Donald Rumsfeld: Andrew Cockburn on an American disaster

Donald Rumsfeld: Andrew Cockburn on an American disaster
Published: 21 May 2007
Independent UK

He's a Machiavellian warmonger whose actions will forever be associated with the catastrophe that is Iraq. But how did a popular congressman known as 'Boy-Boy' become a 'ruthless little bastard'? In an extract from his gripping new book, Andrew Cockburn reveals the unknown unknowns about Donald Rumsfeld

Just after 9.37am on the morning of 11 September 2001, Officer Aubrey Davis of the Pentagon police was standing outside Donald Rumsfeld's office on the third floor of the Pentagon's E Ring. Inside, Rumsfeld, though aware that the World Trade Centre had already been hit, was proceeding with his regularly scheduled CIA briefing. Davis, on the other hand, had concluded from watching the TV news that the country was under attack and the Pentagon might be a target. Assigned to the defence secretary's personal bodyguard, he had come on his own initiative, ready to move Rumsfeld to a better-protected location.

"There was an incredibly loud 'boom'," says Davis, raising his voice slightly on the last word. Fifteen or 20 seconds later, just as his radio crackled with a message, the door opened and Rumsfeld walked out, looking composed and wearing the jacket he normally discarded while in his office. "Sir," said Davis, quoting what he had heard on his radio, "we're getting a report that an airplane has hit the Mall."

"The Mall?" replied Rumsfeld calmly. Without further word, the secretary of defence turned on his heel and set off at a sharp pace toward the so-called Mall section of the Pentagon. Down the hall, someone ran out of a VIP dining room screaming, "They're bombing the building, they're bombing the building." Davis frantically waved for colleagues to catch up as the stocky, 5ft 8in defence secretary marched ahead of his lanky escort.

"Sir," responded Davis, holding his radio, "now we're hearing it's by the heliport." This meant the next side of the building further along from the Mall. Rumsfeld set off again without a word, ignoring Davis's protestations that they should turn back. "At the end of the Mall corridor, we dropped down a stairway to the second floor, and then a little further we dropped down to the first. It was dark and there was a lot of smoke. Then we saw daylight through a door that was hanging open." Groping through the darkness to the door, the group emerged outside. In front of them, just 30 yards away, roared a "wall of flame".

"There were the flames, and bits of metal all around," Davis remembers, as well as injured people. He noticed the white legs of a woman lying on the ground, then realised with a shock that she was African-American, horribly burned. "The secretary picked up one of the pieces of metal. I was telling him he shouldn't be interfering with a crime scene when he looked at some inscription on it and said, 'American Airlines'. Then someone shouted, 'Help, over here,' and we ran over and helped push an injured person on a gurney over to the road."

While the secretary of defence was pushing a gurney, Davis's radio was crackling with frantic pleas from his control room regarding Rumsfeld's whereabouts. "It was 'Dr Cambone [Rumsfeld's closest aide] is asking, Dr Cambone wants to find the secretary.' I kept saying, 'We've got him,' but the system was overloaded, everyone on the frequency was talking, everything jumbled, so I couldn't get through and they went on asking."

An emergency worker approached, saying that equipment and medical supplies were needed. "Tell this man what you need," said Rumsfeld, gesturing to the communications aide, apparently oblivious of the fact that there were no communications.

Once they had pushed the wounded man on the gurney over to the road, the bodyguard was finally able to lead his charge back inside the building. "I'd say we were gone 15 minutes, max," he told me in his account of what happened that morning. Given the time it took to make their way down the Pentagon corridors - each side of the enormous building is the length of three football fields - Rumsfeld was actually at the crash site for only a fraction of that period.

Yet those few minutes made Rumsfeld famous, changed him from a half-forgotten 20th-century political figure to America's 21st-century warlord. On a day when the president was intermittently visible, only Rumsfeld, along with New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, gave the country an image of decisive, courageous leadership. According to his spokesman, the 69-year-old defence secretary's "first instinct was to go out through the building to the crash site and help". Over time, the legend grew. One of the staffers in the office later assured me that Rumsfeld had "torn his shirt into strips" to make bandages for the wounded.

Rumsfeld was first and foremost a politician, though not always a successful one. The weeks before the attacks had been one of the unsuccessful phases, with rumours spreading in Washington that he would shortly be removed from his post. Only the day before he had lashed out at the Pentagon workforce, denouncing the assembled soldiers and civilians as "a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America". Now, his instinctive dash to the crash site inspired loyalty and support among those he had derided.

THE EARLY YEARS

Nearly everybody liked the Rumsfelds, the former high school sweethearts from Chicago who lived in a tiny house in Georgetown with three young children and a dog named Otto and threw spaghetti parties in their backyard. "They were so much fun," remembers one longtime friend and former neighbour. "They never had any money, but they were great to have around." Columnist Joe Kraft affectionately nicknamed the young Republican congressman "Boy-Boy."

Kraft was a liberal, a former Kennedy speechwriter who ultimately landed on Richard Nixon's enemies list. But Rumsfeld, at least in those days, never had trouble making friends across party lines. This was partly due to the effect of his good-natured wife, Joyce, who commanded widespread affection and loyalty. Ever since his arrival in 1962 as a 30-year-old congressman from an affluent Chicago district, he had cultivated friendships across party lines and with journalists.

At the carefree Georgetown gatherings, when the popular young host was not demonstrating his ability to perform backflips with his pipe in his mouth, he liked to quote a profile published during his first congressional campaign that described Rumsfeld as "distinguished by his total lack of social, financial and political standing in the district". He loved that line so much he would still be quoting it in 2003, but it was far from the truth. In his first congressional campaign, no less than 14 chief executives of major national corporations, as well as powerful lawyers and academics, endorsed him.

This potent support derived from the fact that Rumsfeld grew up in Winnetka, one of the wealthier suburbs on Chicago's North Shore, "where all the CEOs lived," according to one former resident. George Rumsfeld, his father, a real estate salesman, managed the local office of a realtor firm. His mother, Jeanette, worked as a substitute teacher. The Rumsfelds "were not exactly in the same club" as their well-heeled neighbours, recalls William Cohea, former pastor of the Winnetka Presbyterian Church, "but they were well known. His uncle was a professor at Northwestern University." New Trier high school, which Rumsfeld attended, was famous for its excellence and therefore attracted the sons and daughters of the local elite. By the time he began running for Congress as a 29-year-old, the young man who had attended Princeton on scholarship, which he followed with three years in the navy, had forged relationships that would still be serving him half a century later.

"When I met him for the first time, he was 18," says Cohea, "and all he talked about was going into politics." Following his military service, Rumsfeld started on the bottom of the political ladder, working as a congressional staffer. But after managing a losing campaign for one of his bosses, he returned to Chicago to work in an investment bank. It was not long before opportunity knocked.

Early in 1962, Marguerite Stitt Church, his local congresswoman, announced her retirement. The 13th Illinois district, which included much of the North Shore, was one of the most solidly Republican in the nation, so the crucial race was the Republican primary. Rumsfeld filed for the primary - one of several aspirants.

Before commencing his campaign, the ambitious young politico had one very important personal decision to make. What, actually, were his political views? According to local Republican sources, Rumsfeld sought outside help in settling the issue. Approaching the chairman of the Chicago Republican Party, Francis Connell, he asked whether he should run as a conservative or as a moderate. For the young Rumsfeld, ideology was a matter of tactics. In any event, Connell seems to have advocated a conservative approach, advice that would have momentous effects far into the future.

State representative Marion Burks was the initial favourite, and was expected to receive the popular Mrs Church's endorsement. But Rumsfeld's chances suddenly improved when the Chicago Sun-Times, which had already endorsed Rumsfeld, headlined a story that money in an insurance company of which Burks was chairman had gone missing. The ambitious 29-year-old (he turned 30 in July 1962) had recruited an equally youthful team of helpers, including an MBA student from the University of Chicago named Jeb Stuart Magruder, later jailed in the Watergate scandal for his role in the Nixon administration's criminal dirty tricks operation. "I already had experience from the 1960 Nixon campaign in Kansas City, so it was natural for me to get involved," Magruder, now a minister of the Presbyterian Church, told me in 2006.

Rumsfeld himself affected a statesmanlike attitude during the campaign, never mentioning the allegations against Burks, while Magruder and other Rumsfeld operatives reportedly arranged for someone to raise the issue at every one of Burks's meetings, disregarding his repeated protests of innocence. "I did what I did best," the 72-year-old Magruder replied when I asked him about his role. "I don't remember much about Burks." In his 1974 memoir, An American Life, a younger Magruder recalled, "We did everything we could to keep the [Burks] issue alive. Don never mentioned it in public, but whenever Burks spoke we would send our people to pepper him with questions about the scandal." The allegations were a total smear; Burks retired as a respected circuit court judge. But meanwhile Rumsfeld had won the primary.

His margin was huge, more than two to one, a spectacular victory for a political neophyte, but in one sense it proved a poisoned chalice. "That was the one and only election contest Rumsfeld ever had to face," a veteran of Illinois politics pointed out to me. "In that district, once he was in, he could keep on getting re-elected till the end of time, barring the proverbial discovery of a dead girl or live boy in his bed. But he thought he knew everything about politics after that one race, and had nothing more to learn."

TAKING CHARGE

The management team assembled by Rumsfeld at the dawn of his administrative career was to show remarkable longevity. A third of a century later many of them were still by his side, either directly in his employ or close at hand to proffer advice. Kenneth Adelman, for example, was an accomplished amateur Shakespeare scholar and ardent supporter of Israel who later carved out a niche as an authority on defence matters. Adelman was joined by his wife, Carol, who, decades later, would find herself recommending personnel choices for Rumsfeld's Pentagon when he took over in 2001. Frank Carlucci was a diminutive lawyer who later reaped a multimillion-dollar fortune as a defence contractor as well as serving in a variety of high-level national security posts.

Most fateful of all was the addition of a young and so far undistinguished man from Casper, Wyoming, Richard Cheney. Arriving in Washington in 1968, Cheney had found service as the political equivalent of a field hand in the office of a Republican congressman before landing in the office of the newly appointed head of the poverty programme. Rumsfeld had actually rejected Cheney when the self-effacing youngster had earlier applied for a job in Rumsfeld's congressional office, but there now began a relationship that would endure for decades to come, with fateful consequences for the country and the world.

Observers of this relationship in its early years were in no doubt as to its internal dynamic: Rumsfeld ruled; Cheney served. As Jerry Ford's sharp-tongued amanuensis, Robert Hartmann, observed a few years later, Cheney's "adult life had been devoted to the study of political science and the service of Donald Rumsfeld". A serious student of political power, he "derived both his employment and his enjoyment from it. Whenever his private ideology was exposed, he appeared somewhat to the right of Ford, Rumsfeld, or, for that matter, Genghis Khan." Hartmann, a former newspaperman, summed up Cheney as a "presentable young man who could easily be lost in a gaggle of Jaycee executives. His most distinguishing features were snake-cold eyes, like a Cheyenne gambler's."

To the extent that the Rumsfelds' social circle took note of the dour young assistant and his buxom spouse, a former drum majorette with literary pretensions named Lynne, it was to remark on Cheney's subservient attitude to his ebullient boss. "Cheney was so much Don's faithful assistant, with Don so clearly the mentor, I can't believe that relationship ever changed," insists one friend who remained close enough to be invited to all of Rumsfeld's formal swearing-in ceremonies.

But the relationship did change. Eventually, the student of political science calculated, like the gambler to which he was compared, that he had learned enough to play his own hand. It was a turning point that, as we shall see, came as a shock to the man who had always considered himself the senior partner, but the relationship eventually re-established itself on a different course. Even so, asked about Cheney in a 2006 interview, Rumsfeld struck a slightly patronising note: "I used to think of him as a promising young man, when I hired him... It was so many years ago, 1969. I hired him as my - one of my special assistants... He's a very talented fellow."

In his diary for 21 May 1970, Nixon's chief of staff, HR Haldeman, recorded how he and Rumsfeld had been summoned by Nixon to discuss how to handle the problem of disloyalty in the cabinet and among the staff. The president was in favour of "cracking down hard", but Rumsfeld "made point you have to establish record of trying to work things out before you fire someone". Nixon liked this kind of thinking, and, as Haldeman noted, "Wants Don Rumsfeld brought more into the inner councils."

It seems Rumsfeld fit right in. "At least Rum-my is tough enough," President Nixon remarked in March 1971. "He's a ruthless little bastard. You can be sure of that."

THE GEORGE HW BUSH YEARS

With George W Bush occupying the White House, the precise nature of the relationship between Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney has become a question of global fascination. There has been little dispute that these two men have operated as a partnership in leading the country into unknown and dangerous territory. Few people have known that this fateful relationship has been far more fractious than the world at large has understood.

While Rumsfeld had abandoned Washington for business in 1977, though dreaming that he would one day return, Cheney had stayed in politics. In 1978 he managed to get elected to Congress from Wyoming and had spent the following years crafting a reputation as a forceful and serious-minded right-winger without destroying his credibility among moderates. Slowly but nonetheless surely, he was making his way up the ladder of the congressional Republican Party. As the senior House Republican on the congressional Iran-contra investigation, he performed valiant service in fending off overly inquisitive Democrats.

By the time Cheney left Congress, his peers had elected him minority whip, a leadership post that had remained beyond the reach of Rumsfeld. He even, reportedly, had some wistful conversations about making his own run for the '88 nomination.

Once upon a time, Cheney had been described as devoting his life "to the service of Donald Rumsfeld." When Rumsfeld requested Cheney's assistance for the presidential campaign, he was acting on the assumption that this was still the case.

In spite of the enormous shadows these men would together cast across the United States and the world, this crucial moment has never been revealed or discussed. One of the few Rumsfeld aides privy to the conversation describes what happened, relying on Rumsfeld's subsequent description for Cheney's end of the conversation.

According to this account, Rumsfeld said, "Dick, as you know, I am shortly announcing that I am a candidate for the nomination, and I am counting on your support." "Don," Cheney answered, "there are many things you can ask of me, but I've moved on politically since we worked together in the White House, so I'm afraid I cannot do what you ask."

"Everything you are, I've made you," replied Rumsfeld. "You owe everything to me."

"I've had to make my own way since '77," said Cheney. "I would do anything for you, but not this."

And that was that. Cheney went on to campaign hard for George HW Bush and was ultimately rewarded with the post of secretary of defence in that administration. Rumsfeld, according to a former colleague, was deeply shocked by his former subordinate's rejection.

Bereft of the support of his once faithful underling, Rumsfeld set off on his quest. The polls were not encouraging, and did not change. In January 1986, the Gallup poll put his support among Republicans at 1 per cent, far at the back of a crowded field led by Vice President Bush. By March he had edged up to 2 per cent, his peak, after which he sank back to 1 per cent again, and stayed there. There seemed little reason for his standing to increase. While George Bush's campaign style was once memorably described as "Janis Joplin in pinstripes," Rumsfeld on the stump was reported as being "as colourful as a CEO's wardrobe" and in danger of being mistaken for a Secret Service agent.

His themes, so far as they were recorded, seem to have been somewhat pedestrian. He told Republicans that "the biggest single reason" for the Iran- contra scandal, which involved the profits from secret weapons sales to Iran being used to aid the Nicaraguan contras, was that the president had changed national security advisers too often. He promised maximum support for missile defence in a Rumsfeld administration. He was "personally opposed" to abortion, but unsure about sponsoring a constitutional amendment to ban it.

Reality seems to have dawned suddenly. He quit the race on Thursday, 3 April 1987. His explanation - or excuse - for pulling out was poverty. When Secretary of State George Shultz asked him why he'd quit, Rumsfeld told him, "I concluded that I could either raise money or run for president. I couldn't do both."

Others have alternate interpretations of the debacle. Former congressman Ed Derwinski, a power broker in Illinois politics over several decades, suggested that Rumsfeld's size was a contributory factor. "It's a fact," he assured me, "that taller candidates tend to do better than the mini-sized ones. Rummy is relatively short so he looked small on stages alongside all those guys like Bush and Kemp and Dole. Rummy was the runt."

There is a more intriguing explanation of Rumsfeld's failure to make even the slightest impact in the race that he had dreamed about for so long. This version was described to me by one of the few professional electioneers consulted by Rumsfeld in 1986 and 1987.

"Over the years, I must have known thirty guys who wanted the White House," this vastly experienced political operative told me in 2006. "Of all of them, he was the most naive. Most candidates for the nomination really immerse themselves in the nuts and bolts of the process. By the time they get going they can tell you everything anyone needs to know about the Iowa caucus system or building up donor lists. Some of them can tell you more than anyone needs to know, but not Rumsfeld. He just hadn't bothered to study that stuff. I figure that he had decided he was so smart that he didn't need to know the details. It was just shocking."

Having withdrawn from the race, Rumsfeld was free to endorse one of the other candidates. Among Republicans, George Bush led by a wide margin in the polls. But Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the man who had secured the coveted slot as Ford's running mate in 1976, scored an upset by solidly defeating Bush in the Iowa caucuses. Rumsfeld promptly endorsed Dole as his choice for the nomination.

Bush went on to win the 1988 election and there was ill-informed speculation that Rumsfeld would be offered a senior cabinet post. Rumsfeld himself was ready to settle for something less. Writing to congratulate Bush on his victory, he stated that he would "like to be your Ambassador to Japan." An official in the Bush transition office processing such requests found that the letter had already been reviewed at a high level. Scrawled across it were the words "NO! THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN!! GB."

Rumsfeld was offered no position in the administration of George HW Bush.

RISING FROM THE ASHES

Rumsfeld's accelerating largesse to the Republicans coincided with the fading aura of his former nemesis in the party, George HW Bush. In his place, a new Bush was emerging, George W Bush, who turned from a lacklustre career in the oil business and the front man for a baseball franchise to win election as governor of Texas in 1994. The rise of the former president's younger son took many people by surprise, including perhaps some in his own family. As she watched young George's victory confirmed on election night, his mother, Barbara, turned to a friend sitting beside her, and remarked in amazement, "Can you believe this?"

Nine days later, at one of the glittering balls held around Washington to celebrate Bush's inauguration, an old friend from Chicago encountered a beaming Rumsfeld, now 68 years old. "Can you believe it?" the friend remembers him exclaiming excitedly. "I've got another chance!"

Rumsfeld: a life

* 1932: Born in Chicago on 9 July, he later wins a naval and academic scholarship to Princeton University. Joins the navy after graduation.

* 1962: Elected to the House of Representatives after serving as an administrative assistant in Congress, and a two-year stint as an investment banker.

* 1969: Resigns from Congress to join President Nixon's cabinet.

* 1973 Leaves Washington to serve as ambassador to Nato in Brussels. Called back to serve President Ford as Chief of Staff until 1975 and Secretary of Defense until 1977.

* 1977: Begins a lucrative business career, including an eight-year stint as boss of pharmaceutical firm GD Searle & Company. Pockets an estimated £6m following a 1985 buy-out by Monsanto.

* 1983: Continuing to influence successive administrations from the sidelines, he jets off to Iraq to meet President Saddam Hussein as special adviser to President Reagan.

* 1998: Co-signs a letter calling for President Bill Clinton to implement "regime change" in Iraq.

* 2001: Appointed Secretary of Defense by President George W Bush. Offends defense top brass by proposing a lighter, more mobile US military. 11 September triggers a "Long War" against global terrorism.

* 2006: His reputation tarnished by the situation in Iraq, Rumsfeld resigns, handing the Pentagon to former CIA director Robert Gates.

---Simon Usborne