Robert Gates

Biography

Robert Gates was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1943 and became an Eagle Scout. He graduated in history from the College of William & Mary in 1965, took a master's degree at Indiana University in 1966, and later earned a doctorate in Russian and Soviet history at Georgetown University. Recruited by the CIA while at Indiana, he served from 1967 to 1969 as an Air Force intelligence officer before returning to the agency as an analyst.

He spent most of the next quarter-century in intelligence and national security, working on the National Security Council staff from 1974 and returning to the CIA in 1979, where he rose to deputy director of intelligence and, in 1986, deputy director of central intelligence. A first nomination to lead the agency was withdrawn in 1987 amid questions about the Iran-Contra affair. After serving as deputy national security adviser to George H. W. Bush, he was director of central intelligence from 1991 to 1993.

Gates was president of Texas A&M University from 2002 and served on the Iraq Study Group before George W. Bush named him Secretary of Defense in December 2006 to replace Donald Rumsfeld. He was kept on by Barack Obama, retiring in mid-2011 with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He later served as national president of the Boy Scouts of America from 2014 to 2016 and became chancellor of the College of William & Mary in 2012.