Robert Gates memoir: Top 5 bombshells

Early leaks of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ highly anticipated memoir have yielded a slew of insider tidbits about the personalities and behind-the-scenes struggles of Presidents Bush and Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other top officials as they fought wars on two fronts.

Here are his top five revelations.

2. General's request for more troops

J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File
This July 23, 2010, file photo shows Gen. Stanley McChrystal reviewing troops for the last time as he is honored at a retirement ceremony at Fort McNair in Washington.

The 2009 request by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, for a large increase in troops for the war surprised the White House – and Gates.

“I believe the major reason the protracted, frustrating Afghanistan policy review held in the fall of 2009 created so much ill will was due to the fact it was forced on an otherwise controlling White House by the theater commander’s unexpected request for a large escalation of American involvement,” Gates writes.

The request from Gen. McChrystal “surprised the White House (and me) and provoked a debate that the White House didn’t want, especially when it became public.”

The request had the effect of making Obama and his advisers “incensed,” Gates argues, because the Pentagon – specifically the uniformed military – “had taken control of the policy process from them and threatened to run away with it.”

2 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.