By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld
by Bradley Graham
PublicAffairs, £16.99
Thomas E Ricks’ account of the American military adventure in Iraq, Fiasco, contained a brief section entitled “Rumsfeld vs Reality”. As if the heading hadn’t said it all, the following four pages identified the SecDef’s many shortcomings as the occupation floundered and the insurgency gathered momentum: “cognitive dissonance”, “self-confident stubbornness” and “towering hubris”. Now Bradley Graham, the former Pentagon correspondent of the Washington Post, has devoted some 700 pages to the subject. Will such a detailed enquiry challenge our preconceptions?
One wonders, given Donald Rumsfeld’s famous impatience with the prolix and recherché, which of these critical accounts he would appreciate most. It’s as if Graham, in studying an undoubtedly potent figure whose vision was nevertheless marred by a tendency to dismiss all conflicting views peremptorily, felt obliged to weigh every conceivable mitigating fact with the utmost care. That is not to say that By His Own Rules wastes words. Rumsfeld has been one of America’s political prime movers. The fascinating contradictions of this complex and influential personality demand a serious enquiry, and that is what we have here.
Graham interviewed Rumsfeld on a number of occasions during and after his time in office. This book also draws upon archived material and further interviews with scores of other people who knew Rumsfeld and Graham obtained access to a number of previously unpublicized Pentagon documents. The result is an extraordinarily thorough account of Donald Rumsfeld’s rise and fall.
Graham wins our affection for the “rascal” schoolboy, the towel-snapping Princeton University wrestling star who, according to sports writer Richard Olesen, “relied less on technical skill than on sheer bulldog grit”. Robert Ellsworth, who served alongside Rumsfeld in Congress and later in the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, cited Republican Party folklore when he said: “Donald Rumsfeld does not lose.”
Throughout his career, Rumsfeld’s combative personal style won him friends as well as enemies. But Graham doesn’t present us with the familiar caricature and
paints instead a complex portrait, taking
in Rumsfeld’s many facets. The journey
is long but the style is compelling.
Anyone really interested in Rumsfeld will fly through the text and at the same time find plenty of revealing insight and new information. The author rejects widespread suspicion that Rumsfeld engineered the removal of his arch rival Henry Kissinger from the West Wing during Gerald Ford’s tenure, and sent George Bush to the CIA to keep him out of the running for vice president. Graham suggests instead that Rumsfeld “was less involved in pulling the political strings than rumored”.
The book surveys Rumsfeld’s career culminating in his tenure as Secretary of Defense in the George W Bush administration. This is very much a study of the man himself over and above the political and personal allegiances that surrounded him. When Rumsfeld needed a right hand man at Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity, he found and hired a 28-year-old Capitol Hill staff aide and graduate student named Richard Cheney. Yet Graham doesn’t delve deeply into the likely influence of the pair’s longstanding friendship on the prosecution of the war in Iraq. Perhaps Rumsfeld’s very nature invites that he be assessed as a figure in isolation.
There were plenty of dissenting voices before the war in Iraq. Within months of the invasion in March 2003, the Cassandras had been proven right, with more troops and a new overall strategy urgently needed to secure the country. When George W Bush was re-elected in 2004, there were fresh calls from all sides for a change at the Pentagon. But Rumsfeld remained in office for two more years. By the time of his farewell ceremony in December 2006, nearly 3,000 US troops had died in Iraq and more than 22,000 had been wounded, while “countless others were mentally and emotionally traumatized from the nightmarish conflict.” Rumsfeld remains overshadowed by his approval for harsh interrogation techniques for prisoners at Guantánamo Bay detention facility.
The only other Pentagon chief with a similarly controversial term in office is Robert S McNamara, and the comparison is irresistible. Both fought for tighter civilian control of the military and both presided over costly and unpopular wars. The difference, says Graham, is that where McNamara came to recognize “that he had failed as Defense Secretary because of mistakes he and others had made in Vietnam” Rumsfeld “has acknowledged no major missteps.”
For all the diligent accounts of Rumsfeld’s high ethics and deep commitment to public service, for all the evident affection and admiration for his qualities and achievements, for all the introduction of new evidence in Rumsfeld’s defence, the final verdict remains damning. Graham writes that with Rumsfeld “it was often hard to divorce style from substance” and that the “biggest failings were the result of the man himself, not simply of the circumstances he confronted.”
In listing those failings, Graham describes Rumsfeld as “neglectful” and guilty of “grave misjudgment”. And he identifies a “lack of collegiality” that “inhibited interagency co-operation”. Graham also holds that Rumsfeld’s criticism of intelligence agencies for relying too heavily on the evidence – instead of giving due consideration to the unknown unknowns? – precipitated a leap to conjecture and the incorrect surmise that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Graham observes that Rumsfeld became the “personification of the arrogance and misjudgments of the Bush administration.”
Rumsfeld faced his greatest challenges late in life. By this time a perfectly adequate mind seemed to have ossified into a bundle of preconceptions while the zeal with which he floored opponents remained as sharp as ever. The conclusions of Bradley Graham’s excellent book won’t challenge what many of us thought we already knew about Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon; that which Thomas E Ricks distilled into three words.
Andy Bunday
