Known and Unknown: A Memoir<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by Donald Rumsfeld (Sentinel, 832 pp.)<\/strong><\/p>\nThe wonder is not that Donald Rumsfeld was one of the longest-serving defense secretaries in history, but that George W. Bush nominated him in 2001 in the first place. As he makes clear in his riveting new memoir, the 68-year-old Rumsfeld had a lot working against him after the contested presidential election of 2000. During the Ford and Reagan administrations, he had wound up on the wrong side of George H. W. Bush \u2014 partly because he opposed the elder Bush about certain appointments and political endorsements and partly because, as a hard-charging, self-made Midwesterner, he was unabashedly skeptical of the East Coast privileges of \u201cthose who enjoy the inherited benefit of prominent names.\u201d That long-standing estrangement meant that many of the Bush family confidants, both inside the new George W. Bush administration (Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice) and outside it (James Baker, Brent Scowcroft), were probably skeptical of Rumsfeld\u2019s history and style from the beginning. Their unease only increased over the next six years.<\/p>\n
As both a former CEO who had turned around the pharmaceutical giant G. D. Searle and a veteran government infighter, Rumsfeld wanted to reinvent the Pentagon to run more like a cost-efficient enterprise whose capabilities matched its obligations. He was dubious about the status-quo military commitments of the United States but willing to use overwhelming force if need be \u2014 but only in areas of vital interest. Without careful deference, then, Rumsfeld\u2019s tight-fisted cost-cutting and questioning of American defense obligations was bound to alienate entrenched interests at both the Pentagon and the State Department. He quickly alienated both, often finding himself at odds with senior generals and admirals, Powell and Rice. CEOs, after all, make and execute policy in ways that single cabinet officers usually do not.<\/p>\n
Several themes are interwoven throughout this massive, exhaustively documented memoir: Rumsfeld\u2019s devout loyalty to and admiration for George W. Bush, unchanged to this day; his four-decade-long friendship and alliance with Dick Cheney; the way the attacks of September 11 radically and unexpectedly altered Rumsfeld\u2019s second Pentagon tenure; his bewilderment over the media\u2019s tarnishing of a sterling, nearly half-century-long record of public service over the Iraq War; and his intimacy with most of the leading American politicians and statesmen \u2014 and national crises \u2014 of our era.<\/p>\n
Why did Rumsfeld so admire the younger Bush, given the family tensions and Rumsfeld\u2019s far more substantial political and executive experience? Bush, Rumsfeld felt, was plain-speaking, decisive, often humble to the point of self-caricature, and unambiguous about the need to further American interests. He was \u201cdecidedly down-to-earth, with no inclination to formality; his demeanor was different from his father\u2019s somewhat patrician manner.\u201d Rumsfeld\u2019s Bush appears in part a throwback to a decent Jerry Ford, in part an upbeat Ronald Reagan devoted to American exceptionalism. His chief fault, in Rumsfeld\u2019s view, was perhaps not responding to an unprecedented level of vitriol in his second term, which would eventually overwhelm his cabinet.<\/p>\n
Cheney, whom Rumsfeld as President Ford\u2019s chief of staff had brought into the White House as an assistant to the president, is portrayed as Rumsfeld\u2019s bureaucratic doppelg\u00e4nger. Both were intimately familiar with the Ivy League and yet by choice estranged from its eastern-seaboard culture. Both were savvy and skilled pragmatists who made lots of money as corporate CEOs between, and in part as a result of, their stints in public service, and both were unquestionably loyal to one another over the years. Cheney explains Rumsfeld\u2019s inclusion in the George W. Bush administration, and it was despite Cheney\u2019s enormous influence, rather than because of it, that Rumsfeld was forced out of the Pentagon in late 2006. When Cheney was deemed the paragon of conservative government competence, Rumsfeld shared in that positive appraisal; when the media reduced Cheney to Darth Vader status, Rumsfeld was likewise easily caricatured.<\/p>\n
Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon when the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 rammed it on September 11. He stayed at his post amid the rubble and within hours was trying to sort out the significance of the attack and possible responses to it. (He notes that the attack could have been even worse: the targeted sectors of the Pentagon were undergoing refurbishment, which meant that many offices were unoccupied when the Boeing 757 struck.) On that morning, Rumsfeld\u2019s eight-month tenure was transformed. His focus changed from questioning long-standing weapons systems and pushing missile defense to conducting war, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq. We forget now that much of the insider animosity toward Rumsfeld had its roots in these early turf disputes within the Pentagon. The secretary would go on to cancel the $11 billion Crusader artillery platform, tilt toward Special Forces over the \u201cold\u201d army, and advocate reformulation of classical divisions into lighter, more mobile, autonomous brigades.<\/p>\n
It would be hard to find another American \u2014 George H. W. Bush, perhaps \u2014 with Rumsfeld\u2019s aggregate government experience. He worked for Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George W. Bush. He met every president since John F. Kennedy. Over some 50 years, Rumsfeld had been a Navy jet pilot, a four-term US congressman, the head of numerous offices in the Nixon administration, and chief of staff of the Ford White House. He became both the youngest and the oldest man ever to serve as secretary of defense, first under Ford and then under George W. Bush. He was often a critical special diplomatic envoy. As a Nixon administration overseer of federal programs, he prevented 1970s America from getting even more unwieldy; as secretary of defense, he kept the country from signing a disadvantageous strategic-arms treaty with Leonid Brezhnev and insisted on merit-based procurement that led to the Abrams tank. And yet by 2006, all that had been reduced to cheap \u201cRummy\u201d slurs from\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0columnists.<\/p>\nWhy and how? It\u2019s fair to say that there was a perfect storm of events and that Rumsfeld still doesn\u2019t fully appreciate it. It\u2019s easy to forget his magazine-cover superstar status between 2001 and 2003, when, in televised press conferences, he played father-explicator to a seemingly adolescent Washington press corps. Those he lectured and embarrassed could live with remonstrations, as long as they could bask in his reflected glory: his calmness on 9\/11 in the wreckage of the Pentagon; his design of the amazing two-month removal of the Taliban, followed by the installation of the pro-Western and, for a while, much-admired Hamid Karzai; his brilliant three-week ouster of the odious Saddam Hussein.<\/p>\n
But when such success seemed to dissipate \u2014 as it always does in the yin and yang of politics and foreign affairs \u2014 during the hellish violence in Iraq after late 2003, the media got even. Rumsfeld\u2019s seemingly brutal assessment of December 15, 2004 \u2014 \u201cAs you know, you go to war with the army you have\u201d \u2014 might have been taken as more of the usual realism from the straight-talking secretary if it had been pronounced in 2002. But when IEDs were blowing light-skinned Humvees apart, such candor seemed callous, especially when deliberately excerpted into sound bites. Yet Rumsfeld seemed almost unaware that his blunt, realistic, and descriptive press tutorials had become rich sources of quotations, used to prove his coldness. The more he attempted to remind the press that mistakes and errors were the \u201cstuff\u201d of war \u2014 and only their remedies the barometer of success or failure \u2014 the more a country exasperated with rising casualties saw such explication, in the words of one conservative critic, as \u201carrogant buck-passing.\u201d<\/p>\n
A second strike was the great debate between surgers and light-footprinters in Iraq after 2006, the full circumstances of which remain unclear. In Rumsfeld\u2019s telling, he was open to all options from his military commanders. Yet until 2006, Generals Franks, Sanchez, Casey, and Abizaid had all assured him \u2014 quite wrongly \u2014 that a higher profile for US forces was not the solution in the heart of the ancient caliphate. Were his generals telling him what they assumed he wanted to hear \u2014 fewer troops, limited deployment and expenditure? By the time of increasing violence in late 2003, shouldn\u2019t the defense secretary have overruled them?<\/p>\n
It seems so clear-cut today. Yet Lincoln and his war secretaries endured a succession of bad generals giving bad advice until finally, in late 1864, Generals Grant and Sherman executed the president\u2019s original vision of bisecting the Confederacy and squeezing the Army of Northern Virginia from north and south. And it was Sherman \u2014 not Lincoln, not Secretary of War Edwin Stanton \u2014 who appreciated the strategic and psychological importance of taking Atlanta before November 1864. Sherman alone made the plans to take the city at tolerable costs and thereby win his president reelection. America had no enterprising Shermans in senior command in the field between 2003 and 2006 until the emergence of David Petraeus, and savior generals are rarely created by their superiors. They emerge on their own through the tragically slow distillation of war.<\/p>\n
Rumsfeld argues \u2014 and documents \u2014 that as a \u201clatecomer in supporting the surge,\u201d he was nevertheless still open to change and so signed off on the Petraeus appointment before his departure. It was all too little, too late, amid popular anger over the human costs in Iraq. Fairly or not, Rumsfeld was blamed for not demanding a larger initial invasion force, for not preempting the insurrection with an early surge of American troops, for worrying more about getting out of Iraq than staying to stabilize it \u2014 and for allowing a once-brilliant and overwhelmingly popular military and political effort to descend into chaos that would end the Bush presidency as effective governance. In 2002, most had marveled at Rumsfeld\u2019s vision of a lighter and more lethal American military, in which a few Special Forces mavericks on horseback used laptops to channel laser-guided bombs and overthrow the Taliban at the cost of 11 American dead. In 2006, many of the same enthusiasts blamed Rumsfeld for not deploying enough traditional, heavily outfitted soldiers \u2014 \u201cboots on the ground\u201d \u2014 to patrol Iraqi streets. The number of those who, at various times, claimed both that they wanted more troops and that they didn\u2019t need more troops \u2014 from Paul Bremer to influential senators, and from Afghanistan to Iraq \u2014 makes reconstruction of culpability difficult.<\/p>\n
Rumsfeld was not a neoconservative, at least in the general sense of that much-maligned term. At heart, he was a sort of Nixon-Ford-Kissinger-elder-Bush realist who believed in knocking around enemies and sending a message but not getting entangled in planting constitutional republics in thin foreign soil. That could put him at odds with his loyal allies, like the president and the idealistic deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, and in rough agreement with his better-connected rivals, like Secretaries Powell and Rice \u2014 an ironic but ultimately untenable position. Like Cheney, Rumsfeld administered a grand strategy of Middle East democratization about which he had grave doubts and in earlier circumstances would have opposed, making him seem a sellout to paleoconservatives, a suspect to neoconservatives, and part of a generic, odious \u201cthem\u201d to his liberal detractors. When times were good, Rumsfeld was just a generic conservative in a conservative administration; when they weren\u2019t, he was an odd \u2014 and often outspoken \u2014 man out.<\/p>\n
What is the legacy of the Rumsfeld years? Neither Senator John McCain\u2019s assessment of him as \u201cone of the worst\u201d defense secretaries nor the childish name-calling of opportunistic pundits begins to hint at a judgment. The apparent viability of Iraq\u2019s present constitutional government, the unspoken foreign-policy consensus not to try such regime change and occupation again, and the ongoing complexity of Afghanistan will make appraisals of Rumsfeld\u2019s record controversial for years to come.<\/p>\n
After all, Rumsfeld\u2019s Guant\u00e1namo gulag is now President Obama\u2019s apparently necessary detention center. Predator drones came of age under Rumsfeld and were attacked by the Left as airborne terrorism, only to have their missions quadrupled under Obama. Ditto preventative detention, renditions, and military tribunals, all of which now have the Obama stamp of approval. The Abu Ghraib scandal was an aberration caused by poor leadership in the field, rather than a logical result of decisions emanating from Rumsfeld\u2019s Pentagon office \u2014 a stain for which Rumsfeld nevertheless offered his resignation in 2004.<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s military looks much more like Rumsfeld\u2019s vision than like his predecessors\u2019, to both the relief and frustration of various military analysts. We live in an era in which Vice President Biden \u2014 who once, in despair, called for the trisection of Iraq \u2014 can imagine a unified and constitutional Iraq as his administration\u2019s \u201cgreatest achievement.\u201d We won\u2019t know for years how to evaluate the tenure of those who skillfully removed Saddam, were unable to achieve postwar stability for four years, and took enormous risks in at last changing the pathological status quo of the Middle East \u2014 a story of upheaval that continues today, from Beirut to Tunis to Cairo to Tripoli.<\/p>\n
Many commentators have blasted Rumsfeld for not using his memoir to apologize in the manner of Robert McNamara and for excusing his own hesitancy from 2004 to 2006. Yet Rumsfeld does acknowledge a number of mistakes, some dating back to his congressional years. And for those who believe in what I would call the accepted Iraq narrative \u2014 General Shinseki bravely warned of the need for more troops and was punished by Rumsfeld for his candor; a beleaguered Colin Powell was always a reluctant war supporter and was duped by a conniving intelligence community; an imperious Rumsfeld insisted that his generals not ask him for more troops and was nearly criminally negligent in waiting so long to up-arm Humvees and order new body armor \u2014 they will either have to produce commensurate written texts that substantiate these assertions or prove that Rumsfeld\u2019s ample paper trail and meticulous documentation are at odds with his performance as secretary. With the publication of\u00a0Known and Unknown<\/em>, the onus shifts back onto Rumsfeld\u2019s critics to prove him wrong or disingenuous \u2014 and to show that the evidence he so amply adduces is neither accurate nor complete.<\/p>\nWhat the book does not leave in question is Rumsfeld\u2019s life before age 68, which at long last is made clear to the reading public. Only a dozen or so Americans in the latter twentieth century saw more, did more, and thought more about the advancement of American society at home and the interests of the United States abroad than did Donald Rumsfeld, and fewer still had more success and satisfaction doing it, and ruffled so many feathers in the process.<\/p>\n
A magnanimous Donald Rumsfeld seems determined to give away most of the money he made during a hectic three decades in private enterprise to a variety of admirable causes (he is donating all the profits from his memoir to veterans\u2019 charities). He is as candid and unapologetic in retirement as he was in government and corporate service. \u201cTake away the insurgency in Iraq,\u201d an acquaintance once told me, \u201cand Donald Rumsfeld would have been a sort of icon of postwar America.\u201d That might now seem obvious, but we don\u2019t yet have the full history \u2014 or know the ultimate consequences \u2014 of the Iraq War. With Rumsfeld\u2019s memoir, we are getting closer.<\/p>\n
\n
\u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson City Journal A review of\u00a0Known and Unknown: A Memoir\u00a0by Donald Rumsfeld (Sentinel, 832 pp.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[87],"tags":[1051,488,512,74,492,1067,162],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-TK","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4536,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/rumsfeld-a-personal-portrait\/","url_meta":{"origin":3456,"position":0},"title":"Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 1, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Commentary Vol. 116, Iss. 5 A Lost Breed Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait\u00a0by Midge Decter (Regan Books\/HarperCollins. 220pp.) Donald Rumsfeld, we are told, had a bad summer and a worse fall. Reporters tried his patience in a testy press conference by implying that the Secretary of Defense\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2004"","block_context":{"text":"December 2004","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2004\/december-2004\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4522,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/leave-rumsfeld-be\/","url_meta":{"origin":3456,"position":1},"title":"Leave Rumsfeld Be","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 23, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"He is not to blame for our difficulties by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0recently warned that doctors are urging interested parties of all types to get their flu shots before the \"scarce\" vaccine is thrown out. But how is such a surfeit possible when our national media\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2004"","block_context":{"text":"December 2004","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2004\/december-2004\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10470,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/10470-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":3456,"position":2},"title":"From An Angry Reader: To:\u2026","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 10, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"From An Angry Reader: To: Prof. Victor Davis Hanson \u00a0 At the end of your interview with Scott Simon on 8 July 2017 I heard this: \u201cAnd look how they took a good man like George Bush and turned him into a monster\u201d. It caught my attention. \u00a0 One of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3525,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-university-madhouse\/","url_meta":{"origin":3456,"position":3},"title":"The University Madhouse","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 1, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Have American academics lost their collective minds? This week, Columbia University allowed Iran's loony President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be a lecturer on its campus. In the circus that followed, Ahmadinejad weighed in on everything from Israel to homosexuals, and came off, as expected,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2007"","block_context":{"text":"October 2007","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2007\/october-2007\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1195,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-old-europe\/","url_meta":{"origin":3456,"position":4},"title":"The New Old Europe","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Nearly ten years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld provoked outrage by referring to \u201cOld Europe.\u201d How dare he, snapped the French and Germans, call us \u201cold\u201d when the utopian European Union was all the rage, the new euro was soaring in value,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Commentary"","block_context":{"text":"Commentary","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/commentary\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":543,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/iraqi-irony\/","url_meta":{"origin":3456,"position":5},"title":"Iraqi Irony","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 1, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Amid all the stories about the ongoing violence in Syria, the most disturbing is the possibility that President Bashar Assad could either deploy the arsenal of chemical and biological weapons that his government claims it has, or provide it to terrorists. 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