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...servant? In this Administration, Gates is the key broker on the question that haunts every U.S. President: how and when to wield military force. But in the last years of a long public career, that makes him the face of a war in Afghanistan that is going badly and getting worse. "Gates has too much experience in D.C. not to get out when he's on top," says an old friend and admirer. But has he waited too long this time? (See photos of Obama accepting the Nobel Peace Prize...
...months into his tenure, the Washington Post broke the scandal about the miserable conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the outdated, Kafkaesque bureaucracy facing wounded soldiers just to get medical attention and benefits. Gates fired the Army's secretary and surgeon general and the hospital commander. The special-ops community nicknamed him the Black Chinook - lands at night, takes care of business and gets...
...comedians are both dead - George Carlin and W.C. Fields. Their sensibilities suit Gates' own - taking down institutions, puncturing pomp. He's even adopted some of their style. He loves to tell the same jokes about egos in Washington - "where people say, I'll double-cross that bridge when I get to it," and "the only place in the world you can see a prominent person walking down lovers' lane holding his own hand." (See pictures of U.S. soldiers delivering aid to Haiti...
...called him a toady who'd fire dissenters and slant intelligence just to please his then boss, Casey. The hearings, which went on for seven weeks before Gates was finally confirmed, were even more bruising than those in 1987. They gave him perspective, Gates said, "so you don't get too pumped up about things and too down about things. One of my favorite lines is, Today a peacock, tomorrow a feather duster." (See TIME's photogallery, "Fun with Photoshop: Obama's Other Awards...
...things his staffers love about him is his common sense, I-don't-get-it attitude toward the stupidity of bureaucracy. Now that he's past worrying about climbing within that bureaucracy, he has the confidence to break it. At the height of the Iraq surge in 2007, which Gates supported, more than 100 soldiers a month were dying. It's almost impossible as an outsider to understand why the Pentagon would not want to build the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, known as MRAPs, that would have saved many of those soldiers' lives. Instead of budgeting for MRAPs...