MichaelMoore.com

Donald Rumsfeld in Repose

Time

For a few months after his departure as Secretary of Defense, Donald 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.

Rumsfeld's roots were in Chicago, where he and his wife 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.

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.'"

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.

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% — Rumsfeld still found that when he dined out at a restaurant or walked along a street, people approached him eager to shake his hand.

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. "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.

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. "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."

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 for all his complexities — or perhaps because of them — Rumsfeld has an abiding interest in simple rules. During the second half of his life, he composed lists of them to live by and distributed them freely to others. The homespun compendium of lessons for coping in the federal bureaucracy and corporate world drew largely on quips, aphorisms, and adages that Rumsfeld had read or heard elsewhere. But he fused them into an approach to issues and people that was distinctly his own, confident of his way even as some close to him worried, when he struggled as defense secretary, that he was veering badly off course. By the end of 2006, even his rules couldn't save him any longer.

The above is excerpted from Graham's book By His Own Rules: The Story of Donald Rumsfeld.