Agent of Change
Robert Gates helped win the cold war as director of the CIA, but that assignment was a walk in the park compared with his current one: bringing Texas A&M university’s unique but not always admired culture into the modern era and remaking the way the world views Aggieland—and the way Aggieland views the world.
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“Leadership in large public institutions requires a skill set different from the private sector,” Gates told me. “A&M and the CIA have this in common. Professionals in the organization got there before you were there and will be there after you leave. For changes to last, the professionals have to assimilate the changes and make them their own. My time here is finite. I want to build something that will long outlast me.”
AS YOU MIGHT EXPECT, Bob Gates is not a man who reveals himself. I have been around him three times, once in 2004 and twice for this story. He is one of the most consistent personalities I’ve ever met. He’s all business, a man under total self-control. He doesn’t fidget. He isn’t a backslapper. He doesn’t make small talk. He doesn’t boast; neither does he engage in false modesty. He is a motivator, not a cheerleader. He is always polite. He wears an air of authority as if it were tailored by Brooks Brothers. He answers questions fully but volunteers little. Most of his laughter comes from a finely developed sense of irony. I would back him to the hilt in a no-limit poker game.
And that would be all that I could tell you about Gates, except that he wrote a book—quite a good book, in fact. From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War is as compelling a history of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry as you’re likely to read. You might get confused by CIA initials—DCI, DO, NIE—and you may learn more about Angola than you care to know, but Gates the personality comes through in these pages and so does the CIA. That sense of irony appears in the form of a photograph of a poster with a head shot of Gates talking into a microphone. “WANTED” it reads. “Robert Gates. Director of CIA. For violation of international law and human rights violations. CIA OFF CAMPUS.” Underneath, Gates’s caption says “Public esteem: one of the rewards of being head of CIA.”
Gates joined the CIA in 1966, during the Vietnam War, fresh out of Indiana University. By 1968 he was an analyst of Soviet policy in the Middle East and Africa. He opposed the war, as did most of his CIA friends, and even marched in protest of U.S. activity in Cambodia. “Popular impressions then and now about the CIA—especially as a conservative, Cold War bureaucratic monolith—have always been wrong. … ” He writes of the influence of the counterculture, of experiments with marijuana by supervisors, of anti-Nixon posters and bumper stickers that “festooned CIA office walls.” Nixon comes in for some harsh words. Richard Helms, then the CIA director, told a story about going into the Oval Office just as Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird was leaving. Nixon pointed at Laird and said, “There goes the most devious man in the United States,” to which Gates adds, “Some accolade, considering the source.”
Gates’s motivation for writing the book, he told me, was to let the public know how well the agency performed its duties—especially its evaluations of Soviet military and economic strength—during the Cold War, despite continuing attacks from the left and the right. The majority of the book focuses on the Reagan and Bush administrations and the climax of the Cold War. For most of this time, Gates was either deputy director of central intelligence or, under Bush, director. He was always a skeptic about Gorbachev, always believed he was a Communist at heart rather than a true reformer. He also believed from the beginning that the Soviet Union could not sustain its vast military buildup and its foreign adventuring without risking economic collapse. In all of this, he was proved right. Gates occasionally allows himself an I-told-you-so, but he also owns up to his misjudgments.
What I found fascinating, though, was the early part of his career, when we see him learning the lessons for leadership he would later put to use, first at the CIA, then at Texas A&M. He wrote the book in 1996, when A&M wasn’t even on his radar screen, but the lessons survive to the present day. Of arms limitations negotiations with the Soviet Union, he writes about senior American officials who “not only lost sight of the forest but mistook tiny shrubs for trees.” Gates knows the difference between shrubs and trees. He has little use for James Schlesinger, a CIA director whose treatment of people was “crude, demanding, arrogant, and dismissive of experience.” But he praises another director, William Colby, who “was friendly and treated us with courtesy” and likewise Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who “treated support staff—secretaries, security people, the Situation Room staff, baggage handlers—with respect and dignity.” This reminded me of a story by A&M business professor Ben Welch, who told me of encountering Gates on campus. “I’m Ben,” the professor said, to which Gates responded, “I know you. Business. We’re lucky to have you.”
In 1974 Gates joined the National Security Council staff under Henry Kissinger. “A common thread of our days,” Gates writes, “was the fruitless effort to persuade the bureaucracy, and especially the State Department, that they worked for the President and might occasionally make time in their busy schedules to support his requirements and implement his policies.” Now, at A&M, Gates wants everybody to be on the same page when it comes to crucial matters like welcoming minority students.
Most of all, Gates saw events with a startling clarity. He developed the ability to see what others could not. Most Americans believed that Jimmy Carter was a weak president toward the Soviet Union whose emphasis on human rights was, as Gates describes the prevailing viewpoint, “naïve and counterproductive.” Not Gates. By emphasizing human rights violations, Carter “became the first president since Truman to directly challenge the legitimacy of the Soviet government in the eyes of its own people. … His approach marked a decisive and historic turning point in the U.S.-Soviet relationship.” This capacity for insight against the conventional wisdom explains why he has so many initiatives going at A&M all at once; trained during the urgency of the Cold War, he can’t see a problem without wanting to fix it. But he was not blind to Carter’s shortcomings, his infamous propensity to micromanage (“We sometimes referred to him as the nation’s ‘chief grammarian,’ ” he writes. “He even corrected CIA’s President’s Daily Brief, and once wrote Brzezinski a special note to remind him that Mrs. Carter’s name—Rosalynn—was spelled with two n’s”), and his inability to resolve disagreements between advisers. Even his critics at A&M would not accuse Bob Gates of not knowing how to make a decision.
In the late seventies, Gates served as executive assistant to Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter’s choice to head the CIA. Turner was widely disliked in the agency, and Gates has little good to say about him. He describes Turner as an “agent of change,” but one who went about achieving it in the wrong way. Gates writes, “His failure to build a substantial internal constituency for his changes led to the reversal of his initiatives very quickly after his departure.” Nothing has engaged Gates more at Texas A&M than building internal constituencies and trying to perpetuate his reforms. Reflecting on Carter’s unrecognized contribution to America’s victory in the Cold War, Gates quoted an observation by the late columnist Walter Lippmann that applies equally to Gates’s efforts to change A&M: We must all “plant trees we will never get to sit under.”
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER GATES went to Baghdad with, among others, James Baker, to evaluate the situation in Iraq for President George W. Bush. That was the second time the White House had turned to Gates. In January 2005 Andy Card, then chief of staff for Bush, called Gates to ask if he would take the newly created post of director of national intelligence, or, as it was called, “Intelligence Czar.” Gates did not want to leave A&M, nor did he want to return to Washington. And he was well aware of the pitfalls of the job. “The DNI only has budget authority,” he told me as we drove back to Rudder Tower in the golf cart Gates uses to get around campus. “He decides how much money each agency gets. What good does that do? If you’re director of NSA [the National Security Agency] and the Secretary of Defense can fire you, who are you going to listen to? That was one reason not to take it. I couldn’t have hired or fired the head of a single agency.”
But there was more to it than that. Gates agonized over the decision for seventeen days. He eventually decided, as he said in his State of the University speech in 2005, “that if I might be able to help make America safer in a dangerous time, then I must, and therefore had to accept the position—and leave A&M.” He wrote an e-mail to all Aggies, which would be sent out as the introductory press conference in Washington began. It ended, “I … wanted you to know that this appointment was due to no initiative of mine, that the decision was wrenching, and that I can hardly bear the idea of leaving Aggieland.”
And then, Gates told the audience, he went for a late night walk around campus, arriving eventually at the statue of Sul Ross, the former governor and Texas Ranger and the only president besides Rudder to have a statue on the campus. He described the thoughts that raced through his mind: “ … of Ross and Rudder, of Silver Taps and Muster, of the Corps, of the incredible students and faculty and staff here, and of all that is under way to make A&M greater. I realized, sitting there alone in the dark, brushing away tears, how much I had come to love Texas A&M, all it stands for, and all it can become. And I knew at that moment I could not leave.”
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