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Known and Unknown: A Memoir Hardcover – February 8, 2011
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Discover the enhanced e-book edition of Known and Unknown offering an unprecedented reading experience for a memoir by a major public figure. For web-connected readers, it features more than 500 links to never-before-available original documents from Donald Rumsfeld's extensive personal archive. It includes State Department cables, correspondence, and memoranda on topics such as Vietnam, Watergate, the days following 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and much more. Available in ePub and Adobe Reader.
Like Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown pulls no punches.With the same directness that defined his career in public service, Rumsfeld's memoir is filled with previously undisclosed details and insights about the Bush administration, 9/11, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also features Rumsfeld's unique and often surprising observations on eight decades of history: his experiences growing up during the Depression and World War II, his time as a Naval aviator; his service in Congress starting at age 30; his cabinet level positions in the Nixon and Ford White Houses; his assignments in the Reagan administration; and his years as a successful business executive in the private sector.
Rumsfeld addresses the challenges and controversies of his illustrious career, from the unseating of the entrenched House Republican leader in 1965, to helping the Ford administration steer the country away from Watergate and Vietnam, to bruising battles over transforming the military for the 21st century, to the war in Iraq, to confronting abuse at Abu Ghraib and allegations of torture at Guantanamo Bay.
Along the way, he offers his plainspoken, first-hand views and often humorous and surprising anecdotes about some of the world's best known figures, from Margaret Thatcher to Saddam Hussein, from Henry Kissinger to Colin Powell, from Elvis Presley to Dick Cheney, and each American president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush.
Rumsfeld relies not only on his memory but also on previously unreleased and recently declassified documents. Thousands of pages of documents not yet seen by the public will be made available on an accompanying website.
Known and Unknown delivers both a fascinating narrative for today's readers and an unprecedented resource for tomorrow's historians.
Proceeds from the sales of Known and Unknown will go to the veterans charities supported by the Rumsfeld Foundation.
- Print length832 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSentinel
- Publication dateFebruary 8, 2011
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.75 x 9.75 inches
- ISBN-10159523067X
- ISBN-13978-1595230676
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Editorial Reviews
Review
-Rush Limbaugh (interview transcript)/2/8/2001
"Readers might be appreciative to find themselves in possession of a serious memoir, more in keeping with the older Washington tradition of Dean Acheson or Henry Kissinger. As might the historians."
-Kimberly Strassel/Wall Street Journal/2/8/2011
"The battle is joined. After a long silence, Donald Rumsfeld opened both barrels Tuesday, releasing his memoir, Known and Unknown . Early leaks of the book's defiant take on his life, times, and conduct of the Iraq War drew howls from some of the targets of his score-settling...But Rumsfeld battles on, taking his unapologetic account to the public."
-John Barry/Newsweek-The Daily Beast/2/8/2011
"The book places the reader in Rumsfeld's chair and is a serious stab at telling the history of a consequential period in America through the eyes of one of its most consequential players. It will be an important addition to the history of our time."
-Peter Baker (New York Times White House correspondent)/Foreign Policy/2/9/2011
Rumsfeld "describes the highs and lows of a long and dramatic career and discloses some behind the scenes details that may shock you."
-Sean Hannity (interview transcript)/2/9/2011
"Known and Unknown is a meaty, well-written book that will be a primary source for historians...this power memoir deserves to be read with the care that went into writing it."
-Christopher Buckley/Businessweek/2/10/2011
"'Dismissive' is a word often used to describe Rumsfeld, but 'dismissive' perfectly describes his critics, who are unwilling or unable to re-examine their own assumptions in the light of new or overlooked information and fresh perspective provided by Rumsfeld, in his exceedingly well-documented work. With its hundreds of annotations and supplementary documents, Known and Unknown is a significant contribution to the historical record. It is, as Rumsfeld once noted about similar memoirs, 'only from one perspective,' but it's a unique and valuable perspective, a serious work that deserves consideration by any serious student of recent history."
-Jamie McIntyre (former CNN Pentagon correspondent)/Line of Departure/2/10/2011
"It is a terrific book...Let me tell you something, it is absolutely fascinating. He's very blunt in talking about people and issues and so forth, you'll really enjoy it, in my humble opinion."
-Mark Levin (interview transcript)/2/10/2011
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Unfinished Business
I was still serving as White House chief of staff on April 29, 1975, when America’s long and vexing involvement in Vietnam came to a close. A few weeks earlier President Ford had implored the Democratic-controlled Congress to authorize aid to our ally, the beleaguered South Vietnamese. He and Kissinger hoped the funds could bolster the South enough so it could arrange some sort of a truce with the North Vietnamese. But the U.S. Congress had had enough of Vietnam.
When Ford heard that Congress had rejected his request, he was furious. “Those bastards,” he snapped. An evacuation of all of our forces was now inevitable.
Vietnam was the first war in our history that the American people were able to watch unfold on television. That fact made a big difference. As such, we were all witnesses to the heartbreaking scene of U.S. forces executing a humiliating exit while our Vietnamese allies of more than a decade of war faced an uncertain future at the hands of the triumphant Viet Cong and North Vietnamese.
Throughout that long, sad day, I was with President Ford at the White House as he monitored the withdrawal. The American ambassador to Vietnam, Graham Martin, updated us on the number of Americans still waiting to evacuate, as well as the number of Vietnamese clamoring to leave. The second number kept growing.
Many of the Vietnamese who had worked with our forces were understandably desperate to flee from the advancing Northern forces, making use of rafts, small boats, whatever they could find to escape. When our Marines temporarily opened the gates to the embassy in Saigon, thousands of local citizens tried to force their way in, only to be physically pushed back. Martin and his team understandably found it difficult to turn our Vietnamese allies away.
As Martin’s wife departed by helicopter, she reportedly abandoned her suitcase so that space could be made for one more South Vietnamese woman to squeeze onboard.
Eventually it was decided that only American citizens could be airlifted in the short time remaining. The indelible image from that day is the heartbreaking photograph of desperate Vietnamese at a building across from the American embassy, trying to crowd aboard a helicopter departing from its roof. Those who had helped America during the war knew what was coming for them. It was an ignominious retreat for the world’s leading superpower.
David Kennerly, the White House photographer who had earned a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam War photography and understood the power of images as well as anyone, put it succinctly to those of us gathered in the Oval Office with the President that day. “The good news is the war is over,” he said. “The bad news is we lost.”
Secretary of State Kissinger believed that Ambassador Martin would be the last American to leave the country. After word was received that Martin had been airlifted out of the South Vietnamese capital, Kissinger announced to reporters,“Our ambassador has left, and the evacuation can be said to be completed.”
As it turned out, that wasn’t quite true.
After hearing Kissinger’s statement, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger advised us of the problem. The contingent of U.S. Marines assigned to prevent the panicking Vietnamese from flooding our embassy was still on the ground. Somehow there had been a misunderstanding. Kissinger and Schlesinger each considered the other’s department responsible for the miscommunication. The President felt Schlesinger bore responsibility and said he was “damn mad” about it. The last thing Ford needed was another public disagreement between his two top national security cabinet officials.
I discussed the issue in the Oval Office with Ford, Kissinger, and Ron Nessen, the White House press secretary. A few in the room felt we should not issue a correction because the Marines were expected to be airlifted out soon, at which point Kissinger’s statement would be accurate. I disagreed. What if the Marines were overrun and unable to get out? In any event, what we had told the American people simply was not true. That mattered.
“This war has been marked by so many lies and evasions,” I said, “that it is not right to have the war end with one last lie.”
The President agreed. He sent Nessen down to the press room to issue a statement saying that the evacuation had not been completed after all.
Kissinger was not pleased about the correction and again vented his anger at Schlesinger. He wanted the Defense Department to be blamed publicly for the miscommunication.* So the war in Vietnam ended in much the way it had been carried out—with recriminations and regret.
Since my years in Congress, I had had concerns about our country’s involvement in Vietnam—to the point that both President Nixon and Kissinger viewed me as something of a dove on the subject. I hoped they would find a way to bring the war to an orderly close. It seemed to me that we had lost opportunities to actually win the war. During the Nixon administration, I supported the President’s and Defense Secretary Mel Laird’s policy of Vietnamization, which put the emphasis on enabling the Vietnamese to take charge of their own affairs. Even in the final days of the war, there was at least a possibility that we might have been able to salvage something worthwhile from the effort had Congress approved the resources to support the South Vietnamese government—and particularly to fund its army—for a longer period. But Congress was not ready to go against the strong antiwar sentiment in the country.
With the war’s unfortunate end, a great many in our military and among the American people swore they would never again get involved in the tough, bloody business of counterinsurgency. Many wanted to turn inward, ignoring conflicts waged by the Soviet Union and its proxies. Instead of bringing us peace, I feared the chaotic conclusion of Vietnam could result in an even more deadly escalation of the broader Cold War struggle. The withdrawal from Vietnam became a symbol of American weakness—a weakness our adversaries would highlight for years—and an invitation to further aggression.
Even after the pullout from Vietnam, President Ford pleaded with Congress to at least provide military aid to the anticommunists in the region so they could defend themselves. Those pleas, too, were rebuffed. As such, the victory of the Viet Cong was accompanied by the rise of Communist forces in neighboring Laos and Cambodia.* By the next day Kissinger had cooled down. After a meeting with the President, he said, “Don, I want you to know that I believe you handled the matter last night just right. . . . We would have ended up in a pissing match within the government, and we don’t need that.” He concluded saying, “I owed you that and wanted you to know it.” Kissinger could be a fierce bureaucratic battler, but he also was a man of integrity who would admit when he had erred.
Product details
- Publisher : Sentinel; 1st edition (February 8, 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 832 pages
- ISBN-10 : 159523067X
- ISBN-13 : 978-1595230676
- Item Weight : 2.55 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.75 x 9.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #600,081 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #859 in United States Executive Government
- #3,195 in Political Leader Biographies
- #17,464 in Memoirs (Books)
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Donald Rumsfeld was the thirteenth and twenty-first United States Secretary of Defense. He currently chairs the Rumsfeld Foundation, which supports leadership and public service at home and the growth of free political and free economic systems abroad. He and his wife Joyce have three children, six grandchildren, and two great grandchildren.
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Customers find the political content insightful, honest, and skillful. They also describe the reading experience as great and a thoroughly decent man. Readers also praise the writing style as exceptionally well written, intuitive, and impressive with Don's analytical skills.
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"...The story of this ambitious and gifted American is truly extraordinary, and serves to set up the last parts of the book...." Read more
"...The book was well worth reading, not simply as a memoir, but as a philosophic reflection of the limits of human knowledge...." Read more
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Customers find the political content insightful, engaging, and well documented. They also say the way Rumsfeld's mind works is impressive, and the book candidly reports his role in government. Readers describe the book as an unparalleled example of skill, wisdom, and guts necessary to fulfill his duties. They say it's the clearest expression of political realism they've ever read, and a careful and precise appraisal of what he has seen in the world during his career.
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"...a conversational writer, a good storyteller, easy to read, with a non-intrusive, meticulous style chronicling his life...." Read more
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UPDATE: I am now finished with the book and cannot recommend it highly enough. Donald Rumsfeld is six years older than I am and started out with about as much family money as I did, none. He was fortunate to have a high school principal who helped him get a Princeton scholarship, unlike my Catholic high school principal who cared for little except that the school would not write me a letter of reference for the "godless" U of Chicago. Rumsfeld was also blessed with a wife, having met her when both were 14, and having made the excellent decision to ask her to marry him at 10 o'clock one morning when he was mulling his coming time in Pensacola learning to fly. He went straight to her parents' house and broke the news. She was, and still is, beautiful and the book contains a photo of her sliding down a fire house brass pole when she was 70.
He astonished his parents by getting elected to the House of Representatives, after coming home from the Navy, and he went to Washington as a young reformist Congressman. Dick Cheney has gotten steady laughter over the years by telling how Rumsfeld turned him down for a job as a legislative intern during Cheney's academic career. Rumsfeld asserts that the only reason was his search for a lawyer for his small staff. Reluctantly, Rumsfeld accepted an executive job for the Nixon Administration, running OEO, which he had voted against. This was an a recommendation for the job, as far as Nixon was concerned, and Rumsfeld turned it into a laboratory of poverty programs which would be spun off to other agencies if they worked and deep sixed if they didn't. Later, he took over the office of wage and price controls at George Shultz' request, again his strongest recommendation being that he was opposed to them in principle.
We are unlikely to see another book this century by a man with this exhaustive experience in American government. The one-star political "reviews" will be gone in a few months as Amazon belatedly cleans up the site. His experience is simply not equaled in modern American history. Perhaps only John Quincy Adams equals Rumsfeld in his time in multiple roles in the US government over many years. Rumsfeld was recruited by the Nixon Administration to head OEO, then left to be NATO Ambassador, wisely turning down roles in the 1972 re-election campaign. He returned to take over as Gerald Ford's Chief of Staff, then the Defense Department at Ford's request. He supported Ford in 1976 and was dismayed, as I was, to see Jimmy Carter become president. This led Rumsfeld to his 25 year experience in private enterprise, taking over as CEO for GD Searle and going on to several venture capital firms. I remember seeing him speak at an AMA convention when he was considering a run for the presidency.
His only real political enemy, other than the looney left since 2001, has been George HW Bush. Naturally, he was surprised to be approached by George W Bush, given the Bush family's reputation for grudges. Richard Armitage is another object of contempt but is not important enough to be called an enemy. Armitage certainly played a significant role in the failure of the State Department in post-war Iraq.
Rumsfeld describes the post Iraq war situation frankly and especially the problems with Bremmer. He lists his own and the Bush Administration's errors. I get a slight suspicion that he is quite a bit more gentle on Bush in the book than he would be in private.
I have wondered for years what happened with General Jay Garner. He was (is) a retired Army 3 star with 40 years in the service. He had been placed in charge of the protection of the Kurds in northern Iraq after Gulf War I and did a great job. He was sent to Iraq by Rumsfeld to set up the post-war Iraqi government and was suddenly relieved with no explanation when Bremmer was appointed. It is now clear from Rumsfeld's book that Garner was ousted by the State people because he was following Rumsfeld's (and supposedly Bush's) policy of putting an Iraqi face on the government as quickly as possible. Garner wanted to have the Iraqi Interim Authority in place in a month or two. In Bremmer's book, he says the CPA was expected to rule Iraq for years. As Rumsfeld points out, Bremmer's story has changed as his plans miscarried. By 2007, Bremmer was disowning his early enthusiasm for a long CPA rule.
With Rumsfeld, what you see is what you get. Four presidents considered him for Vice-President, to the extent that they asked him to fill out the disclosure questionnaire. He opposed Reagan and supported Ford so that opportunity was lost. He is older than Cheney so there was no possibility that he could have been chosen by W Bush but many of us wish he was younger, even ten years younger, as he has the skill set so lacking in modern candidates for president. I would vote for him at the age of 81. One small sign of his vigor is his use of a stand-up desk at the Pentagon when he was 70. When he was told that one allegation of torture was that al qeada prisoners were forced to stand sometimes for four hours at a time, he responded that he stood 8 to 10 hours a day at his office !
It is my personal opinion that Rumsfeld was the best US Secretary of Defense in our history and my discussions with military officers of several branches convince me that they share my opinion. He will be a great figure in history and I hope to shake his hand at his book signing.
This is the best book on government I have read since Conrad Black's biography of Nixon.
Another UPDATE: Since writing this review, I have had the chance to briefly meet Rumsfeld at a book signing and to hear his comments at several interviews. Notable to me was the fact that the Reagan Library had arranged a beautiful desk for the book signing and then had to scramble to find a taller table for him to use for the signing. He has used a stand-up desk all his career and they should have known that. The table was a cheap plywood one that was obviously intended to have a table cloth covering it. This is how you learn about people.
In one of the interviews, he mentioned that, if he had gotten his wish for fighters, he might have stayed in the Navy.
I got him to sign two copies, one for my children.
In his newly published memoir, Rumsfeld replies to his critics. His book addresses all the major issues (Iraq, Afghanistan, Islamist jihadists, terrorism) that plagued the United States during the administration of George W. Bush. Rumsfeld wrote his memoirs with hindsight, of course, but he has developed what appears to be credible defense of the criticism that was heaped on him by the liberal establishment.
The "establishment" ought to read Rumsfeld's memoir, KNOWN AND UNKNOWN, because the book is a tour de force in terms of delivering a sophisticated analysis of this country's foreign policies and national security. Indeed, in this reviewer's opinion, Rumsfeld's book has to be considered one of the top political memoirs published by our contemporary national leaders. Despite its flaws (and there are many, starting with Rumsfeld cockiness), the book is, in a word, excellent.
Rumsfeld is guilty of occasional waffling and weaseling when he gives his side of the story, and the reader should be aware that when Rumsfeld addresses his old adversaries, he is going to color his narrative with disdain. Specifically, Rumsfeld takes on people like Nelson Rockefeller, George H.W. Bush, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Jerry Bremer. Even though he does so with subtlety and a certain amount of grace, his disdain of these people clearly shows.
But those are quirks to be expected of any politician of Rumsfeld's stature. Indeed, people like Rumsfeld would not have succeeded if they didn't play hardball on occasion. And Rumsfeld shows he is a master of the political put-down.
The book is also lengthy, and readers should be prepared to dissect virtually every national security issue that the country has encountered in the last 50 years. But the writing is excellent and the narrative moves quickly along. Reading perseverance will be rewarded with a highly sophisticated review of the issues that affect America's foreign policy.
In the final third of the book, Rumsfeld takes on the 800-pound guerrilla in the room - the American war in Iraq.
According to Rumsfeld, L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer -- whom George W. Bush sent to serve as his viceroy while Iraq struggled to create the first democracy in the Middle East -- made the major mistakes in Iraq. Bremer was supposed to report to Rumsfeld, but Rumsfeld notes that Bremer, aided and abetted by the State Department, created a direct line into the Oval Office in the White House. Writes Rumsfeld:
"Bremer's arrival marked an unfortunate psychological change in Iraq - from a sense of liberation, with gratitude owed to the American military and our allies, to a growing sense of frustration and resentment that Iraq had come under the rule of an American occupation authority...Many Iraqis associated the CPA with imperiousness and heavy-handedness."
The two key mistakes that the Americans made were Bremer's unilateral decisions to ban Bathists from being included in a coalition government and the complete disbandment of the Iraqi Army. Both Iraqi politicians and the well-trained military could have helped stabilize Iraq after Saddam Hussein was overthrown. Rumsfeld claims he heard of these decisions only after the fact, and once they made, chaos and an active insurgency were inevitable.
Rumsfeld's book has been panned by the media establishment. That's not especially surprising because in his memoir Rumsfeld blames the American media for part of the problems that the U.S. encountered in the Middle East. The media, he said, didn't (and still doesn't) understand the basic political and economic issues involved in the struggle over the Middle East.
"Iraq and Afghanistan were the first wars of the twenty-first century - the first where operations were reported in real time on blogs, talk radio and twenty-four-hour news channels. The public was hearing all kinds of allegations and one-sided, sensational reports. It took a while for the facts to catch up."
Indeed, Bob Woodward, that pillar of the inside-the-beltway media establishment, came out with a scathing critique of KNOWN AND UNKNOWN. Here's what Woodward wrote in the on-line blog, Foreign Policy:
"Rumsfeld's memoir is one big clean-up job, a brazen effort to shift blame to others -- including President Bush -- distort history, ignore the record or simply avoid discussing matters that cannot be airbrushed away. It is a travesty, and I think the rewrite job won't wash."
Woodward sounds outraged that Rumsfeld had the temerity to write an independent minded book that did not genuflect to the establishment conventional wisdom. This reviewer thinks that Woodward misses the essential point of the Rumsfeld memoir. Yes, the book was written with hindsight, and of course Rumsfeld takes direct aim at the critics of the Bush war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that is his purpose: he wants to set the record straight from his own, unique perspective. Rumsfeld could care less about the "conventional wisdom" in Washington.
The irony is that Rumsfeld himself, in his memoir, makes a brilliant analysis of the mistakes the Americans made in Vietnam, even as those same mistakes were made a half century later in Iraq and Afghanistan - and on Rumsfeld's watch. Rumsfeld understood that we were making mistakes, but he claims he was unable to convince George W. Bush and his chief lieutenants (Cheney, Rice and Powell), not to mention the U.S. Congress, to keep a low tactical and strategic profile in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, the irony is magnified when the so-called "surges" in both countries seemingly improved the short-term tactical situation on the ground, while taking matters out of the hands of both the Iraqis and the Afghans who should have been fighting for their country. Instead, as in Vietnam, the Iraqis and the Afghanis are letting the Americans do their fighting for them. At the end of the book, one has to fret whether Rumsfeld is right, and Iraq (and Afghanistan) could become the quagmires that allowed Vietnam to fall to the communists in the 1970's. The threat in the Middle East, of course, comes not from communists, but Islamic extremists (though Russia and China could move in quickly to fill any void left by the Americans -- but that's another story for another day).
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“Known and Unknown” ist ein interessantes Buch, an dem Donald Rumsfeld nach eigenen Angaben vier Jahre gearbeitet hat. Rumsfeld wurde 1932 in Chicago (Illinois) geboren und lebte dort eine ziemlich behütete Kindheit. Er ist, wie sein Nachname schon vermuten lässt, Nachfahre von deutschen Einwandereren aus einem Dorf (Weyhe) in Niedersachsen, in der Nähe von Bremen. Im Buch schildert er, wie seine Großmutter Lizette und seine Ur-Großmutter, Elizabeth, sich oft auf Deutsch unterhalten haben. In seiner Kindheit wurde er aufgrund seines Aussehens als “tough German” bezeichnet.
Sein Vater George Rumsfeld meldete sich nach dem Angriff auf Pearl Harbor zum Militär, um für die USA im 2. Weltkrieg zu dienen.
Donald Rumsfeld selbst war ebenfalls beim Militär und machte in Princeton einen Abschluss.
Mit nur 30 Jahren wurde er für die Republikanische Partei in den Sechzigern in den US-Kongress gewählt - als Repräsentant von Illinois (Chicago). Er wurde mehrere Male wiedergewählt und lernte in seinen Amtzeiten unter anderem den Präsidenten Lyndon B. Johnson persönlich kennen und unterstützte Johnsons’ Civil Rights-Gesetze. In einem Interview sagte Donald Rumsfeld, dass die Entwicklung Amerikas erstaunlich sei, noch im 19. Jahrhundert hätte es Sklaven gegeben – was er nicht gutheißen könne.
Als dann Richard Nixon Präsident wurde, diente er in dessen Regierung als Vorsitzender des “Office of Economic Opportunity” und später Botschafter bei der NATO in Brüssel.
Nach Nixons Rücktritt wurde er Gerald Fords Regierung, dem Nachfolger von Nixon, der jüngste Verteidigungsminister der Geschichte der USA. Damals lernte er auch den späteren Vizepräsidenten von George Bush, Dick Cheney, kennen. In diese Amtszeit fällt die Abschaffung der Wehrpflicht und die Einführung eines Freiwilligenmodells.
Nach der Abwahl von Gerald Ford wandte sich Donald Rumsfeld der Privatwirtschaft zu und wurde Vorstandsvorsitzender von G. D. Searle, wo er unter anderem für die Einführung und Vermarktung des Süßstoffes Aspartam, der sich heute in vielen Light-Getränken findet, verantwortlich war.
1983 wurde er dann unter Präsident Reagan “Special Envoy to the Middle-East” und traf auf Saddam Hussein und sprach mit ihm über Iran.
Danach saß Rumsfeld in mehreren Aufsichtsräten, u.a. des Schweizer Rüstungskonzerns ABB, bevor er von George W. Bush 2001 erneut in die Regierung geholt wurde als diesmal ältester Verteidigungsminister (69 Jahre). In diese Zeit fallen die Anschläge von 9/11, der Afghanistan-Krieg und der Irak-Krieg. Diese Episode macht ungefähr die Hälfte des Buches aus. Nachdem die Haltung der Bush-Regierung zu Afghanistan noch nachvollziehbar ist, zeigt sie beim Irak-Krieg deutliche Schwächen. Vor allem die Kriegsbegründung mit den nicht vorhandenen Massenvernichtungswaffen ist sehr zweifelhaft und man hat den Eindruck, dass hier ein Krieg um jeden Preis vom Zaun gebrochen werden sollte und dass die an den Entscheidungen beteiligten Personen zum Teil genau wussten, dass der Feldzug unbegründet war. Das zeigt sich auch in der Nachkriegszeit, als in der Regierung sich alle gegenseitig der Unfähigkeit bezichtigen. Diese Episode ist eine ziemlich zweifelhafte in der Amerikanischen Geschichte. Bei Wikipedia steht über Donald Rumsfeld, dass Henry Kissinger ihn als den rücksichtslosesten Mann bezeichnet, der ihm begegnet ist.
Trotzdem hat mir vor allem die erste Hälfte des Buches gefallen – des noch intakten Amerikas der 50er, 60er und 70er Jahre. Es war ein interessanter Lesegenuss der Geschichte eines Mannes, dessen Lebenszeit, so sagt er selbst in einem Interview, ein Drittel der Geschichte des Landes ausmacht.
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