Donald Henry Rumsfeld died on a Tuesday in Taos, New Mexico,
the way powerful men often die—quietly, in a bed, surrounded by people who
loved him, while far away in the sand-blasted rubble of cities whose names most
Americans couldn’t pronounce, other people were dying in ways that were not
quiet at all. He was eighty-eight years old. The cause was multiple myeloma,
which is a cancer of the plasma cells, and if you wanted to get poetic about it—and
why not, the man himself was never shy about metaphor—you might say that his
own body had finally turned against him the way so many bodies had turned
against so many things he’d set in motion. The cells that were supposed to
protect him had become the thing that killed him. There’s something in there,
if you want to look for it.
He had served as Secretary of Defense twice. Twice.
Most men who reach that office consider it the summit of a life’s ambition, the
Everest of a career spent clawing upward through the cold, thin air of
Washington politics. Rumsfeld did it, came back down, spent twenty years in the
private sector running companies that made sweeteners and electronics—things
designed to make life taste better, work smoother—and then climbed the mountain
again. The second time, he was older, harder, more certain. Certainty, in
Washington, is a superpower. It is also, sometimes, the thing that gets
everyone else killed.
The best defense is a good offense.
He’d said that. Written it down, in fact, in that 2011
memoir of his, Known and Unknown, citing a speech he’d given back in
1984 while accepting a medal named after a general. He’d been thinking about
terrorism even then, back when most Americans were worrying about the Soviets
and shoulder pads and the new Michael Jackson record. He’d been watching
Lebanon burn on the evening news, watching the Marine barracks reduced to
rubble and blood and the peculiar gray dust that follows explosions, the dust
that gets into everything, the dust you can never quite wash out. He’d met
Saddam Hussein—shook his hand, looked him in the eyes—and come away with the
unshakeable conviction that the world was a dark and dangerous place full of
dark and dangerous men, and that the only language any of them understood was
force.
He wasn’t wrong about that last part. That’s what makes the
story so uncomfortable. The monster under the bed is real; the question is what
you do about it, and whether the cure becomes something worse than the disease.
---
He was born in Chicago in 1932, a Depression baby, raised in
a country still learning what it meant to be strong. He went to Princeton,
studied political science, learned to fly Navy jets—there is something worth
pausing on there, the young Don Rumsfeld banking hard over the Atlantic, the
controls responsive in his hands, the horizon tilting at his command. Control.
That was always the thing with him. The sensation of the machine responding to
your inputs, doing exactly what you told it to do.
He was elected to Congress at thirty. Thirty. When
most men are still figuring out where to put the furniture, Rumsfeld was making
law. He supported the Vietnam War when the kids in the streets were chanting make
love, not war, and you can imagine him watching those protests from some
window, his jaw set, thinking: They don’t understand. They can’t see what I
can see. Maybe he was right. Maybe he wasn’t. Vietnam had a way of making
everyone wrong eventually.
He worked for Nixon, that most Shakespearean of presidents,
that sweating, jowly man who contained within himself both genuine geopolitical
brilliance and a darkness so complete it finally swallowed him whole. When
Nixon fell—when the walls came down and the tapes came out and the whole
baroque nightmare collapsed—Rumsfeld was there to help Ford pick up the pieces.
Chief of staff first, then Secretary of Defense at forty-three, the youngest in
history. He had the job. He had the machine in his hands. He felt the controls
respond.
And then Carter won, and it was over, and Rumsfeld went back
down the mountain. For a while, anyway.
---
The thing about Donald Rumsfeld—the thing that made him Donald
Rumsfeld and not just another gray-suited functionary consigned to
footnotes—was the snowflakes.
He called them snowflakes. Short memos, dashed off to aides
and subordinates, dozens a day, sometimes hundreds, little white flurries of
command and question and instruction that settled over the Pentagon like, well,
like snow. Like a blizzard that never quite stopped. Why is this taking so
long? Find out. Report back. I want options, not excuses.
There was one snowflake, written on September 11, 2001—the
September 11, that day that split American history into before and after the
way a cleaver splits meat—written just six hours after the towers fell, while
the smoke was still rising, while the phone lines were still jammed with people
trying to reach the people they loved. In that snowflake, Rumsfeld wrote that
America needed to go after not just bin Laden, but Saddam Hussein. He wrote
this without evidence. He wrote this on a day when nearly three thousand people
were still dying, their last moments stretched across television screens in a
loop that would run for weeks.
The best defense is a good offense.
The machine was in his hands again. He could feel the
controls.
---
What followed is the part of the story that history will
argue about for generations, the part that doesn’t resolve neatly, that doesn’t
offer the satisfaction of a clear moral. Afghanistan first—and the Afghanistan
invasion, if you’re being honest about it, had a certain terrible logic to it,
the logic of a man who’d watched his embassy get bombed and his soldiers get
killed and said enough, we take the fight to them now. The Taliban fell
in weeks. The body count was 8,000 to 12,000 on their side, eleven on ours.
Eleven. The machine worked exactly as designed.
And then Iraq. And here is where the story turns, the way
stories always turn when men become too certain of their instruments. The WMDs
that weren’t there. The al-Qaeda connection that didn’t exist. The cables that
showed Rumsfeld had not warned Saddam about chemical weapons in 1983,
despite what he’d claimed. A Senate report that found his interrogation
authorizations—strip them, use dogs, make them stand for hours—had
spread through the military like spores, like something airborne, contaminating
facilities in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib and places whose names we still might
not know.
I stand for eight to ten hours a day, he’d said. Why
is standing limited to four hours?
He said this about human beings in cages. He said it with
what sounded, on the recording, like a kind of breezy impatience, the tone of a
man who finds certain objections tiresome, bureaucratic, soft. The tone of a
man who has confused his own endurance with a moral argument.
---
Director Errol Morris sat with him in 2014, in a film called
The Unknown Known—a title lifted from Rumsfeld’s most famous snowflake,
the one about known knowns and known unknowns and unknown unknowns, the one
that became a kind of dark poem, quoted and mocked and philosophized over in
equal measure. Morris had made a film like this before. The Fog of War,
with Robert McNamara, the Vietnam-era Defense Secretary who had looked into
Morris’s camera in his old age and said, essentially: I was wrong. People
died because I was wrong. I am sorry.
McNamara wept. McNamara confessed. McNamara’s certainty had
finally cracked, in his eighties, and what poured out was grief.
Rumsfeld did not weep.
Rumsfeld read from his snowflakes, hundreds of them, on
camera, his voice steady and almost fond, as if reading letters from a beloved
correspondent. He came to the interrogation authorizations and said, with what
seemed like genuine wonder: My goodness—there are a lot of them.
Not: I’m sorry. Not: I was wrong. Just the
mild surprise of a man who had forgotten how many memos he’d written,
rediscovering them the way you rediscover old receipts in a coat pocket.
Morris asked him: should the Iraq invasion have happened,
given that there were no WMDs? Rumsfeld smiled, or something that occupied the
same general neighborhood as a smile. I suppose time will tell, he said.
Time. As if time were a neutral party. As if the four
thousand four hundred American soldiers weren’t already dead, their names
already carved somewhere, already visited by parents who would grieve them to
their own graves. As if the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians weren’t
already counted, or uncountable, depending on who was doing the math and for
what reason. As if the refugee flows hadn’t already begun, the long columns of
people carrying everything they owned toward borders that might or might not
open, toward futures that might or might not hold.
I suppose time will tell.
---
He died in Taos on a Tuesday, and the obituaries tried to be
fair, the way obituaries always try to be fair, because speaking ill of the
dead makes us uncomfortable, because powerful men accumulate during their lives
a kind of gravitational mass that persists even after them, bending the
language around them. Influential but controversial, said the Washington
Post. A fierce warrior, said the New York Times. These are the words we
use when we mean something more complicated, something that takes longer to say
and makes readers put down their coffee.
The consequences of his decisions live on in today’s
headlines, in the ISIS recruitment videos and the Iran-backed militias and the
European politics reshaped by refugee flows and the long, grinding,
never-quite-finished wars that still burn in the places he helped set alight.
He was never tried at The Hague, though cases from Abu Ghraib were referred to
the International Criminal Court, which is an interesting sentence to type, the
kind that used to mean something, the kind that perhaps still does.
He was eighty-eight years old. He died in his bed. His body
had turned against him at the end, the plasma cells gone wrong, the immune
system attacking itself.
The machine, at last, had slipped from his hands.
Outside, in the desert around Taos, the wind moved over the
red rock and the sage, indifferent and unhurried, the way wind always moves
over the places where powerful men have lived and died and left their marks on
the world—marks that take far longer than a single lifetime to understand, or
to heal, or to wash away.
The best defense is a good offense.
He believed that until the end. Maybe he was right. Maybe
that’s the most frightening thing of all.
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