Quotes from Robert M. Gates

I took a telephone call from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He told me that he was the one who had talked Obama into running for president (a lot of people were claiming that) but there was no candidate for vice president. Reid said he was thinking about me, and that was the reason for the call. It took a lot of willpower for me to keep from bursting out laughing.

President Lyndon Johnson once said, "If the first person who answers the phone cannot answer your question, it is a bureaucracy." Don

we had pulled a bait and switch on the National Guard and Reserves—most men and women had joined the Guard in particular expecting to go to monthly training sessions and summer training camp, and to be called up for natural disasters or a national crisis; instead, they had become an operational force, deploying for a year or more to join an active and dangerous fight and potentially deploying more than once.

and personally ate sixteen pounds of brisket. The Air Force keeps track of important things like that.

He taught me early in life to take people one at a time, based on their individual qualities and never as a member of a group. That led, he said, to hatred and bias; that was what the Nazis had done.

would listen with growing outrage as hypocritical and obtuse American senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets or appropriations bills, not to mention deal with tough challenges like the budget deficit, Social Security, and entitlement reform.

We have a long tradition in America of electing a president, celebrating him for a few days, and then spending four or eight years demonizing him, reviling him, or blindly defending him.

A leader, or those who aspire to that role, regardless of whether in the public or the private sector, must have integrity.

Given his campaign rhetoric about Afghanistan, I think I myself, our commanders, and our troops had expected more commitment to the cause and more passion for it from him. ...I never doubted Obama's support for the troops, only his support for their mission.

wanted to come right out of my chair at the witness table and scream, You guys have been in business for over two hundred years and can't pass routine legislation. How can you be so impatient with a bunch of parliamentarians who've been at it a year after four thousand years of dictatorship?

Before issuing a single directive or making a single decision, a leader should talk to people at every level of her organization, from the front office to the mail room. Career employees often have startlingly insightful views about the strengths and weaknesses of their organization, which of course they know well; as a result, they often have well-informed ideas for practical ways to improve it.

Quickly filling those information gaps and protecting the country from another attack became the sole preoccupation of the president and his senior team. Any obstacle—legal, bureaucratic, financial, or international—to accomplishing those objectives had to be overcome.

A leader must be friendly, approachable, and accessible but ought not to allow too much familiarity. After all, he's still the boss. It may sound stuffy, but a leader has to maintain his dignity, another old-fashioned notion. He must be cautious about the activities he agrees to join.

Lavrov in Geneva on March 6, and someone persuaded her to present him with a big red button, with the word "reset" printed on the top in Russian. Unfortunately, the Russian word on the button actually said "overcharge.

I thought you were my friend.

We've got to get rid of the mentality that if there are no holes in you, then you're ready for duty.

A leader must not only explain to and reassure employees that their jobs are important to the overall mission of the organization; he must ensure that their work really does contribute, that it is not pointless make-work or wheel spinning.

In 2008, the average size of an IED was ten kilograms; by early 2010, it was three times that; in 2008, 10 percent had been over seventy-five kilograms, and that number too had nearly tripled by 2010. A growing source of explosives for the IEDs was a common fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, which was trucked in from Pakistan. We had to slow that flow.

It is a rare company where the head of a line unit—an operating division—will offer the CEO a dramatic proposal for transforming (or eliminating) his own organization. I never had a line of executives outside my office anywhere I worked who were there on their own initiative to tell me what was wrong with their outfit and how they intended to fix it. I am confident the same is true of most CEOs. Leaders have to understand that a bureaucracy is incapable of reforming itself.

for all the technology, there was common agreement that one sensor worked better at detecting IEDs than anything else: a dog's nose. And so acquiring and training many more dogs became a high priority. New

And so virtually every night for four and a half years, writing condolence letters and reading about these mostly young men and women, I wept.

One lesson from Syria is that American presidents should not call for another leader, however odious, to relinquish power without a plan for, or some prospect of, making that happen. It severely limits political and diplomatic options.

I will do my duty, but I can't wait to lay down this burden.

I considered the practice the equivalent of involuntary servitude and a breach of faith with those affected, and I was determined to end it. A few months before I retired, not one soldier was on stop-loss.