Posted on 07/01/2021 4:44:04 AM PDT by Rummyfan
They loved him when things were going well. They blamed him when things went bad. And he never complained.
Donald Rumsfeld fired me once.
I had been his chief speechwriter for two years when he was George W. Bush’s secretary of defense and in his retirement we were working together on his memoir. Now that collaboration was ending abruptly. He didn’t enjoy firing me—“stepping back” from each other as he put it—but he delivered the decision in his usual no BS, cards-on-the-table manner.
My offense was a book I’d recently written about my experience in the Bush administration that some of its leaders understandably did not exactly savor. Feeling loyal to his former colleagues, Rumsfeld felt he had no choice but to accede to their requests to let me go. It was an awkward and painful parting. But it was also true to form. He remained faithful to the Bush team, even as some of them turned their backs on him. No one, after all, was exactly jumping to his defense as he became the premier target of a barrage of books and publicity critical of the conduct of the Iraq War, as if every senior official on the national security team hadn’t been closely involved in it. The Iraq War? Oh, that was just Rumsfeld and Cheney’s deal.
Rumsfeld changed his mind a few days later, after getting the advice and support of his stalwart wife and adviser, Joyce. He told me bluntly that he had made a mistake—that he had made a commitment to me and he was sticking by it. If people didn’t like it, well, “what the hell.” He hoped we could still be friends. We were for the rest of his life, which ended Tuesday evening at the age of 88.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
Sorry, I had no use for the man; he reminded me of Robert McNamara, one of his predecessors, and he did almost as much damage to the country as that creep did. Arrogant, Ivy League, plotted a war for years before there was an actual pretext of a “provocation” (nonexistant WMDs and the Gulf of Tonkin “attacks”), then pursued it poorly. Had no plan for the governance of a major country that in many respects was quite modern; saw an interview with Bremer who was put in charge of the civilian sector. When Bremer first went into Baghdad from the airport, he commented to the driver on all the fires raging in buildings that no one seemed to be attempting to damper; the driver replied that per Rumsfeld’s policy, all of the firemen had been fired bc they were members of the Baath Party. In defeated Germany in 1945, Truman had the sense to keep government and police employed as long as they could show they had not been involved in deportations or atrocities; you have a modern country and you need to have some semblance of local authority or the place turns into bedlam, just like Iraq did. No, I didn’t “miss” McNamara and I won’t “miss” Rumsfeld. Two of the worst public servants ever to be inflicted on America.
Very nice article about a complicated man. I enjoyed the fact he didn’t use the word ‘very.’
My brother was a Major in the Air Force at the time. He was responsible for a group that did bomb damage assessment.
Two things I remember him talking about were that they bombed a lot of structures beyond what was needed to disable them and a lot that had no military value.
And also that they fired the whole of the military. Leaving them without work or income. A lot were on our side but ended up as insurgents because there was no other way to support themselves or their families.
They could have been paid to rebuild the infrastructure but were blocked out.
Live and learn!
Rumsfeld was one of the last of the old-school public servants, who was kind to people in small, quiet ways; who helped a loved one cope with crippling drug addiction while simultaneously managing a war; who...could put politics and policies aside to value them as people.
He had a Boy Scout’s view of right and wrong. He was a stickler for expenses and charges to the taxpayer. He got rid of a personal pastry chef at the Pentagon because he thought it a waste of money. ”
The latter is mentioned:
When umsfeld left government in 2006, he took all the weight of the Bush administration’s failure in Iraq onto his shoulders and bore it into exile. Though he offered some defense of his actions, he also protected colleagues by refusing to reveal in his books some of the more damning information he knew that could have justified some of his decisions. He refused many opportunities to make a McNamara-esque apology for Iraq that would make him look good or to fault President Bush or others for the decisions he took part in.
“Arrogant, Ivy League,”
“There were two people in public life for whom he held a lifelong disdain. One was former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, who he thought an overprivileged bully—Rumsfeld hated both attributes. The other was George H.W. Bush, or “Poppy” as Rumsfeld would refer to him, who epitomized—in his mind at least—the sneering elitism of the American aristocracy. He never forgot the type of people who looked down on the kid from suburban Illinois who got into Princeton on an ROTC scholarship.”
“I enjoyed the fact he didn’t use the word ‘very.’”
I enjoyed that too. I try to avoid “very”, “really”, “so” at the beginning of a sentence and other unhelpful or overused words.
“Contrary to the image he cultivated as a tough micromanager, he had perhaps to his peril learned from LBJ’s experience in Vietnam, to trust and often defer to the generals on the ground in overseeing a war. Those generals, or many of them, told him to stay the course even when a course correction seemed obvious. I heard this myself. Rumsfeld had a habit of forming strong opinions of people. When he liked you, he let you get away with almost anything, and he liked some of the generals running the war in Iraq a lot. They were masters at toppling the regimes in Kabul and Baghdad, which they did brilliantly and quickly, but none of them were—nor was Rumsfeld —cut out for a long drawn out occupation of a foreign land. Neither, it turns out, were the members of the State Department and National Security Council who played major roles in that occupation or were supposed to. But somehow their leaders largely escaped the condemnation...”
He was a complicated man who made mistakes. But love him or hate him, he was a patriot.
There’s an old story about a king being told that an underling was patriot and asking, “Yes, but is he a patriot for me?” People who are used to having power sometimes confuse patriotism with their own agendas.
Overused words? How about “iconic” and the overuse of superlatives.
Yes a man in full. Who truly loved his country.
Sounds like a pot/kettle situation. Sometimes thinking of oneself as an underprivileged outsider can blind one to the extent one has become an arrogant, elitist insider.
It’s hard to avoid those words, but I’m going to try.
Don’t forget “basically!”
Well said! I never saw Rumsfeld as anything other than a decent person, in all ways.
You can lay the failure to properly occupy Iraq at the feet of that moron George W Bush. W was told by his top general that he did not have enough troops to occupy Iraq. He could topple Saddam but he could not occupy it. So W fired that general and invaded anyway. W was an arrogant fool that put family business ahead of the nations well being. I hate the SOB, one of the worst presidents of all time.
My wife and I watch Jeopardy! every day. At the part where the host comes over to make small talk with the contestants, about 99% of them begin their answers with "So". The host will say "I understand you proposed to your wife in an interesting way", or "you've been a librarian for 20 years?". They almost all begin their response with "So...". It's annoying, but I don't lose sleep over it.
Like I said, his name is on my Cold War Certificate. Proudly hung on the wall.
“My wife and I watch Jeopardy!”
Check out “so” in the dictionary. Multiple uses but something like “so you’re going to town” doesn’t look like one of them.
But maybe it is.
By the way, who do you want to see as the permanent host?
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