EDITOR’S NOTE: Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates spoke recently at the dedication of a room in the Pentagon’s E-ring in honor of the late Peter W. Rodman. Rodman, a pre-eminent figure in American defense and foreign policy for four decades, served every Republican president from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush. In 1992, National Review’s then-editor, John O’Sullivan, recruited Rodman for the magazine, and he spent the next six years overseeing its editorial policy on foreign affairs as an NR senior editor. After Rodman’s death, O’Sullivan wrote: “He foresaw the rise of radical Islamism as a serious threat to the West as early as 1994 — and warned against our treating it as mainly a response to mistaken Western foreign policies.” Until five months before his death, in August 2008 at the age of 64, he was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.

I knew and admired Peter for many years; we were fellow survivors of Henry Kissinger’s NSC. Peter was here in the Pentagon when I arrived in late 2006, and did me the favor of staying on for a stretch. I relied on his counsel a good deal during those early weeks — especially during the Munich Security Conference, when Vladimir Putin served as the warm-up act for my speech.

Peter was a man as mentally refined as any European, yet he had a sense of right and wrong that was thoroughly American. Both were on display shortly after he left this department and went to England, to his alma mater, for an Oxford Union debate. The proposition being debated that night was, and I quote: “This House Regrets the Founding of the United States of America.” The Oxonians got the full Peter: stinging wit; erudition; belief in America and what it means to the world.

To the proposition that the U.S. had become a hegemonic power, Peter said: “Well, if America is an empire, it’s the first empire in history that’s always looking for an exit strategy.”

After leaving the Pentagon, Peter went, as you know, to a berth at the Brookings Institution. His official title at Brookings was “senior fellow.” His functional title was “ideological counterweight.”

I was going to use that line in the opening of a speech at Brookings last spring. That bit was dropped at the last minute when we learned that Peter would not be able to attend. Only later did we find out the reason why: the illness that was to take him from us much too soon.

In one of many tributes that poured in, the defense scholar Edward Luttwak said that Peter was one of the few people in this town who “retained a fully intellectual disposition [along] with an affinity for government office, and improbably combined both with unaffected human warmth.”

Veronique, Nicholas, and Theodora, thank you for having shared him with us. Please know that this brilliant and decent man served his country well. And what a comfort it is to think of his spirit inhabiting this building, and this room that now bears his name.

– Robert M. Gates is the 22nd United States secretary of defense.