Customer Reviews

Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy

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[...]. 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.

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.

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.

While we don't know the end of the Iraq war, we do know one of the first public casualties of the war is no other than Rumsfeld. Cockburn completes this bio just in time to cover his resignation.

He traces the book from Rumsfeld's start as an Illnois congressman,through the Nixon and Ford adminstrations, and then life as a big business CEO until he is called to be secretary of defense for the Bush Adminstration.

There isn't much you will learn from Cockburn's book during his time in the Bush adminstration. No light is shed on his resignation. (I'm still curious who was behind the resignation since Dick Cheney thinks he's the greatest secretary of defense in history). Another problem with the book is there is a chapter on Rumsfeld's role as CEO of GD Searle involving the product Nutra-Sweet which is meant to reflect on Rumsfeld's character but the truth of the matter that chapter says more about the Nutra-Sweet industry than it does about Rumsfeld. Finally, it would help if would Cockburn would name his sources. There is too much reliance on unnamed sources here in this book.

The more informative chapters come from his time in the Nixon and Ford adminstration. It is interesting and a bit eerie to see the parallels between Rumsfeld's role as a secretary of defense in the Ford and Bush 43 adminstration: In both adminstrations, he is extremely hawkish on world matters, disdain for other experienced military opinion and places more faith in weapon technology than our armed forces. However, for all his faith in weapon technology, he doesn't pick ones that are cost-efficient (turbane tank) or even remotely work (missle defense.) That behavior is a nuisance in the Ford adminstration (since he isn't playing with lives here, but just money) but it is dangerous when he plans the Iraq war.

So, while the book doesn't cover as much ground as I would like to, it is not a bad introduction for those who want to learn about Rumsfeld or get a brief idea of who he is. There may be more informative books about him down the road, but for the time being, it will suffice.

"I'm not into this detail stuff. I'm more concepty."

"I don't do quagmires."

"I don't do diplomacy."

"I don't do foreign policy."

"I don't do numbers."

The above are direct quotes. They come directly out of America's corporate heartland from a man whose "accomplishment" at G. D Searle was in terrorizing the sort of people who don't matter and getting a sweetener approved that may cause brain tumors, destroying careers to do so.

It has long been a right-wing fashion to blame government for everything, but the above make it clear that Rumsfeld was very much a creature of a corporate world which, during and directly after the Cold War, was expanding into an economic vacuum created by the Second World War, in which all that mattered was manipulating what other people thought.

This world was so hegemonic that Job One, not only for the CEO but also for the white collar, became the capillary management of one's public relations image.

"Reason" turned inside out and became strictly a matter of managing one's biography, and only fools and losers continued to be concerned with the external world.

"Subjective" and "objective" reversed polarity. "Subjectivity" became a term of abuse hurled at unwanted results such as Shinseki's estimate of how many troops it would take to pacify Iraq. "Objectivity" becamse the name of success in maintaining one's reputation and the body count of careers destroyed to do so.

The world was referred to as complex and unmanageable whenever the results from the field were negative. But any attempt to actually master complexity became to the province of little people trying, the night before the Big Presentation, to figure out how to survive Rumsfeld's illogical, off-topic, and incoherent objections. History became myth: a big man versus a little man, with Goliath the winner at all times, and Isaac sacrificed after all.

Upon the accessing of Monkey Boy, things took a decided turn into utter absurdity. This book has GWB, well into his Presidency, asking his father what a "neocon" was. Other reports have Rove chairing discussions on how to cut Medicare and Medicaid by men who could not tell you the difference between these "entitlements". Rumsfeld himself was bone Midwestern ignorant at an early age and did not learn on the job: early in his career, he decided (using American business logic) that Paul Nitze, an archetypical Cold Warrior, must be soft on the Soviets because he knew so much about them, because in American business logic, knowing too much about any one thing is bad for the pure of heart generalist.

This came about, with grievous consequences for America from the standpoint of national self-interest alone (such as the total loss of leadership of the home hemisphere), because in the USA, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Enlightenment's descent into biography, hagiography, demonology, haruspication, and myth, was at its most Power-Pointed advanced.

Political life became for Players a sort of blood sport with invisible umpires nonetheless presumed to be there, in the peanut gallery of the press and poll.

Of course, no poll could have been conducted prior to March 2003 to haruspicate the reaction of the Iraqi people to the Americans barging in. For one thing, Saddam would have had a fit. For another, the barging-in rendered moot for Iraqis whatever they may have felt before the war, for owing to Rumsfeld's incompetence and malignity, not one-tenth of the riches perhaps anticipated showed up for the Iraqis. Instead, the country became a hell on earth.

Rumsfeld knew this, if he knew little else despite his expensive stay at Princeton (not graced to my knowledge except by wrestling stardom, when Rumsfeld could have wrestled at the "Rock Welcomes You" gym on Van Buren Street around the time of his matriculation, and hopefully got his neck broken, saving us a lot of trouble and the taxpayers alone a lot of money).

He was of a generation accustomed to having its own way in the world. If Aspartame would make them look good, then Aspartame had to be approved by the FDA. If an underpowered invasion would give him the status of a Douglas Macarthur, then that invasion had to proceed.

3000 American service personnel are dead as a result. 24000 are wounded and according to recent reports many of them rot in corridors at Walter Reed. Several hundred thousand Iraqis are dead.

It's almost ungrammatical of Cockburn to say that Rumsfeld accepts responsibility but not blame: it may be that he would accept blame but not responsibility. A man so uncaring of people has a concomitant lack of care for language except to manipulate and to bully, so Rumsfeld would split what Derrida would call the diferance either way.

This man is now in a comfortable retirement. He needs to lose this package pronto. He needs to end his days in a Federal prison, and given the damage he has done, it is a great pity that Donald Rumsfeld is too old to have to worry therein about homosexual rape. He personally monitored and personally authorized unconstitutional torture of suspects including Lindh, the American picked up in Afghanistan and he personally, with a bully's smirk doubtless on his face, gave troops license for what happened at Abu Ghraib.

This is a man who has never grown up. He plays boy's games and goes on whitewater rafting trips to prove a manhood he never once had. His gaze at Searle and at the Pentagon was, basilisk like, intended to suck not only the air from conference rooms but the very possibility of post-Enlightenment manhood.

If there's any chance of getting the sum wrong, he doesn't do numbers. If he might be seen as missing a detail he is concepty. He doesn't "do" foreign policy, and he snubs the Chinese military attache when that gentleman has valuable information on Afghanistan (and, probably, losing Osama thereby): he doesn't "do" diplomacy because it's hard work. This man is a child.

But, the American people enabled his conduct and should hang their co-alcoholic, co-dysfunctional heads in shame: for that's what Rumsfeld used. He was the uncle who rapes the daughter, and the daughter is the one who is condemned as shrill.

His conduct augurs nothing good for the USA, and possibly, its descent into civil war when economic decline and environmental destruction set in a few short years from now.

Late in life, Barry Goldwater said of his fellow Republicans: when I think of these men I get sick to my stomach and I want to throw up. When I think of Donald Rumsfeld I get sick to my stomach and I want to throw up.

wow. if you want to cry yourself to sleep then this is the book for you. if the book is true then this is a severely damning portrayal of our country and its' government. we have to ask ourselves how things got this crazy? our government has become a LEGALIZED MAFIA. you know in your heart that it's true but this excellent book will put all doubt to rest and show you how the politicians are doing it. but the real question is where are these sociopaths coming from? what is wrong with our schools and our churches and our universities and our culture that this country is producing people who should be described as unholy monsters. undoubtedly there have always been leaders whose love of money and power have led them to perpetrate unspeakable crimes against humanity and maybe there will always be such men. but the fact that we are allowing them to ruin the world for us is the real horror story. we are responsible for the crimes of people like rumsfeld because we all allow it to happen. we, in america are ignorant and uneducated and we have become slaves to our present-day culture of greed, money-worship, bigotry, hatred, arrogance and self-interest. we are full of hate for ourselves and our fellow-man and deep down we don't care about truth or mercy or decency. our blindness in everyday life has allowed politicians and corrupt businessmen to flourish and take advantage of the moral void that we have created. our govenment has become the true representation of what we have become as individuals and as a nation. and the only way to reverse this trend is for each one of us to change. we must replace hatred with love, ignorance with education and stop worshiping riches and money. love of money is the driving force for most of us and especially politicians and the business community that controls them. and yes, they will kill your children to get it. read on..........

Having read most of the books about the last eight years and the various debacles imposed on the world and on America by Cheney-Bush (see my lists on Iraq After-Action Reports and on Evaluating Dick Cheney), much of this book was not a surprise, but I would also be quick to say that there are a number of gems here not found elsewhere.

Of special interest to me were the reality that the lies and fantasy on the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq were a replay of the Team B lies about Soviet weapons successfully carried out under Reagan. This cabal has a clear pattern of believing that any lie is acceptable, that Congress is to be ignored, that there is no constraint on Executive power.

Gems:

Rumsfeld started talking about bombing Iraq before 3 pm on 9/11.

Rumsfeld built the force that he fought with, back when he was first secretary of defense.

Sadaam Hussein was the only Arab leader that welcomes Rumsfeld in the 1990's.

Novak was a willing accomplice in destroying CIA under Reagan with Team B lies, and again in destroying Plume today.

Rumsfled liked Doug Feith *because* of Feith's notorious stupidity.

Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff was widely viewed as an "abused puppy" avoiding confrontation with Rumsfeld.

CIA won the Afghan war, but Rumseld claimed it for himself. No mention that I noticed of Rumsfeld's disterous mistakes in allowing Pakistan to evacuate 3000 Tlaiban and Al Qaeda, and in refusing to but a Ranger battalion in Bin Laden's path when CIA had "eyes on" for four days (see my reviews of "First In" and "JAWBREAKER" as well as various books on my Iraq After Action list).

After a while I tired of this book. I thought to myself that the author has done a good job on destroying Rumsfeld, but there is a great deal of context that is missing, including Cheney's more active role behind the scenes, and virtually no mention of the thousands of US dead and 75,000 amputees that Rumsfeld created for no good reason.

My bottom line: Rumsfeld was put at Defense because the first candidate irritated the President, the President was a fool and wanted to appoint someone his father hated, and Dick Cheney was happy to have his former mentor over at Defense, which Cheney, as a more recent Secretary of Defense, no doubt felt he could manage from the White House. America chose to allow this cabal to steal two elections in a row, and to go to war on a web of lies denounced in advance by General Zinni,at OSS.Net, and in many other places. SHAME ON US. Rumsfled is our child, and we have to live with what we have wrought on the world.

Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

I had wondered if President Bush was the guiding hand in the bumbling execution of his administration. After reading Cockburn's book, I think Bush's critical weakness as President is in choosing incompetent subordinates. Rumsfeld's catastrophic management of the war in Iraq appears to be driven by his own ambitions and, sadly, by his avoidence of blame. To be blamed for this kind of failure, of course, would ruin his chances of ever becoming President himself. And so from the very start of the war, he maneuvered himself into being Bush's confidante, pushing out and isolating advisors like Colin Powell and the Joint Chiefs. At the same time, he made decisions, or rather avoided being responsible for decisions and nondecisions that doomed the war effort. Even if Cockburn's analysis is only 90 per cent accurate, the country will pay for generations for the stupidity (there is no better word) and guile of this inept Secretary of Defense.

I am among the many people that dislike Donald Rumsfeld, so I am thoroughly enjoying this book. That said, it is far from even-handed. There is lots of background material on the man and his arrogant dismissiveness is profiled beautifully.

This entertaining and enlightening book by veteran journalist Andrew Cockburn goes a long way to explaining many of the most puzzling errors and bizarre misjudgments that have bedeviled the US military during the Bush Administration. In turns amusing and depressing, "Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy" is the most useful guide yet published on the mismanagement that has all but crippled the most powerful military force in the world. One would hope that the lessons implicit in this book would be learned by future Administrations and policy makers. I'm not holding my breath.