RARELY HAS THE PRESS gotten a story so wrong. Robert Gates, President Bush's choice to replace Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, is not the point man for a boarding party of former national security officials from the elder President Bush's administration taking over defense and foreign policy in his son's administration. The media buzz about the realists of Bush 41, so cautious and practical, supplanting the idealists of Bush 43, whose grandiose, neoconservative thinking got us stuck in Iraq, is wrong.
President Bush--the current one--decided to hire Gates two days before the November 7 election. He didn't consult his father. He didn't talk to James Baker, his father's secretary of state and now co-head of the Iraq Study Group, whose official advice on Iraq is expected in December. Nor did he tell Rumsfeld that he was lining up someone to take his job.
Before hiring him, Bush had to make sure Gates didn't think America's intervention in Iraq was a mistake and wasn't deeply skeptical of Bush's decision to make democracy promotion a fundamental theme of American foreign policy. With Gates, it came down to this: "The fundamental question was, was he Brent Scowcroft or not?" a Bush aide says.
In Bush 41, Scowcroft was the national security adviser, Gates his deputy. Scowcroft, a realist, is a sharp critic of both Bush's Iraq strategy and the democratic thrust of his entire foreign policy. And Scowcroft has gone public with his strong opposition in articles and interviews.
Gates was initially approached about the defense
post in October by Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser. The outreach was "delicate," a Bush aide says, and kept secret. Gates had at least one supporter inside Bush's circle, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She, too, had worked for Scowcroft in the senior Bush's administration. She told the president that whenever she had sought to wean Scowcroft from a narrow realist position--such as his dismissal of Russian democratic leader Boris Yeltsin as a rube and his unyielding support for Mikhail Gorbachev--she turned to Gates for help.
Bush was first given a thick briefing book of articles by or about Gates, who was not an unknown quantity to him. Gates is president of Texas A&M University, the home of the elder Bush's presidential library. He and the senior Bush attended an A&M football game together several weeks ago, a fact that helped fuel the Bush 41 takeover theory.
In 2005, Gates, who was CIA chief from 1991 to 1993, was offered the newly created position as director of national intelligence. He declined, expressing doubt about the usefulness of the post and citing projects at Texas A&M that he needed to complete. Those, he told Bush officials, would take 6 to 9 months.
Despite his father's close relationship with Gates--plus the senior Bush's dislike of Rumsfeld--Bush never had a substantive discussion with him about the possibility of installing Gates or anyone else in the Pentagon job. The elder Bush wasn't informed of the Gates nomination until the morning of its announcement, November 8. The president personally called his father with the news.
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