When the White House was searching for a new secretary of Defense after Robert Gates planned to step down in mid-2011, there were some high-profile contenders to replace him.
Mr. Gates approached Panetta about the job, but Panetta responded by suggesting that the White House give Colin Powell a call instead.
“I did not know then,” he writes, but he later learned – by reading Mr. Gates’s memoirs – that the former secretary of Defense had also suggested Mr. Powell, as well as then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, as possible successors.
It was Vice President Joe Biden who offered Panetta the job during one of their “regular catch-up sessions” in early spring of 2011.
