Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War by Robert M. Gates

(Knopf, $35)

“Always keep an eye on the quiet ones,” said The Economist. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has long been considered an unflappable team player, having served under eight presidents with virtually complete discretion. But now the one Cabinet member who bridged the Bush and Obama administrations has ripped apart that reputation with his new 600-page memoir. In it, Gates questions Obama’s commitment to winning in Afghanistan. He labels Vice President Joe Biden as “wrong on every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” He dismisses the members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee as “rude, nasty, and stupid.” If this is the Team Obama lieutenant who earned the nickname Yoda, we’d hate to meet Chewbacca.

Yet the early headlines generated by Gates’s book make it seem “less nuanced than it actually is,” said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. Gates says he nearly quit years ago over his frustration with Obama’s team, but he’s less focused on pointing fingers than candidly explaining what it’s like to head the Pentagon in wartime. The onetime CIA director proves “curiously elliptical” when addressing one subject: the performance of his predecessor at Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. But Duty is “highly revealing about decision-making in both the Obama and Bush White Houses,” and the insider perspective can be at once troubling and reassuring.

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Duty at times comes across “a bit like an extended therapy session,” said Greg Jaffe in The Washington Post. Gates is “maddeningly self-contradictory” in his criticism of Obama, lauding the political courage it took to send more troops to Afghanistan even while doubting the president’s faith in the mission. His divided feelings only make sense in the context of the guilt he clearly feels about the thousands of American lives lost in missions of uncertain outcome. “Like most soldiers, journalists, and civilians who passed through Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates still seems to be struggling to make sense of his war years.”