The Secret Life of Robert Gates

“Robert Gates’s tenure running the Pentagon might go down as the greatest performance in acting history,” Politico reports.

“On the outside, he was an even-keeled, plain speaking former college president, one who declared to Congress he hadn’t returned to Washington to be a ‘bump on a log.’ He cleaned house at the Air Force after an embarrassing nuclear weapons scandal and, most of all, righted the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — as much as any secretary of defense could.”

“On the inside, according to an early copy of Gates’s new memoir… he was apparently hating every minute of it. But he kept almost everything behind the poker face he’d learned to wear during decades in the spy business.”