Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace
Jim Newton
Language: English
Pages: 512
ISBN: 1594205965
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The inspiring and revelatory autobiography of the defense secretary and CIA director who led the intelligence war that killed Bin Laden, among many important roles in a legendary career
It could be said that Leon Panetta has had two of the most consequential careers of any American public servant in the past fifty years. His first career, beginning as an army intelligence officer and including a distinguished run as one of Congress’s most powerful and respected members, lasted thirty-five years and culminated in his transformational role as Clinton’s budget czar and White House chief of staff. He then “retired” to establish the Panetta Institute with his wife of fifty years, Sylvia; to serve on the Iraq Study Group; and to protect his beloved California coastline. But in 2009, he accepted what many said was a thankless task: returning to public office as the director of the CIA, taking it from a state of turmoil after the Bush-era torture debates and moving it back to the vital center of America’s war against Al Qaeda, including the campaign that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. And then, in the wake of bin Laden’s death, Panetta became the U.S. secretary of defense, inheriting two troubled wars in a time of austerity and painful choices.
Like his career, Worthy Fights is a reflection of Panetta’s values. It is imbued with the frank, grounded, and often quite funny spirit of a man who never lost touch with where he came from: his family’s walnut farm in beautiful Carmel Valley, California. It is also a testament to a lost kind of political leadership, which favors progress and duty to country over partisanship. Panetta is a Democrat who pushed for balanced budgets while also expanding care for the elderly and sick; a devout Catholic who opposes the death penalty but had to weigh every drone strike from 2009 through 2011. Throughout his career, Panetta’s polestar has been his belief that a public servant’s real choice is between leadership or crisis. Troubles always come about through no fault of one’s own, but most can be prevented with courage and foresight.
As always, Panetta calls them as he sees them in Worthy Fights. Suffused with its author’s decency and stubborn common sense, the book is an epic American success story, a great political memoir, and a revelatory view onto many of the great figures and events of our time.
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States; one of those who had, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, committed the Fort Hood attack that left thirteen dead in 2009. Hasan was, according to Awlaki, a “hero” and a “man of conscience.”7 More important, Awlaki was not merely a motivational speaker, whose comments, however vile or incendiary, deserved protection as free speech. He was directly connected to the assassination attempt on bin Nayef and the attempted downing of the airliner on Christmas Day 2009. The bomber in the latter attack,.
The diary in hand. Carl dispatched another Pentagon aide to fetch it and jump on a commercial flight to Vietnam. He did, and arrived just in time to meet me there and hand me a FedEx envelope containing the little book. On June 4, 2012, I presented the red diary to Vietnamese minister of defense Phung Quang Thanh (it was still inside the FedEx package), and he handed me Sergeant Flaherty’s unsent letters on a small silver platter. It was the first official exchange of artifacts between our.
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Blamed them and not Clinton, whose political fortunes and reelection were strongly enhanced by facing down Gingrich. The administration did not ask for the confrontation, but we were ready for it when it came to us, and we outmaneuvered our opposition. There were also unexpected results of the shutdown. After all our struggling between balancing the budget in ten years or seven, and after the GOP’s dismissal of my prediction that we could balance the budget in seven without their cuts, it turned.
Know that he was going to send out his directive to the intelligence community instituting his change. I asked him not to and requested a meeting to discuss it further. Then Blair invited me to attend a ceremony at the DNI offices at which he would announce the new titles for our station chiefs. I debated refusing to attend, but went and used the opportunity to warn Blair that I remained opposed to his idea. He ignored my request and that same day signed the new policy, which was forwarded to the.