Epilogue
For a few months after his departure, Rumsfeld occupied a suite of government-provided transition offices in a high-rise building in Rosslyn, Virginia, up the Potomac River a short way from the Pentagon. There he began sorting his papers for a memoir and charting his next course.
His roots were in Chicago, where he and Joyce still enjoyed an extensive network of friendships and where he had returned after his first stint as secretary. But this time he chose to remain in Washington, eventually renting space in a downtown office building, hiring a staff of several people, and setting up a new headquarters not far from his house in the city. On the walls of the office, Rumsfeld hung photos of Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman, framed certificates marking his own years of service under several presidents, and other mementos. In a corner stood a parting gift from the Joint Chiefs of Staff: a bronze bust of Winston Churchill with a cigar in his mouth. The inscription, quoting Churchill, read, “Victory is never final. Defeat is never fatal. It is courage that counts.”
Rumsfeld explained his decision to stay in Washington as a matter of convenience that allowed him ready access to his Pentagon files and facilitated work with the Library of Congress to archive his personal papers. It also kept him near friends and former associates and afforded a close sidelines view of the capital’s political scene, although as the Bush administration ran out its term, he purposefully maintained a low profile, giving few public speeches or media interviews and spending large chunks of his time at two other homes outside Washington—the old manor in St. Michaels, Maryland, and the farm in Taos, New Mexico.
One public ceremony at which he did speak was the 2008 dedication of the Pentagon memorial to the victims of 9/11. He showed up with his right arm in a blue sling from recent shoulder surgery. Occasionally when he surfaced elsewhere, there were shows of opposition. He drew street protests outside closed-door appearances in California and France, and more than 2,600 faculty and students at Stanford University signed a petition objecting to his appointment as a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he was to play a limited role advising a panel on ideology and terrorism several times a year. John McCain, running as the Republican nominee in the 2008 campaign for the presidency, continued to hammer the former Pentagon leader for mismanaging the Iraq War, telling audiences that Rumsfeld would be remembered as the worst defense secretary in history.
Several longtime friends who visited Rumsfeld in the weeks after he left office described him as somewhat subdued initially, but it wasn’t long before the former secretary was exhibiting his customary exuberance in private gatherings. “He’s extraordinarily resilient,” said Frank Carlucci. “You could bash him all you want and he’ll bounce back right away. It rolls off him.”
Another longtime friend reported that Rumsfeld was not happy with how abruptly his removal had come about. A former subordinate who spent several days with Rumsfeld in Taos heard him fume about disagreements with other top administration officials, particularly Rice. But whatever grumbling he did, Rumsfeld remained very careful not to be heard sounding critical of Bush. “I have a friend who is totally convinced that Don was the scapegoat and that he must be bitter towards the president,” said Margaret Robson, whose late husband was one of Rumsfeld’s best friends. “I told him, ‘You don’t understand Don. He’s never going to say anything critical about the president of the United States.’”
In my own early contacts with him for this book after he returned to private life, Rumsfeld wanted to be sure I saw the many letters of praise and kind words he had received following the announcement of his resignation. He had sorted the letters according to source—members of Congress, foreign dignitaries, U.S. military personnel, former associates, friends—and filed them in large, three-ring binders. The correspondence noted Rumsfeld’s contributions to the war on terrorism, commended him for his drive to transform the U.S. military, and expressed thanks for his public service.
John Howard, the Australian prime minister, singled out the example Rumsfeld had set by his “good humor and willingness to engage the news media.” Even Jim Jones, the retired Marine Corps general who had publicly carped about Rumsfeld’s leadership, offered supportive parting words. “Those of us who were privileged to serve with you during the entire length of your appointment have not only been fortunate to participate in the outcome of the important issues of our time, but we have also benefited enormously by your unsurpassed example of commitment, energy and dedication,” Jones wrote in a letter dated November 20, 2006. “Your loyalty and ability to clearly articulate the enormous complexities of the problems facing the nation ensured that the president was well prepared for the uniquely difficult decision only he can make. I can’t imagine a more reliable or more dedicated secretary of defense. If integrity stands as an asset in today’s arena, you can be certain that yours is intact as you leave your post.”
Such letters seemed to give Rumsfeld some solace amid media commentary that tended to focus on all that had gone wrong—the mistakes made in the Iraq War, the difficult relations with the military chiefs, the tensions with Congress, the quarrels with other NSC members. As low as his popularity was when he left office—Gallup/Harris polls showed him at 34 percent—Rumsfeld still found that when he dined out at a restaurant or walked along a street, people approached him eager to shake his hand.
Over the course of his life, when Rumsfeld had faced criticisms and denunciations, a sense of certainty in his own rightness had helped sustain him. And although public opinion of him now was as negative as it had ever been, he seemed largely unrattled. Instead, he held fast to an abiding belief that he had done what he thought best and had served honorably. “Don Rumsfeld is a throwback to a breed of public man who judge themselves not relative to their peers but relative to the standard they have set for themselves, a standard closely equated to the public good,” Steve Cambone remarked.
Contemplating his next move, Rumsfeld sought opinions from a number of friends and former associates. In the past, he had dismissed the idea of writing a memoir. He had spoken critically of memoirs that involved events in which he had participated and that, in his mind, failed to rightly capture how things had unfolded.
Rumsfeld worried about writing a book that risked criticism from others as unfair or inaccurate and that therefore could result in people thinking less of him. Despite his tendency to be harsh on subordinates privately, he had a longtime aversion to speaking unkindly in public about former colleagues or sharing details of conversations with presidents and other top officials. And he wasn’t much accustomed to introspection. In mulling whether to write his autobiography, Rumsfeld read Katharine Graham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work and confessed that the book’s frankness scared him.
But Joyce told him it was time to tell his own life’s story, and so did others whose judgment he respected. George Shultz, who had helped Rumsfeld rise through the Nixon administration and who remained a booster for years afterward, stressed the contribution that Rumsfeld would be making to history by providing his perspective on events. Early in 2008, Rumsfeld signed with a publisher and began dictating his recollections. His first entry dealt not with his childhood years or his recent Pentagon service but with the period in 1974 when he took over as Ford’s chief of staff—a time he considers the most challenging of his life.
Rumsfeld also decided to establish a new charitable foundation. He and Joyce had maintained a family foundation since 1985 that had grown in value to about $20 million and made grants to dozens of groups a year. But there was little pattern to the charitable giving, and Rumsfeld wanted something more focused.
The new trust, which was funded by a grant from Rumsfeld’s previous foundation as well as by contributions from his own assets, had several aims: to provide fellowships for graduate students interested in public service, to fund charitable organizations that support troops and their families, to help finance loans to “micro-enterprises” in developing countries, and to back programs aimed at assisting the once-Soviet-controlled republics of Central Asia—countries such as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan—which have not enjoyed the kind of U.S.-based support groups that benefited the eastern European states in their transition from communist rule. The foundation’s assorted missions, while a bit of a hodgepodge, reflect Rumsfeld’s longtime interests in promoting government service and in venturing into new frontiers of both government and business.
At the Pentagon, Robert Gates, the new secretary of defense, ushered in a noticeably different approach and personal style. Almost every move he made at the outset seemed, whether deliberately or not, to be a repudiation of what had gone before. He began meeting with the chiefs once a week in the Tank, which Rumsfeld had shunned, and he vowed several times to rely heavily on advice from the uniformed military. In a further concession to the military leaders, he let go of Staser Holcomb, who had been brought in by Rumsfeld to review the appointment of senior officers, and allowed the Joint Chiefs to reclaim greater control over the promotion process.
Gates also relaxed the grip that Rumsfeld had exerted over deployment orders. Rather than insisting on checking every instruction, Gates set some overall parameters for dispatching troops and allowed the movement of small units with no controversial issues to go forward without his personal review.
He let the department’s senior civilian staff know that he had no intention of cleaning house, and while some officials chose to leave, most stayed. Eric Edelman, the department’s top policy adviser, was among those who agreed to remain, but only after receiving assurances that the combatant commanders would be instructed to work with him more closely. Gates made a point of bringing Edelman along on trips to see the commanders. Relations quickly improved between the regional military commands and the policy branch. “It changed my life dramatically and made things a lot easier,” Edelman said.
Even journalists were treated more kindly. Gates preferred a less combative dialogue, without the gleeful sparring that had characterized Rumsfeld’s encounters. “The press is not the enemy, and to treat it as such is self-defeating,” Gates asserted in the spring of 2007, declaring an armistice of sorts.
On key policy matters, too, Gates endorsed new ways forward. He readily backed the surge in U.S. forces for Iraq that Bush announced in January 2007. He also recognized that the U.S. Army needed to expand and enthusiastically supported a permanent increase in overall end strength for the service of 65,000 troops, boosting it to a total 547,000, something Rumsfeld had strongly resisted.
Gates did pledge to continue making military transformation a top priority, but it wasn’t for him the signature issue it had been for Rumsfeld, and he didn’t invest anywhere near the same amount of energy and ambition in it. Instead, he made it very clear that fixing Iraq would be his overriding mission.
In time, Gates also demonstrated a strong commitment to accountability, taking action against top officials with a firmness that Rumsfeld had lacked. He demanded the resignation of Army secretary Francis J. Harvey in 2007 after a slow Army response to reports about substandard care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He declined to nominate Pete Pace for a second two-year term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff amid concerns that a Democratic-controlled Congress would grill the general on Iraq. He managed the removal of Admiral William Fallon, Abizaid’s successor at Central Command, after weeks of rifts between the admiral and White House officials over Iran and Iraq. And he fired the top civilian and military leaders of the Air Force—Secretary Michael Wynne and General Michael Moseley, the chief of staff—over their unsatisfactory response to disclosures that nuclear weapons had been flown around the country improperly.
Gates attracted favorable notices as well for a series of thoughtful speeches that argued for a higher level of coordination in administration policy, rejecting any hint of parochialism and setting an example for others in the national security arena. Additionally, he warned against what he called the “next-war-itis” that had dominated the thinking during Rumsfeld’s reign, the system’s preference for what might be needed in future wars over what was immediately needed. He repeatedly urged the military to focus on current war demands, even if that meant devoting less time and money to planning for speculative future conflicts.
Perhaps most significantly, Gates brought a sense of balance to a Pentagon that Rumsfeld had kept in a swirl. His lack of flare and self-promotion were a relief after the theatrics of his predecessor, and there was noticeably less carping between Defense and State. But in his quieter way, Gates, in the Rumsfeld tradition, persisted in prodding the military to think outside its box, and after being in the job a while, he was heard expressing more than a little sympathy for what his predecessor had gone through in trying to effect change. “Gates said several times that every day he’s here, he understands more and more why Rumsfeld was the way he was,” remarked Ryan Henry, the second-ranking official in the Pentagon’s policy branch.
For much of his adult life, Rumsfeld never met an organization he didn’t want to change. Although his politics were mainstream conservative, his instincts both in government and business were to shake things up. At once a revolutionary and a conservative, he was a living contradiction, a human oxymoron. “I would tell him he’s a funny kind of conservative in that conservatives tend to want to preserve things,” recalled Doug Feith, who referred to Rumsfeld as a “radical conservative.”
The sheer number of initiatives that Rumsfeld undertook as defense secretary, and the long time he served, assure that his impact on the Pentagon will last far beyond the Iraq War. In his six-year tenure, he launched a dizzying list of reforms, all aimed at getting the Pentagon to think about warfare differently and to develop more-flexible plans for dealing with a world of heightened uncertainty, of small wars as well as possible big ones, of multiple contingencies, and of unconventional threats.
“There has in fact been a change in attitudes and cultures over the last decade,” said a former official who worked on strategy issues in the department’s policy branch. “The Pentagon has become far more receptive to change now than when I came in the early 1990s. We used to base contingency plans on a very small set of scenarios. Now there’s a much bigger set. Rumsfeld’s theme about contending with surprise and uncertainty and having the agility to adapt has, I think, over time been embraced by the bureaucracy and has led to far more resilience and capacity within the department than there was before 9/11.”
But as Rumsfeld himself recognized, his record on transformation is mixed. While his efforts brought noticeable changes in thinking, they were slower to translate into actual changes in weapons programs. Some initiatives, too, like the supercharging of Special Operations Command into a worldwide manhunt force, proved too hard to push past entrenched interests. Although he grew SOCOM’s budget by 80 percent and added thirteen thousand troops, Rumsfeld never did get the SOCOM he wanted—one that would have been devoted more to direct-action missions and less to the kind of community engagement practiced by civil affairs teams and psychological operations units. Additionally, the regional commanders never fully accepted Rumsfeld’s attempt to hand SOCOM the lead in the war on terrorism, refusing to cede control over activities conducted in the areas of the world they oversee.
Other Rumsfeld projects were scaled back in the months after he was gone. The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Germany was slowed. Plans to build two satellite systems—one the Space-Based Radar, the other a classified system—were deemed unaffordable and canceled. The Pentagon’s intelligence directorate was restructured to align more closely with the office of the director of national intelligence, and the controversial Counter-Intelligence Field Activity program, which had attracted criticism for spying on antiwar protestors, was eliminated.
Concerned as he was about saving taxpayer money, far more federal funds were being spent on defense by the end of Rumsfeld’s tenure. Even without direct war costs, the defense budget grew from $366 billion to $654 billion between fiscal years 2001 and 2006. Rumsfeld argued that the nation could afford to spend more on its military and should do so, particularly to offset reductions in defense spending by partner nations. “Ours is also a world of many friends and allies,” he said in his farewell address. “But sadly, realistically, friends and allies with declining defense investment and declining capabilities, and, I would add, as a result, with increasing vulnerabilities. All of which requires that the United States of America invest more.”
To this day Rumsfeld maintains that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan energized his transformation campaign rather than delaying or distracting it. In his view, the wars gave impetus to what had to be done. “People said there’s no way you can have a major transformation program and simultaneously be involved in a war. I said just the opposite,” Rumsfeld recalled in an interview. “That’s the time you’ve got the best opportunity to make the changes. When things are in motion, it’s a lot easier to make adjustments.” In a peacetime environment, Rumsfeld added, nowhere near the same kind of progress could have been made. “The forces would have been marshaled against you much more than they even were, and they were significant even in a time of war.” Asked if there was ever a time he thought about slowing up, Rumsfeld replied, “Nope. I thought about hurrying up.”
Rumsfeld’s initial notion for how the military should change rested on an abiding belief in technological advances, including dramatic improvements in information management and precision weaponry. These advances, he contended, should make it possible for the military to generate considerably more combat capability with the same, or in some cases, fewer, numbers of weapons platforms and with lower levels of manning.
The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were triumphs that seemed, at first, to confirm Rumsfeld’s vision of a transparent battlefield, long-range precision strikes, and rapid, decisive operations. But the picture changed as the enemy continued to fight back and proved to be different from what had first been imagined. As impressive as the overthrows of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein regimes had been, they ended up far from decisive. U.S. forces found themselves battling not Iraq’s elite Republican Guard divisions and Taliban militias but mongrel bands of insurgents and foreign fighters. It was a different kind of twenty-first-century conflict, one where speed and precision weapons mattered less than patience and constructive community relations.
Rumsfeld resisted the idea that combating shadowy, resourceful insurgents could require more forces on the ground, not just alternative tactics. At times he seemed, even to close associates, to treat the Iraq War more as an irritating diversion from his main mission of transforming the military than as the defining challenge of his time in office.
“It’s my belief that he had an expectation of what his job would be as secretary of defense, and it probably centered around transformation—building a foundation that a Defense Department could stand on for the next forty years,” said Andy Card. “And then a war got in the way. Transformation had been a labor of love for him. The war became a labor of responsibility. It was the beautiful siren of transformation that had attracted him to the job, but the shoals ended up being the shoals of war.”
War is what saved Rumsfeld in the Bush administration’s first year when his impolitic ways got him into trouble with Congress and the military brass, and war is what ultimately brought him down. He had never bought into the rhetoric of implanting democracy abroad that was touted by others in the administration, but he had favored removing the regime in Baghdad, figuring any change would be an improvement both for the Iraqi people and for U.S. interests in the region.
The war plan he developed with Tommy Franks succeeded in its aim of swiftly toppling Saddam Hussein. But in war, the hard part often comes after the fighting ends. And here Rumsfeld proved neglectful. He failed to ensure adequate preparation for the postwar phase. He couldn’t imagine the enemy’s ability to launch a follow-up war of its own. He claims to have been unaware of the decision to assign command of military operations in Iraq to Ricardo Sanchez, the Army’s most junior three-star general. And when Paul Bremer, the senior U.S. civilian in Baghdad, appeared increasingly to skirt the Pentagon and deal directly with the White House and the State Department, Rumsfeld largely washed his hands of responsibility for all but the security aspect of the mission.
Given the frequent criticism that Rumsfeld micromanaged too much, it was odd to see him not micromanaging more. Indeed, even after Bremer and Sanchez were gone, he left the drafting of a new counterinsurgency plan largely in the hands of the new Baghdad commander, George Casey, and then held fast to many of its basic assumptions despite mounting evidence indicating that the nature of the war was changing into a more sectarian fight and required new assumptions and revised approaches.
Adamant about having Iraqis assume responsibility for their own security, Rumsfeld resisted the idea of pouring more U.S. troops into the country, even as it became increasingly apparent that Iraqi forces were not yet capable of securing neighborhoods cleared by American soldiers. This minimalist approach might have made sense in a more benign environment. But under combat conditions, when the general rule is to bring as much as possible to the fight because there’s no knowing what might be needed, it was an especially risky strategy.
Army colonel Bill Hix, who advised Casey on strategy, recalled that in August 1941, before the United States entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, what sorts of support would be needed to help the British, Russians, and other Allies defeat Germany and Japan. “It wasn’t a question of what can you do with what you’ve got,” Hix said. “It was a question of what does it take to win. But Rumsfeld seemed inclined to go the other way—you know, How little can I use to try to win?”
It may be that Rumsfeld’s business experience, considered an advantage in his transformation drive, handicapped his thinking when it came to planning for a war and managing it. The initial success, too, of the war in Afghanistan, which showed the power of a relatively small number of U.S. ground forces using precision air strikes and working with indigenous militias, seems to have reinforced Rumsfeld’s commitment to the minimalist model.
“I think his fundamental flaw in being secretary of defense in time of war was that he appeared to equate efficiency with effectiveness,” Hix said. “War is an inherently inefficient exercise, particularly on the scale of Iraq; it wastes everything. Surprise and uncertainty are inherent components of it, and one important way you deal with that is to prepare for as many things as possible. You can spend ridiculous amounts of money and find out in the end that you didn’t need everything—and people will criticize you afterward. But that’s just the way it is. If you end up needing something you don’t have, its absence can put at risk everything you are fighting for and demand more lives, treasure and political capital. That’s where we were in Iraq.”
Asked to assess Rumsfeld’s tenure, James Schlesinger gave him high marks as a secretary of defense trying to revamp the U.S. military, but scored Rumsfeld low as a secretary of war. The same, Schlesinger added, was true of Robert McNamara, the only other Pentagon leader whose term rivaled Rumsfeld’s for controversy.
Both Rumsfeld and McNamara came to the Pentagon from the corporate world exhibiting arrogance and impatience, and both showed similar characteristics in office: keen analytical minds, insatiable appetites for data, predilections for new methods and approaches to problem solving. McNamara may have been more soullessly analytical, and Rumsfeld more intuitive, but both sought tighter civilian control of the military and ordered reappraisals of U.S. strategy. Both brought with them contingents of civilian aides who shared their determination to shake things up and a propensity to clash with the Joint Chiefs. And both became embroiled in unpopular wars.
Where they differed significantly was in how they ultimately viewed their own tenures. Despite his public cheerleading for the Vietnam War, McNamara privately became dubious about its wisdom and effectiveness while still in office. In later years, he increasingly recognized that he had failed as defense secretary because of mistakes he and others had made in Vietnam.
By contrast, Rumsfeld did not leave office doubting his handling of the Iraq War. He has acknowledged no major missteps or shown any remorse on the subject to date. To the contrary, he contends that the strategy he pursued in Iraq from 2003 through 2006 succeeded in large part—inflicting substantial enemy losses, developing capable Iraqi forces, and establishing a new Iraqi government. The shift in strategy and surge in U.S. forces after he left that is credited with pulling Iraq back from the brink of total disaster would not have worked had it been tried earlier, Rumsfeld has argued, because conditions were not right. The problem with this thinking is that it overestimates what the old strategy accomplished and underestimates what a better-run counterinsurgency program could have achieved.
Asked in our final interview whether he harbored any regrets, Rumsfeld was dismissive. “Oh, that’s the favorite press question: What was your biggest mistake?” he remarked. Nor was he interested in being drawn out on the question of how, having come into office so well prepared for the job, he had run into so much difficulty. “I wouldn’t be in a position to tell you how to explain it,” he said. “You’ll have to divine it.”
Part of the answer lies in the circumstances. He and the rest of the Bush administration were confronted with extraordinary challenges for which, as Rumsfeld often said, no guidebook or blueprint existed. (Although, in the case of counterinsurgency warfare, there was a wealth of established doctrine that, while out of use for decades, was readily available on the Army’s shelves to be dusted off.) And Rumsfeld was hardly alone in his misjudgments. It is both incorrect and unfair to heap singular blame on him for the disaster that Iraq became. Many wrong shots were called by Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority. Sanchez proved inadequate to his assignment. And Casey and Abizaid readily concurred with the notion of trying to fight in Iraq with as few U.S. forces as possible. The generals tended to reinforce Rumsfeld’s thinking, not challenge it.
“The military was a full-blown partner in this,” observed Michael Vickers, a former CIA officer and Special Forces member who played a key role in arming the Afghan resistance to the Soviets in the 1980s and who joined the Bush administration in its last year and a half as an assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations. “The notion that Rumsfeld was managing the war and that the generals were just cowed and going along is just wrong.”
Other top administration officials were complicit as well. Bush was exceedingly deferential toward Rumsfeld and failed to question the Iraq strategy sufficiently until late 2006. Cheney consistently lobbied to keep his old friend in power and, in the case of detainee policy, led him down a path of dubious legality and damaging morality. And the rest of the U.S. government, as Rumsfeld frequently complained, was unable to muster the personnel and resources needed to supplement the Pentagon’s security measures with economic reconstruction and diplomatic assistance. The administration was trying to fight a twenty-first-century adversary using a dysfunctional twentieth-century interagency structure, one that lacked strong mechanisms to integrate the work of separate departments or a clear precedent for how to coordinate postwar operations of the magnitude required in Iraq. Critical decisions about such central matters as whether, after the invasion of Iraq, to establish an interim Iraqi government or a longer-term U.S. occupation authority were made without full discussion with all the principals.
But much of what befell Rumsfeld resulted from his own behavior. With him it was often hard to divorce style from substance. He is apt to be remembered as much for how he did things as for what he did. And here, too, he was an internal contradiction. Capable of genuine charm, kindness, and grace, he all too frequently came across as brusque and domineering, often alienating others and making enemies where he needed friends. His bullying manner and cutting humor made it difficult for him to draw loyalty from people and make others want to work for him. He kept many people around him and under him on edge.
In an interview in the spring of 2008, Cheney strongly defended Rumsfeld’s rough approach. “I liked his style, the way he dug in and asserted civilian control at the Department of Defense,” the vice president explained. “It’s easy to go over there and just sort of sit on top and float on top of the organization. A lot of people keep you happy in the secretary’s office. Don was a bulldog for work and for digging into the organization in major ways and making his presence felt.”
Addressing arguments that Rumsfeld’s bull-in-a-china-shop manner was needlessly harsh, Cheney maintained that such tough tactics were necessary to shake up a bureaucracy as hidebound as the Pentagon’s. “He broke china, which I think is important to do as secretary,” Cheney said. “If you’re not doing that, especially under the circumstances, then I don’t think you’re doing your job.”
But others, even some who remain largely sympathetic to Rumsfeld, acknowledge that the former secretary too often undercut himself. “He wielded a courageous and skeptical intellect,” Feith wrote of Rumsfeld. “He challenged preconceptions and assumptions—including his own—and drove colleagues as well as subordinates to take a long view and to evaluate honestly whether their work was actually producing results. His ideas and ambitions for the Defense Department and the United States were high-minded, his contributions extensive and influential. But his style of leadership did not always serve his own purposes: He bruised people and made personal enemies, who were eager to strike back at him and try to discredit his work.”
Stuart Rochester, a senior Pentagon historian, recalled receiving several research requests from Rumsfeld asking whether, as secretary, he had the authority to take a particular action—to merge some Joint Staff functions with those in the secretary’s office, for instance, or to combine the operations centers of each of the military services into a single center. “He had no patience for moving in a consensual way,” Rochester said. “He felt he needed to act in a decisive way. He’d always be asking, ‘Can I do this without having to consult with the service chiefs and with Congress?’ A lot of what Rumsfeld was trying to achieve made sense, a lot of his instincts were right, but the problem was the way he went about things. In the end he had to settle for less because he’d alienated so many.”
Even Pace, the even-tempered, ramrod-straight Marine general who as chairman sought to appear in lockstep with Rumsfeld, couldn’t avoid a blunt judgment months after leaving office when asked what he thought of his former boss. “I’m not an apologist for Secretary Rumsfeld. He’s a son of a bitch. And I told him that,” Pace remarked before an audience at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, in May 2008. In a later interview, Pace said he had not meant to sound derogatory. “He’s just a very demanding leader,” Pace explained, adding that Rumsfeld “demands more of himself than of anybody else.”
For all his grousing that other government agencies didn’t do enough in Iraq and in the larger war on terrorism, Rumsfeld did not make it easy to work with his Pentagon. His own lack of collegiality and his strained relations with other cabinet members inhibited interagency cooperation. “Unfortunately, he was not collaborative with the rest of the government,” Abizaid said. “He closely guarded so many of his prerogatives as secretary. That, I think, contributed to a sense that the Pentagon itself wasn’t approachable.”
Rumsfeld could be at his most obstinate when he wasn’t getting his way. “When he grew frustrated with how something was going, he was inclined to check out or throw up some kind of roadblock,” Card said. “He might decide not to attend a meeting, or he would come and say he hadn’t seen the documents being presented. It was as if he was both spurning involvement and demanding attention at the same time. Sometimes, if he didn’t agree with something, he would say, ‘It’s not our job.’ Other times he would say, ‘If you’re telling me it’s my job, then this is how we’re going to do it, but I only have so many resources so we’re going to have to take resources away from here to do it. So what are your priorities?’”
Even the commanders with whom Rumsfeld got along best found him trying. “He’s a very complicated guy, and my feelings are mixed,” Abizaid remarked months after retiring. “He’d drive me nuts at times, and there were days I wanted to kill either him or myself. There were probably ten times I wrote out a letter of resignation, although I never sent it. On the other hand, I have great respect for Rumsfeld’s courage and his tenacity.”
Rumsfeld has tended, even in retrospect, to write off much of the criticism of his style as a function of the mission he was asked to do. “Change is hard” has remained a frequent refrain of his. Chosen to lead the Defense Department as the agent of change, Rumsfeld said he expected that he would come under attack. “People in uniform resisted, and people in civilian clothes resisted; the Congress resisted,” he recounted in an interview. “They don’t call it the Iron Triangle for nothing, between the permanent bureaucracy and the defense contractors and the Congress. They’re permanent, and the people coming in are temporary. And if you try to change that interaction in the Iron Triangle, you’re going to catch some shrapnel.”
In fact, Rumsfeld has continued to relish his image as a no-nonsense reformer. Coming across a description of himself as someone who dragged the Defense Department into the twenty-first century “with no bedside manner,” Rumsfeld said he liked the phrase, joking that it would make a good title for a book.
Convinced that many of his critics didn’t really know him, he believes he got along well with those with whom he spent the most time. “The people who I worked with for the most part, I think, were fairly comfortable working with me,” he said. “It’s the people three layers down who would get the ripple effect.”
Told that even some senior officers who dealt closely with him found him difficult, Rumsfeld said it was the work itself that was difficult, and he defended his own manner as nothing the officers shouldn’t have been able to tolerate. “The idea that guys with three and four stars on their shoulders can’t take tough questions—well, then, they shouldn’t have three or four stars on their shoulders.”
Rumsfeld has ascribed much of the negative perception of him and the Bush administration to distorted media coverage. Complaints about what he views as inaccurate, biased reporting came up frequently in the series of interviews conducted for this book, and he returned to the issue again in our final meeting in November 2008.
“The intellectual dishonesty on the part of the press is serious,” he asserted. He groused about “a strong incentive to be negative and dramatic” that had infused much of the coverage. “It’s a formula that works. It gets Pulitzers; it gets promotions; it gets name identification on the front page above the fold.”
Part of the formula, Rumsfeld added, involved pillorying him along with Bush and Cheney but sparing Powell and Rice. As an example, he noted accusations that Bush and Cheney had lied about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction in making the case for the invasion of Iraq. “They never say Colin Powell lied,” Rumsfeld asserted. “They don’t say Condi lied.”
Rumsfeld attributed many of the distortions to self-serving accounts provided by State Department and NSC officials. He said that although other top administration officials knew such leaking was going on, they did nothing about it. Even out of office, Rumsfeld has sought to nudge his erstwhile colleagues to correct the record. He wrote Powell, for instance, objecting to statements by Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army colonel who served as Powell’s chief of staff, in which Wilkerson alleged that senior defense officials had quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China—an act that the Communist regime has repeatedly warned would provoke a military strike.
Rumsfeld’s decision while in office not to tell his side of things and to ban his staff from providing insider accounts was motivated, he said, out of a sense of loyalty to the president. He wanted to be able to look Bush in the eye and assert that neither he nor any of his aides were behind any of the stories disclosing the administration’s secret discussions. But he has had second thoughts about having kept as mum as he did.
Some associates who served with Rumsfeld during both his stints as defense secretary think he changed over the years. “I refer to him as Don One and Don Two,” said James Roche, who was a Navy officer doing strategic planning under the first Don and secretary of the Army under the second. “Don One was a leader, Don Two was a bureaucrat. Don Two was worried about what the White House was doing, what Condi was doing, what Colin was doing.”
Ken Adelman, who greatly admired the earlier Rumsfeld but grew increasingly disillusioned with him during the Bush years, wonders whether Rumsfeld fundamentally changed or just appeared different to him. “Maybe he was better before, or maybe I was just wrong about him,” Adelman said. “Maybe it’s the challenges that were different later. I don’t know.”
The second time around, Rumsfeld was clearly more driven than he had been in the mid-1970s. He spoke at his farewell ceremony of having felt “an enormous sense of urgency,” particularly in the wake of the September 11 attacks, to identify U.S. vulnerabilities and to fortify the military against them. “Get your eyes off your shoelaces!” he often instructed his staff, advising them to be alert to problems, to remain vigilant, and to think longer term. “Stir the pot” was another of his favorite sayings, reflecting his incessant drive for improvement.
But just what the stirring was supposed to produce wasn’t always clear. The recipe was a constant work in progress, and the cooking was compounded by a tendency on Rumsfeld’s part to prolong it, to delay decisions, or to cede responsibility to others. At times he appeared less the head cook than the health inspector, closely examining the ingredients and challenging the kitchen’s methods.
Rumsfeld was at his best—and seemingly most comfortable—when he was questioning things. Decisions came harder. Although he projected an aura of the man-in-command, he frequently led not by direct orders but by the power of strong suggestion. In the planning for the invasion of Iraq, for instance, he didn’t tell Franks to do it this way or that; he kept saying, “Well, are you sure you want to do it this way? What about this option or that option?”
The same could be said of his approach to decisions on major new weapons systems. Apart from the Crusader system, which he was nudged by Wolfowitz and others into canceling, and Comanche, which the Army itself offered up for elimination, Rumsfeld remained reluctant to cancel any big program.
“On decisions he was very wary,” said Paul Gebhard, who served as a special assistant in Rumsfeld’s first months and continued to consult for several years afterward. “He didn’t want people to box him in. He didn’t want the fingerprints. He would roll the stuff around forever.”
NSC officials also found him frustratingly evasive on a number of issues, tossing out options but resisting being pinned down. “I think he’s a man who keeps everybody bouncing around wondering what to do, and then kind of acquiesces to a situation when people have tried to figure out what he wants,” remarked John Hamre, a deputy secretary of defense under Clinton. “The service chiefs tell you that when they went to him with a presentation to try to get an answer, they’d never get one. They’d ask themselves, What does he want? Finally, they’d try to package something as close as they could to what they thought he wanted, and he’d look at it and say, ‘Well if that’s what you want, okay.’ That was his basic MO.”
So much of Rumsfeld’s own energy as defense secretary was taken up dealing with tiny details—wordsmithing briefing charts, examining the smallest deployment orders, nitpicking the schedules of commanders, snowflaking about dining table settings. In his own efforts to probe, he would often get down to a level of minutiae that struck some officials as inappropriate for a defense secretary.
“I look at him as a tragic hero, like a Forrestal or McNamara, who tried to do the right thing but got overwhelmed by it all,” said a former Pentagon official who had worked closely with Rumsfeld for a time.
Most tragic of all was the human loss that occurred on Rumsfeld’s watch. The tally of U.S. troops who had died in the Iraq War had reached 2,939 on the day of his farewell ceremony, and the number of wounded in action had exceeded twenty-two thousand. Countless others were mentally and emotionally traumatized from the nightmarish conflict. Aside from the toll in human lives, billions of dollars had been spent on the war. And the U.S. military’s honor had been tarnished by the Abu Ghraib revelations and other scandals involving the treatment of detainees in the custody of American troops. These are the deepest scars of Rumsfeld’s time as secretary.
Rumsfeld is in many respects an honorable man, deeply patriotic, a good friend to many, and unfailingly loyal to those he has served and to a number who have served him. He is smart, cunning, and capable of great geniality, all highly desirable qualities in a leader with such power.
The challenges he faced were extraordinary—waging a counterinsurgency campaign long after the U.S. military had forgotten the lessons of the last one it fought, attempting to transform a Pentagon bureaucracy notoriously resistant to change, coping with a U.S. government deficient in civilian capacity to assist in postwar stabilization and reconstruction.
But in the end, Rumsfeld’s biggest failings were personal—the result of the man himself, not simply of the circumstances he confronted. While he was unwilling to profess regrets to me, it is unlikely that he is without any. Nor do I expect him simply to fade away. That has never been his style. Withdrawal is not a Rumsfeld rule.
