Defense Secretary Robert Gates pins Combat Infantry badges on soldiers at Forward Operating Base Connolly in Kunar Province, Afghanistan in 2010.
(AP Photo/Win McNamee, Pool)WASHINGTON-Several days before Robert Gates took over as defense secretary in December 2006, it struck him that the job’s most punishing pressure would not come from the White House, Capitol Hill or inside the Pentagon.
From a chance encounter with a military mom, he realized that his heaviest burden as Pentagon chief would be his own emotions, the inescapable worry about the thousands of young American men and women he would send to fight and die on foreign battlefields.
“She said, ‘I have two sons in Iraq. For God’s sake, bring them home safe. And we’ll be praying for you.’ Now that’s real pressure,” he told the Senate committee that was considering his nomination.
It is pressure that, 41/2 years later, he readily acknowledges has taken a heavy toll. In a sense it has been a defining feature of his tenure, not the personal strain itself but how it influenced his priorities in the job. Gates’ tenure is one of the few in history to have begun and ended in wartime.
“One of the interesting challenges about this job has been the responsibility of waging two wars, neither of which I had anything to do with starting,” Gates mused during his final scheduled news conference last week. He’s retiring June 30.