82 The Economist July 10th 2021
Obituary Donald Rumsfeld
A
shesatinthePentagononSeptember11th2001, Donald
Rumsfeld felt the table tremble. It had once been used by Gen
eral William Tecumseh Sherman; no trembler he. At the same mo
ment, the whole building shook. Running out across the grass, he
saw a huge blackened gash in the west side, figures scrambling out
of it, dense smoke and flames. He ran towards the fire to help. His
staff tried to hustle him to safety, but he wouldn’t have it. The ter
rorists were not going to win on his watch. The Pentagon, he de
clared on tv, would be back in business in the morning.
This was the closest he had come to terror since, in Lebanon as
Ronald Reagan’s envoy in 1984, he had been blown across a shack
by a rocket hitting an suv outside. That was a near one. But ene
mies of some form or other lurked on every side. Some, like the So
viet Union, were fundamental and existential. Others, like the Re
publican old bulls he wrangled with over his four terms in Con
gress, were just obstructive. At the Pentagon, as defence secretary
under Gerald Ford in 197577 and George W. Bush in 200106, it was
jackass bureaucrats who maddened him, as well as the hide
bound, turfobsessed military top brass. Then there was the press,
eager to splash the slightest misstep all over the Washington Post.
He didn’t believe in a defensive crouch. He had seen enough of
that in the Nixon White House, where he stripped down the Office
of Economic Opportunity: enemies lists, walls of lies and ever
smaller protective circles huddled round the president. Skilfully,
he got away (to Brussels, as ambassador to nato) before Watergate
blew up. So, no crouch. Instead he faced opponents with his eyes
narrowed and his smile darting dangerously, prepared to strike.
His method with sluggish staff was a blitz of memos, on yellow
paper (“yellow perils”) or white (“snowflakes”), carrying stray
thoughts and reprimands he had barked into his Dictaphone. They
were treated, too—as were colleagues in the firms, G.D. Searle and
Gilead Sciences, where he later made fortunes—to “Rumsfeld’s
Rules”, aphorisms collected since boyhood. A favourite came from
Al Capone, another tough talker from Chicago: “You’ll get more
with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.”
Political opponents he could beat, too. He wore most down
gradually. In Congress, as a reformist spirit, he led a group called
“Rumsfeld’s Raiders”, who delayed bills they disliked with repeat
ed quorum calls. In his first turn as secretary of defence, deep in
the cold war, he steadily talked up the Soviet threat to get a bigger
budget for new tanks,B-1 bombers and missile systems to range
against it. The best defence was deterrence. Detente, which in
volved curbing America’s cruise missiles, gave an impression of
weakness. So he neatly pulled the rug from under Henry Kissinger,
then secretary of state, at the salt IItalks, and scuppered them.
They needed to beat the Soviets, not make nice.
September 11th 2001 brought another enemy to the fore. If the
contest with the Soviet Union had been like his wrestling bouts at
Princeton, entwined hulks grappling slowly, the new threat from
violent Islamism was more like the avid games of squash he
played with staff, hardballs bouncing anywhere. But he could deal
with it. His Doctrine, already drawn up in his second tour at the
Pentagon, replaced the lumbering old army divisions with small,
mobile combat brigades. A counterstrike, therefore, could be al
most immediate. On October 7th America invaded Afghanistan,
and could do more. An aide had caught his thought, a mere five
hours after the attacks: “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough
[to] hit SH@ same time...Go massive. Sweep it all up.” In 2003,
claiming that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,
America invaded Iraq. Allies and the unobjected, but he waved
them off: this was “anticipatory selfdefence”. Like his childhood
hero, the Lone Ranger, he would take the fight to the enemy. If you
cocked your fist, you’d better be ready to throw it.
The two wars tested his Doctrine fully. His new flexible bri
gades became the norm in both Iraq and Afghanistan, reinforced
by halfhidden special forces. Too many men would make too ma
ny targets. Helped in Afghanistan by the local Northern Alliance
and in Iraq by the melting of Saddam’s army, they made quick pro
gress. There was no longterm plan. That was unnecessary, since
they would destroy the terrorist havens, deter violent Islamists
everywhere, and come home. They were not in the business of na
tionbuilding. These poor, broken societies were not America’s to
fix. He had not reckoned on the Islamist “deadenders” regrouping
so quickly, nor on the growing need to protect civilians; nor on the
fact that, with such lean forces, that job was too big. Tricky.
Now, as well as violent extremists, he faced his old enemy the
press. Against their kneejerk opposition he posed complexity and
conundrums. Hadn’t America gone into Iraq on a false premise,
weapons that were not there? “Absence of evidence is not evidence
of absence.” Why had they seemed blind to conditions on the
ground? “There are known knowns...known unknowns...[and]
unknown unknowns”, he said defiantly: complete shocks, as 9/11
had been. Another unknown unknown was the abuse and sexual
degradation of detainees in the prison at Abu Ghraib outside Bagh
dad. He offered to resign over that and, for once, apologised. But
freedom was untidy and, as he yelled at the press, “Stuff happens.”
Staying in both Iraq and Afghanistan was hard. Quitting,
though, was worse. In 1975, as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, he had
watched the last American marines being winched from the em
bassy roof in Saigon. That image hurt, and emboldened his coun
try’s enemies. Many Americans might want to consider graceful
exits from the agonies of combat, but the enemy thought differ
ently. They were just waiting, regrouping. That conundrum, stay
or go, was for others to solve. In either case, though, there were
positives in his ledger. In both Iraq and Afghanistan elected gov
ernments had replaced tyrannical regimes. Violent extremism, if
not eliminated, had been deterred. No secretary of defence had ev
er again had to pick his way through mangled metal and bodies on
the Pentagon lawns. All that, in his book, added up to success. n
Stuff happens
Donald Henry Rumsfeld, secretary of defence in both the
Soviet and modern eras, died on June 29th, aged 88