The Fastidious President

David Bromwich
London Review of Books

The Afghan war looks as if it will outlast the Obama presidency, and if it does the largest single reason will be Obama’s choice of Robert Gates as secretary of defence. Gates worked under William Casey, the director of the CIA at the time of the Iran-Contra scandal. His nomination by Ronald Reagan to head the CIA was thwarted by suspicions of his complicity in covert operations in Nicaragua. The elder Bush later renominated him and got him through. Gates would have struck George H.W. Bush as a sound appointment because he knew the secrets and could be trusted to keep them. When the younger Bush, after the 2006 election, brought in Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld at defence, he would have had in mind that history of loyalty to the Bush family. With Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantánamo to think of, Gates was a man to trust. Also, Gates might help to slow and muffle the incessant pressure from Cheney and his circle for an attack on Iran. It is generally supposed that Gates, together with Condoleezza Rice, held Cheney off and gave Bush the institutional backing to resist him.

Obama by all reports has become friendly with Gates – they share a certain reserve and an image of themselves as temperate and moderate-minded public men. He has shown no such signs with Hillary Clinton. In retrospect this makes her appointment as secretary of state all the more perplexing. There is no reason to believe that by appointing her, Obama removed a threat she would have posed as a senatorial counterweight against his authority. The idea that she was ever such a threat is bogus. Hillary Clinton is a party loyalist, far more than Obama himself; she would have helped him by being a distinct, contentious and credible voice in the Senate on various issues (as she was before her run for president). Abused in the role of first lady, she had come to be respected by the press as a lawmaker. Her low profile in the cabinet has been a surprise. But Obama’s extraordinary insistence on placing himself at centre stage has kept out all contenders.

We are learning now, from such sources as Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, about the oddness of some of the president’s other appointments and his treatment of them. General James Jones, whom Obama had never met, was asked to become national security adviser. Once chosen, he hardly ever saw the president alone. To head the CIA Obama picked Leon Panetta, a former congressman who had served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. Panetta was a complete outsider to the world of spies: it could have been predicted that he would be overawed by the company he now kept and come to defend their actions present and past with the anxiety of someone who has to prove himself. Panetta thought there was no point arguing with the generals or doing more than a fast and perfunctory ‘review’. Give them what they want, a Democrat has to: that was his line. Hillary Clinton also backed the generals, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and the chief of staff Admiral Mullen, in their request for 40,000 more troops. Indeed she supported them more strongly than Gates did. Jones sought to help Obama by running interference with the Pentagon, but Obama preferred to work on his own and hardly gave him a chance.

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