What Is Robert Gates Really Fighting For?

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates flies around the world to war zones and allies, to China and Russia and Suriname, on a Cold War relic called the Doomsday Plane. Forged in the 1970s by Boeing, it was designed to stay aloft even in the midst of nuclear war. It’s an airborne Pentagon. The plane is so heavy that it needs refueling in midair on long flights. The Air Force crew aboard told me that on occasion, the fuel nozzle from the floating tankers has smashed through the pilots’ windshield like an angry space creature. It’s one of a handful of planes coated with nuclear-attack shielding and capable of emitting launch codes to all U.S. missile silos.

Just past the flight deck is a conference room outfitted with plugs and portals and a lacquered table at which the relaxed Secretary sat in jeans, loafers and a pressed button-down, on the way back home from Afghanistan and Iraq. We’d been talking about the stress of congressional hearings, the burden of sending young men and women to war, and just as our conversation was drawing to a close, he said, “I always used to tell people that Texas A&M football caused me more stress than any job I’ve ever had. And they always thought I was exaggerating.” I expressed disbelief, but he stood by the statement.

“I asked my wife one time, Why is that? And she said, ‘Because you have no control.'” He paused. “Here, I have a little control,” he said, tapping the plane’s conference table.

It was classic Gates: droll, attentive to timing, a little self-deprecating, acutely self-aware. It was also revealing. Gates is a careful, restrained player who wields his power with quiet but ruthless efficiency–as he did on Feb. 1, when he fired the military officer overseeing the Pentagon’s new F-35 stealth-fighter-jet program for cost overruns and technical failures and punished Lockheed Martin by withholding $615 million in fees. Lots of defense contractors and program managers underachieve, yet they almost always get away with it. Not under Gates.

Like his fellow Cold War survivor the Doomsday Plane, Gates has come to embody power, control and an astonishing longevity. Just 5 ft. 8 in., with small hands and feet, the demure 66-year-old Kansan has outlasted seven Presidents as well as most of his fellow bureaucrats and policymakers. He’s the only entry-level CIA analyst to rise to the top job, director of central intelligence. And he’s the only Secretary of Defense ever to be asked to stay on in a rival party’s Administration. He has thrived through a combination of endurance, pragmatism and bureaucratic savvy. And during the past year, on issue after issue–Pentagon reform, missile defense, Afghanistan and now the Pentagon’s move to repeal the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military–Gates has become the most important player in the Obama war Cabinet. It’s a remarkable feat, considering that he’s the only Republican on the Democratic national-security team.

“Whatever Gates chooses to take a position on, Gates is the single most influential guy,” says Leslie Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a skeptic of the Administration’s strategy in Afghanistan. Gelb points out that in early December, days after President Obama’s West Point speech announcing his decision to send 30,000 additional troops (on top of the 32,000 deployed in 2009) to the war zone and then begin bringing them home in July 2011, Gates went on the Sunday talk shows to say the withdrawal would depend on conditions on the ground. “The President didn’t challenge him,” Gelb says. “That tells you most of what you need to know about Gates’ role and power in the Administration.”

It also tells you how the White House, if it finds itself in a national-security bind, will wield Gates to fend off Republican attack dogs. When FBI agents arrested the alleged Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, they questioned him for just 50 minutes before reading him his Miranda rights. Ever since, Republicans have assailed the White House: Why was he permitted access to lawyers before a more complete interrogation could take place? Why is he being tried in a civilian court instead of a military one? Somehow the story got around that Gates had approved both decisions. When I asked Gates about it, he was cautious, saying the conclusion about what to do with the alleged bomber had already been made by the time he said he had no problem with it. Abdulmutallab has since begun cooperating with investigators. As for where he should be tried, Gates said, “I defer to the judgment of the Attorney General.”

When Gates, who took over the Pentagon from Donald Rumsfeld in 2006, accepted Obama’s request to stay on and work for the new Administration, many people assumed he wouldn’t last long–and that even if he stayed, his clout would shrink in a White House suddenly populated by left-leaning staffers suspicious of anyone associated with George W. Bush foreign policy. And yet Gates has achieved “two victories in one year,” in the words of an in-house fan. In December he won passage of a watershed Pentagon budget that shifted spending from theoretical, conventional wars to the unconventional ones the military is actually fighting now. He also helped Obama execute a surge in Afghanistan, a plan Obama had campaigned on in 2008 but which has since become known as the “Gates option.” “Sixty-two thousand forces committed in one year of a liberal Democratic President’s first term? That’s pretty remarkable,” says a senior Defense official.

Gates has always had a keen sense about who is the boss, “how they work, what their needs are and how to successfully contribute to their offices,” says an aide. It’s what allows him to adapt his positions to changing times. Under Bush he justified the missile-defense program; under Obama he took charge of canceling it. Similarly, while he’s never been a champion of repealing the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, he has agreed to carry out the President’s order to do just that.

If you were to ask Gates about his influence within the Administration, he’d stress that he serves at the pleasure of the Commander in Chief. But that too is a mark of his craft. “I have never seen anyone more effectively maneuver in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government than Bob Gates,” says his old friend David Boren, the former head of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee who is now advising the White House on intelligence. “He knows just when to give his advice, to whom to give it, and he’s extremely good at forming alliances with other people in the government to advance his point of view.”

Those skills have made Gates perhaps the most powerful Defense Secretary since Robert McNamara ruled the roost in the Vietnam War era. But for the left, Gates is a disappointing compromise, a constant reminder of Obama’s reluctance to fully repudiate Bush’s conduct of the war on terrorism. “Gates is an agent of change within his own empire and not within the broader national-security construct. That is the risk Obama ran. He covered his flank but didn’t get change,” says a Defense policy adviser. White House staffers are no doubt uneasy about their dependency on this old Cold War hawk–as adaptable as he may be–which probably explains why none of them wanted to speak for this profile.

Just before Christmas, Obama invited Gates to the Oval Office and asked him to stay on. Gates agreed to remain for another year, though he told me it was highly unlikely he would finish the term.

So what does Robert Gates stand for? Is he one of the great Secretaries of Defense, in the mold of Henry L. Stimson or his idol, George Marshall–not just steward of the building but also architect of American national-security policy? Or is he merely a first-rate apparatchik, a gifted infighter and faithful servant? In this Administration, Gates is the key broker on the question that haunts every U.S. President: how and when to wield military force. But in the last years of a long public career, that makes him the face of a war in Afghanistan that is going badly and getting worse. “Gates has too much experience in D.C. not to get out when he’s on top,” says an old friend and admirer. But has he waited too long this time?

‘General Gates’

December, Kabul. A cold fog drifted over the airfield. Gates was dressed in a brown bomber jacket, khakis and boots, ready to fly to Kandahar to visit the Stryker brigade that has been devastated by unrelenting Taliban IED attacks. Since their deployment in July, more than 30 soldiers from that brigade have been killed by roadside bombs. Gates had a message for them: “We’re in this thing to win.” Obama had said nothing of victory during his speech to the West Point cadets. “You can’t tell soldiers to fight for a draw,” says one of Gates’ staff aides. But Gates never got to give his pep talk. There would be no trip to Kandahar, or anywhere for that matter. The helicopters were grounded by the Afghan weather.

It was not the best few days for Gates. At the Arg Palace in Kabul, Afghan President Hamid Karzai told Afghan and foreign journalists that the country’s security forces would be dependent on the U.S. for at least 15 years. Gates stared stonily at the floor in front of him, then politely corrected the Afghan President. A few days later in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd lamented that puppets just aren’t what they used to be.

With nowhere to go, Gates was given an impromptu tour at the airport by his former military adviser General David Rodriguez, now No. 2 to General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. He ushered Gates through a hangar outfitted as NATO’s new cyber-command-and-control center. One of his staff whispered, “An enormous well-oiled machine for eatin’ bad guys.” In another hangar, Gates got a glimpse of the fledgling Afghan air force and stepped into the cockpit of an old Russian Mi-17 attack helicopter. “Don’t you love the irony of Gates in the pilot’s seat of an Mi-17 that he was getting Stingers to shoot down?” said his spokesman Geoff Morrell.

Today Gates is fighting to buy more of those Russian helicopters, considered the Kalashnikovs of the sky. The Iraqis and Afghans are familiar with them. They’re hardy and easier to fly than Black Hawks, and their engines are better at handling the tough Afghan altitudes.

The symbolism of Gates employing the very machines left behind by the Soviets is more unsettling than ironic. Before finally throwing his support behind McChrystal’s push for a troop surge late last year, Gates repeatedly warned that even the Soviets could not win with 110,000 troops in Afghanistan. Gates should know, since he was one of the reasons the Soviets failed. As deputy director of intelligence at the CIA in the 1980s, he signed off on the decision to ramp up U.S. aid to the mujahedin, including the supply of Stinger antiaircraft missiles. Gates plotted with President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan and toured the mujahedin camps, befriending some of the guerrilla leaders who now live in Pakistan’s tribal regions and dispatch suicide bombers to blow up American and Afghan forces. Ex–CIA officer Milt Bearden recalls crowds shouting “Allahu akbar” (God is great) in honor of Gates. Afghans who fought the Soviets still refer to him as “General Gates.”

In that Russian cockpit, however, Gates looked less like the pilot of the world’s most powerful military machine and more like a man in a bubble. Does he worry that he’ll end up like the Soviet generals he once fought against, steering a strategy that ends in defeat?

Gates replied, “That’s like going back and saying, ‘If you’d known the mujahedin would morph into what they became, would you have supported them against the Soviet Union?’ My view is, having done this for a long, long time, you never know. You make the best call you can with the information and judgment you have.”

Lately Gates has been pressing Pakistani generals to go after the jihadis they helped create–men like Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose son now wields the deadliest force in North Waziristan, from which he launches attacks against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. To Afghan and Pakistani audiences, Gates likes to reiterate that the U.S. made a big mistake when it abandoned the region after the Soviets withdrew in 1989. This time is different, he says. But the Pakistanis are not convinced. They still count the Taliban as a bulwark against Indian influence in Afghanistan and an ally in the civil war that is sure to follow after the U.S. leaves.

After his most recent trip to Islamabad, I asked Gates how he could consider Pakistani officials who support Haqqani’s network as allies. “It’s frustrating,” he said, then went quiet. I suggested that his silence said a lot.

“Well, I was very specific in a couple of my meetings in looking at them point blank and saying, ‘Haqqani and his people are killing my troops. I’ve got a problem with that.'”

And the response? “They listened.”

‘Black Chinook’

Gates is prone to bracingly honest language that is not necessarily reassuring from a man who has the weight of Obama’s Afghanistan policy on his shoulders. But that may be because Gates has something of the writer’s sensibility about him. He has the look of a man both in the moment and at a slight angle, peering in, through dark glasses, upon the human comedy. In his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows, he wrote, “I was, during the remarkable events from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, there in the shadows, the proverbial fly on the wall in the most secret councils of government, listening, watching, observing many of the greatest events of the century.”

Gates’ career has not been without controversy. He made his name as a Cold War hawk, an intelligence analyst who saw the Soviet Union as an implacable and evil adversary. During the Reagan Administration, he sided with hard-liners who got the Soviets wrong. He failed to recognize that Mikhail Gorbachev was a true reformer. He didn’t believe that Soviet power was collapsing. “He said the Soviets would never leave Afghanistan. They did. He said [former Afghan President] Najibullah would never survive the Soviet departure. He was totally wrong. Najibullah survived three or four years,” recalls Mort Abramowitz, who was Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research at the time. “People make mistakes. Bob is not infallible.”

Gates’ ambition and intensity didn’t always endear him to his colleagues, who say he has mellowed with age. “He was on the make when I knew him. He’s made it now,” says one. In 1987, after then CIA director William Casey retired, Reagan nominated Gates to become director of central intelligence. It was the midst of the Iran-contra hearings, however, and there was little hope of a quick confirmation. After four weeks, Gates withdrew his nomination. He recalls going back to his job as deputy and wanting to hide from his colleagues, then getting a call that his father died. Gates was convinced that watching him go through those hearings and investigations was too much for his father’s weak heart. The shock and the stress of those six months was too much for Gates as well. He shut the door to his office and wept.

The public saw only the poker face. “‘Never let them see you sweat’–you can put that above Gates’ door,” says Richard Armitage, an old friend and colleague. Four years later, while serving as Deputy National Security Adviser under President George H.W. Bush, Gates was nominated again to be DCI. What followed was one of the longest and most bitter confirmation hearings in Senate records. CIA co-workers from the Soviet desk excoriated his character, his motives, his honesty. They called him a toady who’d fire dissenters and slant intelligence just to please his then boss, Casey. The hearings, which went on for seven weeks before Gates was finally confirmed, were even more bruising than those in 1987. They gave him perspective, Gates said, “so you don’t get too pumped up about things and too down about things. One of my favorite lines is, Today a peacock, tomorrow a feather duster.”

As well as being a writer, Gates is the consummate technocrat, a comforting presence who puts a face on the predictability of uncertainty. His Wichita monotone and old-fashioned speeches about service and duty exude a sense of calm and control–just what the Pentagon needed at the end of 2006 as an antidote to Rumsfeld. Gates had left government in 1992 after the elder Bush’s defeat and became president of Texas A&M before being summoned back to Washington by George W. Bush. At Gates’ confirmation hearings, Democratic Senator Carl Levin asked whether the U.S. was winning the war in Iraq. Gates replied, “No, sir.” With those two words, he won over the Democrats in the bitterly divided Congress. (He also said he didn’t think the U.S. was losing.)

In his memoir Speech-less, Matt Latimer, a speechwriter for both Rumsfeld and Bush, describes Gates as “our Winston Wolf,” the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction who comes to dispose of the bodies and take care of the bloody mess after an accidental killing. “Wolf was a case study of robotic efficiency, overseeing an elaborate cleanup while calmly drinking a cup of coffee,” writes Latimer. “That’s what President Bush wanted–a cold-blooded competent cleaner.”

The cleaner quickly went to work. He walked into the Pentagon alone. Inheriting many former Rumsfeld aides, Gates told them on his first day that he wouldn’t be firing anyone. There was no time for confirmations, and he was leaving that day for Iraq. Gates brought a sense of relief, a feeling that an adult was back in charge.

Two months into his tenure, the Washington Post broke the scandal about the miserable conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the outdated, Kafkaesque bureaucracy facing wounded soldiers just to get medical attention and benefits. Gates fired the Army’s secretary and surgeon general and the hospital commander. The special-ops community nicknamed him the Black Chinook–lands at night, takes care of business and gets out.

One of the things his staffers love about him is his common sense, I-don’t-get-it attitude toward the stupidity of bureaucracy. Now that he’s past worrying about climbing within that bureaucracy, he has the confidence to break it. At the height of the Iraq surge in 2007, which Gates supported, more than 100 soldiers a month were dying. It’s almost impossible as an outsider to understand why the Pentagon would not want to build the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, known as MRAPs, that would have saved many of those soldiers’ lives. Instead of budgeting for MRAPs, the Pentagon was still spending money on outdated weapon systems. So Gates bypassed the normal procurement process, created a special task force, went to Congress and got the money to build them. “Those vehicles saved hundreds of lives and limbs,” says a senior Pentagon official.

The same thing happened in Afghanistan. The absurdities of the NATO campaign, in which each country’s forces operate according to their own particular caveats–many of which include no fighting–shocked Gates during his visit a year and a half ago. “He heard that we had a soldier who was shot and was in Spain’s AOR [area of responsibility]. The Spanish troops had to call back to Madrid to seek permission to medevac him,” a Pentagon aide told me. “The soldier lived. But Gates was furious.” He also heard that while wounded soldiers in Iraq were guaranteed a medevac within the “golden hour,” in Afghanistan they could wait as long as 1 hr. 41 min. Gates saw that there were Air Force helicopters sitting on the tarmac at the Bagram base, on call for search-and-rescue missions to recover downed airplanes–something that hadn’t happened in years. Why couldn’t they be used to evacuate soldiers? It was a classic case of interservice rivalry getting in the way of practical solutions to save lives. Gates insisted that they all ramp up their medevac capabilities. Today most wounded soldiers are evacuated within an hour, and the formerly grounded Air Force has begun flying so many missions that Army pilots have expressed envy.

The list of mindless bureaucratic obstacles that were hampering the war effort was dizzying. For example: military officers complained that there were not enough drones, Predators and unmanned reconnaissance in the air to help target insurgent cells. The holdup? Air Force pilots are taught to fly real planes, not drones. Each pilot costs about $1 million to train. And yet some staff sergeants in the Army had started operating the drones at a fraction of the price, with far fewer crashes. “If the Army is doing it safer and cheaper and able to produce more pilots faster, why aren’t we doing it to that standard?” Gates asked. “This requires a cultural revolution in the Air Force,” explained one of his staffers–which it got in 2008, after Gates fired the civilian and military leaders of the service for other reasons. Now the Air Force licenses junior officers to fly unmanned aircraft, and Gates has tripled the number of drones operating in the war zones.

From the Old School

A story Gates’ staff loves about him: Shortly before Obama’s first state dinner, for the Indian Prime Minister in November, Gates was told that when he entered through the East Wing, a gauntlet of press would ask him what he was wearing. “Why would they ask me that?” he replied. Not wanting to be part of the red-carpet scene, he slipped in through the quiet West Wing entrance and went straight to the bar. For dinner he ate half a basket of dinner rolls, preferring them to the gourmet Indian-fusion cuisine being served to the dignitaries in the dining room.

Gates is a man of old-school habits: a Grey Goose at the end of the day and preferably steak or bacon cheeseburgers for lunch and dinner. He doesn’t use a cell phone. He asked me during our interview if there was tape in my digital recorder. Gates keeps a box filled with index cards of quotes and anecdotes and one-liners he’s collected over the years. His favorite comedians are both dead–George Carlin and W.C. Fields. Their sensibilities suit Gates’ own–taking down institutions, puncturing pomp. He’s even adopted some of their style. He loves to tell the same jokes about egos in Washington–“where people say, I’ll double-cross that bridge when I get to it,” and “the only place in the world you can see a prominent person walking down lovers’ lane holding his own hand.”

At the height of the Iraq surge, Gates gave a speech to the Marine Corps Association. He began in Johnny Carson fashion with a long, meticulously timed story about Nixon’s Secretary of Defense Mel Laird on a trip to see the Pope.

Laird was smoking a cigar, and Henry Kissinger told him to at least put it out before they went inside. “A couple of minutes into the Pope’s remarks, Kissinger heard this little patting sound, and he looked over, and there was a wisp of smoke coming out of Laird’s pocket. The Secretary of Defense was on fire. The American party heard this slapping and thought they were being cued to applaud. And so they did. And Henry later told us, ‘God only knows what His Holiness thought, seeing the American Secretary of Defense immolating himself, and the entire American party applauding the fact.'”

The house fell apart in laughter. His audience captivated, Gates ended the speech with the story of Major Douglas Zembiec, who’d been dubbed the Lion of Fallujah by his soldiers. After a stint at the Pentagon, Zembiec went back to Iraq, where he was killed in action. Gates stumbled on his words as he went on and could barely finish. He’d been Secretary of Defense for just seven months. They were the bloodiest months of the war. Maybe these soldiers were dying for naught. By the time he uttered the words that Zembiec had fallen, everyone, including Gates, was in tears.

I asked Gates recently about that night. He told me it was not a singular event. “At the end of the West Point graduation, I told them I consider every one of them as if they were my own sons and daughters. I feel a very personal sense of responsibility for each and every one of them,” he said. “And one of the reasons I’ve stayed on is that I worry that whoever comes next won’t care as deeply, won’t do the MRAPs, isn’t willing to spend $30 billion to save our kids’ lives and limbs. And that is very emotional.”

Inside Man

In late 2008, with the Iraq war and the Bush presidency winding down, Gates made plans to return to Texas. Just before the presidential election, Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed contacted Gates. Would he be interested in staying on? Would he meet with Obama about it? Gates prepared some questions. He wanted Obama to know where he was coming from. Obama read them over and told Reed, “They’re right on target. I’m impressed, and it’d be useful to have a conversation with him.”

What did Gates ask the President-elect? “I asked him if he could trust me.”

Gates made himself easy to trust. By nature he’s not a guy who seeks the limelight, and Obama has no patience for media hounds. Staffers say it turns out Gates has got more in common with Obama than he did with Bush. They’re both cerebral, analytical and reflective. “Seeing terrorism as a long-term challenge–I think that’s kind of fundamental,” Gates told me. “And President Obama has pursued that with every bit as much vigor as President Bush.”

Like Obama, Gates can consume reams of information. His photographic memory is legendary. He is a voracious reader of history, spy novels and pulp fiction. He’s subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month Club for 50 years. And he is careful, meticulously so. One decades-long colleague told me Gates will cancel a briefing if he hasn’t done his homework. “Preparation for him is a cathartic experience,” says his spokesman Morrell. He vents brutal answers to imaginary questions so he can be more diplomatic on the Hill. He’s vigilant about the stagecraft of statecraft, even taking his own messy handwritten notes to meetings so his preparation can be seen.

In his office overlooking the Washington Monument, Gates has hung portraits of the leaders who most inspire him, Eisenhower and Marshall. Since 2007, when Gates re-emerged on the government speaking circuit, he has had one consistent obsession–the relationship between State and Defense. Like a nervous tic, he never misses the chance to tell an audience how, for most of his career, the secretaries of State and Defense have barely been on speaking terms.

Gates has gone out of his way to woo Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, so much so that they’ve come to seem inseparable. “Gates needs her,” says Bruce Riedel, who led Obama’s strategic review of Afghanistan early last year. “No one would take Gates’ view on what the Democratic Party would support in Afghanistan seriously. He’s not a Democrat.”

Gates and Clinton have forged a formidable partnership. “They were both clearly very hardworking students in school,” says a Pentagon aide. They speak frequently on their secure phones, comparing notes before they go to the White House. They meet once a week and have lunch at either the Pentagon or State every month. (“The notion of Condi and Rumsfeld having lunch together? Or Rumsfeld and Powell?” says a Clinton staffer.) Not long after the war-council meetings drew to a close and Obama gave his West Point speech, I asked Clinton about Gates’ methods. “He listens more than he talks. He is very careful about when he intervenes and what he says because he knows his words carry a lot of weight,” she said. “I think his ability to lead in a quiet and determined way carries a lot more influence,” she added. For his part, Gates told me it was key to his success that from early on, “Clinton and I were on the same page.”

And yet, though everyone talks about bringing soft power and a civilian surge to Afghanistan, in reality there are very few civilians to surge with. From the moment Gates put McChrystal in charge of the war, the military usurped control of the Afghanistan debate; ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who reports to Clinton as her special envoy to the region, was relegated to the sidelines.

Upon arriving in Kabul last spring, McChrystal flooded the Afghan countryside with counterinsurgency experts who came up with dire assessments and stated a need for more troops. Even Gates seemed blindsided by his own general. Gates had been public about avoiding a big American footprint in the Pashtun countryside. But after the McChrystal team’s findings began leaking, Gates shifted course. To me, he said, “Once McChrystal said, ‘This is what I need,’ then I was there. And my goal was, how do we get Stan McChrystal as much of what he’s asked for as quickly as possible?”

To his credit, Gates is mindful that the U.S.’s diplomatic assets pale in comparison to its military power. The Pentagon budget is still $660 billion, compared with State’s $51 billion. To audiences, Gates often bemoans the fact that the State Department’s foreign-service officers would barely crew one aircraft carrier. “We joke that Gates is the best surrogate for the State Department. He always makes the point that we are underfunded and underresourced,” says a Clinton staffer. At the same time, the Pentagon has assumed more of the burdens of diplomacy and statecraft. The building contains its own mini State Department, with regional deputies and country officers making policies. And that whole structure is replicated at the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I was reminded of the power of the Pentagon corporation last fall when I followed Gates on his visit to the modern-day riveters of Oshkosh. We went to a factory where they were manufacturing off-road vehicles that could withstand the Afghan Taliban’s powerful new IEDs. The workers were heavyset, rough-hewn men and women in unlaced boots, jeans, flannel shirts and goggles. Gates’ patriotic speech moved them. One woman told me that whenever she didn’t feel like doing her job tightening those screws, she reminded herself that she would be saving the life of Johnny from next door. Most of the workers travel long distances to the factory. All along the road to the airport were boarded-up businesses and FOR SALE signs. Oshkosh Corp., under contract with the Pentagon, is one of the few employers around.

As steward of that Pentagon machine, Gates does not like to lose the narrative or flow of information. Leaks irritate him almost as much as bad performances. But his desire to place some limits on what the public sees has put him at odds with some of this Administration’s political supporters, who say Obama campaigned on promises to change the culture of secrecy that marked the Bush years. Many of Obama’s liberal supporters were flabbergasted when Obama, through Gates, reversed the decision last year to release photographs from the Abu Ghraib scandal as well as cases of military abuse of detainees that had been withheld by the Bush Administration. Gates personally issued an angry letter to the Associated Press after it distributed a photograph of a soldier dying in Afghanistan, against the wishes of his family. The AP argued that the public needed to know what was going on there. “If you apply the standard that [the Pentagon] decides what images the public will see, think of the civilian massacres we would not know about. The poor girl in Vietnam running naked down the street away from napalm,” says Ben Wizner of the ACLU. “It’s very important for us to have that documentary history. The backlash they are most concerned about is from the American public, not the world public.”

The Dealer

Anyone who’s known Gates over the years will tell you he’s a guy who holds his cards close to his vest and knows just when to play them. His timing is impeccable, his negotiating skills unbeatable. A man of few hobbies–hiking, B movies and books–he loves to play hardball buying cars. His bargaining skills are so legion that a car salesman asked him, “Where the hell’d you learn to negotiate?” Gates replied, “I had a lot of practice with the Soviets,” allowing an example of Washington bravado to leak from his lips. Negotiating what he wants in the corridors of power–no one does it better, say his friends.

What is the end of all that dexterity? Is there a Gates vision or doctrine? Or is the end the master he serves, the duty of service, like the Eagle Scout he was? When I put this question to him, he talked about the consistent focus on reforming the Pentagon’s way of thinking about war and seeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through.

At that point, an aide stepped in and said he was concerned that I was being too polite; what I really meant was that he’s a chameleon who adapts to the people he works for but lacks a strong vision.

Gates considered that and said there was a lot of consistency in his strong support for surges both in Iraq and Afghanistan. His aide interrupted to clarify. “This goes back to the Cold War, sir.” Gates thought for a moment. Even his chief of staff, Robert Rangel, the most influential unknown man in Washington, seemed curious to see what the boss would say. “If there’s a consistency, it is my belief that the country is–I am very much an American exceptionalist”–he paused–“and I believe that we are, as a country, the greatest force for good in the history of the world.”

Those who know Gates consider him a realist in the mold of his mentor Brent Scowcroft, which is why it was surprising to hear such an idealistic answer. But American exceptionalism can signify many things. Its assertion of America’s historical uniqueness can suggest that the U.S. has special global obligations and privileges. Exceptionalism can be a dangerous faith because of how much it can extenuate and excuse. Gates is not a philosopher, and it is hard to know what he means by his profession of the exceptionalist faith. It may be just a fancy way of expressing the more prosaic pursuit of a great power’s long-term strategic goals: the Cold War, the long war on terrorism, the escalation in Afghanistan.

It’s understandable why the realist might steer away from the label of realism, particularly in time of terrorism and war. Realism is a fuzzy thing; it can accommodate both darkness and light. On the dark side, it denotes cynicism, indifference to higher principles, opportunism. On the positive side, though, it implies a lack of dogmatism or ideological blinders, an ability to respond to the world as it actually is.

It’s the latter quality that has made Gates so valuable. He is a problem solver, a fixer and a loyal soldier. In Washington those qualities go a long way. For a long time now, the wise men in Washington have been the problem solvers, and the fixers have been regarded as sages. But the fixer is not the moral leader, the one who provides American policy with its purposes. It’s worth remembering that what finally matters are the values and the principles he is fixing for.

Robert Gates in Afghanistan

To see more photos of the Defense Secretary at work, go to time.com/robertgates