EDITORIAL ROUNDUP : The Gates Nomination

ROBERT GATES--WRONG CHOICE FOR CIA: The Senate Intelligence Committee should recommend against confirmation of Mr. Gates to lead the CIA. The times demand a massive rethinking of the country’s intelligence mission. It stretches the imagination to believe that Mr. Gates, the ultimate Old Guard insider, is the right person to do the intelligence work of the post-Cold War era.

--The St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press

APPROVE GATES: Skeptics might claim that with the collapse of the Soviet empire, the CIA is an agency without a purpose. They’re wrong. The world remains, in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous phrase, a dangerous place, and the CIA has a role to play in it. The problem is that the agency has been slow to define what that role will be. The process isn’t helped by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s delaying of Robert Gates’ nomination. The director-designate has been left dangling while committee members await the results of special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s reinvigorated Iran-Contra investigation. Given Walsh’s record, this could be a very long wait indeed. . . . All indications are that Gates, a career intelligence man, understands these needs. All the more reason to approve his nomination now, and let him get to work.

--The Evansville (Ind.) Courier

CIA NEEDS A CHANGE: People like Mr. Gates are often the last to see the need for change in an organization. If it rewards them, they think, what can be wrong with it? The CIA needs to be updated for a new century with different challenges. An organization man is not the right person for the job.

--The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post

THE SPY WHO ‘CAN’T RECALL’: Gates represents all that is wrong with the CIA, and there is much that is wrong. The CIA needs to be drastically reformed and curtailed, particularly now that communism around the world has crumbled. Gates, who has no idea what the CIA’s new role should be, is the wrong person for the job.

--The (Madison, Wis.) Capital Times

GATES PUSHING RIGHT BUTTONS IN SENATE HEARINGS: Gates gained the upper hand at the start of his confirmation hearings Monday by admitting the “misjudgments that I made and the lessons I learned” from Iran-Contra. . . . Barring any irrevocably damaging testimony, . . . the Senate should confirm Gates. Let us hope the new openness he promises by changing public and congressional perceptions of the agency will make all the difference in the future of central intelligence.

--The (Newport News, Va.) Daily Press

(IN SUPPORT OF) ROBERT GATES: Gates, a gifted administrator with vigorous opinions, could be a good candidate to lead that process of change. His philosophy about the uses of intelligence in new times is the right one.

--The Buffalo (N.Y.) News