How Obama Dumped Hagel - Glenn Thrush - POLITICO Magazine
November 24, 2014
He ‘just wasn’t the man for the job,’ president concluded.
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 shortcomingsin 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.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/hagel-dump-obama-113152.html#ixzz3K34CcLXL
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