Traveling with [Gates] last week to Iraq and Afghanistan, I had a chance to see how he operates. And the magic is that there's no magic. He's plain vanilla, a man who instinctively mistrusts flashy ideas and loud voices. His clipped facial expressions and tight body language convey the message: I don't need this job, and I won't put up with any obstacles to getting it done.

Photographers say it's hard to get a good picture of Gates. He doesn't smile or gesticulate for the camera. Where his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, was a walking photo opportunity, Gates is the gray man. One photographer says he has to scan through dozens of images of Gates blinking, frowning or looking at his shoes before he finds a photo that's usable.

Gates has brought a sense of balance to a Pentagon made dizzy by Rumsfeld's machinations. Indeed, balance was the theme of a speech he prepared to deliver in Britain. Taking a middle position between foreign policy "realists" and "interventionists," he argued that America must stop lurching "between a too-eager embrace of the use of military force and a deep-seated loathing of it." Crises shouldn't always evoke Munich and 1938, he said; neither should they trigger automatic analogies to August 1914.