"The fact that the CIA missed the most important historical development in its history -- the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union itself -- is due in large measure to the culture and process that Gates established in his directorate."
Winning for Bob
Though Gates had been implicated in some of the worst judgments of the Reagan years, President George H.W. Bush was determined to put Gates in as head of the CIA in 1991.
Bush lined up solid Republican backing for Gates on the Senate Intelligence Committee. But the key to Gates' confirmation came from the quiet support of accommodating Democrats -- particularly Sen. David Boren of Oklahoma, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, and his ambitious chief of staff, George Tenet.
In his memoir, Gates credited his friend, Boren, for clearing away any obstacles. "David took it as a personal challenge to get me confirmed," Gates wrote.
With the help of Boren and Tenet, allegations against Gates were downplayed, denounced or ignored. Gates skated past the various controversies as leading Democrats agreed to put bipartisanship ahead of oversight.
The powers-that-be closed ranks around Gates and made sure his nomination was pushed through, although the 64-31 confirmation vote indicated an unusually high level of opposition to a CIA director.
A similar pattern occurred in late 2006 when President George W. Bush picked Gates to replace the controversial Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary. The Democrats in the Senate had no stomach for even a reprise of the unanswered or partially answered questions about Gates. They simply fast-tracked his confirmation without a single question on his controversial history.
At the time, there was a powerful conventional wisdom in Washington that Gates as Defense Secretary would represent the cooler heads of Bush Senior's Republican establishment and restrain the impetuous Bush Junior on the Iraq War, which was going from bad to worse. However, almost everyone read the tea leaves wrong.
Instead of getting Bush to wind down the war, Gates was privately on-board for an escalation. It was Rumsfeld and much of the Pentagon high command who were the relative doves on Iraq, trying to keep the U.S. military footprint as small as possible and pressing for a withdrawal as quickly as practical.
But Bush (and many of his neoconservative advisers) understood that they were facing an impending defeat in Iraq, which had to be at least delayed if the failure were not to be hung around their necks. While a "surge" of American troops might not change the eventual outcome, it would delay any clear-cut defeat until they were gone, albeit at the cost of many more American and Iraqi lives.
Eager to return to the global spotlight, Gates agreed to go along with Bush's escalation plan, but he didn't share that fact with the Senate Armed Services Committee, which eagerly approved his nomination as Rumsfeld's replacement.
The ugly old accusations about Gates were ignored, even highly relevant ones such as how his politicization of the CIA's analytical division in the 1980s contributed to the false intelligence regarding Iraq's WMD in 2002-03.
In December 2006, Gates won Senate confirmation by a resounding 95-2 margin. Then, once in office, he collaborated with President Bush in cashiering the commanders who weren't in line for the "surge" and replacing them with the likes of Gen. David Petaeus, a neocon favorite, who was.
Though the Iraq "surge" ended up costing the lives of about 1,000 U.S. soldiers -- and didn't prevent the Iraqi government from demanding a complete U.S. military withdrawal by the end of 2011 -- the decline in Iraq's ghastly violence was hailed by the Washington press corps as "victory at last."
The neocons and their many media allies made a hero out of Petraeus. Gates rode the "successful surge" wave, too.
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