The Secretary We Had
    By Jacob Heilbrunn
    The New York Times

    Sunday 25 March 2007

    A Book review:
    RUMSFELD
    His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy.
    By Andrew Cockburn
    247 pp. Scribner. $25.

    After the 1988 presidential election, Donald Rumsfeld sent George H. W. Bush a congratulatory letter. In it, Rumsfeld, who had antagonized Bush during the Ford administration, wrote that he would "like to be your ambassador to Japan." It was quite a comedown for Rumsfeld, who had harbored presidential ambitions of his own. But a person on the Bush transition team responsible for handling such requests noticed that Rumsfeld's letter had already been reviewed, and that scrawled across it in capital letters was a fatal verdict: "No! This will never happen!! G. B."

    Rumsfeld, as Andrew Cockburn shows in his perceptive and engrossing biography, got his revenge over a decade later when president-elect George W. Bush invited him to his temporary headquarters in Washington's Madison Hotel. Bush knew that his father hated Rumsfeld, which served as a kind of recommendation, and Rumsfeld, who was well aware of the contentious relations between the two Bushes, played to the younger man's insecurity, reassuring him that he was eminently suited to be president. "In return," Cockburn writes, "Bush could give what Rumsfeld customarily exacted from close associates: loyalty and obedience."

    As Bush's defense secretary, Rumsfeld used his father-figure relationship with Bush to rule, rather than simply run, the Pentagon. His initial successes in Afghanistan and Iraq - and his old-fashioned colloquialisms - even turned him into an improbable media star, prompting the neoconservative writer Midge Decter to discern, in an admiring 2003 biography, "the return of the ideal of the Middle American family man." Since then, however, Rumsfeld has become an almost universal figure of derision and contempt. Last November, Bush ousted him from his Pentagon job.

    Cockburn argues that Rumsfeld's disastrous tenure cannot be fully understood without examining his earlier career. He demonstrates that Rumsfeld was an inveterate schemer, skilled at evading responsibility for his decisions. Though Cockburn sometimes places the most sinister construction possible on Rumsfeld's actions, his overall account is quite persuasive.

    Rumsfeld never changed much from his days as an Illinois congressman, Cockburn says. In 1962, for example, he denounced Paul Nitze, a Kennedy administration nominee for a Pentagon post and an ardent cold warrior, as "soft" on the Communists. He also complained that Kennedy's call for going to the moon recklessly ignored "the main thrust of the Soviet space aim, which is to ... exercise control over the surface of the earth" - a harbinger of his long obsession with a ballistic missile defense.

    Together with his loyal assistant Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld went on to work for Richard Nixon before becoming Gerald Ford's defense secretary. Drawing on the infighting skills he had honed under Nixon, he plotted to derail Henry Kissinger's policy of d tente with the Soviet Union, which the right saw as appeasement. Kissinger, himself no slouch at intrigue, soon found himself on the defensive as Rumsfeld, among other things, held private briefings for congressmen and leaked State Department documents to the press.

    Then came the wilderness years. After Ford lost his bid for re-election to Jimmy Carter in 1976, Rumsfeld joined the G. D. Searle pharmaceutical company as its president and chief executive. In a sign of his desire to beat Rumsfeld with any stick he can find, Cockburn bludgeons him for being cavalier about the health effects of aspartame, a Searle product that has proven perfectly safe. More persuasive are his accounts of Rumsfeld's quest to remain politically relevant by inflating threats to the United States. In July 1998, a Congressional commission on missile defense that he led issued a report foreshadowing the Iraq intelligence debacle: Rumsfeld hectored and dismissed witnesses "whose information he found unpalatable," insisting on worst-case scenarios.

    Cockburn is at his strongest in recounting the internal battles at Defense (though he maligns Rumsfeld by stating that on 9/11 he tried to "micromanage" the crash site at the Pentagon, when, in fact, his instinct to help the wounded was admirable). Cockburn says that Rumsfeld's view of his earnestly intellectual deputy Paul Wolfowitz was "fundamentally patronizing" and that he viewed himself as the grand strategic thinker. Cockburn reports that Rumsfeld remained silent as Bush slapped down Wolfowitz and his deputy Douglas J. Feith by instructing them that their pet Iraqi exile leader, Ahmad Chalabi, was not "my man." Four years later, Bush has yet to find his man. Meanwhile, the Army that Rumsfeld bragged he would transform into a lithe, high-technology force is scrambling for spare parts.

    Nevertheless, Bush only reluctantly dismissed Rumsfeld. And despite his current exile, Rumsfeld's mind-set lingers on. His final, calamitous bequest to Bush, after all, is his former prot g , Vice President Dick Cheney.

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    Jacob Heilbrunn is the author of a forthcoming book on neoconservatism.