"As early as his “bump on a log” confirmation hearing — staged specifically to cast him as the new sheriff in town, a truth-teller about the bleak reality in Iraq — Gates writes that he was thinking to himself, “What am I doing here?”
“The temptation to stand up, slam the briefing book shut and quit on the spot recurred often,” Gates writes. “All too frequently, the exit lines were on the tip of my tongue: ‘I may be the secretary of defense, but I am also an American citizen, and there is no son of a bitch in the world who can talk to me like that. I quit. Find somebody else.’ It was, I am confident, a fantasy widely shared throughout the executive branch. And it was always enjoyable to listen to three former senators — Obama, Biden and Clinton — trash-talking Congress.”
Gates seems to have fantasized about quitting as often as an intern wronged; he daydreamed about storming out of meetings and harbored deep resentments about Congress and both his bosses at the White House. In short, the Secretary of All Defense, as he’s known inside the Pentagon, the emperor of The Building — who at the time wielded a nearly $700 billion budget — was living the life of a Walter Mitty.
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/robert-gates-101926.html?hp=t1_3
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