Published in the October 2014 issue

It wasn't until he was engaged in the melancholy task of moving his mother from her condo to assisted living that Robert Gates, a former CIA director and secretary of defense, discovered the truth hidden from him his entire life: His father was a Boy Scout.

The family lived in Wichita, Kansas. Mel Gates sold wholesale auto parts. Robert was the younger of two sons by eight years. He remembers his dad being gruff in public but very affectionate at home. "He frightened my friends a little bit until they got to know him," Gates remembers, gesturing toward a table, to the black-and-white photo he'd unearthed in his mom's stuff—his dad in full scout regalia, Kansas City, 1918, when Mel was twelve years old and the Boy Scouts of America was only eight. "We really had a good time when I was growing up. But I never had a clue he'd been a scout."

Mel was neither a handy man nor an outdoorsman. "Dad was a golf nut," Gates says. "He would work, I think, every day he was alive, but on Saturday he would work only half a day and then go to the golf course." Mel's son, who in May became the thirty-fifth national president of the Boy Scouts, is sitting at his desk in the library of his house in rural Washington state, facing toward a lake, a landscape of tall evergreens. His ruddy face is lit as much by memories as by the light reflected off the water; his thin lips are pressed into a fond smirk. Occasionally, through the glass doors that open onto the deck, an American eagle can be seen flying past, its familiar strong profile and huge outstretched wings outlined against a perfect blue sky.

José Mandojana

Inside, Gates is surrounded by tall bookcases, important books, the usual array of mementos befitting a man who started his career as a hayseed scholarship student at the College of William & Mary, was recruited by the CIA, received his Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet history during the cold war, and eventually rose to become the agency's director. There are ceremonial swords from West Point and the Air Force Academy. Photos with dignitaries. A bronze eagle or two. And a pair of leather chairs, in slightly different styles, that he occupied at Cabinet meetings during his tenure as defense secretary—his actual seats at the table. (It is a custom for the staffs of outgoing Cabinet secretaries to purchase the chairs for their bosses.)

At the moment, Gates, a robust seventy and the father of two grown children, is wearing a dress shirt and blue jeans and occupying a traditional office chair, blond wood with wheels. (He thinks the Cabinet chairs could have used wheels also. "I suggested to both presidents they have rollers. You've got women sitting around the table, you've got older people sitting around the table. These chairs are heavy—to pull them forward was huge. You had to be in decent shape.")

In his library, Gates keeps a photo of his father as a Boy Scout in Kansas City in 1918 beside mementos from his own long career—and, in a case, bottom, the kerchief he received at the Boy Scout Jamboree in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in 1957.

Over the years, Mel Gates passed along at least two pieces of guidance his son has never forgotten: "There are more horse's asses than there are horses." And "You have to make your judgments about people one at a time." It was also his father who insisted upon scouting. ("My dad was always disappointed that neither my brother nor I took up golf—frankly, neither one of us was very athletic.") Mel was a typical father for his era, when a man was not supposed to be so sharing and caring with his kids. The elder Gates never spoke of his experiences as a Boy Scout, and never came to troop activities. When the time came, both Gates boys went to the big jamboree at Valley Forge, and both became Eagle Scouts, Robert at fifteen.

When he was thirteen, Gates went to the Boy Scouts' National Junior Leader Training Program at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico.

"It was the only formal management course I've ever had in my life," he says. "Can you imagine a better experience for learning leadership? Being thirteen years old and figuring out how to get a bunch of kids your own age to do what you want them to do and what they may not necessarily want to do, and do it willingly."

He looks out the big windows, shaking his head, still a little bit awed by the experience more than a half century later. "In my whole life, I've never forgotten those lessons."

Gates takes the helm of the scouts at a fraught time, when the organization is struggling to find its place in a postmodern, politically correct, multicultural society. The scouts were founded in 1910, at a time when the country was becoming increasingly urbanized, when the familiarity of small-town life was giving way to the anonymity (and godlessness and heterogeneity) of the industrialized city. The BSA was organized by congressional charter as a Title 36 "patriotic and national organization"—as is the American Legion, Little League Baseball, and the National Academy of Sciences. Its mission statement upon inception was to teach "patriotism, courage, self-reliance, and kindred values."

Unfortunately, as times have changed, the question of whose kindred values to teach has become a little dicey.

Over the past ten years, according to BSA spokesman Deron Smith, the scouts have seen membership decline 2 to 4 percent per year, to a total of about 2.5 million kids in 2013 (compared with nearly 5 million in the 1970s). In 2013, when the BSA's governing body voted 61 percent to 39 percent in favor of a resolution allowing openly gay males to become scouts, there was a 6 percent decline in membership. (Openly gay scout leaders remain banned.) Historically, the BSA has been closely aligned with local churches, which routinely sponsor scout troops. Some of the BSA's exceptional numerical decline over the past year has been attributed to the incorporation of Trail Life USA, billed as a Christian alternative to scouting that was founded after the ruling on gays by the BSA national leadership. The CEO of Trail Life has been quoted as saying the organization already has 370 troops in forty-five states, with another 300 troops in the process of chartering.

Having come to the scouts' table about a year after the decision on gay membership was reached, Gates said he would have moved to allow openly gay adults in the organization. "At the same time," he told reporters at the national leadership's annual meeting in Nashville, "I fully accept the decision that was democratically arrived at by fifteen hundred volunteers."

At home in his office chair, Gates continues. "One of the reasons I took the job is that I think the country needs scouting now more than ever. More and more kids come from broken homes, half of all marriages end in divorce, an amazing number of boys grow up without a positive male role model in their lives. As we've become more urban, they have no experience in the outdoors. The key is—and it's the same challenge I faced at Texas A&M [where he was president for four years before returning to government to run the Defense Department in 2006] and with the military: How do you keep the traditions and those things that have created enormously successful institutions over many, many decades, and at the same time modernize them to deal with a twenty-first-century world?"

Romulda Vasquez Pena III—known to all as Romy—was born fifty years ago in Tijuana, Mexico. His parents brought him to South Central Los Angeles when he was an infant, a little before the time of the Watts riots. Romy was the first in a brood of seven; today, his mom has forty-eight grandchildren and seventeen great-grandchildren, all living in the United States.

He is sitting at a picnic table, wearing his scout uniform; the many colorful patches hand-sewn over his left breast pocket denote his mentorship of every possible age group of scouts and cubs. On his left sleeve, a pair of patches identifies him as the Scoutmaster of Troop 780, which meets at South Park Elementary School in the heart of South Central Los Angeles, just off the Manchester Avenue exit of the 110 Freeway.

"We're in the middle where you got all the projects, all the hardcore gangs. We're right there," Romy says.

A former teacher's assistant and school-district employee, Romy works as a home-health-care provider while he's applying to master's degree programs in clinical psychology. This is his twenty-eighth year as a scoutmaster.

His father, Romualdo Vasquez II, was a stolid man of Mayan and Aztec descent, compact and strong and unwavering, as much of a master as he was a mentor. Concerned that most Hispanic kids were left unsupervised during the days while both parents worked, Romualdo chose to take night shifts. As the eldest, Romy was given a lot of responsibility—expected to care for his younger siblings. He wasn't allowed to hang out with friends. Spanish was spoken at home, English in school, graduation was considered a must. His parents even decided what kind of clothes he could wear.

When Romy was thirteen, the Boy Scouts made a presentation at his predominantly African-American school. He liked the uniforms, the idea of learning things. Compared with his surroundings in blighted South Central L. A., the camping seemed pretty cool.

But his brothers and his cousins were all like, "Dude, why you wanna be where all the gringos are? They all bores."

Romy wasn't so sure. Being in the minority in middle school was not so great, either. He went to his dad and discussed it. "I told him, 'It's funny. I want to join but I don't.' "

Surprisingly, the stern Romualdo was in favor. "He figured, You know what? If it's white people, something good is going to come out of it. You're going to learn something."

The picnic table where Romy is sitting, set on a slightly declining flat spot in a campsite beneath a grove of giant trees, is nowhere near South Central, but about two hours to the northeast. Surrounded by khaki tents, he is five thousand feet above sea level in the San Bernardino Mountains, near Lake Arrowhead, at the Forest Lawn Scout Reservation. The temperature is around 90, there is lots of dust in the air from the drought. Flies and other small bugs hover around everyone's heads, despite a liberal dousing with Off! Deep Woods. It is getting to be lunchtime. Other scouts filter by on the main path, headed from activities back to their own campsites, kids of every shape, size, and color.

Since becoming the troop's scoutmaster in 1994—when he was drafted by the local counsel to start a troop in the 'hood—Romy has mentored hundreds of boys and young men, including fourteen Eagle Scouts, the highest honor a scout can attain. (Two more will be pinned this year.) Of his original five troop members, four went on to become eagles. Seemingly his only regret in life is that he succumbed to peer pressure at the age of fifteen and dropped out of scouting, never to make Eagle Scout himself.

Although a scouting official sits within earshot, Romy is not the least self-censoring. "Our troop is not like the regular troops," he says. "We're ghetto, but we're a lot of fun. We follow the same scriptures, you know, we follow the same laws, we have to do scout motto, scout law, scout slogan. We have to do merit badges. But, you know, dealing with this group, you have to adjust the program and not just go by the law. The important thing, you know, is introducing them to the real world outside of South Central.

"We're ghetto," says Scoutmaster Romy, top, of Troop 780 in SOuth Central L.A., "but we're a lot of fun." Bottom, the troop in the San Bernardino Mountains recently. Those his three Eagle Scouts behind the tent pole in the center.

"Sometimes, you have the hardest time getting the Hispanic parents to understand what scouting is. I try to tell them: Somehow your son can have a future—and scouting is going to open things up. Maybe he's going to a university, maybe he could be the next president of the United States. He could be a court justice. The opportunity is there, it just has to be taken, and you have to give it a chance, just like you take your kid to soccer."

Across from Romy at the table are three of his Eagle Scouts, all now assistant scoutmasters. Joaquin Morales lives near Forty-seventh Street, Blood territory. He made Eagle this past winter, has just graduated high school. He's hoping to join the fire department. John Patrick Gutierrez, Eagle Scout class of 2007, from Fifty-first between Hooper and Central, is an operations manager at FedEx, something for which he thanks the skills he learned scouting. Joshua Vasquez, 2008, hails from Koreatown. He excels in first aid; he's hoping to get into a medical field like his mom, a registered nurse.

All three of the young men, who grew up within a half hour of the Pacific Ocean, agreed that learning to swim—one of the basic merit badges—was by far the most challenging part of their scouting experience. And they agree that scouting has set them apart, made them feel confident to move on in life and seek a successful path.

"When I was in middle school and high school, my friends thought scouting was weird, and they were like, What's wrong with you? Why are you doing this?" says Gutierrez, twenty-five. "Of course, they were in gangs and I wasn't." It wasn't until he got to college that he met other guys who'd been scouts, though not many eagles like him. It actually made him realize how special it was.

"All of our silver merit badges—they actually teach us how to go the right direction, if I may say," Gutierrez continues. The eldest of the three, he is treated deferentially by the others; they let him do most of the talking. "Family life teaches you about healthy families, personal management teaches you about your finances. And citizenship—country, world, community—all teach you different aspects of your world that you might not have gotten growing up."

"To be honest," says Morales, the youngest, "I just wanted to feel that glory. I saw how the Eagle Scouts were respected. I was like, I gotta do that, you know? In my family, my parents didn't go to college. If I can accomplish this and also that, that's bringing my family up."

Romy estimates that ten of his Eagle Scouts have followed his lead and gone to college. He knows all their birthdays, he keeps in touch with them regularly.

"My Eagle Scouts, I consider them my sons," he says. "Every single one of them. When they get their Eagle, I just wanna cry so bad, but I hold it inside because I'm so happy. Knowing that I give these young men a tool that they will use for the rest of their lives—no one can take that Eagle away from him."

Back in rural Washington, by the lake, Gates is talking about the time he went on a father-son camping trip with his own boy—while he was still the director of the CIA. Per protocol, the CIA set up a security perimeter around the campsite—black vans with satellite dishes and armed agents. "The Sunday-morning activity was skeet shooting," Gates laughs. "You had the CIA director out there with a bunch of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds firing shotguns. You could imagine how nervous my team was."

Gates will serve for two years as the scouts' national president, the organization's top volunteer, working as part of a triumvirate leadership, with paid and unpaid members, to shape policy and make decisions. While chairing meetings of the National Executive Board and making appearances and raising money on the BSA's behalf, Gates will help oversee big-picture planning and operations as the Boy Scouts seek to modernize. New merit badges—including one in programming and another in robotics—have already been added to make scouting more relevant; apps and other technology are being used for activities like astronomy; a new high-adventure base, the fourth, opened last summer in the New River Gorge area of West Virginia. Aggressive efforts are being made at local levels to publicize the millions of hours of good works the Boy Scouts donate routinely to their communities.

"We have an interesting challenge in the world today, especially in America, with such demographic change," says Gary Butler, deputy chief scout executive and COO, who is based at the BSA's national headquarters in Irving, Texas. "And it's not just demographic change—I heard the other day that sales of white bread are down 10 percent—it's also about the change in people's lives and interests."

Butler says scouting is at a crossroads: "How do we keep our experiences relevant yet protect the very essence of what makes us so special? Research says that most kids just want to do fun, and they want to do fun in the outdoors. And that hasn't changed in a hundred years. What's changed is the number of choices parents have for their kids today. Our challenge is how we differentiate."

Gates knows he has work to do, both to hold the BSA together during a turbulent period and to keep what he considers its unique virtues visible and available to boys, whether from the Kansas plains or South Central L. A.

"In scouting, there's a secular emphasis on values and virtue that is not found anyplace else," he says. "We don't teach civic values in schools anymore, so where else are kids going to learn it?"

Mike Sager Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter who's been a contributor to Esquire for thirty years.

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