How Obama Dumped Hagel

How Obama Dumped Hagel

He ‘just wasn’t the man for the job,’ president concluded.

By Glenn Thrush in Politico Magazine

When President Obama first summoned Chuck Hagel to the Oval Office in October, he wanted to know how his Pentagon chief planned to cope with the dangerous new threat posed by the Islamic State that had drawn the reluctant president back into war in the Middle East, not to mention getting a sense of Hagel’s other plans for the final two years of Obama’s presidency.

But after several lackluster, low-energy sessions, Obama was so unimpressed by the performance of his laconic, self-effacing defense secretary that he decided Hagel “just wasn’t the man for the job,” according to a senior administration official. That set in motion the decision that led to Hagel’s decorous dumping on Monday by a president who almost never fires anybody—and never admits it when he does.

Hagel, a heavy-lidded former Republican senator from Nebraska with an iconoclastic streak, freely acknowledged his own shortcomings in at least three meetings with Obama. He had signed on to preside over the end of Obama’s wars, a period the president envisioned as a time of downshifting and pulling back for the over-stressed American military. But that was then, after the 2012 election; now, Hagel reckoned, he wasn’t the kind of gung-ho, wartime consigliere Obama needed as he recalibrates his national security strategy to deal with a new round of conflict in the Middle East.

But Hagel also fired back: After reports began surfacing of White House dissatisfaction with his performance in the past few months—including an ominous column by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius—he dashed off an uncharacteristically sharp memo to National Security Adviser Susan Rice slamming the administration’s Syria policy as rudderless and ill-defined.

“I don’t think he knew when the axe would fall, but he knew it was time,” said a person close to Hagel. “He also knows that it isn’t really about him. … It’s hard to find a rationale for getting rid of Hagel that was entirely about Hagel. It has as much to do with the internal politics of the White House, and the larger policy issues, as it has to do with him.”

Even before the midterm election defeat earlier this month that saw Republicans take both houses of Congress while hammering a message of Obama administration fecklessness and indecision on national security, it was no secret that Obama and his West Wing team harbored serious reservations about the decorated Vietnam vet whose near-narcoleptic performance during confirmation hearings in early 2013 prompted an immediate bout of buyer’s remorse. In a Politico Magazine profile of Hagel a year ago, one senior Obama aide called the defense secretary a “paper tiger” and suggested “he needs to show us more” to keep his job, hardly a guarantee of long-term employment. More recently, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough has groused about Hagel’s inability to control the Pentagon brass that ostensibly works for him—believing the Pentagon had been the source of calculated leaks over expanding the war in Iraq and Syria intended to narrow Obama’s policy options.

At the same time, several sources I spoke with yesterday insisted that Hagel’s dismissal should not be misinterpreted as the start of a major national security overhaul that many, especially Republicans, have called for. “There is no shake-up,” a senior administration official told me. “For good or ill, Hagel’s it.”

 “What’s sad about this whole thing is that this is a way to say to the American electorate that we are shaking things up. But this is not a shake-up because Hagel never really had a voice in policy discussions anyway,” added one former defense official. “This is so superficial.”

The defense secretary, regardless of his lofty title, was never part of the president’s inner decision-making circle on foreign policy, which the sources said would remain intact (and it’s worth noting, the sources said, that powerful Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey is), and few expect his departure to solve the deeper problems plaguing Obama’s national security team given the iron grip exerted on foreign policymaking by Obama’s West Wing staff.

And the move alone will do little to help a struggling second-term president mend what the sources said were far deeper rifts within his overburdened West Wing-based national security team, pointing in particular to long-simmering tensions between McDonough, who had been deputy national security adviser before moving up to chief of staff, and Rice, the worst-kept secret struggle in Washington.

More broadly, the dumping of Hagel leaves unanswered the key foreign policy dilemma that hangs over the remainder of Obama’s presidency: It’s clear that Obama, propelled to office six years ago on the promise of ending two unpopular wars, must now radically readjust his priorities from a posture of military withdrawal and Pentagon budget cuts to one of engagement, but it’s not at all clear how he plans to do so.

“This is like the owner of a team that is unable to make wholesale changes on the field, so the only option left is to change the coach and hope it looks better to the fans in the bleachers,” says P.J. Crowley, a spokesman for the State Department during Obama’s first term.

“Hagel was not part of the Obama inner circle and was expendable. … But it’s the policy questions that really matter.”

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The awkward, borderline-surreal staging of Hagel’s departure on Monday mirrored his lurching 18-month tenure at the helm of the Pentagon, and seemed to underscore his outsider status. Appearing in a half-empty State Dining Room—with only pool reporters and cameras present—a grim Obama and Hagel delivered stilted statements under the scowling visage of Vice President Joe Biden, a close friend of Hagel’s who was “ticked off” at the way his former Senate colleague was treated by the White House, according to an administration official.

Moreover, the version of events emanating from the Pentagon and White House seemed to differ in small but significant ways. West Wing aides, speaking on background, left no doubt that Hagel had been fired—or that Obama and McDonough had decided on his fate weeks ago. Hagel’s aides pushed back, saying he had made the decision in “mutual” consultation.

Even the core rationale for his replacement was in dispute. After initially praising Hagel’s handling of the Islamic State crisis, White House press secretary Josh Earnest implied that the secretary wasn’t, in fact, ideally suited to lead the Pentagon against the Islamic State. “I think the point I’m trying to make is just that the priorities of the department, or at least of the new secretary, have changed, given changes in the international community,” Earnest told reporters at his Monday briefing. “It doesn’t mean that Secretary Hagel hasn’t done an excellent job of managing these crises as they’ve cropped up, but it does mean that as we consider the next remaining two years of the president’s time in office, that another secretary might be better suited to meet those challenges.”

Regardless of who succeeds Hagel—the top candidates for the job are former department officials Michèle Flournoy and Ashton Carter, I was told—the core question of how to deal with Syria, Iraq and the Islamic State remains unanswered, and maybe unanswerable. Hagel, according to Earnest and other Obama aides, wasn’t the ideal warrior for the new, unpredictable fight—but who is?

“No one is happy with the Syria policy, but there is very little appetite for a more assertive one, even among the president’s critics. … No one is advocating boots on the ground and without them,” Crowley says. “It is hard to see how the current dynamic in Syria is likely to change in a meaningful way any time soon.”

However, current and former officials said the White House’s frustration with Hagel was not limited to the fight against the Islamic State. In the eyes of Obama aides, Hagel could be maddeningly slow to respond to policy directives from the White House. When Obama began pushing last year to reinvigorate the process of closing the Guantanamo detention camp, White House aides repeatedly urged Hagel to sign off on transfers of detainees who had long been cleared for release. Yet for months, the defense secretary refused to sign certifications that the future threat posed by the prisoners could be adequately mitigated, according to a U.S. official. “This was not an insignificant source of friction,” said the official, who asked not to be named. “I can say definitively on this one it has been utterly public and unmistakeable in terms of the disconnect.”

White House irritation with Hagel grew so intense that last May, Rice sent Hagel an extraordinary memo directing him to report every two weeks on progress toward transferring or releasing Guantanamo prisoners, the source said, discussing a directive first reported earlier this year by the New York Times. “He was the bottleneck,” said one advocate closely tracking the process. “He wasn’t signing off.” There was little movement from Hagel until a meeting of national security principals last month, which pushed the defense secretary to reluctantly approve a few transfers, the official said. While few analysts believe the tug-of-war over Guantanamo releases was a key factor in Hagel’s departure, it was a piece of the broader problems in his relationship with the White House. “There were several things, but this was certainly a weight on the scale that actually registered,” the official said.

For his part, Hagel questioned the administration’s commitment to restoring sequester-spurred budget cuts he believed were hobbling the Pentagon’s capacity to respond to pop-up crises like the Islamic State and the Ebola epidemic. Since taking office, Hagel has directed most of his fire at GOP budget-cutters, but he has also made clear he is dissatisfied with some in the administration, especially former Obama Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Mathews Burwell (now Obama’s health and human services secretary), who, in the words of one Hagel confidant who spoke to me last year, “just doesn’t get the urgency” of the threat.

But Hagel’s main gripe, according to people close to him, was what he viewed as a disorganized National Security Council run by Rice—a criticism shared by McDonough, according to a senior administration official. (An email to McDonough wasn’t returned.)

In October, Hagel sent National Security Adviser Susan Rice a sharp memo criticizing U.S. policy in Syria.

That observation puts Hagel in good company: His predecessors as defense secretary, Bob Gates and Leon Panetta, have both taken the unusual step of publicly criticizing Obama’s White House team for power-hoarding and dysfunctional decision-making at the expense of the Pentagon. “The whole system is dysfunctional. The lines of communications [between the NSC and the Department of Defense] are totally broken,” the staffer told me. “I hope that whoever takes over fixes it, and fast.”

Senator John McCain, another former Senate colleague of Hagel’s who is the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the problem is less about any one official than about the Obama administration’s decision to concentrate decision-making in the West Wing, at the expense of the Defense and State departments.

“I know that Chuck was frustrated with aspects of the administration’s national security policy and decision-making process. His predecessors have spoken about the excessive micromanagement they faced from the White House and how that made it more difficult to do their jobs successfully. Chuck's situation was no different,” McCain said in a statement when Monday’s firing became public. “The president needs to realize that the real source of his current failures on national security more often lie with his administration’s misguided policies and the role played by his White House in devising and implementing them. That is the real change we need right now.”

Staff writer Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.

Glenn Thrush is senior staff writer at Politico Magazine.