‘I may be dangerous,’ he said, ‘but I am not wicked. No, I am not wicked.’ — Henry James, The American
It was a failed administration’s ritual scapegoating, the ousting last winter of its ruinous secretary of defense. But in the sauve qui peut confirmation of his replacement — ‘The only thing that mattered,’ said a Senate aide, ‘was that he was not Don Rumsfeld’ — there was inadvertent irony.
With George W. Bush’s choice of ex-CIA Director Robert Gates to take over the Pentagon, this most uninformed of presidents unwittingly gave us back vital pages of our recent history. If Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and the neoconservative claque in the second echelon of the administration are all complicit in today’s misrule, Gates personifies older, equally serious, if less recognized, less remembered abuses. His laden resume offers needed evidence that Washington’s tortuous, torturing foreign policies did not begin with the Bush regime — and will not end with it.
While Rumsfeld’s record bared some of Washington’s uglier realities and revealed the depth of decay in the U.S. military, Gates’ long passage through the world of espionage and national security illuminates other dark corners — specters of the Cold War still haunting us, nether regions of flawed, corrupted intelligence, and the malignant legacy of foreign policy’s evil twin, covert intervention.
Like the Senate, the media welcomed Gates, in the words of the Christian Science Monitor, as the ‘Un-Rumsfeld.’ In the wake of his flinty predecessor, he arrived as a smiling, silver-haired cherub of Midwestern earnestness. That image seemed borne out by his swift firings of ranking Army officials in the Walter Reed scandal, his apparent questioning of the value of the Pentagon’s notorious penal colony at Guantanamo, his more moderate (or at least conventionally diplomatic) rhetoric in the international arena, and even his heresy in mentioning respectfully — and quaintly — the Constitutional role of ‘the press’ in a Naval Academy commencement address.
For all his relative virtues in 2007, however, Gates remains a genuine Jekyll-and-Hyde character, a best-yet-worst of America as it flung its vast power over the world. To appreciate who and what he was — and so who and what he is likely to be now, at one of the most critical junctures ever to face a secretary of defense — is to retrace much of the shrouded side of American foreign policy and intelligence for the last half-century or more. Most Americans hardly know that record, though its reckonings are with us today — with a vengeance. At the unexpected climax of his long career, the 63 year-old Gates faces not only the toll of the disastrous regime he joins, but of his own legacy as well.
This is a vintage American chronicle with dramatic settings and dark secrets. The cast ranges from hearty boosters in Kansas to bitter exiles on the Baltic, from doomed agents dropped behind Russian lines across Eurasia to Islamic clerics car-bombed in the Middle East — all in a family saga of long-hidden paternity. As with Donald Rumsfeld, such a sweeping history — the history, in this case, of that blind deity of havoc, the CIA — cannot come condensed or blog-sized. It is, necessarily, without apology, a long trail a-winding. Though in the end this will indeed be a profile of our new secretary of defense, much has to be understood before Gates even joins the story in a serious way as policy-accomplice and -maker. But the trip is full of color, and quicker than it seems. And as usual, the essential lessons, along with the devil, are in the details.
As with so many good stories, it begins on a train — two trains, in fact, crossing landscapes worlds apart, a great separation Robert Gates was heir to, revealing much about the man — and us.
‘Heart of the Vortex’
One of the Santa Fe Railroad’s old diamond-stacked, wood-burning locomotives, chugging in off the Kansas prairie on what civic historians memorialized as ‘a dark and stormy night’ in May 1872, was the making of Wichita. Finagled by boosters with government bonds and railroad-company influence, beginning a flow of private profit from public money and political favor that would be the hallmark of the town (and nation), the new tracks thrust the settlement ahead of competing sites as a lucrative depot for great cattle drives up the old Chisholm Trail.
Wichita, 180 clacking miles southwest of the Kansas City stockyards, would now become the ‘cow capital’ of the plains. Even when barbed wire turned the droves of cattle toward Dodge City in the 1880s, the train saved the town, helping to transform it into a milling center for the surrounding sea of wheat. Raucous saloons, brothels, and gambling dens gave way to the white clapboard, civilized murmur and discreet hypocrisies of merchants and farmers, churches and schools.
A sizable pool of oil was discovered nearby in 1915, and a year later Wichita built its first airplane, just in time for the American entry into the Great War. Over the 1920s, with amiable banks within reach and a hungry workforce streaming out of the ragged farm economy, ex-military pilots and barnstormers opened 29 aircraft factories in what was now being touted as ‘the Air Capital of America.’ The Depression killed some of those plants, but World War II and its Cold War sequel begat the giants — Boeing and Beech, Cessna and Learjet, feeding parasite payrolls like Raytheon’s and those of Wichita originals Pizza Hut and Coleman Camping.
By 1951, busy McConnell Air Force Base, its runways conveniently verging on Boeing’s, roared with the bounty of Cold War budgets. It was already home to a Strategic Air Command wing and soon to an outlying horseshoe of 18 Titan II missile sites. Ever abreast of the times, Wichita neighborhoods of hale entrepreneurs and factory hands were now home, as well, to clean-cut silo warriors whose understood, if unspoken, round-the-clock business was preparing for the incineration of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Communist China.
In 1960, Wichita was still a small city of 250,000 — a stubby skyline along the silt-heavy Arkansas River. ‘Small-town atmosphere with modern-city amenities… low crime rate, nationally-recognized school system, low cost of living, ample opportunities for culture and recreation’ — paradise according to the Chamber of Commerce. Kansas’ ‘largest little city’ smugly sold itself as the ideal. America agreed. In 1962, for the first of three times, quintessentially Midwestern, quietly metaphorical Wichita was voted the ‘All-American City.’
Just as typically, the model had dissidents. Behind booster smiles, labor always met the anti-union snarl of the corporations and the city they ruled. For the less than 10% of the community that was African-American or Hispanic, unrelieved racism, face-to-face mockery, went with Brown v. Board, part and parcel of early desegregating Kansas. Not least, the place bred its disillusioned intellectuals, known as the ‘Magic Locals,’ who, in the course of the 1950s, fled for the Beat Scene of San Francisco’s North Beach, where they were celebrated as ‘the Wichita Group,’ in part for the scorn they hurled at their abandoned archetypal town, and thus the nation.
Their bane was the ‘vortex,’ the interlaced cultural-economic tyrannies and personal duplicities of what one of them called the ‘Suburbia, Materialism and Conformity… ‘Donna Reed/Leave it to Beaver’ identity held dear by a largely white, educated middle class.’ So archetypal was the critique that primal-beat poet Alan Ginsberg sought out the place on a Guggenheim-financed road trip in 1966, finding ‘radio aircraft assembly frame ammunition petroleum nightclub Newspaper streets.’ He plunged boldly ‘On to Wichita to Prophesy ! O frightful bard ! Into the heart of the Vortex.’
A Man Without Anecdotes
In that same year, as Ginsberg recited, one of the Vortex’s most commendable sons, destined to be perhaps its most influential, was being recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency. Robert Michael Gates was an example the Wichita Group would have found characteristic, if not prophetic — an all-American boy in the all-American town.
He was born in the fall of 1943, during Wichita’s wartime boom which would prove nearly endless. His father sold wholesale auto parts, and the family lived, like much of postwar America, in what he pointedly would call ‘a middle class section’ of town, presumably comfortable, average circumstances (where ‘average,’ after all, was declared a civic virtue). The uniformly generic accounts that have been written about his life portray young Bob growing up with the full local infusion of wholesomeness. ‘A model child,’ he was ‘bright, well-organized and punctual…. read voraciously and loved to run and hike,’ but still found time for church youth groups and ‘tutoring underprivileged children.’
His early ambition to be a doctor offered a ready excuse for otherwise suspect science projects, experiments on rats he kept in his basement or the boiling of cat carcasses to examine their skeletons. (Alexander Cockburn, one of his least forgiving critics, called him ‘a cat torturer/drowner in his youth.’) He even attended the same grade school as future Republican Senator Arlen Specter (who, in Gates’ 1991 confirmation hearing for CIA Director, vouched personally for the exceptional quality of their elementary education). Gates went on to excel at Wichita East, education-proud Kansas’ largest high school.
He was also an Eagle Scout. More than just another rite of male passage, it was for him credential, qualification, identity — a talisman of innocence and purity — and he would cling to it. He often listed his Distinguished Eagle Scout Award ahead of his CIA medals and, at 63, earnestly served as president of the National Eagle Scout Association even as he became secretary of defense.
After a quart
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