The most important part of last Sunday’s interview shows was the part that didn’t make much news. It was the part when the departing secretary of defense said that the tone of American political dialogue is posing a threat to the country’s security.

When secretaries of defense speak of mortal dangers to the nation, they usually speak of enemies armed to the teeth, adversaries with new technologies or terrorist groups with nothing to lose but their lives. But Robert Gates is a different kind of defense secretary, and not because he is from a different party than the president he serves (Robert S. McNamara and William Cohen, both Republicans, were appointed to the Pentagon by Democrats), and not because he served two presidents of two different parties (he’s the only one to do that).

Robert Gates is different because he has been in government, with some interruptions, since the Nixon-Ford years. That’s enough to unsettle both Democrats, who distrust anyone who was recruited in college to work for the CIA (he joined twice), and Republicans, who distrust anyone who has spent most of his life on the public payroll (even his latest interruption, the presidency of Texas A&M, was a public job). Even so, Gates is, along with James A. Baker III, perhaps the greatest non-presidential public servant of the postwar age. One more thing. Perhaps better than anyone alive, he knows how the world works.

Gates’ words of wisdom

These days the world isn’t working all that well, and the same can be said about Washington. It’s the latter that preoccupies Gates, who is to leave office this week. Last Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Gates what was the big lesson he had learned during all that time in the capital. Here’s his answer on “Fox News Sunday”:

“That when we have been successful in national security and foreign affairs, it has been because there has been bipartisan support. And agreement between the president and the Congress that the fundamental strategy — maybe not all the tactics, maybe not all the specific decisions — but that the fundamental strategy is the correct one. That’s what (happened) through nine presidencies and the Cold War that led to our success, because no major international problem can be solved on one president’s watch. And so, unless it has bipartisan support, unless it can be extended over a period of time, the risks of failure (are) high.”

There’s a lot of experience in that paragraph, and a lot of wisdom, too. It applies to foreign policy, to be sure, but it also applies to domestic policy.

At the heart of Gates’ critique is the loss of bipartisanship, but bipartisanship cannot be forced or learned. What can be learned is the lesson that many of America’s problems, domestic and international, aren’t matters for one presidential term but instead are themes that slop over from one administration to another.

We should not need Gates to tell us that. While the Nazi threat was the concern of only one president (two, if you count the first month of Harry Truman’s administration), the slavery issue occupied a dozen presidents. Reconstruction occupied four presidents, maybe more if you count the spillover effects. You could argue that civil rights occupied all 44 presidents. Iran has been an irritant, or at best a minor aggravation, for six presidents, Iraq for four.

Lost art of compromise

The biggest threat facing the country is economic right now, and let’s stipulate from the start that all presidencies are in a sense about economics. But budget woes have haunted every one of the last eight presidents, and worries about entitlements have been a major preoccupation of the last five. A bipartisan commission on Social Security added some stability to the system in the early Reagan years, but all sensible people agree that the topic has to be taken on again, and that, this time, Medicare has to be part of the equation.

Compromise is a lost art in American civic life and increasingly regarded as one of the dark arts. The country was built on compromise, both at the Second Continental Congress and at the Constitutional Convention. Yet we also honor the politician or statesman who stands alone and stands firm. This contradiction is at the heart of our history, and an American Ecclesiastes might say that there is a time to stand and a time to stand down.

The times to stand are when great principles are at stake — in civil rights, for example, where there is now an American consensus, and on abortion, where there remains no American consensus. The times to stand firm are almost always moral issues, questions of right or wrong. But even in a country built on commerce there are few economic issues that are as starkly moral as slavery and abortion. There is room to compromise on most of them.

Today it is not possible to serve both parties’ priorities — the Democrats’ demand that the sanctity of benefit levels be preserved, the Republicans’ demand that the programs be solvent. That is an overstatement, but both parties have been hiding behind their own overstatements for some time.

There is political purity in these arguments, but not moral purity. Members of both parties know that the benefit levels and the level of taxation imposed to support those benefits have changed since Social Security was passed in 1935 and Medicare was passed in 1965.

Let’s not forget that both programs were passed with bipartisan support. On the Fox television show last Sunday, Wallace asked Gates what he worried about most. Gates’ answer was simple: “A loss of bipartisanship.”

Said the man who served presidents of both parties: “I think that the kind of relationships that I’ve had on the Hill show that when individuals make this effort, they can make headway. They can make progress, and at least (have) civil conversation about these issues.”

Right now bipartisanship is gone. Gone — but not forgotten.