Duty

I could not make headway on implementing the Iraq strategy without extinguishing—or at least controlling—a number of political and bureaucratic brushfires: with the senior military, Congress, the media, and other agencies, including the State Department and the intelligence community. Figuring out how to do this required a lot of time and energy during my first months as secretary. As you can imagine, I was also determined to establish a special bond with our troops, especially those on the front lines. How could I communicate to them and give them confidence that the secretary of defense personally had their backs and would be their advocate and protector in the Pentagon and in Washington?

In Washington, nearly every day began with a conference call at 6:45 a.m. with Hadley and Rice. Then I would usually spend endless time in meetings. In the White House, there were meetings with just Steve and Condi; meetings with the two of them and Cheney; meetings with that cast plus the director of national intelligence, the director of CIA, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs; “principals” meetings with a cast of thousands, all of them taking notes (I was usually pretty quiet in those meetings); and meetings with the president. All those dealt just with routine business. If there was a crisis, more meetings were added. It was frustrating how often we would cover the same ground on the same issue, huge quantities of time consumed in striving to establish a consensus view. Some of the sessions were a waste of time; moreover, they often failed to highlight for the president that under a veneer of agreement, there were significant differences of view. As I would often say, sometimes we chewed the cud so long that it lost any taste whatsoever. I drank a huge amount of coffee, and the only saving grace of late-afternoon meetings at the White House was homemade tortilla chips with cheese and salsa dips. Still, all too often I found myself bored and impatient.

My meeting “problem” was even worse at the Pentagon. My days there began with a “day brief” in my office to acquaint me with what had happened overnight and the bureaucratic challenges ahead that day; the day ended with a “wrap up” at the same Jefferson Davis round table, where we surveyed the bureaucratic battle damage of the day. That table was one of three antiques in the office. (I would joke with visitors, four, if you included me.) There was also an elaborately carved long table behind my desk that had belonged to Ulysses S. Grant. My huge partners desk had been General John J. Pershing’s, spirited away from the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House to the Pentagon by the second secretary of defense, a political hack named Louis Johnson. The rest of the office was in “late government” style, that is, brown leather chairs and a sofa, exquisitely accented by stark fluorescent lighting. Two portraits were on the wall behind my desk: my personal heroes, General George C. Marshall and General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Robert Rangel conducted both the morning and evening meetings, which included just the two of us and my senior military assistant. Rangel had the best poker face of anyone I’ve ever known, so when he started in, I had no idea whether he was going to give me good news (quite rare) or set my hair on fire with some disaster (routinely). The rest of the day was filled with secure videoconferences with commanders in Baghdad and Afghanistan; meetings with my foreign counterparts (sometimes two or three a day); meetings on the budget or various weapons programs; meetings on civilian and military personnel; meetings on service-specific issues; meetings on issues of special concern to me that I wanted to track closely (usually having to do with the troops in the field). I usually ate lunch alone so I didn’t have to talk to anyone for at least forty-five minutes during the day. For a mental break, I would usually do the daily New York Times crossword puzzle while I ate my sandwich. In the mix were all the calls and meetings with members of Congress and congressional hearings. Pace and subsequently Mike Mullen sat in with me on many, if not most, of these meetings. PowerPoint slides were the bane of my existence in Pentagon meetings; it was as though no one could talk without them. As CIA director, I had been able to ban slides from briefings except for maps or charts; as secretary, I was an abject failure at even reducing the number of slides in a briefing. At the CIA, I was able on most days to protect an hour or so a day to work in solitude on my strategies for change and moving forward. No such luck at Defense. One tactic of bureaucracies is to so fill the boss’s time with meetings that he or she has no time to meddle in their affairs or create problems for them. I am tempted to say that the Pentagon crew did this successfully, except that many of my meetings were those I had insisted upon in order to monitor progress on matters important to me or to put pressure on senior leaders to intensify their efforts in accomplishing my priorities.

In truth, nothing can prepare you for being secretary of defense, especially during wartime. The size of the place and its budget dwarf everything else in government. As I quickly learned from 535 members of Congress, its programs and spending reach deeply into every state and nearly every community. Vast industries and many local economies are dependent on decisions made in the Pentagon every day. The secretary of defense is second only to the president in the military chain of command (neither the vice president nor the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is in the chain at all), and any order to American forces worldwide goes from the president to the secretary directly to the combatant commanders (although as a practical matter and a courtesy, I routinely asked the chairman to convey such orders). More important than any of the meetings, the secretary makes life-and-death decisions every day—and not just for American military forces. Since 9/11, the president has delegated to the secretary the authority to shoot down any commercial airliner he, the secretary, deems to be a threat to the United States. The secretary can also order missiles fired to shoot down an incoming missile. He can move bombers and aircraft carriers and troops. And every week he makes the decisions on which units will deploy to the war front and around the world. It is an unimaginably powerful position.

At the same time, no secretary of defense who wants to remain in the job can ever forget that he works for the president and serves only at the pleasure of the president. To be successful, the secretary must build a strong relationship of mutual trust with him and also with the White House chief of staff and other senior executive staff members—and, most certainly, with the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The secretary of defense is also part of a broader national security team—the vice president, secretary of state, national security adviser, director of national intelligence, and director of the CIA among them, and the part he chooses to play on that team can have a big impact on the nation’s, and a president’s, success. Further, money fuels the Defense machine, and because every dime must be approved by Congress, the secretary needs to have the savvy and political skill to win the support of members and to overcome their parochial interests for the greater good of the country.

In short, despite the tremendous power inherent in the job, the secretary of defense must deal with multiple competing interests both within and outside the Pentagon and work with many constituencies, without whose support he cannot be successful. He is constantly fighting on multiple fronts, and much of every day is spent developing strategies to win fights large and small—and deciding which fights to avoid or concede. The challenge was winning the fights that mattered while sustaining and even strengthening relationships, while reducing the number of enemies and maximizing the number of allies.

MAKING PEACE AT HOME

Before becoming secretary, I had heard and read that Defense’s relationships with Congress, the media, and other agencies of the government—and the national security team—were in trouble. I had also heard rumors of real problems between the civilian leadership and senior military officers. Then I arrived in Washington for confirmation and really got an earful about how bad things were—from members of Congress in both parties, from reporters I had known a long time, from friends in government, and from a number of old associates with close ties to many in the Pentagon, both civilian and military. To this day, I don’t know how much of this gossip was simply animosity toward Rumsfeld, how much was institutional ax-grinding, and how much was just sucking up to the new guy by trashing his predecessor (an old habit and a highly refined skill in Washington). But I also knew that in Washington, perception is reality, and that I had to tackle the reality that the Department of Defense had alienated just about everyone in town and that I had a lot of fences to mend. It would be critical to success in Iraq.

I started closest to home, in the executive corridors of the Pentagon itself, the E-Ring, the outermost corridor in the building and home to the most senior military and civilian officials. An hour after I was sworn in on December 18, I held my first staff meeting with the senior civilian leadership and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I wanted them to know right away how I intended to operate. This is part of what I said:

I then told them that General Pace, undersecretary for policy Eric Edelman, and I would be leaving the next day, the nineteenth, for Iraq, would return on the twenty-second and report to the president on the twenty-third. One important reason I took Pace and Edelman with me was to signal to civilians and military alike in the Pentagon that the chairman was going to be a close partner in my leadership of the department, and that the military needed to recognize that my civilian senior staff would play a critical role as well.

I repeated these points and expanded upon them in a meeting with the entire Defense leadership, civilian and military—including the combatant commanders from around the world—on January 24. I told them I was grateful Gordon had decided to stay on as deputy and that he would be the department’s chief operating officer. I made clear to the senior military officers that Eric would have a key role in representing their interests in interagency meetings and at the White House and they should regard him as an asset and work closely with him.

I emphasized that when dealing with Congress, I never wanted to surprise our oversight committees, and I wanted to pick our fights with the Hill very carefully, saving our ammunition for those that really mattered. I encouraged anyone in the department who had special relationships or friendships with members of Congress to cultivate them. I felt that would benefit all of us.

Meetings and conferences, I said, should be more interactive. A briefing should be the starting point for discussion and debate, not a one-way transmission belt. If they had to use PowerPoint, I begged them to use it sparingly, just to begin the discussion or illustrate a point. I asked my new colleagues to construct a briefing while asking themselves how it would move us forward, and what the follow-on action might be. (Again, changing the Pentagon’s approach to briefings was a singular failure on my part. I was not just defeated—I was routed.)

I told them I had decided to make a change in the selection process for flag-rank officers—generals and admirals. Rumsfeld had centralized this in the secretary’s office. I said I would continue to review all positions and promotions at the four-star level and some at the three-star level, but otherwise I was returning the process to the services and the Joint Staff. I said that I still wanted the same things Rumsfeld had been looking for—joint service experience, operational experience, bright younger officers, and those willing to reexamine old ways of doing business. And I would be checking the services’ homework.

I decided to adopt the same strategy with the military leadership I had used with the faculty at Texas A&M and with the intelligence professionals when I was running the CIA: I would treat them with the respect deserved by professionals. I would approach decisions by seeking out their ideas and views, by giving them serious consideration, and by being open and transparent. Everyone would know the options under consideration, and everyone would have a chance to weigh in with his or her point of view (more than once if they thought it important), but I often would not reveal my own views until the end of a decision-making process. I never fooled myself into believing that I was the smartest person in the room. As I had told Colin Powell, I am a very good listener and only through the candor and honesty of both my civilian and military advisers could I work my way through complex issues and try to make the best possible decision. In everything I did as secretary, I sought the advice of others—though I did not always heed it—and depended upon others for effective implementation of my decisions.

Good arguments could get me to change my mind. Early on I had to decide on a new U.S. commander in Korea. The position had been filled for nearly sixty years by Army generals. I thought the time had come to rotate the position to another military service. Because our Air Force and Navy would play a big role in any conflict on the Korean peninsula, I decided to appoint an Air Force officer as the new commander. Army chief of staff George Casey balked and made a strong case that the timing for the change wasn’t good, especially as we were negotiating with South Korea on a transfer of operational control of forces from the United States to the Koreans. He was right, so I recommended that the president nominate another Army general.

As I signaled at my first staff meeting, I worked hard from the beginning to make the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff my partner within the framework of the chain of command, consulting with him on virtually everything and making certain, through him, that the service chiefs and commanders all knew I wanted and expected candor and their best advice.

I have long believed that symbolic gestures have substantive and real benefits—“the stagecraft of statecraft,” as I think George Will once put it. Rumsfeld rarely met with the chiefs in the Tank, instead meeting in his conference room. I resolved to meet regularly with them in their space. I ended up doing so on a nearly weekly basis. Even when I had no agenda, I wanted to know what was on their minds. Instead of summoning the regional and functional combatant commanders (European Command, Pacific Command, Strategic Command, Transportation Command, and all the others) to the Pentagon to give me introductory briefings on their organizations, I traveled to their headquarters as a gesture of respect. This had the additional benefit of familiarizing me with the different headquarters’ operations and of giving me the chance to speak with a number of staff I wouldn’t otherwise have met. I resolved that I would try to attend change-of-command ceremonies for the combatant commanders, symbolic recognition of their important role and of the institutional culture.

My approach in dealing with the military leadership had a far more positive impact than I had expected. I had much less of a problem with end runs to the Hill and leaks than many of my predecessors. Of course, over time, demonstrating that I was willing to fire people when necessary probably didn’t hurt either.

As for Congress, the two most important people on the Hill for me were the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, and the ranking Republican on the committee until 2009, John Warner, as we’ve already seen. While the House Armed Services Committee and its chairman, Ike Skelton, and the two Appropriations Committees were also important, I had a lot more business with the Senate Armed Services Committee, if only because it handled all of my department’s civilian and military leaders’ confirmations. My confirmation hearings got me off on the right foot with Levin and Warner, and I tried to keep them informed of what I was doing and planning, particularly with personnel. Levin was a formidable adversary on Iraq, but my willingness publicly to acknowledge the legitimacy of some of his concerns—such as the failure of the Iraqis to reconcile politically—and even to concede that his criticisms were helpful in putting pressure on the Iraqis, kept our differences from becoming personal or an impediment to a good working relationship. Levin was strongly partisan, and I thought some of his investigations were attempts to scapegoat my predecessor and others. But he always dealt fairly and honestly with me, always keeping his word. If he said he would do something, he did it. Warner was always pleasant to deal with, even if he sometimes was in my view a little too willing to compromise on Iraq. The next ranking Republican was John McCain. Ironically, while McCain and I agreed on most issues—especially Iraq—he was, as we have seen, prickly to deal with. During one hearing he might be effusive in his praise, and in the next he would be chewing my ass over something. But I always tried to be respectful and as responsive as possible to all members of the committee, however difficult that sometimes would prove to be. I saved my venting for the privacy of my office.

I dealt with many other members of Congress as well. I disagreed with Speaker of the House Pelosi on virtually every issue, but we maintained a cordial relationship. I would also meet from time to time with House Majority Leader Hoyer and other Democrats he would gather. My approach to Congress seemed validated when, at a Hoyer-hosted breakfast, Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, opened his remarks with a French phrase he directed at me and translated as “It is the tone that makes the music.” “You bring things and people together with your tone,” he said. “Thank God. Your principal contribution will be setting a new tone in respecting different views on the Hill and throughout the country.”

With all the major issues we had to deal with, my personal contacts with Senate Majority Leader Reid were often in response to his calls about Air Force objections to construction of a windmill farm in Nevada because of the impact on their radars. He also once contacted me to urge that Defense invest in research on irritable bowel syndrome. With two ongoing wars and all our budget and other issues, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I came to believe that virtually all members of Congress carried what I called a “wallet list,” a list they carried with them at all times so that if, by chance, they might run into me or talk with me on the phone, they had a handy list of local projects and programs to push forward. And some became pretty predictable. If Senator McConnell of Kentucky was calling, it was probably to make sure a chemical weapons disposal plant in his state was fully funded. Anyone elected from Maine or Mississippi would be on the phone about shipyards. California, C-17 cargo planes; Kansas, Washington, or Alabama, the new Air Force tanker; Texas, when were the brigades coming back from Europe and would they go to Fort Bliss?

In the privacy of their offices, members of Congress could be calm, thoughtful, and sometimes insightful and intelligent in discussing issues. But when they went into an open hearing, and the little red light went on atop a television camera, it had the effect of a full moon on a werewolf. Many would posture and preach, with long lectures and harshly critical language; some become raving lunatics. It was difficult for me to sit there with a straight face. But I knew from reading a lot of history that such behavior dated back to the beginning of the republic. And as amusing or infuriating as members sometimes were, I never forgot the importance of their roles. And all but a handful would treat me quite well the entire time I was secretary.

I had not dealt much with the media while director of the CIA or as president of Texas A&M, so regular press conferences and routine exposure to reporters were new to me. In a departure from the usual practice at the Pentagon, I wanted a press spokesman who had been a practicing journalist and who would not also have the job of administering the huge Defense Department public affairs operation. Marlin Fitzwater, Bush 41’s press secretary, had made the point to the president that he could not do his job if he was not included in many of the president’s meetings or if the press lacked confidence that he really knew the president’s mind on issues. I thought Marlin was right, and I adopted his approach for Defense. I hired Geoff Morrell, who had been with ABC television news and had covered the Bush 43 White House. He became a key member of my team.

I continued the practice of appearing at press conferences together with the chairman. Both of us sat behind a table, which I thought was more casual (and more comfortable). I departed from this practice a few times early on, when I had a major personnel announcement (especially a firing), in which case I would go out alone and use a podium. It became a standing joke with the Pentagon press corps that if the podium was on the stage, someone was going to get the ax. I thought about faking them out a few times but thought better of it.

A practice I developed in talking with student groups and others at Texas A&M was never to condescend to a questioner, or question the question. I would follow the same practice with reporters. The Pentagon is fortunate in having, on the whole, an experienced and capable group of reporters assigned to it, most of whom are interested in the substance of issues and not personalities. I never had a real problem with them. Sure, I’d get frustrated occasionally, but probably not as often as they did: while I was candid and straightforward most of the time, they could not get me to talk about something I didn’t want to talk about.

I hated leaks. I rarely blamed reporters for printing leaks, though; my anger was reserved for those in government entrusted to keep secrets who did not. When I announced the extension of Army tours in the Centcom area from twelve to fifteen months, I had to rush the announcement because of a leak. I was furious because we had orchestrated the decision to give commanders forty-eight hours to explain the decision to their troops. I told the press that day, “I can’t tell you how angry it makes many of us that one individual would create potentially so much hardship not only for our servicemen and women, but also for their families, by… letting them read about something like this in the newspapers.”

My views on the role of Congress and the media were a little out of the ordinary for a senior official of the executive branch, and I pushed those views forward whenever possible, especially at the service academies. In my commencement address at the Naval Academy on May 25, 2007, I told the about-to-be new ensigns and lieutenants:

Today I want to encourage you always to remember the importance of two pillars of our freedom under the Constitution—the Congress and the press. Both surely try our patience from time to time, but they are the surest guarantees of the liberty of the American people. The Congress is a coequal branch of government that under the Constitution raises armies and provides for navies. Members of both parties now serving in Congress have long been strong supporters of the Department of Defense, and of our men and women in uniform. As officers, you will have a responsibility to communicate to those below you that the American military must be nonpolitical and recognize the obligation we owe the Congress to be honest and true in our reporting to them. Especially if it involves admitting mistakes or problems.

I went on to discuss the media:

Many members of Congress and many in the media read these remarks. They were, I believe, the foundation of an unprecedented four-and-a-half-year “honeymoon” for me with both institutions.

The final relationships to fix were interagency, particularly with the State Department, the intelligence community, and the national security adviser. This was the easiest for me. I had first worked with Steve Hadley on the NSC staff in 1974, and Condi Rice and I had worked together on that staff during Bush 41’s presidency, as mentioned earlier. I knew that for much of my career, the secretaries of state and defense had barely been on speaking terms. The country had not been well served by that. I had known the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, when he was the two-star head of intelligence for the Joint Staff. Nearly nine years on the NSC staff had also ingrained in me the importance for a president of having the team pull together. It had worked well in Bush 41’s administration, and it needed to in Bush 43’s. I readily conceded that the secretary of state should be the principal spokesperson for the United States, and I also knew that if she and I got along, it would radiate throughout our departments and the rest of the government. Symbolism was important. When Condi and I would meet together with leaders in the Middle East, Russia, or Asia, it sent a powerful signal, not just to our own bureaucracy but to other nations, that trying to play us off against each other wasn’t likely to work.

There was another factor that made me comfortable assuming a less publicly assertive role. I wrote earlier about the unparalleled power and resources available to the secretary of defense. That ensures a certain realism in interagency relationships: the secretary never has to elbow his way to the table. The secretary can afford to be in the background. No one can ignore the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room.

The fractious relationship among Defense, the director of national intelligence, and the director of the CIA needed to be repaired as well. Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Jim Clapper; McConnell, the DNI; General Mike Hayden, the CIA director; and I now undertook to figure out how to remedy the deficiencies of the 2004 Intelligence Reform Act and bring the intelligence community closer together. It was an arduous process—more than it should have been—because of so much scar tissue and enmity in the various bureaucracies. This was one of those rare instances where a unique set of personal relationships stretching back decades allowed us significantly to mitigate otherwise intractable bureaucratic hostility. And it is still another reminder that when it comes to government, whether it works or not often depends on personal relationships.

If there was any doubt that things had changed among the agencies with my arrival, it was put to rest with a speech I made at Kansas State University in November 2007, where I called for significantly more resources for diplomacy and development—for the State Department and the Agency for International Development. No one could ever recall a secretary of defense calling for an increase in the State Department budget. With Rice, Hadley, and me working together, cooperation among the agencies and departments improved significantly. Indeed, as early as February 2007, Steve told me I was already making a huge contribution, that I had “opened up the process for the president” and had had a real impact on other departments and the interagency process. My unspoken reaction was that I had enough fights on my hands without looking for more.

THE BUSH TEAM

I joined the Bush administration at the end of its sixth year. Neither the president nor the vice president would ever again run for public office. That fact had a dramatic impact on the atmosphere and the nature of the White House. The sharp-elbowed political advisers and hard-core ideologues who are so powerful in a first term were pretty much gone. All eyes were now on legacy, history, and unfinished business, above all, on Iraq.

In all the books and articles I have read on the Bush administration, I have seen few that give adequate weight to the personal impact of 9/11 on the president and his senior advisers. I’m not about to put Bush or anyone else “on the couch” in terms of analyzing their feelings or reactions, but my views are based on many private conversations with key figures after joining the administration, and on direct observation.

Beyond the traumatic effect of the attack itself, I think there was a huge sense among senior members of the administration of having let the country down, of having allowed a devastating attack on America take place on their watch. They also had no idea after 9/11 whether further attacks were imminent, though they expected the worst. Because the senior leadership was worried there might be warning signs in the vast collection apparatus of American intelligence, nearly all of the filters that sifted intelligence reporting based on reliability or confidence levels were removed, with the result that in the days and weeks after 9/11, the White House was flooded with countless reports of imminent attacks, among them the planned use of nuclear weapons by terrorists in New York and Washington. All that fed the fear and urgency. That, in turn, was fed by the paucity of information on, or understanding of, al Qaeda and other extremist groups in terms of numbers, capabilities, leadership, or anything else. Quickly filling those information gaps and protecting the country from another attack became the sole preoccupation of the president and his senior team. Any obstacle—legal, bureaucratic, financial, or international—to accomplishing those objectives had to be overcome.

Those who years later would criticize some of those actions, including the detention center at Guantánamo and interrogation techniques, could have benefited from greater perspective on both the fear and the urgency to protect the country—the same kind of fear for national survival that had led Lincoln to suspend habeas corpus and Franklin D. Roosevelt to intern Japanese Americans. The key question for me was why, several years after 9/11 and after so many of those information gaps had been filled and the country’s defenses had dramatically improved, there was not a top-to-bottom review of policies and authorities with an eye to culling out those that were most at odds with our traditions, culture, and history, such as renditions and “enhanced interrogations.” I once asked Condi that question, and she acknowledged they probably should have done such a review, perhaps after the 2004 election, but it just never happened. Hadley later told me, though, that there had been a review after the election, some of the more controversial interrogation techniques had been dropped, and Congress had been briefed on the changes. Like most Americans, I was unaware.

Most of the members of the Bush team I joined have been demonized in one way or another in ways that I either disagree with or believe are too simplistic. As for President Bush, I found him at ease with himself and comfortable in the decisions he had made. He knew he was beyond changing contemporary views of his presidency, and that he had long since made his presidential bed and would have to sleep in it historically. He had no second thoughts about Iraq, including the decision to invade. He believed deeply in the importance of our “winning” in Iraq and often spoke publicly about the war. He saw Iraq as central to his legacy, but less so Afghanistan, and he resented any suggestion that the war in Iraq had deprived our effort in Afghanistan of adequate resources. Bush relied a lot on his own instincts. The days of funny little nicknames for people and quizzing people about their exercise routines and so on were mostly long over when I came on board. This was a mature leader who had walked a supremely difficult path for five years.

Bush was much more intellectually curious than his public image. He was an avid reader, always talking about his current fare and asking others what they were reading. Even in his last two years as president, he would regularly hold what he called “deep dives”—in-depth briefings and discussions—with intelligence analysts and others on a multitude of national security issues and challenges. It was a very rare analyst or briefer who got more than a few sentences into a briefing before Bush would begin peppering him or her with questions. They were tough questions, forcefully expressed, and I can see how some might have seen the experience as intimidating. Others found the give-and-take with the president exhilarating. At the same time, the president had strong convictions about certain issues, such as Iraq, and trying to persuade him otherwise was a fool’s errand. He had a very low threshold for boredom and not much patience with structured (or long) briefings. He wanted people to get to the point. He was not one for broad, philosophical, or hypothetical discussions. After six years as president, he knew what he knew and rarely questioned his own thinking.

Bush was respectful and trusting of the military but, at least in my time, not reluctant to disagree with his senior leaders and commanders, especially as it became clear in mid-2006 that their strategy in Iraq wasn’t working. He visited the Pentagon fairly regularly, willing to meet as often as needed with the chiefs to give them the opportunity to lay out their views and talk with him. He welcomed their candor, and while he would react to or rebut things they said, I never heard him do so in a rude or curt manner or in such a way as to discourage future candor. At the same time, he would get impatient with senior officers who were publicly outspoken on sensitive issues. Whether it was the DNI, Admiral Mike McConnell, in a New Yorker article calling some of our interrogation techniques torture, or Fox Fallon expounding on avoiding conflict with Iran, or Mike Mullen on several occasions going against the company line on both Iraq and Afghanistan, the president would turn to me and say, “What is it with these admirals?”

The president and I were not close personally, but I felt as though we had a strong professional relationship. He invited Becky and me to Camp David on several occasions, but we were unable to go either because of my foreign travel or Becky being in the Pacific Northwest. Declining the invitations became a source of embarrassment to me, especially when the invitations stopped coming. I was always concerned the president might think we were avoiding what would have been a real honor when, in fact, it was always just poor timing.

The one somewhat touchy area between us—never openly discussed—was my close relationship to the president’s father. When Bush 41 was in Washington in late January 2007 and wanted to come over to the Pentagon to see me and meet some of the military leaders, I got a call from Josh Bolten that Bush 43 thought such a visit might become a news story and he did not want that. Josh urged me to call off the visit. I said I would defer to 43’s wishes. So 41 and I had breakfast the next day at the White House instead. A few weeks later I was returning from a meeting at the White House when my secretary called to tell me that 41 was on his way to the Pentagon. I barely arrived in time to welcome him, and he went around shaking hands and talking with the folks in my immediate office. He was there only about fifteen to twenty minutes, but I think he wanted to make a point about his own independence.

My only real problem with the Bush White House involved its communications/public relations advisers. They were always trying to get me to go on the Sunday TV talk shows, write op-eds, and grant interviews. I considered their perspective—and that of Obama’s advisers too—to be highly tactical, usually having to do with some hot-button issue of the moment and usually highly partisan. I believe that when it comes to the media, often less is more, in the sense that if one appears infrequently, then people pay more attention when you do appear. Bush’s advisers occasionally would try to rope me into participating in White House attacks on critics of the president, and I would have none of that. When the president gave a speech to the Israeli Knesset in the summer of 2008 in which he came close to calling his critics appeasers, the White House press folks wanted me to endorse the speech. I directed my staff to tell them to go to hell. (The staff told them more politely.) In terms of picking fights, I intended to make those decisions for myself, not cede the role to some staffer at the White House.

President Bush was always supportive of my recommendations and decisions, including on those occasions when I told him I wanted to fire some of his senior-most appointees in the Defense Department. He gave me private time whenever I asked for it, and we were in lockstep on strategy with respect to Iraq, Iran, and other important issues where some in the administration, the press, and Congress sometimes thought I was freelancing. I kept him well informed about everything I was doing and what I intended to say publicly.

I enjoyed working for and with President Bush. He was a man of character, a man of convictions, and a man of action. As he himself has said, only time will tell how successful he was as president. But the fact that the United States was not successfully attacked by violent extremists for the last seven years of his presidency, and beyond, ought to count for something.

I met Dick Cheney in the mid-1980s when he was a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. I had been a junior National Security Council staffer during the Ford administration, when he was deputy White House chief of staff and then chief; I was far too much of an underling to have any contact with him. In my opinion, one cannot understand Cheney without having been in the White House during the Ford years. It was the nadir of the modern American presidency, the president reaping the whirlwind of both Vietnam and Watergate. The War Powers Act, the denial of promised weapons to South Vietnam, cutting off help to the anti-Soviet, anti-Cuban resistance in Angola—Congress took one action after another to whittle down the power of the presidency. Cheney saw it all from the Oval Office. I believe his broad assertion of the powers of the presidency after 9/11 was attributable, in no small part, to his experience during the Ford years and a determination to recapture from Congress powers lost fifteen years before and more.

Because Dick is a calm, fairly quiet-spoken man, I think a lot of people never fully appreciated how conservative he always was. In 1990, in the run-up to the Gulf War, the question arose as to whether to seek both congressional and UN Security Council approval for going to war with Saddam Hussein. Cheney, then secretary of defense, argued that neither was necessary but went along with the president’s contrary decisions. And when the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.

He and I had always had a cordial relationship. When I was acting director of central intelligence in early 1987, I met with Cheney to ask his advice on how to deal with the White House and Congress; he was the only member of Congress I consulted. We got along well during 41’s administration, sharing a concern—well placed, as it turned out—about the prospects for Gorbachev’s survival and agreeing on the need to reach out to other reformers, including Boris Yeltsin. Much later, perhaps around 2004 or 2005, Becky and I had joined the Cheneys and one other couple as guests of former U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom Anne Armstrong and her husband, Tobin, at their vast and historic ranch in south Texas for bird shooting. Neither Becky nor I am a bird hunter, but we went out with the party and watched the shooting from a safe distance. We socialized before, during, and after meals and had a great time. (We were later invited to participate in another such hunting weekend at the Armstrong ranch with the Cheneys a year or so later. I had a speech commitment in Los Angeles and so we had to decline. The Austin lawyer invited in our stead would be the victim of the hunting accident involving the vice president.)

By the time I joined the administration, Dick was increasingly concerned about unfinished business, with regard to Iran in particular, and eager to deal with it because the next president, in his view, might not be tough enough to do so. He was a strong supporter of the surge in Iraq and provided access to its most vocal advocates outside government, including retired general Jack Keane, especially when they thought others in the government (mainly me, Rice, Mullen, and Fallon) weren’t sufficiently committed. Cheney never wavered in his support for “enhanced interrogation techniques” or for the ongoing importance and value of the prison at Guantánamo. On these and other issues, he was increasingly isolated inside the senior ranks of the administration, a reality he conceded with some humor and grace. He got to the point where he would often open his remarks with “I know I’m going to lose this argument” or “I know I’m alone in this.”

Cheney’s manner in the inner circles of the government belied the “Darth Vader” image that his public speeches and positions helped create. I never heard him sound off in anger; rather, he would present his point of view lucidly and calmly. He asked thoughtful questions of experts and intelligence professionals, and I considered him a less aggressive questioner than the president. Based on what I heard from folks at the Defense Department, I think the vice president let some of his staff be the “bad guys” in interagency affairs rather than taking on that role himself. Again, my observations come from the last two years of an eight-year run. How much his approach changed after Condi became secretary of state and Hadley the national security adviser (Hadley had worked for Dick at Defense during 41’s administration), and then again after I replaced Rumsfeld (they had been extraordinarily close), I simply do not know. What was clear was that on the important issues, the vice president remained as committed as ever, and however calm his demeanor, he was not prepared to retreat on any of the controversial policies of the Bush administration. While we agreed on a number of important national security issues—above all, Iraq and Afghanistan—when I thought he was prepared to risk a new military engagement, I pushed back, just as I would in the Obama administration.

I knew Condi Rice and I would get along fine. (She, Hadley, and I are now consulting partners.) Under Bush 41, when I was deputy national security adviser, Condi had been the Soviet expert on the NSC. We both had doctorates in Russian and Soviet studies (she could still speak Russian, not me), and we agreed on just about everything relating to the collapsing Soviet Union from 1989 until 1991, when she returned to Stanford. Indeed, when 41 authorized me in the summer of 1989 to form a very secret, small group to begin contingency planning for the collapse of the Soviet Union, I asked Condi to lead the effort.

Condi is really good at just about anything she tries, a source of resentment for those like me who have no athletic, linguistic, or musical talent. But she and I quickly developed a strong working relationship that radiated throughout our respective bureaucracies, as I’ve said. We would get together for dinner every few months, always at her favorite restaurant in the Watergate building. On virtually all of the major issues during the Bush administration, she and I were pretty much on the same page. On North Korea, where I was far more pessimistic than she or her negotiators about any chance for denuclearization, I saw no harm in trying—unlike the vice president, who opposed any talks.

Rice was very tough-minded and very tough. She has a razor-sharp tongue, and she spares few who cross her. On one occasion, in a meeting with the vice president, Hadley, and me, Dick made some comment about the need to protect the Republican base in the Senate. Condi shot back, “What’s that—six senators?” Another time, when the senior leadership of the government was meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House to discuss closing Guantánamo (Condi and I were about the only advocates for closure at the table), Attorney General Mike Mukasey said we should let the whole thing just play out in the courts. Without missing a beat, Condi said, “Mike, every time you go to court, you lose.” She was also skeptical of guidelines for interrogation that still allowed humiliation through nakedness, as well as other techniques she found questionable.

Condi and I testified together on a number of occasions. The worst was a four-hearing marathon that we had to endure right after the president’s decision on the surge. A number of members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee were rude, nasty, and stupid—in the process, making the Armed Services Committees look almost statesmanlike. I was so angry at the boorishness and antagonistic tone of members of the Foreign Affairs Committee that about half an hour before the end of the hearing, I just shut down. I made clear I was finished trying to answer their questions. But not Condi. She leaned forward in the saddle and took them on (she clearly had more experience with this crowd) with intensity and logic. Of course, logic doesn’t count for much when the critics are baying at the moon.

Condi was very protective of State Department turf and prerogatives, and she bristled quickly at any hint that State wasn’t pulling its weight in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than once, I got an earful about some general or admiral who had complained publicly about the lack of civilian support in the war effort. My sense from our military leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan was that the civilian experts made a real difference; there were just too few of them. Early in my tenure, I received a memorandum from the State Department asking for military officers to fill what were supposed to be civilian positions in Iraq. Given what our folks were already being asked to do there, I wasn’t happy and said so publicly. Still, she and I never let those dust-ups impact our cooperation. It was my great good fortune to have two formidable women—Condi and Hillary Clinton—serve as secretary of state during my tenure as secretary of defense. On controversial issues in both the Bush and Obama administrations, I worked hard to make sure Condi and Hillary were on my side—and vice versa.

Steve Hadley and I first started working together on the NSC staff in 1974. He worked amazingly hard and, I thought, ran an interagency process that well served the president but that also was regarded as fair and even-handed by the rest of us. He was deeply loyal to Bush 43. As befits a good lawyer, he was meticulous in every respect. When I joined the government in late 2006, I thought Steve was exhausted, spent. But he kept on trucking, fueled by green tea. As secretary, I had a lot of respect for him, even if he did convene all those damn meetings.

The other key member of the national security team with whom I would work most closely was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As I’ve said, I worked with Pace for nine and a half months and with Mike Mullen for three years and nine months. They had very different backgrounds (beyond the former being a Marine, the latter a sailor) and very different personalities. Both are observant Roman Catholics, both are men of extraordinary integrity and honor, and both have good senses of humor. Their views on homosexuals serving in the armed forces were diametrically opposed—Pace adamantly against, Mullen becoming a historic advocate in favor. Both were superb advisers to me and to the presidents they served.

I was sold on Mullen to succeed Pace when Pete Chiarelli, my new senior military assistant, told me that he had paid a courtesy call on Mullen and had asked him what worried him the most about our forces, and he, the chief of naval operations, had replied, “The state of the Army.” I got to know Mullen better than Pace because of the length of our time together, and we shared more foxholes together. Despite the occasional bump in the road, I could not imagine a stronger, better chairman or a better partner.

At the outset of his tenure, Mike took on several issues where I actually agreed with him but, consistent with my practice of avoiding fights I didn’t need, thought he would spend political capital and ultimately lose. I think Mike felt the role of the chairman had been diminished over a period of years, and he was determined to strengthen it and make the chairman a much more publicly visible senior military leader. He soon took on a significant public calendar of speeches, television shows, and other appearances. Some of my staff and some at the White House became restive over this and recommended that I rein him in. While his public schedule occasionally made me uneasy, I trusted him, felt we had a strong partnership, and decided I would not make an issue of it. Mike strongly objected to Jack Keane’s advisory role in Iraq, specifically with Petraeus, and called Keane in to tell him he couldn’t go to Iraq anymore. Keane complained to the vice president, and the next thing I knew, Cheney was on the phone asking me why all the administration’s critics could travel to Iraq but not one of its foremost defenders. I ended up leaving the matter in Petraeus’s hands—if he could use him and found value in his visits, then Keane could go over. Mike objected to retired military officers taking an active role in politics and spoke out forcefully against it. He also wanted to eliminate the use of the term “Global War on Terror” by the military, early on in his tenure, perhaps to stake out his independence from the White House. Again, I didn’t really disagree, but I knew it would raise hackles throughout the administration and was another hassle we didn’t need. All that said, over nearly four years, there were only a few issues or decisions of consequence where we disagreed.

Mike had many strengths. He gave me great advice on military appointments and those personal relationships among senior officers that count for so much. He was a powerful advocate of accountability, especially after a screw-up, and thus an important ally when it became necessary to fire or replace senior officers. One of his greatest strengths was his ability to bring the service chiefs together as a unified front when we had to deal with tough issues like the budget, thereby mostly avoiding internecine fighting among the services. He also made sure they had the chance to present their views directly to me and, whenever necessary, to the president. He had the gift of fostering unity, and I believe it well served the military, both presidents, the country, and me.

Perhaps for the first time ever, the chairman and the secretary of defense were next-door neighbors. Confident that I was going to be in Washington for only two years, for an exorbitant amount of money I rented a house on the Navy compound next door to where Mullen lived as chief of naval operations. He remained there as chairman, even though there is a very large house at Fort Myer, in Virginia, just across the Potomac from D.C., reserved by law only for the chairman. As a result, on weekends, Mike and I fairly often would wander over to each other’s porch to talk through some sensitive issue or crisis or our agenda. It must have been a strange sight for others working in the compound on a weekend to see the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals sitting on the porch talking to the secretary of defense wearing jeans and a sport shirt and smoking a cigar.

One little problem was that, as chairman, Mike had several noncommissioned officers who worked at his house, cooking, cleaning, and so on. I, on the other hand, despite being secretary of defense and his boss, was a civilian and therefore not entitled to the household help that top generals and admirals receive. There was a lot of good-humored back-and-forth between us about the situation. I’d see Mike headed out on a weekend, and as I told my staff, “I was out there watering my damn flowers.” One night there was a terrible rain and windstorm, and a big limb came down in my yard. It lay there for several days, and I finally told one of my security officers, “After dark, drag the thing over to Mullen’s yard—it’ll be gone in an hour.” Sure enough, it was. At my farewell ceremony, Mike suggested that I had blown leaves over onto his yard. Not true, but only because I didn’t have a leaf blower.

The other senior military officer with whom I would work most closely was Marine General James (“Hoss”) Cartwright. During my first months on the job, I had been extremely impressed with Hoss, then the commander of Strategic Command (responsible for U.S. nuclear forces and, at that time, cyber warfare). When the president decided to nominate Mike as chairman, Hoss was my pick for vice chairman. He had extraordinary technical expertise and a rare ability to explain highly technical matters in a clear and straightforward manner to the layman. I settled on Hoss before consulting Mike, who had reservations. I told him I had made up my mind and asked him to make it work. For four years, both were highly professional and the relationship did work more or less, but the chemistry between them at the beginning was not good and would only get worse. Both Bush 43 and President Obama developed a high regard for Hoss. He represented the chiefs at the “deputies”-level meetings at the White House and had to spend an inordinate amount of time there each day alongside the civilian undersecretary of defense for policy, who was my representative. This group, which Brent Scowcroft and I had created in 1989 and I had chaired as deputy national security adviser under Bush 41, would hash out policy options in preparation for meetings of their bosses and play a key role in crisis management. Cartwright performed superbly in that forum, as well as in his other responsibilities as the second-ranking American military officer, including procurement, budget issues, and other critical administrative matters. He and Mike had very different styles, and getting the Joint Staff to be open and work hand in glove with its civilian counterparts in the department was an ongoing challenge (something I suspected was not a new phenomenon at Defense). When Mike was traveling, Hoss would accompany me to all meetings at the White House, including my private meetings with the president. He was very smart and had great common sense—and a sense of humor. I valued him and his contribution the entire time we worked together, although I would come to have some issues with him under President Obama.

BECOMING “THE SOLDIERS’ SECRETARY”

As president of Texas A&M, I had devoted a lot of time and effort to looking after the interests of the students. They would often send me their complaints by e-mail, and whenever I thought they had a legitimate gripe, which was pretty often, I would be sure the university responded. I invited the student body president to be a regular participant in my executive staff meetings. I participated in countless student events. In many huge universities, the president is just a name to the students. I wanted them to think of me as their advocate in that huge bureaucracy. By all accounts, I was successful in establishing that kind of relationship and reputation. As mentioned earlier, ten thousand students turned out to say good-bye on my last day there.

I wanted the same kind of personal relationship with our troops. At Texas A&M, I would walk the campus all the time and see eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds in T-shirts, shorts, and backpacks. Now suddenly I was in Iraq and Afghanistan and seeing young men and women the very same age in full body armor, carrying assault rifles and living in wretched conditions. The contrast had a profound impact on me. Having been a university president made my transition to secretary of defense more difficult emotionally, and it would continue to affect me as long as I was in the job—especially as I reflected that one group of young people had set aside their dreams, made sacrifices, and were risking their lives to protect the dreams of another group the same age, and all the rest of us as well.

Establishing a personal relationship with two million troops required innovation. When I suggested establishing a designated e-mail account so they could communicate directly with me, as the students had at A&M, my chief of staff, Robert Rangel, looked at me as though I had lost my mind. Two million potential e-mails! That was the end of that.

There were no shortcuts to what I wanted to achieve. Young people are inherently skeptical, if not cynical, about the rhetoric of older people and those in authority, because too often their actions do not correspond. In the military, that is compounded many times over. The only way I could make any impact on the troops and dent their indifference to who might be secretary of defense would be through actions that demonstrated how much I cared about them.

Coincidentally, many decisions intended to help the troops were also necessary for success in our military campaigns. Our fundamentally flawed and persistent assumption from the outset, that the Iraq War would be a short one, caused many problems on the ground and for the troops. As the months stretched into years, those at senior levels nevertheless clung to their original assumption and seemed unwilling to invest substantial dollars to provide the troops everything they needed for protection and for success in their mission, and to bring them home safely—and if wounded, to provide them with the very best care. Who wanted to spend precious dollars on equipment for today’s troops that, after Iraq, would just be surplus? So for years in Iraq, our troops traveled in light vehicles like Humvees (the modern equivalent of a jeep) that, even with armoring, were vulnerable to weapons such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and explosively formed projectiles (EFPs). These vehicles that could all too easily be blown up or become funeral pyres for our troops. While investments had been made in remotely piloted vehicles (drones), there were no crash programs to increase their numbers or the diversity of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities for commanders. And here at home, while the quality of military medical care was absolutely the best in the world, outpatient and posthospitalization treatment of the wounded and their families was a scandal waiting to happen. Too few in the Pentagon responsible for training, equipping, and deployment decisions looked out sufficiently for the interests of the troops as individuals. This would become a principal preoccupation of mine for my entire tenure.

During my first months as secretary, I made these issues my own. As mentioned, I recommended an increase in the size of the Army and Marine Corps by 65,000 and 27,000 respectively. In September 2007, I would authorize a further, temporary increase in the Army of 22,000 soldiers. On January 19, I signed a directive that the National Guard thereafter would deploy as units (rather than individuals being shifted around to fill out units from other states) and that deployments would be limited to a year. Protecting that limit would be a challenge, and whenever the Joint Staff wanted to break it, I would send them back to the drawing board. I would repeat, over and over, “I gave my word to them they wouldn’t have to go for more than a year. Why would they ever believe me again if I break my word on this?” With respect to deploying as units, I would argue, if I’m an ordnance disposal specialist, I want to deploy with the team I trained with, know, and trust, not a bunch of strangers I just met. On a few occasions, harsh reality forced me to violate my commitment to one-year tours, but only under extraordinary circumstances. As hard as the decision was to extend tours in Iraq and Afghanistan to fifteen months, my only consolation was that it at least guaranteed those troops a year at home and provided predictability. I wanted to end the practice of stop-loss, a practice in the Army of involuntarily extending a soldier’s duty time. The overwhelming majority of those stop-lossed were NCOs, whose continued service was considered essential to unit cohesion. Stop-loss had been going on for some time, but the numbers increased fairly significantly as a result of the surge in Iraq, and during my tenure it peaked at about 14,000 soldiers. I considered the practice the equivalent of involuntary servitude and a breach of faith with those affected, and I was determined to end it. A few months before I retired, not one soldier was on stop-loss.

As I’ve said, every place I went, I learned a lot from the young troops I insisted upon spending time with. Having conversations with maintenance NCOs on board ships and at Air Force bases and hearing about shortages of manpower “to do the job right” played a big role in my decision to stop further reductions in both Air Force and Navy personnel. Visiting Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, where many of our drones operating overseas are controlled, I learned that the crews had more than an hour commute each way to their homes at Nellis Air Force Base and little in the way of amenities—places to eat and work out—at Creech. Those problems would be fixed. At Camp Pendleton, I observed Marines training in a fake Iraqi town before their deployments, and I learned that the commanders did all their training on how to use drones in simulators because there were no real drones available. We largely corrected that, though it took considerable time.

I tried to meet with families and spouses of soldiers whenever possible. Most of those meetings were emotionally draining. I visited Fort Campbell, Kentucky, a few weeks after becoming secretary. Soldiers from the 101st Airborne were preparing to deploy. I met with some of their spouses, whose tears showed that they had been down this road before and that they were feeling the stress of multiple deployments. Some were very young, still teenagers, but with one or two babies. Many of those women were scared and frustrated with problems that only added to their stress, like marginal medical care on post, long waits to see a doctor, or the need to drive sixty miles to get care from a pediatric specialist.

The compliments that always meant the most—until the day I left my job as secretary—were from the troops and their families.

The hardest part of being secretary for me was visiting the wounded in hospitals, which I did regularly, and it got harder each time. At the outset, I wasn’t sure I could handle it. People would tell me not to worry, that “they will lift you up” with their courage, determination, and resilience. But I would think, particularly as time went along, Yes, they do, but there is one difference between all of you—members of Congress, military officers, whomever—and me: I’m the one who sent them in harm’s way. It tore me apart to see fit young men who’d had limbs blown off, suffered devastating gunshot wounds, and experienced every sort of trauma to their bodies and their brains—wounds both visible and invisible. Some were in comas or unconscious. Many had their families there, often including a young wife and little children, a family whose life would never be the same. I approached one soldier’s room and a doctor emerged to suggest that I not go in because the young man had an open, gaping leg wound and he refused to cover it while I visited him. I steeled myself and went in. He was neither bitter nor self-pitying. I visited a young soldier at Walter Reed who was the first quadruple amputee, losing both legs above the knee and both arms below the elbow. He said he just wanted to drive a car again. And his father told me, “We have been to the valley of despair and the mountain of hope.” The father asked me to make sure his son received the most advanced prosthetics, and I promised he would. I met a soldier from Texas A&M who had been shot in the throat. He rasped out to me that he was able to choose the music played in the operating theater during his surgery, and he had them play the Aggie “War Hymn” over and over. I kidded him that he should have made sure his surgeon wasn’t a rival University of Texas Longhorn.

In May, I made my first visit to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where the military’s finest burn treatment facility is located. I was to visit the Center for the Intrepid, a new rehabilitation facility for amputees paid for by private donations, and also the burn center. I told Pete Chiarelli that I didn’t think I was strong enough to visit the burn unit. He was silent, and I asked him, “Do the kids at the burn unit know I’m coming?” He said yes. I closed my eyes and told him, “Well, then I have to do it.”

I walked into the rehab center at the burn unit, and standing in front of me was Marine First Lieutenant Dan Moran, wearing a Texas A&M Corps of Cadets T-shirt and holding his graduation picture of me handing him his diploma. His beautiful wife and four-week-old baby were with him in the unit. He asked me to sign the graduation picture and then asked if I would present his Navy commendation medal with V for Valor to him at some point at Texas A&M. I said of course. (On October 27, Bush 41 and I presented Dan with his medal at halftime during an A&M home football game, with 85,000 in attendance cheering their lungs out for this young hero. If only all our wounded and veterans could get such recognition.)

The burn unit was nearly full. There was a young soldier who had been there for nearly two years with horrific burns; we did a fist bump because he had no fingers. After a long and heroic struggle, he would die a few months later. I visited a sergeant in an isolated room, badly burned, missing limbs, in a coma. There were others, ambulatory and sharp, who still faced dozens of surgeries in the months and years to come. There are no words to describe their courage. Because Brooke is not in Washington or on a coast, not very many VIPs from any walk of life visit there. The patients would talk about how rarely they got official visitors. After my visit, one Army sergeant told the press that it meant a lot when someone “comes here in person.” He said, “I don’t need more medals or money, just someone to say thanks.”

I would never have forgiven myself had I fallen victim to my self-doubt and not gone to the burn unit. I would visit again on a number of occasions. There are no adequate words to describe the compassion, commitment, and skill of those at Brooke—and at all our military hospitals—caring for our sons and daughters.

Soon afterward I visited the U.S. military hospital at Landstuhl, Germany, where nearly all wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan were sent before returning stateside. I was told I was the only secretary of defense to visit that hospital since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There, for the first time, I presented Purple Hearts, six of them. One was to a young soldier who was unconscious, and I had my initial experience with a mother in my arms crying. The next time I saw him, months later, he was sitting in a chair having lunch at a Pentagon event for wounded warriors. With a certain insouciance, he said, “Bet you don’t recognize me!”

I increasingly felt a personal responsibility for those kids in the hospitals, and it weighed more and more heavily on me. Yet in the hospitals there was still hope. Not so for those who were killed, or for their families.

Every morning, first thing, I would receive written notifications of servicemen and women killed and wounded in combat during the preceding twenty-four hours. There were no names, just a description of what had happened and the raw numbers. Immediately upon taking office, I starting signing condolence letters to parents, a spouse, or a child of someone killed in action. It wasn’t long before just a signature didn’t seem enough, and at night, I started hand-writing notes at the end of each letter. As the surge in Iraq progressed, I was soon signing well over a hundred letters a month. Sometime later even the notes didn’t seem enough. I was determined not to let these men and women ever become statistics for me, and so I asked for a picture of each, and the hometown news accounts of the life and death of their local heroes. I could look at the picture and read accounts from family, friends, coaches, and teachers about how fun-loving they had been, how they loved to fish and hunt, how they excelled at athletics, about their willingness to help others. Or I learned how they had been aimless until joining the military, where they found purpose and direction for their lives. And so virtually every night for four and a half years, writing condolence letters and reading about these mostly young men and women, I wept.

That was in private. But after only a few months as secretary, my emotions over the sacrifices of these amazing men and women in uniform began occasionally to ambush me in public. The first time was in a speech at the Marine Corps Association dinner on July 18, 2007. I was cruising along just fine until near the end of the speech, when I began to talk about a Marine company commander, Capt. Douglas Zembiec, and his actions in the first battle of Fallujah (Iraq) in April 2004. He said his men had “fought like lions,” and he was later himself dubbed the “Lion of Fallujah.” I talked about him volunteering to go back to Iraq in early 2007, but “this time, he would not return—to his country or to his wife, Pamela, and his one-year-old daughter.” I began to lose my composure at that point, though I was able to say that more than one thousand people—including many enlisted Marines—had attended his funeral at Arlington, where an officer told a reporter, “Your men have to follow your orders; they don’t have to go to your funeral.” I simply could not go on. Press accounts would say that I was clearly struggling and suffering. I was. But I finally pulled myself together and closed with these words: “Every evening I write notes to the families of young Americans like Doug Zembiec. For you, and for me, they are not names on a press release, or numbers updated on a web page. They are our country’s sons and daughters.”

This was the real face of war. I never spoke to anyone about the emotional toll on me of the visits to the front lines, the hospitals, and the cemeteries, of sending kids into danger and hardship—a burden that would only grow over four and a half years of war. I would do my duty, I would do everything I could for us to win in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I knew the real cost. And that knowledge changed me.

WALTER REED

On February 18 and 19, 2007, The Washington Post ran a two-part series by reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull on the administrative nightmare and squalid living conditions endured by wounded warriors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The series documented a bureaucratic labyrinth faced by soldiers who were in recuperation, seeking further treatment, or deciding whether they could stay in the military despite their wounds. The reporters described, in detail, Building 18, where a number of recuperating soldiers were housed, as rife with mold, filth, leaks, soiled carpets, rodents, cockroaches, and overall shabbiness. There were clearly not enough caseworkers to help outpatients and not enough help for outpatients and families to navigate through the huge hospital complex or the massive and confusing paperwork. I was shocked by the conditions described in the articles. At my morning staff meeting on February 20, I said we had a big problem on our hands, a failure to take proper care of our wounded warriors and their families. That had to be addressed immediately.

Over the next two days, I learned enough to substantiate much of what had been in the Post and to devise how we would respond. On February 23, I met with the president at nine a.m. to confirm for him the seriousness of the conditions at Walter Reed and to tell him I intended to announce that day the formation of an outside group led by Togo West, secretary of the Army and secretary of veterans affairs under President Clinton, and Jack Marsh, secretary of the Army under President Reagan, to look at the situation in depth and recommend remedial actions. I would give them only forty-five days to report their findings. I told the president I intended to hold people accountable and that that could result in some high-level firings. He was entirely supportive. I then went directly from the White House to Walter Reed, where I personally walked through Building 18. In the few days since the articles came out, the place had been cleaned up some, but it was still depressing. I was then briefed on outpatient care and the resource challenges and bureaucratic obstacles that had led to the conditions reported by the newspaper.

I held a press conference at Walter Reed, during which I said I was dismayed to learn that some of our injured troops were not getting the best possible treatment at all stages of their recovery, especially in their outpatient care. “This is unacceptable, and it will not continue,” I said. In a departure for a senior government official, I also said, “I am grateful to reporters for bringing this problem to our attention, but very disappointed we did not identify it ourselves.” Speaking of our wounded warriors, I asserted, “They should not have to recuperate in substandard housing, nor should they be expected to tackle mountains of paperwork and bureaucratic processes during this difficult time for themselves and their families. They battled our foreign enemies; they should not have to battle American bureaucracy.” I made clear that the problem was not about world-class medical care but about outpatient facilities and administration. I then named the members of the review group and said they were empowered to inspect circumstances not only at Walter Reed but at Bethesda National Naval Medical Center in Maryland and at any other centers they chose to examine. I expressed my “strong belief that an organization with the enormous responsibilities of the Department of Defense must live by [the] principle of accountability at all levels. Accordingly, after the facts are established, those responsible for allowing this unacceptable situation to develop will indeed be held accountable.” I later noted that several of those officers and NCOs most directly involved had already been relieved by the Army, and that “others up the chain of command were being evaluated.”

Senior Army officers responded in different ways. The vice chief of staff, General Dick Cody, said, “We were absolutely disappointed in the status of the rooms and found the delays and lack of attention to detail to the building’s repairs inexcusable.” From that day forward, Cody made the problems of our wounded warriors his highest priority, and with his leadership, the Army began to move in the right direction. Unfortunately, there were others who were defensive and seemed to downplay the problem. The Army’s top medical officer, Lieutenant General Kevin Kiley, called the newspaper reports a “one-sided representation” and seemed to question the tone rather than the facts. His response set my teeth on edge, but not nearly as much as comments from Secretary of the Army Fran Harvey, who was quoted as saying, “We had some NCOs who weren’t doing their job, period.” To blame the widespread outpatient problems at Walter Reed on “some NCOs” was, in my view, unconscionable.

I wanted change at Walter Reed, and under pressure from me, the Army’s first step, on March 1, was to relieve the hospital commander, Major General George Weightman. Weightman had been in the job only about six months but accepted the action with dignity. He publicly acknowledged the problems and apologized to the families. Secretary Harvey then made what was, in my opinion, a huge mistake. He appointed Kiley as temporary hospital commander. In our own examination of the situation during the preceding days and in congressional hearings that week, it became pretty clear that Kiley had been informed of the problems at Walter Reed and that some of them could be traced back to his command there. His appointment was greeted with dismay by many wounded warriors and their families. He had not acted to remedy the situation, and his public comments continued to seem to downplay it. Indeed, Harvey recounted to the press a call he had received from Kiley criticizing the Post series and saying, “I’m willing to defend myself…. I want to have an opportunity to defend myself, and it was wrong and it was yellow journalism at its worst, and I plan on doing it. Trust me.” Kiley’s appointment, on top of Harvey’s placing blame on a few NCOs, confirmed to me that the secretary of the Army did not understand the magnitude of the problem and could not lead the effort to fix it. On March 2, after talking with the president, I called in Harvey and asked for his resignation, saying Kiley’s appointment was the last straw. He was stunned and clearly felt he was being thrown under the bus to placate the media and Congress. I received his letter of resignation that afternoon. Fran Harvey was a good man who had rendered distinguished service to the country. I fired him because once informed of the circumstances at Walter Reed, he did not take the problem seriously enough. I said the same thing to reporters.

I held a press conference on March 3 to announce that I had directed the Army—Pete Geren would be acting secretary—to appoint a new commander at Walter Reed that same day, rescinding the Kiley appointment. I went on to say, “I am disappointed that some in the Army have not adequately appreciated the seriousness of the situation pertaining to outpatient care at Walter Reed. Some have shown too much defensiveness and have not shown enough focus on digging into and addressing the problems. Also, I am concerned that some do not properly understand the need to clearly communicate to the wounded and their families that we have no higher priority than their care, and that addressing their concerns about the quality of their outpatient experience is critically important.” I reaffirmed my full confidence in the Walter Reed doctors, nurses, and staff, who I said were “among the best, and most caring, in the world.”

At my suggestion, the president appointed a bipartisan commission to examine the full range of treatment of wounded warriors by the Departments of Defense and of Veterans Affairs. He appointed former Senate majority leader Bob Dole, a wounded warrior himself from World War II, and former secretary of health and human services Donna Shalala to cochair the commission. At George Casey’s suggestion, I urged the president to include in the membership of the panel a young wounded warrior and the widow of one of our fallen.

At my senior staff meeting on March 5, I went back to the comments I had made on my first day, December 18, and again to the senior civilian and military leaders in mid-January. I repeated that when Congress or the press makes an accusation, we need to look into it and not be defensive. Further, I said I would not allow junior or midgrade officers and NCOs to be fall guys for systemic problems. “Your antennae need to be up for other issues, such as equipping the troops.” I went on to speculate that the Department of Veterans Affairs likely had many problems if Walter Reed had the problems it did. I told the staff that the idea of a White House commission to look at the entire wounded warrior problem had been mine, and I expected full cooperation. I reiterated that acute care at Walter Reed was the best in the world, and that the problem was outpatient care. “The easiest thing in the world to fix is the facility; the biggest issues are bureaucracy and resources,” I said. “However, we will ensure it is not a resource issue. We’ll get the resources.”

There was still one loose end, Lieutenant General Kiley. I told my assistant Rangel on March 6 that I wanted General Cody, Major General Eric Schoomaker (the new commander at Walter Reed), the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Acting Secretary Geren to talk about Kiley’s future. I said that it needed to be an Army decision, but I did not feel he was helping the Army. Kiley retired soon thereafter.

I sent a message on March 9 to every American serviceman and woman all over the world informing them of my reaction to the situation at Walter Reed, describing the remedial actions being taken, and pledging to them that, “other than the wars themselves, I have no higher priority than taking care of our wounded warriors.”

The outpatient problem at Walter Reed was just the most visible of our shortcomings and failures in taking care of our wounded and their families. Because no one had expected a long war or so many wounded, no one had planned for or allocated the necessary resources in terms of caseworkers, established facilities on posts and bases to care for the wounded, fixed the bureaucratic abyss between the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, and so much more. At my first cabinet meeting, the secretary of veterans affairs had introduced himself, and I offered him any and all assistance, knowing that his department had to have been pushed to the wall with all the seriously wounded veterans coming into its system as a result of two wars. I was staggered when he said his department was in good shape and had no problems. I’d been around long enough to know that when the head of a cabinet department says his organization has no problems, he is either lying or delusional. I knew the secretary wasn’t a liar. The scandal at Walter Reed was caused by a failure of leadership, but the awful outpatient conditions there were also a product of budget and personnel cuts, an unwillingness to invest money in a hospital complex that was slated for closure, and outsourcing to contractors. As I had foreshadowed to my staff, fixing the bureaucratic problems would prove a lot harder than getting adequate resources.

I received a lot of praise in the media and in Congress for acting so decisively. But as usual, the reaction that meant the most to me came from a soldier. I received an e-mail, a few weeks after these events, from someone who had sat next to an Army medic on an airplane flight. The medic was quoted as saying that he and his buddies had been “amazed and hopeful with Gates when he jumped into the Walter Reed Hospital mess. With the first appointment of a new administrator [Kiley], it looked like more of the same. Gates firing the guy in under twenty-four hours meant a lot to them.” The medic “was so grateful for Gates’s efforts to straighten out the hospital mess. Gates gave him hope.”

I spent a lot of time and energy during my first months mending fences and making allies. I won praise for my calm, respectful approach to doing business and dealing with people—and for patching up relationships across Washington. But the Walter Reed scandal gave me an unanticipated opportunity to demonstrate early on that when it came to incompetence, negligence, or anything negatively affecting our men and women in uniform, I could and would be utterly ruthless. Such ruthlessness would be needed when, beginning in the spring of 2007, I resolved to make senior civilian and military leaders in the Pentagon lower their eyes from future potential wars and turn aside from day-to-day politics and bureaucratic routine to focus on the wars right in front of them, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Effectively waging war on our enemies on those battlefields would also require successfully waging war on the Pentagon itself.