Robert Gates may be the only CIA director or defense secretary who ever took part in peace demonstrations during the Vietnam War. In his 1996 memoir — the one nobody noticed — he says that in 1970, as a young CIA employee and Air Force veteran, he marched in Washington to protest the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.

“I and virtually all of my friends and acquaintances in CIA were opposed to the war and to any prolonged strategy for extracting us,” he recalls, with no evident regret.