Obama: A New Kind of Commander-in-Chief

[Geee]

National Review:

Like just about everybody else in Washington and many across the country, I’ve been reading the excerpts from former defense secretary Robert Gates’s book Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.

 

It presents a significantly more negative picture of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton than Gates’s statements in office led anyone to expect.

 

And it presents an interesting contrast with Gates’s previous memoir, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War, published in 1996.

To be sure, Gates in Duty says many positive things about his most recent former colleagues. He calls Obama’s decision to target Osama bin Laden the “most courageous” presidential decision he has seen.

He praises Clinton’s judgment, her sense of humor, and her penchant for hard work. Though he doesn’t make the point explicitly in the excerpt, the secretary of state and secretary of defense weren’t constant and mistrustful antagonists.