Reid: Gates ‘out to make a buck’

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) accused former Defense Secretary Robert Gates of being “out to make a buck” by denigrating President Obama and other top officials in his memoir.

“He denigrates everybody, everyone, Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton, the president, [Vice President] Joe Biden, me,” Reid said in an interview with The Associated Press Thursday.

{mosads}”I’m surprised he would in effect denigrate everybody he came in contact with in an effort to make a buck,” he said.

Reid said that he had not talked about the book with Obama, but had with Biden, who gets some of the worst criticisms from Gates in Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.

“We just lamented how disappointed we were,” Reid told the AP. “It’s obvious it’s to sell a book.”

Gates is critical of Reid in his memoir. At one point, Gates writes that he wasn’t sure if Reid was “delusional” when the majority leader approached Gates about being Obama’s running mate in 2008.

Reid said that he hasn’t read Gates’s memoir and does not intend to, but he knows what Gates wrote from conversations with other people.