This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 7th, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

Robert Gates is a popular guy these days, showered with praise for his tenure as Defense Secretary.

Justin Logan, Associate Director of the Cato Institute's Foreign Policy Studies says Gates's

tenure should be judged by his policies, not myths.

A lot of people have been sort of trying to recap the record of Robert Gates tenure

as defense Secretary.

How do you evaluate both the standard line and Gates's tenure?

Right, so Secretary Gates has been getting plotted, for years about his service as defense

secretary.

And to start with, probably the biggest thing he had in his favor was not being Donald Rumsfeld.

Donald Rumsfeld was associated intimately with a White House and an administration

that was increasingly detached from reality on the ground in Iraq in particular and Rumsfeld just as a

sort of personal aspect of his character seemed in many instances to relish

antagonizing the press corps, he had a combative sort of

affect and the juxtaposition of his, again sort of affect, against Gates, who came off very conservative personally,

soft spoken, and who in his confirmation hearing before the Senate answered a question about Iraq, whether or not the United States

was winning in Iraq, keep in mind this was 2006, with two words. He said no sir.

And that I think caused a lot of commentators to conclude that Gates was a new brand of secretary

and on a sort of superficial level that's divorced from the policies that the secretary served.

That's certainly true.

Stylistically, he was quite different than Donald Rumsfeld, and even on some policy aspects

he was different than Rumsfeld.

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