Former U.S. Secretary of Defense and CIA director Robert M. Gates will publish his memoir with Random House’s Alfred A. Knopf.
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War will come out in January 2014 with a first printing of 200,000 copies. The book will talk about the country’s fight against al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but also tackle his domestic struggles. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:
this book is also about my political war with Congress each day I was in office … and the dramatic contrast between my public respect, bipartisanship, and calm, and my private frustration, disgust, and anger. There were also political wars with the White House, staff, and occasionally with the presidents themselves and often with their Vice Presidents, Dick Cheney and Joe Biden. And finally, there was my bureaucratic war with the Department of Defense and the military services, aimed at transforming a department organized to plan for war into one that could wage war, changing the military forces we had into the military forces we needed to succeed.