditures onto those bills—earmarks for their districts and states—with no regard for fiscal discipline. Even worse, members would often eliminate items we had requested in the supplementals to fight the wars and substitute their pet projects. The Pentagon was not innocent in this regard either, as a good deal of defense spending that would normally be in the base budget—from Army reorganization to an additional F-35 fighter—got shoveled into the war funding request, which would make weaning the military off supplemental funding all the more painful in the future.

In any event, given bipartisan criticism of the supplementals, I decided we should begin to move certain war-related costs that we knew should continue beyond the wars themselves—including, for example, the expansion of the Special Forces and programs to help military families—into the regular defense budget. Anticipating that we would be deploying the equivalent of several brigades to various hot spots around the world for years to come, for everything from small-scale conflicts to training and assistance missions, as an experiment we added $25 billion to the regular budget to pay for such operations, thereby reducing the need for future supplemental appropriations. In their last meeting with President Bush, the Joint Chiefs pressed their budget concerns, and the president encouraged them to make his last defense budget very forward-leaning in terms of modernization, reequipping our forces after the two wars, and funding “unplanned contingencies.” His encouragement only abetted the traditional practice of a departing administration leaving behind a budget that would immediately be ripped apart by the new team. Only this time, of course, I was “the new team.”

By the time we were finished putting together an FY2010 budget that incorporated what the Joint Chiefs had discussed with Bush and a good deal of spending previously covered by supplementals, it had exploded to $581 billion, $57 billion more than the earlier projected budget for FY2010. I knew immediately that that dog wouldn’t hunt. What I had not taken into account was that an effort that I had seen as experimental and illustrative for the White House and Congress had been immediately embraced as firm financial guidance by the Joint Chiefs and others. Every element of the Pentagon had built its budget down to the last dime on the basis of a $581 billion request. And when we had to develop a real-world budget tens of billions of dollars lower, there was all manner of screaming and yowling out of the Pentagon about a huge “cut.” Needless to say, as all this was playing out, more than a few Obama folks—with some justification—thought the Bush administration had sandbagged them, seeking to make Obama look weak on defense, as he inevitably would have to pare back the budget. Trying to begin moving away from supplementals had blown up in my face. I also realized I should have stopped the additions encouraged by Bush. These were both my errors. After all my years around Congress and my own building, I had, to my chagrin and embarrassment, been naïve about both.

This fiasco behind me, I set about to rebuild the 2010 budget. In a meeting with the president on February 2, I acknowledged the need to curtail the growth in defense spending, but in a refrain I returned to again and again, I said the cuts should be “strategy-driven, not accountant-driven,” that we should do what was best for the country and not worry about the politics. The president agreed. The numbers we settled on in early February ($533.8 billion for the 2010 base budget and $130 billion for the war supplemental) were lower than I wanted but higher than what the Office of Management and Budget wanted.

I had a long private conversation with the president on February 11, during which I told him I “hoped and expected” to send him a new budget that cut many programs and reshaped spending to provide greater balance between current and future needs. This would involve making very difficult decisions, I said, and would be very controversial on the Hill. If we waited to speak out publicly until after the administration formally submitted its full budget to Congress in April, every major decision would have leaked, giving industry, lobbyists, and members time to galvanize support for sustaining every major individual program.

I recommended a highly unusual, if not unprecedented, political strategy. I told him, “I propose to review the major elements of the package with you and Peter [Orszag, director of OMB] before I even send it to OMB. Then I will go public and brief the recommended actions in their entirety—a holistic, coherent reform package. It will be harder to cherry-pick parochial interests if the package is seen as a comprehensive whole that serves the nation. We can capture the political high ground.” Another advantage, I told him, was that he and OMB could gauge the reaction and, if necessary, turn down one or more of my recommendations. The president was very supportive but wanted Orszag on board. I used Obama’s support to ensure that that was the case.

Rebuilding the 2010 budget gave me the opportunity not only to make “rebalancing” meaningful but also to weed out over-budget, overdue, or unjustifiable programs and to turn my attention to the herculean task of reforming the defense acquisition process. The history of cutting defense programs, especially big ones, is not pretty. When Dick Cheney was secretary in the early 1990s, two programs he tried to cut were the A-12 Navy and Marine Corps ground attack aircraft (nicknamed “the Flying Dorito” for its triangular shape) and the Marine Corps’ tilt-rotor Osprey, a combination helicopter and airplane. The A-12 matter was still in litigation twenty years later, and Congress overruled Cheney to keep the Osprey flying. When other secretaries had tried to kill programs, the services would work behind the scenes with sympathetic members of Congress to keep the programs going and preserve the jobs they provided. When the services wanted to kill a program, Congress would usually just override them and fund the procurement over their objections. For most members of Congress, the defense budget is a huge cash cow providing jobs in their districts and states. Thus, even in those rare instances when the Pentagon tried to show some acquisition discipline, Congress made it tough, if not impossible, to succeed. To beat the system, I needed the radically different political strategy that I had described to the president.

I threw myself into the budget process. During February and March 2009, I chaired some forty meetings as we considered which programs should have more money and which were candidates to be eliminated or stop production. It was an intense period, partly because of the amount of work that had to be done, and partly because everyone knew that hundreds of billions of dollars in programs were at stake. Most of my meetings were with what we called the “small group”—deputy secretary Bill Lynn (after he was confirmed on February 11); the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mike Mullen and Hoss Cartwright; the director of program evaluation, Brad Berkson, and his deputy, Lieutenant General Emo Gardner; the acting comptroller, Mike McCord and (once confirmed) the comptroller, Bob Hale; the undersecretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics, John Young (a Bush holdover); the undersecretary for policy, Michèle Flournoy; and Robert Rangel and Ryan McCarthy of my staff. Gardner was the real workhorse on much of the effort. Every few days we would hold expanded meetings (the “large group”) that included the service secretaries and chiefs and other senior civilians. And twice we brought in the entire senior Defense leadership, including the combatant commanders. One key point I would keep repeating, especially for the military, was that this was not driven by a reduction in the overall budget—money saved in some areas would be reinvested in programs of higher value.

All these meetings were a critical part of my strategy. One of the principal reasons previous secretaries—from Robert McNamara on—had failed to get Congress to go along with their recommended program changes was their exclusion of the military services from the decision-making process and the consequent opposition of the chiefs to their initiatives. I wanted the services intimately involved in the process, and I was prepared to give each service chief and secretary all the time he wanted to explain his views. Knowing that the services would often include programs in their budgets they didn’t want but were sure Congress would insist on, I told the chiefs that this time around they should include only programs they really wanted “and leave the politics to me.” I met at least four times with Army chief of staff George Casey and several times each with the other chiefs. Everyone had a chance to weigh in, not just on his own program but those of others as well. I wanted this to be a team effort, because when we were finished, I expected the chiefs, in particular, to support whatever decisions I made.

As I had told the president, previous efforts to cut programs had been leaked to Congress and the press early in the process, usually from the military service whose program was at risk. So at sensitive points in the debates, I prohibited circulation of briefing books and instead created limited access reading rooms where senior Defense officials had to go to prepare for the meetings. The huge staffs previously involved in the process were cut out. At the suggestion of Mike Mullen, I made everyone sign a nondisclosure statement. I signed the document and ultimately so did everyone else, after some grumbling. In other organizations, those agreements might not have meant much. But Mike and I knew what an oath and honor meant to military men and women—there was not a single leak during the entire process. I told no one except a small core group any of my final decisions until the day I announced them publicly. All of this drove the media and Congress nuts. Members of Congress would later complain about the use of “gag orders” and the lack of “transparency,” and I shot back that previous “transparency” had been the result of a flood of leaks, not official briefings.

As grandiose as it sounds, the magnitude of what I intended to do was unprecedented. Other secretaries had tried to cut or cap a handful of defense programs. We were looking at more than sixty possibilities.

Ultimately I settled on nearly three dozen major programs that, if executed, would have cost about $330 billion over their lifetimes. Given my strategy to announce together all the changes I had in mind ahead of the regular budget process, we were lucky that by the time I was ready to go public, Congress was in recess. (In the hope of securing the neutrality, if not the support, of the leadership of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees, we briefed them a few days before the announcement on the broad strategic context as well as the specifics. All those leaders supported most of my recommendations.) I believed the response of most media and pundits would be positive, so when Congress reconvened, those members attacking my decisions would be on the defensive. I thought announcing the changes all at once would “divide and conquer” members on the Hill. Previously, when only a few programs were proposed for elimination, affected members could build opposition coalitions by promising those who had no dog in the fight their vote on another issue in exchange. Going after dozens of programs made forming those coalitions much harder.

As for the larger defense industry companies, most of which have multiple contracts with the department, while many would lose in some areas, they would gain in areas where we would be increasing investments. This by and large minimized contractors’ opposition to my decisions.

It was important to make sure the president not only was supportive in principle but would stand behind me with a veto threat if necessary. On March 30, I told the president, Rahm Emanuel, Jim Jones, and OMB director Peter Orszag about each of the major recommendations. The president approved them all. Rahm, thinking of the political challenge ahead, asked me for a list of states and districts that would be most affected by the cuts and how many jobs were affected by each decision. The advantage for the president in all this was that it fit nicely into his theme of Defense reform. And, if it went badly, he could disown one or more of my proposals.

I went public on April 6. I talked about reshaping priorities for Defense on their merits, not to balance the books. I announced we would spend $11 billion to protect and fund the growth of the Army and Marine Corps and halt manpower reductions in the Air Force and Navy; add $400 million for medical research and development; institutionalize and increase funding in the base budget by $2.1 billion for programs to take care of the wounded and those suffering from traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress; and increase funding by $200 million for improvements in child care, spousal support, housing, and education. All together, funding for taking care of our troops and their families was increased by $3 billion.

I said we would increase base budget funding for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance by $2 billion to deploy fifty Predator-class drone orbits, increase the number of turboprop Liberty aircraft to go after IED networks, and fund a number of ISR enhancements and developmental platforms “optimized for today’s battlefield”; $500 million more for acquiring and sustaining more helicopters and crews, “a capability in urgent demand in Afghanistan”; $500 million more for training and funding foreign militaries’ counterterrorism and stability operations; add more money for expanding our special operations capabilities, both in terms of people and specialized equipment; and add money for more littoral combat ships, a key capability for presence, stability, and counterinsurgency operations in coastal regions.

For conventional and strategic forces, I said we would accelerate the purchase of F-35 fifth-generation stealth fighters and buy more F/A-18 fighters to keep the Navy’s carrier wings fully equipped until the F-35s came on line; add $700 million to field more of our most capable theater missile defense systems; add $200 million to fund conversion of six additional Aegis ships to enhance ballistic missile defense capabilities; fund additional DDG-51 “Arleigh Burke” destroyers, a ship first built in the Reagan years but with additional modernization still best in class; add money to triple the number of students in our cyber warfare schools; proceed with the next generation Air Force tanker; and begin a replacement program for our ballistic missile submarines. I said we would also examine the need for a new Air Force bomber.

I realized that for the press and others, this was mostly ho-hum stuff. The real headlines were about the major programs to be cut or capped. The most significant was probably my decision to cap the F-22 stealth fighter at 187 aircraft. Ironically, I got tagged as the one who “killed” the F-22, but the program had had a long slide since the original proposal in 1986 for 750 aircraft. Over nearly twenty-five years, the F-22 program suffered almost as many cuts from as many hands as Julius Caesar had. Virtually every defense secretary except me wielded a knife. The manufacturers of the plane were very clever—the plane had suppliers in forty-four states, which made it important for eighty-eight senators. That made capping the number a battle royal.

Apart from cost, I had other problems with the F-22. It was an exquisite aircraft designed primarily to take on other fifth-generation aircraft (presumably Chinese) in air-to-air combat and penetrate and suppress sophisticated air defenses. But we had been at war for ten years, and the plane had not flown a single combat mission. I would ask the F-22’s defenders, even in the event of a conflict with China, where we were going to base a short-range aircraft like the F-22. Did its defenders think the Chinese wouldn’t destroy bases in Japan and elsewhere launching U.S. warplanes against them? All that said, one couldn’t quarrel when pilots said it was the best fighter in the world. After a hard fight, and with a presidential veto threatened, the Senate voted 58–40 in July to accede to our proposal to end production at 187 aircraft. The House of Representatives ultimately went along.

My cancellation of the new VH-71 presidential helicopter drew considerable attention. This program was a poster child for acquisition going off the rails. Over the years, the White House had added more and more important requirements—like added survivability, range, and passenger load—but also trivial ones such as more than six feet of interior clearance so the president wouldn’t have to stoop when he got on board, and a galley with a microwave oven. The Navy acquisition bureaucracy had also made expensive engineering changes that moved the helicopter further away from a commercial design intended to keep costs down. The development program for the helicopter had fallen six years behind schedule, and the cost had doubled to $13 billion. The five helicopters in the initial buy would have had half the range the White House wanted and just over half the range of the existing helicopters. I told President Obama he was about to buy a helicopter that in several respects was not as good as what he already had, that each would cost between $500 million and $1 billion—but that he could microwave a meal on it in the middle of a nuclear attack. As I expected, he thought the whole thing was a pretty bad idea. The concern on the Hill—especially from Jack Murtha and Bill Young—with the cancellation was that we had already spent $3.5 billion of the taxpayers’ money, and it would just be wasted. They were right. The blame belonged squarely on the White House, the Defense Department, the Navy (managing the contract), and the contractor.

I also canceled a couple of big parts of the missile defense program that simply couldn’t pass the giggle test. I guess they had survived until then because for some members of Congress, there was no such thing as a dollar wasted on missile defense. The first was the “kinetic energy interceptor,” intended to shoot down enemy missiles (for example, from China and Russia) right after launch. It had been canceled a year earlier by the Ballistic Missile Development Office but restored by Congress. Its five-year development program had stretched to fourteen, there had been no flight tests, and there had been little work on the third stage and none on the kill vehicle itself. The weapon had to be deployed in very close proximity to enemy launch sites, a real problem with respect to large countries such as Russia, China, or even Iran. And the missile was so large and heavy, it would have to be deployed either on a future ship specifically designed for it or as a ground-based launcher. The program’s cost had already increased from $4.6 billion to $8.9 billion. I put a stake through its heart.

The so-called airborne laser, also designed to shoot down ballistic missiles right after launch, met the same fate. This chemical laser was to be deployed aboard a Boeing 747, but the laser had a range of only about fifty miles, and so the 747 would have to orbit close to enemy launch sites (usually deep inside their territory), a huge, lumbering sitting duck for air defense systems. To maintain constant coverage, a fleet of some ten to twenty of the aircraft would have been needed at a cost of $1.5 billion each, along with an estimated annual operating cost per airplane of about $100 million.

I also killed the Army’s Future Combat System, a highly sophisticated combination of vehicles, electronics, and communications with a projected cost in the range of $100 billion to $200 billion. The program, like so many in Defense, was designed for a clash of conventional armies. It was highly ambitious technologically, and there were serious doubts it would ever come to fruition at an acceptable cost. My major concern, though, was that the vehicle design did not take into account all we had learned in Iraq and Afghanistan about IEDs and other threats. I killed the vehicle part of the program, seeking a new approach, and the Army was able to use a number of the other technologies that had been developed.

General Cartwright patiently sat beside me through the entire presentation in the Pentagon press room, added his own remarks in support, and then helped me in answering questions. His technical understanding of the issues and problems affecting many of the programs was invaluable at that moment, as it had been in the decision-making process itself.

In the days following my press conference, I traveled to the war colleges of all four services—Quantico, Virginia, for the Marines; Maxwell AFB, Alabama, for the Air Force; Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania for the Army; and Newport, Rhode Island, for the Navy—to talk about what I was trying to do and to discuss decisions specific to each service. The middle-grade officers I addressed were the future of each of the services, and I hoped by engaging them directly I might be able to plant some ideas and perspectives that would have long-term impact. We’ll see.

We fought Congress all summer and fall of 2009 over the 2010 budget and over all the program changes that I had recommended and the president had embraced. To stay on the offensive, Geoff Morrell, my press spokesman, suggested I give a major speech before the Economic Club of Chicago in mid-July, which Rahm Emanuel arranged with the help of William Daley, a member of the club’s board (and Rahm’s subsequent successor as Obama’s chief of staff). Given that it was midsummer, I was amazed at the size of the crowd they assembled, its enthusiastic response to what we were trying to do, and the widespread press coverage we received. The event symbolized the full support of the White House.

When I had reviewed with the president at the end of March the specifics of what I was going to propose, both Biden and Emanuel said we’d be lucky to get half or 60 percent of what we wanted. When the dust settled, of the thirty-three major program changes I had recommended to the president, Congress ultimately acquiesced in 2009 to all but two. A year later we were successful in getting our way on those. It was unprecedented.

From some quarters, I received harsh criticism. One retired general said that I had “ripped the heart out of the future of the Army.” Others said I had gutted missile defense. According to one retired Air Force general, “He has decimated the Air Force for the future.” Former secretary of the Air Force Mike Wynne, not a member of my fan club, wrote, “I am sure… the Iranians are cringing in their boots about the threat from our stability forces. Our national interests are being reduced to becoming the armed custodians of two nations, Afghanistan and Iraq.” At the same time, a significant number of members of Congress of both parties were supportive, as were most of the media, who were amazed that a secretary of defense was able to kill even one military program, much less thirty or so.

These battles would continue for as long as I was secretary and beyond. Meanwhile the new president and his team were focusing on other, more politically potent issues such as health care and foreign policy, and that would include addressing my fourth priority, getting Afghanistan on track.

THE PRESIDENT’S AGENDA

As I said earlier, for the first several months under Obama, it took a lot of discipline to sit quietly at the table as everyone from the president on down took shots at Bush and his team. Sitting there, I would often think to myself, Am I invisible? During those excoriations, there was never any acknowledgment that I had been an integral part of that earlier team.

It was especially grating when the others would talk about how terrible our relations were with so many countries around the world, how our reputation as a country had been so damaged, how our standing had never been so low, and how much repair work lay ahead. While I would concede that the war in Iraq, in particular, had hurt many of our relationships, the world they described was not the world I had encountered when traveling as Bush’s secretary of defense. Instead, I had found most countries in 2007–8 eager to strengthen their relationship with us. I thought our partnerships in Europe, Africa, and China were in pretty good shape, and the fairly sour state of affairs with Russia had more to do with their bad behavior—including the invasion of Georgia—than with missteps by the United States. Asian leaders, however, had told me they felt neglected by the Bush administration, and we obviously still had big problems in the Middle East.

Discussions in the Situation Room allowed no room for discriminating analysis: everything was awful, and Obama and his team had arrived just in time to save the day. Riding back to the Pentagon after White House meetings, Mike Mullen and I would discuss how everyone seemed completely oblivious to the possibility that both of us might take offense to some of the things being said. Just as likely, they didn’t care. It was the dues we paid for staying on, but we didn’t have to like it.

No president has the luxury of focusing on just a few issues, but it is hard to think of a president who entered office facing more challenges of historic magnitude than Obama. The nation’s economic meltdown and the possibility of another great depression while we were engulfed in two wars certainly were at the top of the list. But there were myriad other pressing problems as well, among them the Iranian nuclear program and the related growing possibility of a new Middle East war; a nuclear-armed North Korea; a European economic crisis; increasingly nationalistic policies in both Russia and China; and Pakistan in possession of dozens of nuclear weapons and growing more dysfunctional by the day. Then there were Obama’s own initiatives, such as reshaping the federal budget and far-reaching health care reform. During his first four months, he had to deal additionally with the launch of a long-range North Korean missile over Japan on April 5, which fortunately failed; the killing of three Somali pirates and the rescue of an American ship captain by Navy SEALs on April 12; a North Korean nuclear test (which apparently fizzled) on May 25; and working with the Canadians to rescue two of their UN envoys who had been kidnapped in Mali by al Qaeda. These and other such unforeseeable events made every day interesting, but they also made demands on the president’s time and, accordingly, the time of his senior national security team.

Given the president’s campaign pledges, Iraq had to be high on the agenda for prompt action. As a candidate, Obama had promised to withdraw all U.S. combat forces within sixteen months and, as provided in the Strategic Framework Agreement, to have all U.S. troops out of Iraq by December 2011. General Ray Odierno, the commander in Iraq, had started looking at different options for drawing down his forces well before the inauguration. As usual, there was a leak—almost certainly from the Pentagon—and The New York Times ran an article on January 15 discussing Ray’s efforts. The story implied that there already was a difference of view between Obama and the military. This was not helpful. Geoff Morrell talked with Obama’s adviser David Axelrod and press secretary–designate Robert Gibbs, who were very concerned about Obama appearing to be at odds with the military “right out of the gate,” as had happened with President Clinton. They agreed that Morrell would tell the press that Mullen’s and my discussions with Obama “had been broad in nature and they will not begin the process of presenting specific options on the way ahead in Iraq and Afghanistan until after the inaugural.” In the months to come, there would be real, not imagined, problems between the White House and the military.

In a videoconference, Odierno told me he thought a recent preinaugural trip to Iraq by Biden and Senator Lindsay Graham had gone well, and he hoped if there was continued progress in both the security and political arenas, it might persuade the president to be flexible about his sixteen-month timeline. He said Biden told him that Obama would not be communicating directly with Prime Minister Maliki nearly as much as Bush had. I told Odierno I hoped to set up two sessions with Obama on the subject of drawdowns, one a videoconference with him and Petraeus, and the second a meeting at the Pentagon with the chairman, the chiefs, and me. I cautioned Odierno—and others—that Obama likely would not make a decision “on the spot,” as Bush had done so often, but would probably want to consult with other advisers first.

Iraq was the subject of the first Obama National Security Council meeting on January 21, 2009. The president said he wanted to draw down troops in a way that “preserves the positive security trends and protects U.S. personnel.” He asked for at least three options, one of which had to be his earlier sixteen-month timetable. In a press conference the next day, a reporter asked me what they should take from the fact that a White House statement after the NSC didn’t mention sixteen months. I replied, “I wouldn’t take anything from it.”

In early February, ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and Odierno submitted three options: (1) a twenty-three-month drawdown period, reducing U.S. forces to a residual training and advisory presence by December 2010, an option they recommended as offering the lowest level of risk and highest probability of achieving our objectives; (2) a nineteen-month drawdown, reaching the residual force level by August 2010, that would meet most but not all requirements for development of the Iraqi security forces; and (3) a sixteen-month-drawdown, which would be completed in May 2010, an option they said presented “extremely high risk” to overall mission accomplishment. Crocker and Odierno recommended a residual force of 50,000 to 55,000 troops, restructured into six advisory and assistance brigades, with the primary mission of training and advising Iraqi forces, deterring external threats, conducting counterterrorism operations, and protecting themselves and U.S. civilians. As provided in the Strategic Framework Agreement with the Iraqis, all American forces would be out of their country by the end of December 2011.

I had discussed the options in detail with Odierno in January and knew what he could live with. I also knew Obama wouldn’t accept a twenty-three-month drawdown. So in a private meeting with the president on January 26, I strongly recommended the nineteen-month-drawdown option. That moved his timetable back by 90 days and Odierno’s up by 120 days. I told him this option would demonstrate that he was not blindly committed to a campaign promise, that it would show he had listened to his commanders and adjusted his approach, and that it would provide a definite date to move to an “advise and assist” mission. This also would provide maximum U.S. military strength through the March 2010 Iraqi elections. “You will be a prisoner neither to your campaign nor to your commanders,” I concluded. He replied tersely: “I’m okay with that. It’s also good politically.” Obama and I had informally agreed on the Iraq drawdown timetable six days after the inaugural.

Unaware of the conversation between the president and me, the Deputies and Principals Committees met on several occasions during the first three weeks of February to discuss the options. On February 26, the president met with two dozen Democratic and Republican congressional leaders in the State Dining Room at the White House for “consultations” on the drawdown decision. As with virtually every president I worked for, such an occasion was less a consultation with Congress than a preview of what he was going to do and then hearing them out. All the president’s senior advisers were there, including Mike Mullen and me. Everyone sat at one huge table.

Politically, it was not a great evening for the president. The Republicans were almost unanimously supportive, including John McCain. The Democratic leadership was shocked not so much by the timetable but by the fact that some 50,000 troops would remain in Iraq until nearly the end of 2011. I was sitting across from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and thought she alternately looked like she had swallowed an entire lemon or was simply going to explode. She drummed her fingers on the table and had a white-knuckled grip on her pencil. She said she just could not understand why so many troops had to remain. Among the Democrats there, only Senator Dick Durbin, a close Illinois ally of Obama’s, supported the president’s plan.

The president flew to the Marine base at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, the next day to announce his decisions and place them in a larger regional context. Mike Mullen, Jim Jones, and I accompanied him. His references to the sacrifice and bravery of the troops drew warm applause, but he got his biggest round of cheers when he told the Marines he was going to raise military pay. That day, February 27, General Odierno sent a message to all his troops: “After extensive consultation with the Iraqis, [the] U.S. military chain of command, and civilian leaders, the president announced his plan for the responsible drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq…. The president has provided clear guidance regarding the change of mission for our forces, and his plan provides significant flexibility to military commanders on the ground to implement this guidance.”

At the outset of the surge in Iraq in 2007, as we’ve seen, I had told Petraeus I would get him as many troops as I could for as long as I could. In Odierno’s case, I was trying to ensure that he would keep as many troops as he could for as long as he could. While he was not entirely comfortable with the deal I struck, he would be able to hold on to significant troop levels until after the March 2010 Iraqi elections. He would manage it brilliantly.

The president moved quickly on the several foreign policy initiatives he had talked about during the campaign. Reaching out to Europe, he sent Biden, Jones, Holbrooke, and Deputy Secretary of State Steinberg to the Munich Security Conference in early February. Their tone, particularly on Biden’s part, was that the Neanderthals were no longer in charge in Washington and the “good guys” were back. In exchange for more consultation and strengthening partnerships and international organizations, Biden said, the Obama administration was hoping for less criticism and more constructive ideas; for help in enforcing the rules of international organizations; for greater willingness to consider the use of force when absolutely necessary; and for concrete contributions, even if not military. He and the other senior Americans met to good effect with a number of European leaders at the conference. I was happy I didn’t have to go. I had been to that conference twice under President Bush and that was enough. (On my second trip to Munich, I told my staff to pull me out of the dreaded formal dinner before dessert on the pretext of a call from the White House. Then I told them to get me just as the main course was served. Finally, just before going into the dinner, I said to come for me after the salad. As I left, heads turned, wondering what crisis compelled me to leave such a wonderful occasion so early. Pete Chiarelli made me stop by my hotel room to “take the call” before we made a beeline for the hotel pub for beer and sausages.)

Given the perception of American neglect in Asia, I was both impressed and pleased that Hillary Clinton’s first overseas trip as secretary of state was to Asia, beginning in Indonesia. I thought it sent an important message.

The more controversial among Obama’s early initiatives were his efforts to reach out to countries where our relationships ranged from poor to outright hostility, principal among them Russia and Iran. In these cases, the president and Clinton played the primary role, although we spent a great deal of time discussing each matter in the Situation Room. I had a lot of bad memories relating to Iran from my earlier life in government. I had been on the advance trip to Tehran in late 1977 for a state visit by President Carter, a city I thought then—just over a year before the Islamic revolution—was the most tense I had ever experienced; I was present as notetaker in the fall of 1979 in Algiers, when Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, made the first (failed) U.S. attempt to engage the Iranian leadership (our embassy in Tehran was seized days later); I was in the White House with CIA director Stansfield Turner the evening of our failed attempt to rescue our embassy hostages in the spring of 1980; I witnessed the Iran-Contra disaster in 1986–87; and I was present in the Situation Room during the U.S.-Iranian naval incidents in the Persian Gulf in 1987–88 and the downing of a civilian Iranian airliner by a U.S. warship in 1988. I reminded the president and principals that every president since Carter had tried to engage with the Iranians, that every outstretched American hand had been slapped away, and that two presidents, Carter and Reagan, had paid a significant political price for it.

There were a couple of exchanges of letters between Obama and Iranian supreme leader Khamenei in the spring of 2009, and Obama videotaped a message to the Iranian people on March 20 on the occasion of the Iranian New Year. The return letters from Tehran were diatribes. There was a lot of criticism, especially from conservatives, about the outreach to Iran. I had no objection because I thought that when it failed—as I believed it would—we would be in a much stronger position to get approval of significantly stricter economic sanctions on Iran at the UN Security Council. That turned out to be the case. I was convinced that those sanctions held the only possible path to stopping the Iranian nuclear program, short of war. I underestimated the reaction to the initiative from the Israelis and our Arab friends, both of whom nurtured the dread that the United States would at some point cut a “grand bargain” with the Iranians that would leave both Israelis and Arabs to fend for themselves against Tehran.

Most support inside the administration for engagement ended with the Iranian regime’s rigging of the outcome of the June 9 elections and the brutally harsh repression of protesters that ensued, although the administration would not fully abandon the idea until fall. The president was strongly criticized then and later for failing to speak out more clearly on behalf of the “Green Revolution.” At the time, I was persuaded by the State Department’s experts and by CIA analysts who briefed us in the Situation Room that too powerful an American voice on behalf of the protesters might provide ammunition for the regime to label the protest movement a tool of the United States and CIA and thus be used against them. In retrospect, I think we could and should have done more, at least rhetorically.

Another Iranian problem we faced had its roots in Bush’s final days in office. On January 7, 2009, I was heading out of my office to celebrate with my infinitely patient wife our forty-second wedding anniversary when I heard Geoff Morrell talking to my chief of staff, Robert Rangel, right outside my door. Geoff had received a call from New York Times reporter David Sanger that afternoon alerting him that Sanger was writing an article that would say Israel had asked the United States early in 2008 for bunker-busting bombs and for permission for overflight of Iraq in order to strike the Iranian nuclear enrichment site at Natanz. Sanger claimed that the United States had refused both requests, believing that the Israelis would be able to delay the Iranian program only a short while but would put 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq at risk. He also referred to a covert program intended to delay the Iranian nuclear program. Sanger wanted Morrell to ask me what I made of all this. I was furious. I called Bush’s national security adviser, Steve Hadley, to report what Morrell had just told me. I suggested Hadley call executive editor Bill Keller of the Times to try to stop publication of the article. Hadley thought that would never work, and then, at Rangel’s suggestion, I proposed bringing Jim Jones up to speed and then recommended that Hadley and Jones together call Keller. I don’t think that ever happened. Sanger’s article was published on January 11. A month later Obama was still so angry about the leaks to Sanger that he told me he wanted a criminal investigation.

As long as I had been in Washington, I could not for the life of me understand why someone would leak information about programs that were an alternative to war. But the leaks would continue. I didn’t know whether they were coming from the administration, from the Israelis, or from both. What I did know was that they were terribly damaging to the prospects for a nonmilitary outcome with Iran, and that that was unforgivable.

As an old “Russia hand,” I had no objection to Obama’s reaching out to Moscow as long as no unilateral concessions were involved. I was greatly reassured in an early meeting when Hillary said that she had no interest “ever” in doing something for nothing. She sent Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov a handwritten note on January 29 outlining a number of areas where the two sides could work together constructively, including a follow-on strategic arms agreement, global economic challenges, Middle East peace, Iran, North Korea, and Afghanistan. This was followed by a letter in early February from Obama to Russian president Medvedev setting forth a similar agenda, adding that both of them were young presidents with a different mind-set from those who came of age during the Cold War. (I wonder who he could have been talking about.) As reported publicly several weeks later, Obama wrote Medvedev that if we could satisfactorily resolve the Iranian nuclear problem, the need for missile defenses in Europe would be removed. This caused consternation in some conservative circles in the United States but in fact was very close to what Condi Rice and I had told Putin during the Bush administration. Although the administration would pursue a wide range of possibilities for cooperation in the months ahead, the focus of our dealings with Russia, as for so long before, narrowed principally to arms control and missile defense. There was progress on the former, failure and rancor on the latter.

Although by 2009 it was politically incorrect to describe Iran and North Korea as “rogue nations” or an “axis of evil,” they still acted as if they were, even in small things. In March 2009, two American women journalists who had crossed on foot into North Korea from China were arrested for spying. A few months later, in July, three other American hikers—two men and one woman—crossed into Iran from Iraq and were arrested. Frankly, I had no patience with any of them; no sentient person goes tootling anywhere near either the North Korean or Iranian border. But we had to try to get them out nonetheless.

The North Korean government said it would release the two women only if a former U.S. president came to get them. Hillary, Jim Jones, several others, and I gathered in Jones’s office in early August to discuss what to do. Hillary had asked President Carter to go, but he made clear that if he went, he would discuss broader aspects of the U.S.–North Korean relationship—as ever, an unguided missile—in addition to negotiating the terms of their release. When Clinton told Carter he could not go without a prior guarantee of the women’s release by the North, the former president responded, “You can’t dictate terms—they’re a sovereign state!” I was against either Carter or former president Clinton going. I had no objection to lower-profile emissaries who had been suggested, such as former defense secretary Bill Perry, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, or New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, but I was very much against giving the North a chance to humiliate a former U.S. president or allowing Pyongyang to dictate terms to one. I don’t remember who it was who said the two women had a lot of media connections and the families could go public, charging that the administration had turned down a chance to get the women back. I was frustrated that the others seemed more sensitive to the domestic U.S. ramifications of not doing as North Korea wanted than to the foreign policy implications. Ultimately, President Clinton made the trip and secured the release of the two women. The Iranians released the woman hiker after about a year, but it was nearly three years before the two men were released. All of this took up an enormous amount of time and effort.

The president wanted very much to reach out to the Muslim world and looked for an opportunity to do so. There was general agreement he should give a major speech in the Middle East but considerable debate about the best location to do so. On June 4, 2009, eighteen months before the Arab Spring, he stepped to the rostrum of a huge auditorium at Cairo University and delivered one of his best speeches. He spoke forthrightly about tensions between Muslims and the United States around the world, about shared principles, the dangers to all of violent extremists, the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab conflict, the Iranian nuclear program, and the American commitment to governments that reflect the will of the people—democracy. I thought he threaded the needle well in terms of advocating for human and political rights while not losing sight of the importance in the region of the American relationship with Mubarak’s Egypt. His talk was welcomed in most Muslim countries and raised our standing among the Arabs. His words were not well received in Israel, and he was criticized by the more hawkish neoconservatives in the United States, who accused the president of apologizing for his country. For me, the real downside of the speech was not that it was an acknowledgment of mistakes—free and confident nations do that—but that it raised expectations very high on the part of many Arabs that, for example, the United States would force Israel to stop building settlements and accept an independent Palestinian state. It wasn’t long before perceptions of us reverted to the by-then normal distrust and suspicion.

In the early months of the Obama administration, there was another Defense-related agenda item high on the president’s priority list—getting rid of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) law. Early in President Clinton’s administration, he had pushed hard to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the American armed forces but ran into opposition in Congress and a brick wall of resistance from the senior military leadership. The result was a compromise that left everyone unhappy: in essence, gays could continue to serve as long as they remained in the closet and kept their sexual orientation a secret, that is, as long as they did not engage in homosexual “conduct.” Between 1993 and 2009, some 13,000 service men and women were discharged from the military for homosexuality, either self-admitted or as a result of being reported by someone. Obama was determined to allow gays to serve openly but was willing to wait a bit. He did not want to repeat the 1993 Clinton experience of having a confrontation with the Joint Chiefs early in his term. That suited me just fine. I think all of us at Defense, civilian and military, knew that a change in the law was inevitable at some point, but with our military engaged in two wars and already under great stress, the prevailing view was that waiting was the right thing to do.

I was conflicted. As director of central intelligence in 1992, I had lifted all the restrictions and practices that effectively had previously barred gays from serving in CIA. If a person was open about his or her sexual orientation and therefore not vulnerable to blackmail, they were welcome to serve as long as they met the same CIA standards as other employees. CIA officers, however, do not live and work together 24/7. They do not share foxholes for days at a time or live in the extremely close quarters of a warship. The military is therefore different from CIA—a perspective strengthened by my conversations with troops, particularly young soldiers, in Iraq and Afghanistan. At a lunch with ten or so junior enlisted soldiers, one asked about the prospects for DADT. In the conversation that followed, one of them told me very matter-of-factly that if gays were allowed to serve, “There will be violence.” Another asked if “combat arms units”—those on the front lines—could be exempted. I heard such comments elsewhere as well. At the same time, I was mindful that there were gay men and women in uniform who were serving with courage and honor yet were required to live a lie, constantly in fear of being outed and having their careers ended. Still, when asked about changing the law in a television interview on March 29, 2009, I replied, “I think the president and I feel like we’ve got a lot on our plates right now, and let’s push that one down the road a bit.”

In the spring of 2009, though, we faced a growing risk that the courts would take control of the issue and make a decision requiring a change overnight. I felt that that was the worst possible outcome, and that risk increasingly shaped my view of the need to move forward. The president faced his first decision on a court case in early April. Major Margaret Witt had been a highly respected nurse in the Air Force Reserve for seventeen years. She never disclosed her sexual orientation to anyone in the military, but in 2004, the estranged husband of a woman Witt had begun dating reported the major to the Air Force. When informed in 2006 that the Air Force was beginning the process that would culminate in her discharge, she sued. Her suit was dismissed in district court, and she was discharged from the Air Force in July 2007. On her appeal, the Ninth Circuit Court in May 2008 reinstated certain aspects of the case and remanded it back to the district court. The Air Force in December urged appealing the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision to the Supreme Court. In early April 2009, Obama chaired a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the West Wing to discuss what to do. He clearly hated the idea of upholding a law he considered abhorrent. Some in the meeting said DADT was the law of the land and that was that. The president said if he had to take that approach, he was going to say publicly that he was going to change the law.

On the advice of the Defense Department’s general counsel, the well-respected New York lawyer Jeh Johnson, I agreed we should not appeal to the Supreme Court, and that was subsequently the decision. Johnson’s primary reason, and therefore mine (because I trusted and respected him like no other lawyer I had ever worked with), was that he thought the government’s case as it stood was weak and that we might very well lose the appeal, resulting in my nightmare scenario of a Supreme Court–mandated overnight change in the DADT law for the military. I told the senior defense leadership that the decision not to appeal did not represent a change in policy but was a very technical and narrow legal decision about how to dispose of a specific case.

This discussion formed the backdrop of Mullen’s and my first in-depth discussion of DADT with Obama on April 13. We understood his commitment to changing the law, but the question was how to fulfill that promise in a way that “mitigates the negative consequences.” I was quite candid with him. He needed to remember, I said, that a high percentage of our service men and women come from the South, Midwest, and Mountain West, more often than not from small towns and rural areas. They come from areas with conservative values, and they are, broadly speaking, more religious than many Americans. While they join the military for a variety of reasons, they often enlist because of the encouragement or at least support of their fathers, coaches, and preachers. The demographic and cultural realities of the U.S. military could not be wished away, and we had to acknowledge and address them if a change in the law was going to be successful.

I went on to tell him that no one in the Pentagon had any idea what the impact of eliminating DADT would be on the force with regard to unit cohesion, discipline, morale, recruitment, and retention. We didn’t know how quickly a policy could be implemented without major disruption to the services. The military had never had an open conversation internally about gays serving. What dialogue there had been was, I suspected, mostly among groups of soldiers in the barracks or in small groups over a few beers. If the policy was to change, I cautioned him in the strongest possible terms, it should not be by presidential order; it could not be seen by the military as simply the fulfillment of a campaign promise by a liberal president. DADT was the law. Any change had to come through a change in that law by the elected representatives of the American people. That, and only that, would have legitimacy. I said he could count on the fact that when the law and the policy changed, the military would implement it quickly and smoothly. He took all that in, I thought, with surprising equanimity.

“Let’s do it but do it right,” I concluded. I told the president I would appoint a task force to study the impact of changing the policy and how best to implement such a change. A few weeks later Rahm urged me to begin preparations throughout the force for repeal right away, to ease pressure from the “advocacy groups.” I refused, telling him I would not throw the military into turmoil in the middle of two wars to prepare for a controversial change that might or might not happen. When the president went to Congress and got the law repealed, then I would act.

That said, Mullen and I were thinking about how to structure a dialogue within the military to have an open discussion for the first time ever about gays serving openly, what the challenges would be, and how they could be mitigated. I asked Jeh Johnson to examine ways in which I could change the regulations to make it harder to discharge gays and to place the responsibility for such a decision higher in the chain of command. At the end of June, in response to a question, I told the Pentagon press corps that Mullen and I were actively discussing a change in the DADT law with the president and the senior military leadership. Among other things, we were looking at how to prepare for a change without disrupting the force, and for areas where there might be some flexibility in how we applied the law; for example, if someone was “outed” by a third party, would we be forced to take action? Those two issues would be debated internally through the remainder of 2009.