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Commentary: What Has Gone Wrong With Donald Rumsfeld?

By Lee Cullum, KERA 90.1 commentator

Dallas, TX –

What has gone wrong with Donald Rumsfeld? When he joined George W. Bush's cabinet as Secretary of Defense, he brought a resume worthy of the first President Bush. After all, he had already served in that post under Gerald Ford, and even then his experience was extraordinary for one of his years.

Rumsfeld was elected to Congress from a suburb of Chicago when he was only 30, but he left his seat to head the Office of Economic Opportunity and then the Cost of Living Council for Richard Nixon. He also served as ambassador to NATO.

Then Nixon resigned during the Watergate scandal, yielding the Oval Office to Gerald Ford. In time the new leader shed Al Haig who had managed everything during the disintegration of the Nixon presidency and replaced him with Donald Rumsfeld, who by then was 42. It was not an ordinary chief of staff's job any more than Haig's had been. Richard Reeves has reported that Ford was overwhelmed by the responsibilities of the White House and he spent most of his time on the road, trying to escape. Who was left in charge? Most likely it was Rumsfeld and his deputy, Dick Cheney.

Working in the White House as a military aide was a young officer named Wesley Clark. He told an interviewer earlier this year that the Ford administration was riddled with paranoia and he traced it directly to Rumsfeld and Cheney.

Henry Kissinger, Ford's Secretary of State, has said that Rumsfeld is a ferocious bureaucratic player, and he should know. Rumsfeld led a move to discredit Kissinger so that Ford would look more like the leader he wasn't. It was also the case that Rumsfeld wanted Kissinger's job.

Rumsfeld also wanted to be president and made some tentative moves in that direction in 1988, but they got nowhere. He was too cold to connect with the voters. So he waited out those years running a pharmaceutical company and chairing various efforts such as creditable commission on national defense.

Now here he is, presiding over chaos in Iraq and seemingly oblivious to what he has wrought, occupying himself with curious statements such as "There are known knowns and known unknowns," firing off memos with questions the answers to which have long since been obvious. The truth is that Rumsfeld looked good during October to December of 2001 and March to May of 2003, the opening, brilliant months of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Otherwise he has looked not only bad but inept, insulting would-be allies unnecessarily, snorting that "stuff happens" when major institutions of Baghdad were looted, strangely aloof from the trouble at Abu Ghraib and devoid of strategies for taming the storm he has stirred up in Iraq except for retaking Samarrah and a few other towns which American and Iraqi forces accomplished recently.

Donald Rumsfeld, in fact, has become the Robert McNamara of the Iraqi war. George W. Bush, if he is reelected, would be wise to do what Lyndon Johnson did with McNamara and pack the Secretary of Defense off to the World Bank next May when the post will open up. The question is: will Rumsfeld someday experience the same remorse that eventually gripped Robert McNamara? It could happen.

 

Lee Cullum is a contributor to the Dallas Morning News and to KERA. If you have opinions or rebuttals about this commentary, call (214) 740-9338 or email us.