DC wonks are giddy at the political drama sure to unfold with Bob Woodward’s review in the Washington Post of Robert Gates’s new memoir to be published this month. The controversy is predictably focused on a few quotes in which Gates describes Obama as petty and political and expresses “outright contempt for Vice President Joe Biden and many of Obama’s top aides,” as Woodward puts it.
Other than the “he said, she said” and the political name-calling that everyone seems to eat up like America eats up reality TV, there was one quote from Gates’s forthcoming book that really stood out to me. Gates referenced Obama’s “determination that the White House tightly control every aspect of national security policy and even operations,” and that “his White House was by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost.”
I’m not surprised. See here for another similarity I’ve noticed between the Obama and Nixon administrations.
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