Gates to W.H.: Go look in the mirror

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates shot back at members of the Obama administration who have criticized recently released excerpts from his memoir, saying they should take a look at their own “micromanaging” tendencies.

“Well, for a micromanaging White House, they should go look in the mirror,” Gates told Yahoo News Global Anchor Katie Couric in an interview Monday. “Maybe they ought to think about how they do business. And I think it’s fair to say that the book is a lot more critical about the people around the president than it is of the president.”


While discussing his memoir, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,” detailing his years as defense secretary under former President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama Obama, Gates told Couric that Obama has created an atmosphere fraught with conflict and tension among administration officials.

“At the end of the day, the president controls what goes on inside the White House,” he said. “The environment and the style of the White House is established by the president.”

Still, Gates defended his memoir and rebuffed accusations that the publication is an outright attack against the president.

“Frankly, I just don’t buy the notion that the book shouldn’t have been written or shouldn’t have been written for another three years or that it is a negative narrative about President Obama,” Gates said.

Earlier on Monday, Gates claimed his memoir has been “hijacked,” following the release of excerpts that have been viewed as critical of the president and the White House.

“The book has sort of been hijacked by people along the political spectrum to serve their own purposes,” Gates said Monday in his first live interview with the NBC’s “Today Show,” since excerpts of his memoir came out last week.

Gates sought to clarify those passages that were critical of Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with regards to their positions on the war in Iraq.

According to excerpts published in the Washington Post, Gates writes that “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary.”

However, Gates defended Clinton on Monday saying Clinton never let her political aspirations influence her recommendations to Obama during her tenure in his administration.

“I think there’s a difference when you’re in the Senate and you’re campaigning for office and when you have the responsibility of office and when she had the responsibilities of office, as I say, I never heard her bring domestic politics into the issue,” Gates said.

Despite the coverage his book has received as slamming the president on foreign policy, Gates maintains that the memoir is “very even-handed.”

“I don’t vilify anybody,” he told NBC’s Matt Lauer.

In a separate interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition” published Monday, Gates expressed reservations with Obama’s staff, saying he said he had “a lot of battles” with them.

“I had certain ideas about how the national security staff and how the White House staff ought to comport themselves in discussions on national security and military issues,” Gates said, citing his previous national security experience under multiple administrations.

“And let’s just say that the way it worked under — in the Obama White House — was not anything like I had seen before,” he added.

Gates said that there were “things that went on in the Obama White House” that under security advisers such as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski or Brent Scowcroft — all of whom Gates worked under — he was confident would’ve been “a firing offense.”

Continuing his criticism of Obama staffers, Gates told NPR that they went outside of the chain of command, but noted a generational divide.

“Some of the young people in senior positions on the White House staff and the National Security Council staff had probably been in college or even in high school when I was the director of CIA. So we just had a different world outlook and a different experience,” Gates said.