Forever In His Debt

[Geee]

American Spectator:


Born in 1932, Donald Rumsfeld was too young to have been a member of that "Greatest Generation" who fought in America's "good" war (though he was the 10-year-old son of a father who, after Pearl Harbor, managed by sheer dint of will to nag an initially unwilling United States Navy into accepting him for duty). By the same token, he was too late for the "bad" wars, that is, Korea and Vietnam. What he did instead on being graduated from college was to join the Navy, learn to fly, become a naval flight instructor, and then head to Washington, where he learned some of the lesser arts of politics by working in the losing campaigns of two different congressmen.

And at the age of 29 he ran for Congress himself from his home district in Illinois and won. But, though he himself does not quite put it this way -- and despite the fact that with a group of fellow congressmen he would succeed, as it would turn out fatefully, in replacing the old minority leader with a congressman from Michigan named Gerald Ford -- he was, especially as a Republican, bound to find the rules of the House too confining for his best energies. Thus it was that when Richard Nixon was elected to the presidency and called him to join the administration (as, of all things for someone regarding himself as a mostly conservative Republican, the head of the Office of Economic Opportunity) he was ready to embark on his true career as a manager of men and events.

Thirty-two years later, having played a variety of important roles in the administrations of Nixon, Ford, and Reagan as well as having taken time out to serve as the chief executive officer of two corporations, he would not himself be on the ground in a war but rather given the responsibility, as George W. Bush's secretary of defense, for planning and directing two of them, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. And it is that experience, of course -- quite properly -- which occupies both the most engrossing, and inevitably the most significant, part of his book.
His first assignment as defense secretary, however (it would be his second round of duty in the job, having served briefly in the Pentagon during the Ford administration), was a no less daunting one than to reform and modernize (as well as to gain control and reshape the budget of) the American military. Anyone who merely casts a glance at the mass that is the Pentagon, no matter how ignorant he might be of the details of all the bureaucratic agreements and disagreements that seethe inside, can at least begin to imagine the uproar, personal as well as impersonal -- or as Rumsfeld himself might have put it, "known and unknown" -- that was bound to ensue. He was, of course, a manager, by that time a famously successful one, and it was said that the building itself began to tremble as he set loose an avalanche of the little white notes of inquiry and instruction that had come to be known as "Rumsfeld's snowflakes."