WASHINGTON — Robert Gates, a former defense secretary and CIA director, has served eight U.S. presidents. He knows what it takes to be a leader, and says he doesn’t see a lot of leadership qualities in the current crop of presidential candidates.
“Of all the candidates I see, maybe two or three I think have the qualities of leadership necessary to be a successful president,” he said recently.
He went even further at a recent Politico event, singling out the Republican candidates for having a grasp of national security issues that “would embarrass a middle-schooler.”
Gates is trying to pass along some of his accumulated knowledge in his new book, “A Passion for Leadership: Lessons on Change and Reform from Fifty Years of Public Service.”
In the book, Gates details how he was first tested as a patrol leader in a Boy Scout troop when he was about 12 years old: “There’s nothing that teaches leadership lessons like trying to get a bunch of eleven- and twelve-year-old boys to do what they don’t want to do, and you can’t make them do it and you’re only a year older than they are.”
GATES LIKES TO TELL future leaders about the importance of listening in order to get problems solved. He says he starts by listening to the professionals in his organization to get their take on what’s not working right.
Next, he talks with people on the outside who are familiar with the organization, and get the broadest possible range of input on what needs to be fixed. Then, in cooperation with the professionals, he develops an agenda for beginning the process of change.
Gates is big on forming coalitions and building support during the early formative stages of an idea, making allies and supporters out of people of divergent viewpoints. He thinks it’s the only way to get change that lasts — and that there’s not nearly enough of that going on now.
He still thinks coalition building is possible and necessary. He cites the example of Harry Truman, who he describes as maybe the most unpopular president in American history in terms of poll numbers.
Yet even during his nadir, Gates says Truman “managed to work with Republicans to pass the National Security Act, aid to Greece and Turkey that started our policy of containment toward the Soviet Union, the Marshall Plan, and establishing the Defense Department despite a political environment that was probably every bit as polarized as the one we face now.”
Gates laments that when it comes to solving today’s extremely complicated global problems, in the current campaign “you hear a lot of rhetoric, grandiose promises and strident threats” from the candidates, but “nobody is really talking about how they would solve these problems, other than in the most simplistic terms that often are just totally unrealistic.”
