20 accurate description for Gates may be "steady hand on the wheel," says the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Michael Noonan. "T don't think [Gates's] accomplishments merit the sky-high reputation that he enjoys as he leaves office," former senior CIA analyst Paul Pillar says. "Gates has long had a knack for nurturing his own reputation." Pillar recalls that Gates during his CIA days was "always saying, 'I'm going to whip this organization into shape.' Anything good that happens, it's because 'I'm head of the organization.’ Anything bad can be attributed to ‘institutional resistance." When Gates took over the Pentagon in December 2006, he quickly demonstrated the diplomatic and political acumen he had acquired as he worked his way up through the intelligence community as the first career officer to become CIA director. Take, for instance, his decision to court Hillary Clinton when she took over as secretary of state in 2009. One of the few senior Bush holdovers in the new Obama administration, Gates was keenly aware of the tensions between the State and Defense departments built up during the war in Iraq. He invited Clinton to his Pentagon office, and the two ate lunch at a table that belonged to Confederate President Jefferson Davis back when he was U.S. secretary of war. "T just told her, based on my experience, that how well the administration worked would depend a lot on how well she and I got along together," Gates recalls. "If we got along, the message would go to the entire bureaucracy--not just our own bureaucracies but the rest of government as well. She totally understood." Gates made a calculated--and more public--courtship of her entire agency. "I read in the press, and therefore it must be true, that no secretary of defense had ever been quoted as arguing for a bigger budget for State," Gates boasts now. The strategy worked. Clinton and Gates try to get together privatelyonce a week to work out HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_032190