SATURDAY PROFILE: Donald Rumsfeld has been described as 'Dr Strangelove on testosterone'. A political animal for more than 40 years, he is used to doing things his way, or no way, writes Conor O'Clery
Donald Rumsfeld is something of a matinée idol to devotees of the Pentagon's televised news briefings. He comes across as raffish and cocky, squinting through rimless eyeglasses and hunching his shoulders as he puts down reporters with a withering stare and incredulous sighs of "goodness gracious" or "good golly". He is mimicked regularly on Saturday Night Live, where imitator Darrell Hammond conveys the sense of a menacing, tightly-wound professor. With his gaunt face and spooky confidence, some commentators have compared Rumsfeld to Dr Strangelove, or as Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel put it on MSNBC television, "Dr Strangelove on testosterone".
Others see a more benign, even sexy figure. To the Wall Street Journal he is "the new hunk of home-front airtime", to Fox News a "beltway babe magnet" and to a CNN Pentagon correspondent, "a big flirty pussycat". Abroad, Rumsfeld is of course the bull who is said to bring his own China shop with him. His remarks about France and Germany being "old Europe" and his lumping of Germany with Cuba and Libya in the "soft-on-Saddam" camp exacerbated the bitter transatlantic split over Iraq. He gets the blame for alienating much of the world by subjugating diplomacy to military planning. It is not something he loses sleep over.
When Donald H. Rumsfeld was sworn in as US Secretary of Defence on January 20th, 2001, it was a second coming. He had been head of the Pentagon a quarter of a century before. The Chicago-born son of a naval officer began his career as a jet pilot for the navy just after the Korean War. He was a bit of a daredevil, a wrestler who rode motorbikes, sky-dived and once water-skied fully clothed, and ferociously ambitious. Aged only 30, Rumsfeld got himself elected to Congress from Illinois, transferred after four terms to the Nixon White House and served as US Ambassador to NATO in Brussels. At the age of 42 he become chief of staff to president Gerald Ford, and at 43 America's youngest-ever Defence Secretary.
In Washington he acquired a reputation as a tough in-fighter, a knife-wielder, who courted the far right to further his own presidential ambitions. Then secretary of state Henry Kissinger, no amateur with his elbows, commented dryly to Rumsfeld once: "Your wife was measuring my office the other day, Don." Rumsfeld sent a rival for future high office, George H. W. Bush, whom he frequently belittled, to what was considered the dead-end job of CIA director. He had few close friends. One was another young, ultra-conservative newcomer called Dick Cheney, whom he brought to the White House when he was chief of staff.
After Jimmy Carter won the presidential election in 1976 and the Democrats came back to power, Rumsfeld switched to a career in corporate America. He took on some special tasks for Ronald Reagan, who succeeded Carter, including a trade-promotion mission to Baghdad in 1983 where he shook hands with Saddam Hussein, and again in 1994 to confer with Hussein aide Tariq Aziz. He also managed an election campaign for Bob Dole and toyed himself with a run for president. But mainly Rumsfeld concentrated on accumulating wealth as head of a couple of Fortune 500 companies. He bought a big spread in New Mexico, where he retreated with Joyce, his wife for 48 years. He was heading for retirement when George W. Bush got elected president and made Dick Cheney his vice president and Cheney invited him back to Washington.
Shortly after he took over again at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld told an aide: "I just took Andy to lunch, I think that sends a signal." It did. Andrew Marshall (81) was a maverick Pentagon analyst who had long advocated a smaller, faster more lethal force for future wars. The signal to the uniformed military was that the new civilian boss was receptive to Marshall's revolutionary ideas. Word went round that Rumsfeld could start sacrificing tanks, ships and army divisions in favour of what he called "transformation" to a leaner, more sophisticated, high-tech force.
As the issue simmered the chiefs of staff invited Rumsfeld to a meeting in their strategy room, known as the "Tank". Their private conversation appeared in the next day's Washington Post. Rumsfeld was furious. "The tank leaks," he said, turning down a second invitation for a strategy session.
At first the generals more than held their own with the new boss, who liked to quote Al Capone ("You'll get more with a kind word and a gun than a kind word alone") and who displayed on his desk a bronze plaque engraved with president Teddy Roosevelt's adage: "Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords." There were early rumours that "Rummy" as he is known inside the Washington Beltway (George Bush calls him "Rumstud") would not last. His personal contempt for many Clinton-era appointees and his humiliation of time-serving officers as he pushed for modernisation made him many enemies.
He challenged everything. His memos, often scathing, became so frequent they were referred to as snowflakes, as in blizzard. His frustration bubbled up in the first week of September 2001, when Rumsfeld declared the Pentagon bureaucracy a mortal enemy of the US.
Everything changed with 9/11.
Rumsfeld, who had just turned 69, helped carry wounded officials from a shattered Pentagon. The breach of America's defences gave him the opening to push for a goal he had pursued for many years - taking out Saddam Hussein. Back in 1998 Rumsfeld was one of 18 neo-conservatives who signed a letter to president Bill Clinton urging regime change in Iraq. Other signatories included Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage and Richard Perle, now working for or advising the administration. The letter was the product of a right-wing think tank, Project for the New American Century, promoting global leadership that had been established in 1997 by Weekly Standard editor, William Kristol. It claimed that with his capacity to make banned weapons, Saddam Hussein was a threat to the safety of America, Israel and the region's oil supply. It also argued that the US already had authority under UN resolutions to take military actions.
A few days after the attacks, Rumsfeld raised Iraq with the President as a potential military target after dealing with al Qaeda and the Taliban. In mid-2002, after the successful US military action in Afghanistan, he began composing his war plan for Iraq, despite the scepticism of Secretary of State Colin Powell, who rolled his eyes in exasperation and warned of destabilising the region.
Rumsfeld and Powell go back a long way and maintain an uneasy relationship, teasing each other to cope with policy differences. Once Powell cracked to Rumsfeld "Give me a high five", when he spotted the Secretary of Defence with his arm in plaster. But it is Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney who came to form the "A team" inside Bush's war cabinet and it is the Defence Secretary who spends a half hour alone with the president every day as the war progresses.
Rumsfeld's planning for Iraq was done in his office, rather than in the "Tank". Every day at his stand-up desk he poured over Deployment Order No. 177, deciding what troops and material should go to the Gulf and in what order. He was widely considered the architect of the plan, and General Tommy Franks the draftsman. In his pursuit of the goal of "transformation" Rumsfeld wanted to shock and awe the enemy with high-tech munitions and strike for Baghdad with only 100,000 troops, according to insider accounts of the process. Franks persuaded him he needed 250,000 personnel, and Rumsfeld finally agreed, but only if they were to be deployed in phases as needed. The general also wanted a two-week softening up bombing campaign, but Rumsfeld insisted on the ground war starting simultaneously. Still the Defence Secretary insists today it is Frank's plan, something that led reporters at Pentagon briefings to ask him pointedly, as set-backs occurred last week, if he was distancing himself from the formula.
The coming days will be the ultimate test of Rumsfeld's doctrine of digital war. If the Iraq war is successful he will be hailed as a reformer who brought warfare into the 21st century. If it goes badly, he will share the fate of Robert McNamara, the Defence Secretary in the 1960s whose reputation was forever tarnished by overruling and micromanaging the uniformed military in Vietnam, with disastrous results.