Paul Eaton Quoted In Politico On Robert Gates’ Book

The Secret Life of Robert Gates

By Philip Ewing

January 8, 2014 |Politico

Robert Gates’s tenure running the Pentagon might go down as the greatest performance in acting history.

On the outside, he was an even-keeled, plain-speaking former college president, one who declared to Congress he hadn’t returned to Washington to be a “bump on a log.” He cleaned house at the Air Force after an embarrassing nuclear weapons scandal and, most of all, righted the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — as much as any secretary of defense could.

On the inside, according to an early copy of Gates’s new memoir obtained by POLITICO, he was apparently hating every minute of it. But he kept almost everything behind the poker face he’d learned to wear during decades in the spy business…

“The tone of what I’m reading now is a big surprise to me,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, now senior military adviser to the National Security Network. “He gave such a professional demeanor. … I consider him a hero. He was dealing with all this turmoil, all this disagreement with the White House, but his professional display was spot on.”

Eaton said he hoped the headlines from Gates’s criticism of the White House wouldn’t distract too much from his accomplishments, including the way he prosecuted the wars after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gates’s emphasis on getting mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, MRAPs, downrange when the troops needed them.

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