Chuck Hagel

Ted Cruz is not going to win Senator Congeniality. Not that he cares. The newly arrived Texas Republican has come out, well, guns blazing — and not just on guns. The traditional stance for a freshman senator is to hold back a bit. Being reticent and deferential are not qualities that come naturally to those who manage to win Senate seats, but most new senators choose, as much as it clashes with their instincts, to tamp down. Not Cruz. Since being sworn in fewer than two months ago, the 42-year-old tea party darling has: ...

TEL AVIV — If Chuck Hagel didn't know his Middle East geography before, he does now — thanks to a birds-eye tutorial from the Israeli military. In his first visit to Israel as secretary of defense , Hagel took a one-hour, 40-minute tour of the northern half of the country Monday in an Israeli Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, flying from Tel Aviv to the Golan Heights before circling over Jerusalem's Old City. Just in case he didn't immediately absorb the main lesson of the flight — that Israel is a really small...

Disheartening and wrong are the kindest words to characterize the Dec. 19 editorial attack on former senator Chuck Hagel [" Pentagon mismatch "]. A defense secretary who views war as a measure taken as a last resort is a wise choice for leadership. As the nation extricates itself from wars that will end up costing about $3 trillion and thousands of American lives and have not endeared us to the allies we need to fight terrorists, it is a shame that Mr. Hagel was not defense secretary a decade ago. I first met Mr. Hagel in 1981, when...

WHEN HE WAS asked in 2011 about the possible impact of the sequestration on defense, Chuck Hagel breezily replied that the Pentagon was " bloated " and "needs to be pared down. " In his first major speech as defense secretary on Wednesday, Mr. Hagel's assessment was considerably more sober. The $41 billion cut the department is taking this year, he said, "is already having a disruptive and potentially damaging impact on the readiness of the force. " He added that he would not "assume or tacitly accept" that "these cuts can be accommodated...

Regarding the Dec. 21 front-page article " Vietnam scars still show in Hagel's policies ": We strongly object, as a matter of substance and as a matter of principle, to the attacks on the character of former senator Chuck Hagel. Mr. Hagel is a man of unshakable integrity and wisdom who has served his country in the most distinguished manner in peace and war. He is a rare example of a public servant willing to rise above partisan politics to advance the interests of the United States and its friends and allies.

Before they were girls, they were women. Before that, they were girls. I am not talking here of the chronology of females but of acceptable usage. Back in the 1970s, for instance, the use of "girl" could trigger a stinging rebuke and the damning charge of male-chauvinist piggism — or why else would a man call a woman a girl? This was the Golden Age of political correctness, which now, it seems, has its last redoubt on, of all places, the opinion pages of the robustly anti-PC Wall Street Journal.

After word leaked from the White House late last week that Chuck Hagel was in line to become the next secretary of defense, Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard manned the Patriot missile batteries to shoot down that trial balloon. The neoconservative journal, no fan of the iconoclastic former Republican senator, published a smear under the headline : "Senate aide: ‘Send us Hagel and we will make sure every American knows he is an anti-Semite.' " In the posting, this anonymous aide went on to accuse Hagel of "the...

Aaron David Miller is a vice president and distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. He served as a Middle East analyst, adviser and negotiator for Republican and Democratic secretaries of state from 1980 to 2003. 1 . Chuck Hagel is anti-Israel. In 2006, I interviewed then-Sen. Hagel for a book I was writing on U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli negotiations. Quotes from that interview, such as his comment that "the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here," have been used by his...

TEL AVIV — If Chuck Hagel didn't know his Middle East geography before, he does now — thanks to a birds-eye tutorial from the Israeli military. In his first visit to Israel as secretary of defense , Hagel took a one-hour, 40-minute tour of the northern half of the country Monday in an Israeli Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, flying from Tel Aviv to the Golan Heights before circling over Jerusalem's Old City. Just in case he didn't immediately absorb the main lesson of the flight — that Israel...

Virtually everyone in the defense establishment of our country agrees that the clear and present danger to the United States does not lie in a uniformed military attack on our homeland. Therefore, our standing military forces and array of weaponry no longer possess the deterrent factor that they did during the Cold War. Terrorists and others who would do us harm have little or no regard for our military might or, for that matter, their own lives. Consequently, our best defense lies in intelligence networks and military...

Chuck Hagel was taking questions at Fort McNair on Wednesday after his first major speech as defense secretary when a man rose to ask about his recent comments on North Korea. "I was misquoted again," Hagel blurted out, without saying what he was misquoted about or who did the misquoting. When the laughter subsided, Hagel mentioned his press secretary, George Little, who was in the audience. "He likes that kind of response," Hagel said. " ‘Keep your answers short,' he says.

Chuck Hagel has only been on the job a little more than a month, and he's already getting a pay cut. A voluntary one, that is. The new Secretary of Defense has elected to give back the equivalent of 14 days of his pay — or $10,750 of his $199,700 salary, Reuters reports — to the government. The move is a show of solidarity to the Department of Defense's some 800,000 civilian employees, who will be hit with 14 days of unpaid leave as a result of the across-the-board cuts known as the sequester.

Sen. John McCain's " Straight Talk Express " has been in the repair shop for a while, but it sure was rolling this week during an interview. The main theme was that Republicans should end their self-isolation and "start working for the American people. " Journalists have always had a soft spot for McCain (R-Ariz.) when he's in the mode of bipartisan conciliator. And I don't want to overstate the evidence of an hour-long conversation the other day in his Senate office. He remains a complex and mercurial man...

Is bad penmanship a prerequisite for President Obama 's second-term Cabinet? Newly minted Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel signed off on a letter to a former Senate colleague this week with a scrawly, nearly illegible version of his signature. We're pretty sure it's his signature, at least, but we arrived at that only by deduction, based on its placement. It appears he's giving Treasury Secretary Jack Lew a run for his money. Lew, whose John Hancock will grace every dollar bill being issued, was...

The Senate's top leaders on military affairs added their voices Monday to the list of lawmakers asking the Pentagon to rethink its plans for a new military medal to honor drone pilots and cyber­warriors who work far from the battlefield. In a letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Sens. Carl Levin (Mich.) and James M. Inhofe (Okla.), the Democratic chairman and top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, respectively, said that the new Distinguished Warfare...

Charles Kestenbaum [ letters , March 4] assured us that, since he has worked for more than 40 years with Arabs and Muslims, he can vouch for the existence of a powerful, influential Israel lobby. There is, of course, an Israel lobby, just as there is a lobby for virtually everything under the sun. But if the Israel lobby cannot keep former senator Chuck Hagel from becoming defense secretary, how influential is it? Sol Schindler , Bethesda

A Senate Armed Services Committee vote Tuesday for Chuck Hagel to be defense secretary will not end his image issues. At the confirmation hearing on Jan. 31, Hagel appeared to be unprepared and open to bullying. I'm not saying the former Nebraska senator's lackluster performance will keep him from being confirmed as the next defense secretary by the Democratic-controlled Senate. Enough of his former colleagues will accept the idea that he didn't want to be confrontational or that he was having a bad day. The people Hagel must worry about...

Some people are seeking to block Chuck Hagel 's confirmation as defense secretary on the basis that he is out of the mainstream on national security policy and intolerant of gays. These charges don't stand up to either his public record or his personal relationships. As executive vice president of the Atlantic Council , where Hagel is chairman, I have had the privilege to work with the former senator since 2009. In addition to being a centrist policy wonk, I am gay. Much has been made of Hagel's...

In his Feb. 27 op-ed column, " McCarthyism 2013, " Dana Milbank denounced Republicans who opposed former senator Chuck Hagel's nomination to be defense secretary, implying that they had unfairly castigated the senator. But when Mr. Hagel purportedly spoke of the State Department as an "adjunct" of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and when he talked of an intimidating "Jewish lobby," he invoked words of classic anti-Semitism. The notion that Jews "control" international finance or Wall Street, the media or the corridors of power in...

Chuck Hagel appeared more at ease during his first day on the job at the Pentagon on Wednesday than he did during his turbulent confirmation process, as he repeatedly paid homage to a military that has been engulfed in war for nearly 12 years. Hagel, who was sworn in earlier in the day, is the only Vietnam combat veteran to serve as defense secretary. In his remarks Wednesday, the former enlisted infantryman didn't dwell on his experience or the two Purple Hearts he was awarded for...