As I said earlier, in July 2009, the president told me that he wanted to talk to Hoss Cartwright about succeeding Mike Mullen in 2011 as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Obama, like Bush, had quickly come to admire Cartwright. The White House staff and the NSS also liked working with him. I let the chairman’s succession issue simmer for nearly a year. However, by early summer 2010 time was growing short for me to act, inasmuch as I thought I would be leaving by the end of the year. I thought there was zero chance Obama would nominate Petraeus as chairman. The White House didn’t trust him and was suspicious that he had political ambitions. An alternative candidate for chairman I had in mind was Army General Marty Dempsey, then leading the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. Previously he had commanded a division in Baghdad during the bloody first year of the Iraq occupation, led the training of Iraqi security forces, and had served superbly as the deputy commander and then acting commander at Centcom. I wanted very much to ensure that the next chairman or vice chairman had commanded in Iraq or Afghanistan. For my own job, my short list included Hillary, Colin Powell, Panetta, and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Obama and I seriously discussed the succession issue in an hour-long private meeting on October 1, 2010. He began by asking yet again whether there was any chance of my staying on longer. I simply said, “Please don’t.” I asked him, once more, if Petraeus was not a possiblity as chairman. Obama replied that pulling Petraeus out of Afghanistan would be a problem, especially with drawdowns set to begin in July 2011. I told Obama that Cartwright was willing to stay on either as national security adviser or as chairman. A big fan of Cartwright’s, I nevertheless felt obligated to share again with the president my concerns about Cartwright’s relationships with the other chiefs and his propensity to hold information close. Cartwright had told me he would prefer the national security adviser’s job as a new and different challenge. Obama said he needed “to talk to him,” and he would do so on several occasions. At the end of the meeting, I again urged the president to think about Panetta as my successor.
The president was sold on Cartwright as the next chairman, and as so often, I was being difficult. I kept thinking about having assigned Dave McKiernan to a job that did not play to his strengths and worried about doing the same to Cartwright.
On April 4, 2011, the president told me I could still change my mind about leaving. During our meeting he said that Hillary had told him the previous day, “You’re not leaning hard enough on Bob.” I told him, “I’m spent. I’m just out of gas.” I then recommended that he nominate Marty Dempsey as chairman. The previous fall, not knowing how the chairman’s succession would play out, I had recommended that the president nominate Dempsey to be the new chief of staff of the Army, and he had done so. I proposed he nominate Panetta as my successor and Petraeus to take his place at CIA. (Petraeus had surprised me shortly before by expressing his interest in the CIA job.) I told Obama I thought he could wait until mid-May to announce the military choices, but that I wanted to go public with my firm departure date by the end of April.
Dempsey was sworn in as Army chief of staff on April 11. I called him to my office the next day to tell him I was recommending him to the president to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He was flabbergasted. I shared with him the challenges I believed he would face, particularly with the budget, and said that he would need to lead the chiefs as a team, maintain their cohesion, and help the new secretary manage the relationship between the senior military and the president.
On April 28, in the East Room of the White House (where Abigail Adams once hung the presidential laundry), the president announced that I would leave on June 30 and be replaced by Panetta. Panetta would be replaced at CIA by Petraeus, and Petraeus as commander in Afghanistan by Marine General John Allen. Eikenberry would be replaced as ambassador to Afghanistan by Ryan Crocker. We were all on the dais with the president, along with the vice president, Hillary, and Mullen. The president invited each of us involved in the changes to say a few words, and we were all quite disciplined. For my part, I thanked President Obama for “asking me to stay on—and on and on.”
On Memorial Day, I stood with the president in the Rose Garden at the White House as he announced his intention to nominate Dempsey and Admiral Sandy Winnefeld as chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Ray Odierno as chief of staff of the Army. Two weeks later I announced that I would recommend Admiral Jon Greenert as the next chief of naval operations. He would be my last personnel recommendation to the president.
When it was all done, I felt I had left the president with the strongest possible team of military leaders to face the daunting challenges ahead. It was a legacy that made me proud.
THE BIN LADEN RAID
During my first three and a half years as secretary of defense, the hunt for Osama bin Laden had been dormant as far as senior policy makers were concerned. While there was lip service to the priority of finding him, there were seemingly no new leads, and our focus in Afghanistan was on fighting the Taliban, not on finding Bin Laden. When Obama early in his presidency directed a more concentrated effort to get the world’s most notorious terrorist, I thought it was an empty gesture without new intelligence information on his whereabouts. In the summer and early fall of 2010, I did not know that a small cell of analysts at CIA had acquired a lead on a courier thought to be in contact with Bin Laden. In the end, he would be found not through the $25 million reward or a new agent with firm evidence of his location, and certainly not through any help from the Pakistanis. Bin Laden was found through old-fashioned detective work and long, painstaking analysis by CIA experts. There would be a lot of heroes in the Bin Laden raid and even more people in Washington who would take credit for it, but without those extraordinary analysts at CIA, there would have been no raid.
The story of the raid by now has been told countless times. Here is my perspective. Sometime in December 2010, Panetta came to see me and privately informed me of his analysts’ belief they had found Bin Laden’s location. Leon would update me from time to time, and then in February 2011 he invited the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, Vice Admiral Bill McRaven, to CIA headquarters to begin a collaborative effort to strike the suspect compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. McRaven’s special operators had been carrying out similar raids virtually every night for years inside Afghanistan to capture or kill Taliban commanders, and had the requisite skills and experience to carry out the strike successfully.
The president and his seniormost national security team met multiple times in March and April to debate whether to strike the compound. Joe Biden and I were the two primary skeptics, although everyone was asking tough questions. Biden’s primary concern was the political consequences of failure. My highest priority was the war in Afghanistan, and so my greatest worry was that no matter what happened during the raid, as a result the Pakistanis might well shut down our vital supply line from Karachi to Afghanistan (carrying 50 percent of our fuel and 55 percent of our cargo), withdraw permission for us to overfly Pakistan, and take other steps that would have a dramatically negative impact on the war effort. A successful raid would be a humiliation of the worst kind for the Pakistani military. The Abbottabad compound was thirty-five miles from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, six miles from a nuclear missile facility, and within a couple of miles of the Pakistan Military Academy (their West Point), the boot camps and training centers for two storied Pakistani regiments, a Pakistani intelligence office, and a police station.