Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (48 page)

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 9

New Team, New Agenda, Old Secretary

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.