Duty

Robert M. Gates had worked under six presidents, at the CIA and on the National Security Council, and he considered his time in Washington finished. Then in 2006 the White House called, asking him to take over a Defense Department stretched thin by two wars. He accepted out of what he saw as an obligation to serve.

Duty is his memoir of the nearly five years he spent as Secretary of Defense during wartime. He describes the fights he waged on several fronts at once: with Congress, with the armed forces, with the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy, and with the two presidents he worked for. He recounts his part in George W. Bush's effort to reverse the course of the war in Iraq, and then his role under Barack Obama, where he was an adviser who often disagreed with the people around him.

Gates is blunt about the people he dealt with. He gives frank assessments of political figures including Dick Cheney, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, and he does not soften his judgments of the institutions he had to manage. Running through the book is his deep personal attachment to American service members, which he presents as the thing that mattered most to him in the job.

The result is an insider's view of two administrations and the wars that came to define them, told by a man who was in the room for many of the decisions.