Petraeus: General, Spymaster, Comfortable in Casual Wear

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — When David H. Petraeus testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, it was a rare public appearance by America’s onetime most famous general who by tradition has gone into virtual hiding as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. But the spymaster, who oversaw the troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, now has a biographer who is keeping his name in lights, at least on the set of “The Daily Show:’’ Paula Broadwell, a doctoral candidate and 39-year-old major in the Army reserves who is the author of “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.’’

Karen Bleier/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDavid Petraeus, the C.I.A. director, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday.

Ms. Broadwell describes Mr. Petraeus as a mentor, so her book, written with Vernon Loeb, a Washington Post editor, is not exactly a searing portrait.


“He loves being out of uniform,’’ Ms. Broadwell said in a recent interview at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington, describing the general’s new civilian life at the C.I.A. When he went to the agency this past September, she said, “It was a huge growth period for him, because he realized he didn’t have to hide behind the shield of all those medals and stripes on his arm.”
On “The Daily Show” last week, Mr. Stewart summed up Ms. Broadwell’s book like this: “I would say the real controversy here is, is he awesome or incredibly awesome?”A short time later the very fit Ms. Broadwell challenged Mr. Stewart to a push-up contest, which she won handily. Mr. Stewart had to pay $1,000 for each push-up he lost by to a veterans’ support group. Ms. Broadwell said he wrote a check for $20,000 on the spot.
News nuggets in the book include reports that friends urged General Petraeus to resign last spring when President Obama decided to begin withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan faster than General Petraeus recommended, but Mr. Petraeus’s spokesman has since said he never considered it.
The book also recounts the former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates telling then-General Petraeus in late 2010 that President Obama was not going to name him as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top job in the military. Ms. Broadwell does not say why in the book, although in the interview she said that the White House was nervous about the general’s ambitions. “My sources say he intimidated the team, and they thought they wouldn’t be able to control him,” she said.
Ms. Broadwell, who describes herself as a “soccer mom” who lives with her husband and two young sons in Charlotte, N.C., researched her book during long periods embedded with Mr. Petraeus’s team in Kabul, Afghanistan. She had unusual access: she taped many of her interviews while running 6-minute miles with Mr. Petraeus in the thin mountain air of the Afghan capital. (Ms. Broadwell was ranked No. 1 overall in fitness in her class at West Point, although she benefited from a different ranking scale for women. But, “I was still in the top 5 percent if I’d been ranked as a male,” she said.)
For the record, Ms. Broadwell does not think Mr. Petraeus will run for president — a topic of on-again, off-again speculation — but she also does not think the C.I.A. will be the last job he will have. “He will die if he has to retire,” she said. “He doesn’t have any pastimes except for running and working out.”