Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: former senior official, White House, United States, Donald Rumsfeld (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Bing West

Andrew Cockburn opens his new book on Donald Rumsfeld by concluding that his subject was an insufferable disaster as secretary of defense, then goes on to provide dozens of anecdotes by way of proof. In this slim volume, we learn that Rumsfeld saved a multi-billion dollar bomber program that was "incapable of performing its mission"; as a businessman with G.D. Searle Co., pushed sugar substitutes through the Food and Drug Administration's approval process even though scientists believed the fake sugar "contributed to several thousand Americans" developing brain cancer; plotted with Dick Cheney to form "a secret government-in-waiting" during war games in hidden bunkers; tolerated levels of opium production in post-Taliban Afghanistan that meant "millions of future heroin addicts"; sanctioned torture at Abu Ghraib; procured tanks that had to wait "by the side of the road for the fuel truck" in Iraq; and ran a "reign of terror over the officer corps."

President Richard M. Nixon is quoted as describing Rumsfeld in March 1971 as "a ruthless little bastard," and reading Cockburn, one can only imagine what his exploits would be like if he had been taller. Hollywood might have cast Rumsfeld as the heavy who brought us global warming and penguin stew.

Page after relentless page, Cockburn hauls Rumsfeld's stewardship onto the dock to flop and expire. The book traces his career from 1962, when he was a young congressman, and jumps back and forth in time to the present day. Cockburn describes Rumsfeld as a bully marred by hubris, a portrait previously drawn in Bob Woodward's State of Denial. His Pentagon meddling antagonized general officers. To run post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, he chose the arrogant L. Paul Bremer, whose failures ensured "the ultimate doom of the American adventure in Iraq." Rumsfeld's dismissive put-downs antagonized the press. And so on.

Cockburn, who has written for major magazines, is right about the enormity of Rumsfeld's failure in Iraq, but the book has fatal flaws. Throughout his jeremiad, Cockburn brandishes not a scalpel but a broadsword, holding both Rumsfeld and the entire U.S. military in contempt. In his opinion, the Pentagon's failure to anticipate the need for heavily armored Humvees in Iraq reflected not human error but an "uncaring and incompetent civilian and military high command." Having accompanied numerous American units in Iraq, I have witnessed our generals extending extraordinary care to their troops.

Cockburn's critique lacks historical perspective about errors in war. After all, the gallant World War II assault against Iwo Jima claimed twice as many American lives in one month as have died in Iraq in four years. But while some historians claim Iwo Jima was a strategic mistake, we still don't damn the leaders of the "greatest generation." Similarly, the one thing the world can take to the bank today is that every American general will stand with his men.

Moreover, Cockburn accuses our soldiers of "immorality," claiming that every Iraqi he met "was utterly convinced that the occupation was intrinsically corrupt" and that "determination to maintain the honor and standards" of the U.S. military "was, unfortunately, all too rare." Rare? Tell that to the Iraqi civilians in Baghdad who routinely ask U.S. patrols for help, trusting our soldiers more than their own forces.

Because Cockburn didn't persuade true insiders to talk, his book lacks in-depth reporting. He doesn't address the central issue of whether Rumsfeld blocked requests to alter course in Iraq or whether there were any such requests. Nor does he explain why Rumsfeld, portrayed as nimble at avoiding blame, stayed at the helm as Iraq drove the Republican Party from power in Congress and divided the country as deeply as had Vietnam. Perhaps Rumsfeld stayed, as he repeatedly said, because he believed that the cause was noble and that the consequences of failure were dire.

Most critics complain that Rumsfeld bullied U.S. military commanders into placing too few "boots on the ground." Cockburn argues, however, that more American soldiers in Iraq would only provoke more opposition and lead to more casualties. Because he views Iraq as insoluble and our institutions as execrable, Cockburn leaves the reader wondering if Rumsfeld's actions made any enduring difference.

Now, more troops are surging into Iraq under a different strategy. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who recently took over as the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is trying to set up the Iraqi government to succeed. It's too early to assess whether the Iraqi imbroglio is a clash of cultures doomed from the start or whether Rumsfeld's decisions were central to a slow failure that can be reversed with him out of office.

Because Cockburn has written with a razor, he has left room for more balanced books. It is doubtful, though, if any will revise his central thesis: Rumsfeld envisioned a quick victory in Iraq and a quick exit. Had he left office after the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan and before the Iraq fiasco, he would have been a national hero. But when the Iraqi insurgency portended a long war, Rumsfeld did not adopt a new strategy. He failed, and he remained too long in his post.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review

"[A] perceptive and engrossing biography... Cockburn argues that Rumsfeld's disastrous tenure cannot be fully understood without examining his earlier career. He demonstrates that Rumsfeld was an inveterate schemer, skilled at evading responsibility for his decisions. Though Cockburn sometimes places the most sinister construction possible on Rumsfeld's actions, his overall account is quite persuasive." -- Jacob Heilbrunn, The New York Times Book Review --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1 edition (February 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416535748
• ISBN-13: 978-1416535744
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #370,927 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Piece of Work. Essential reading!, February 25, 2007

By	Clive Adonis (Clear Lake, Iowa) - See all my reviews

[...]. Despite the fact that the author and publisher must have moved heaven and earth to get it published so quickly, there is no sign of any undue haste: it is thoroughly researched, and clearly- (and in many places, very wittily-) written, and makes its case convincingly.

Like a lot of people, I was familiar with Rumfeld's most recent "achievements", but not aware of his work in the Nixon White House. (Incidentally, Nixon referred to him as a 'ruthless little [...]' and there is a very telling dialogue between Nixon and Rumsfeld on the subject of Africans and African-Americans, where Rummy sycophantically echoes all of Nixon's worst prejudices.) Nor did I know of the role that Donald played as CEO of the GD Searle company in pushing the highly-controversial aspartame product onto the market.

The whole sorry story of the invasion of Iraq and the roles of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle are described with greater insight than I have read to this date, thanks to the author's skill in getting so many officials close to the decision-making processes to speak to him. Rumfeld's responsibliity for the disgrace of Abu Ghraib is outlined in its full sickening detail.

The myth of Rumsfeld's managerial abilities is effectively laid to rest, with examples of mismanagement, indecisiveness, and bullying from throughout his career. Interestingly it seems that George Bush Snr. seems to have been one of the few to have recognized this (when Rumsfeld wrote asking to be ambassador of Japan, Bush wrote on his request NO. THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN!!).

Now that Rumsfeld has amassed an enormous fortune, I suppose he can turn his back on his disastrous career and enjoy Midge Decter's fawning biography of him. For the rest of us who must suffer as a result of his mistakes, this masterly work serves as a model of how we need people like Cockburn to remind us that so often our emperors are naked frauds.

29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read for Concerned Citizens, March 13, 2007

By	Franklin C. Spinney (Italy) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Andrew Cockburn's unauthorized biography of Donald Rumsfeld is a "must read" for anyone interested in understanding the systemic and dysfunctional behavour of the US government and that of the current Bush Administration in particular. While much has been written of Rumsfeld's failure as a wartime Secretary of Defense, and Cockburn adds much valuable information to this growing body of literature, less has been written about Rumsfeld's disastrous record in managing the Pentagon' programmatic and budgetary activities. Cockburn's book is pathbreaking in that it also addresses this equally important subject, and this review will focus on this latter aspect of Rumsfeld's record.

First some "truth in advertising:" I have known Cockburn for almost thirty years and consider him a close friend. I am an admirer of his earlier books, and I was a minor source of information in the Rumsfeld book (see pages 207-208).

I retired from the Department of Defense in 2003 after thirty three years, including twenty-six years in the Office of Secretary of Defense in Pentagon, where, as a staff analyst, I wrote numerous publicly available reports describing how the dysfunctional managerial problems plaguing the Pentagon, from the Carter presidency to that of George W. Bush, created a historical pattern of shrinking forces, aging weapons, and continual pressure to reduce combat readiness, all lubricated by corrupt accounting system that subverted the Accountability Clause of the Constitution. Most of these reports can be found on the internet ([...]) and in my book "Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch." The fact that our troops went to Iraq ill-equipped and untrained to a war of choice created by the Bush Administration is natural consequence of this dysfunctional history. Cockburn's book is an essential reading for anyone trying to understand why the Big Green Spending Machine is now completely out of control.

Donald Rumsfeld cannot be blamed for the Pentagon's managerial dysfunctions. In fact, when he entered office, he promised to transform the Pentagon's management practices. To this end, he established several transformation panels, including a financial management transformation panel. The final report issued by this panel, Transforming Department of Defense Financial Management: A Strategy for Change, April 13, 2001, (aka the Friedman Report) correctly described the profound consequences of DoD's unauditable accounting system when it said these systems do not provide reliable information that ... "tells managers the costs of forces or activities that they manage and the relationship of funding levels to output, capability or performance of those forces or activities." Put another way, the management information provided by DoD's accounting system is so corrupt and unreliable that it is impossible to link budget decisions to policy intentions.

Nevertheless, while the Bush Administration shovelled money into the Pentagon jacking up spending to levels not seen since WWII, Rumsfeld chose to effectively ignore the findings of the Friedman Report, his rhetoric about tough-minded change notwithstanding. By ignoring the problems his own transformation panel correctly described, Rumsfeld demonstrated a level of incompetence and cavalierness that magnified the Pentagon's decision making pathologies to a degree that I found and continue to find astonishing and unprecedented.

Cockburn's well written book lays bare how this disaster is part and parcel of Rumsfeld's character flaws: on the one hand, Cockburn shows how Rumfeld was a bully who surrounded himself with sychophants and yesmen, a fact that was common knowledge in the Pentagon before I left in 2003, and on the other hand, he shows how Rumsfeld was a dilettante and consequently afraid to make truly hard decisions, a fact that was also in evidence before I left. Combine these twin character flaws with skyrocketing defense budgets, and you have a prescription for a financial and programmatic catastrophe that will plague the United States for at least a generation and undermine the government's ability to pay for the perfectly predictable costs of an aging population, not to mention a grotesquely mismanaged war. The only beneficiaries of this mess are defense contractors and the politicians who feed on defense expenditures. The soldiers at the pointy end of spear and the taxpayers and their children have been hosed.

One vignette from Cockburn's book illustrates how Rumsfeld's twin character flaws force-fed the natural impulse to chaos: Rumsfeld played the tough guy when he cancelled the Army's Crusader self-propelled howitzer, a gold plated holdover from the cold war. To be sure, this hi-tech program was flawed and suffered from cost growth and should have been cancelled. In fact, it was the lowest hanging fruit in the Pentagon's orchard of low hanging fruit. The Army and its congressional supporters howled at the time, but their howls quickly disappeared. Why?

Well, progammatically speaking, the answer is clear: Rumsfeld replaced the Crusader with the far more expensive, super hi-tech Future Combat System (FCS), a fantastical "system of systems" for the all-electric battlefield of the future. The end result of this cynical swap was that the same contractors were promised much more money and given a far longer period of time before they would have to deliver any new hardware to our combat forces. More money with less deliverables is manna from heaven to contractors on a cost-plus dole. And ... it has the added benefit of increasing the pressure for higher Army budgets over the long term. Meanwhile, today, troops going to Iraq, particularly those in the National Guard, who don't have the equipment they say they need. Multiply such decision-making modalities by hundreds of R&D and procurement decisions over the last six years, and it is easy to see how ground work has been laid for even higher defense budgets in the future, Iraq War of no Iraq War, threat or no threat, Democratic or Republican Administrations notwithstanding.

This is the programmatic and budgetary legacy of Rumsfeld's tenure. To understand why, a good first step is to read Cockburn's book.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It Gets Even Better With Every Reading!, March 12, 2007

By	Richard Penniman (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

I've now read this book three times, twice fairly quickly and once in depth, and the more I read it the better it gets!

What really amazes me is the number of sources the author is able to draw up, particularly from within the military. The political views of Andrew Cockburn and his brothers Alexander and Patrick are well documented, but this does not seem to have restrained their sources in any way. Cockburn certainly has a sharp ear for the telling piece of insider information.

Where I think this book really shines is in its tight editing. There is often a tendency for biographers to include every piece of information they have been able to find, even if it does not necessarily add to the argument. This writer does not tell us those things we already know, and nor does he include text just to show us how much research he has done. His self-restraint makes for a very compelling - and often wryly ironic - narrative. Who would have expected a biography of such a man to be such a page-turner?

The current debacle in Iraq is not the result of an accident, nor of unforseen events. It is the direct result of policies instigated by Rumsfeld and his coterie. I would describe this book as essential reading for everyone interested in learning about how such mistakes can possibly be avoided in the future.