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Robert Gates memoir: Top 5 bombshells

Early leaks of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ highly anticipated memoir have yielded a slew of insider tidbits about the personalities and behind-the-scenes struggles of Presidents Bush and Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other top officials as they fought wars on two fronts.

Here are his top five revelations.

4. Concern for fate of US troops

  • By Anna Mulrine Staff writer

Gates struggled mightily with sending US troops to war, and his sense of foreboding about their fate “enveloped” him.

Gates may have had a good poker face, but he was also known among members of the Pentagon press corps for becoming misty-eyed, and for his voice catching slightly, when he was speaking with US troops.

In his memoir, he shares what was going through his mind as he struggled with the deaths of more than 3,800 American service members during his time on the job and as he wrote condolence letters to troops in the evenings, aided by the hometown newspaper clippings he asked his staff to compile in order to personalize the letters to the families.

As he returned to Iraq and Afghanistan again and again, on each visit, Gates writes, “I was enveloped by a sense of misery and danger and loss.”

He also reveals that he plans to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 60, where many of the Iraq and Afghanistan war dead are laid to rest. “The greatest honor possible,” he writes, “would be to rest among my heroes for all eternity.”

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Mark Sappenfield
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