Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy - Softcover

Cockburn, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416535764 ISBN 13: 9781416535768

Verlag: Scribner, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Donald Rumsfeld, who as secretary of defense oversaw the army, navy, air force, and marines from 2001 to December 2006, is widely blamed for the catastrophic state of America's involvement in Iraq. In his groundbreaking book Rumsfeld, Washington insider Andrew Cockburn details Rumsfeld's decisions in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and also shows how his political legacy stretches back decades and will reach far into the future.

Relying on sources that include high-ranking officials in the Pentagon and the White House, Rumsfeld goes far beyond previous accounts to reveal a man consumed with the urge to dominate each and every human encounter, and whose aggressive ambition has long been matched by his inability to display genuine leadership or accept responsibility for egregious error. Cockburn exposes Rumsfeld's early career as an Illinois congressman, his rise to prominence as an official in the Nixon White House, his careful maneuvering to avoid the fallout of the Watergate scandal, and his skillful infighting as secretary of defense under President Ford. Cockburn also chronicles for the very first time Rumsfeld's subsequent tenure as CEO of G. D. Searle (and his devoted efforts to get governmental approval for the controversial artificial sweetener aspartame) as well as his interesting behavior in secret high-level government nuclear war games in the years he was out of power.

President George W. Bush's hasty elevation of Rumsfeld as his secretary of defense proved historic, for it was the triumvirate of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Rumsfeld who plunged America into the disastrous quagmire of the war in Iraq. Cockburn reveals how Rumsfeld's habits of intimidation, indecision, ignoring awkward realities, destructive micromanagement, and bureaucratic manipulation all helped doom America's military adventure. The book challenges the notion that Rumsfeld was an effective manager driven to transform the American military, examines the reasons that Rumsfeld was removed from office, and shows how his second appointment as secretary of defense reflects a deep conflict between President Bush and his father, former president George H. W. Bush.

Brimming with powerful revelations, Rumsfeld is sure to emerge as the must-have piece of investigative journalism as America grapples with its difficult involvement in Iraq and the uncertain path the country faces today.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrew Cockburn is a writer and lecturer on defense and national affairs, and is also the author of five nonfiction books. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Playboy, Vanity Fair, and National Geographic, among other publications. He currently lives in Washington, D.C.

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Rumsfeld

Chapter One

Making History

Just after 9:37 a.m. on the morning of September 11, 2001, Officer Aubrey Davis of the Pentagon police was standing outside Donald Rumsfeld’s office on the third floor of the Pentagon’s E Ring. Inside, Rumsfeld, though aware that the World Trade Center towers in New York had already been hit, was proceeding with his regularly scheduled CIA briefing. Davis, on the other hand, had concluded from watching the TV news that the country was under attack and the Pentagon might be a target. Assigned to the defense secretary’s personal bodyguard, he had come on his own initiative, ready to move Rumsfeld to a better-protected location.

“There was an incredibly loud ‘boom,’” says Davis, raising his voice slightly on the last word. Fifteen or twenty seconds later, just as his radio crackled with a message, the door opened and Rumsfeld walked out, looking composed and wearing the jacket he normally discarded while in his office. “Sir,” said Davis, quoting what he had heard on his radio, “we’re getting a report that an airplane has hit the Mall.”

“The Mall?” replied Rumsfeld calmly. Without further word, the secretary of defense turned on his heel and set off at a sharp pace toward the so-called Mall section of the Pentagon. Down the hall, someone ran out of a VIP dining room screaming, “They’re bombing the building, they’re bombing the building.” Davis frantically waved for colleagues to catch up as the stocky, 5' 8? defense secretary marched ahead of his lanky escort.

The group, which grew to include several more police officers as well as Rumsfeld’s personal communications aide, turned into the wide passageway running along the Mall face of the building. Thick crowds of Pentagon staff, in and out of uniform, were hurrying past in the opposite direction. They could smell smoke, but there was no sign of any damage here. “I thought you said the Mall,” said Rumsfeld.

“Sir,” responded Davis, holding his radio, “now we’re hearing it’s by the heliport.” This meant the next side of the building farther along from the Mall. Rumsfeld set off again without a word, ignoring Davis’s protestations that they should turn back. “At the end of the Mall corridor, we dropped down a stairway to the second floor, and then a little farther we dropped down to the first. It was dark and there was a lot of smoke. Then we saw daylight through a door that was hanging open.” Groping through the darkness to the door, the group emerged outside. In front of them, just thirty yards away, roared a “wall of flame.”

“There were the flames, and bits of metal all around,” Davis remembers, as well as injured people. He noticed the white legs of a woman lying on the ground, then realized with a shock that she was African-American, horribly burned. “The secretary picked up one of the pieces of metal. I was telling him he shouldn’t be interfering with a crime scene when he looked at some inscription on it and said, ‘American Airlines.’ Then someone shouted, ‘Help, over here,’ and we ran over and helped push an injured person on a gurney over to the road.”

While the secretary of defense was pushing a gurney, Davis’s radio was crackling with frantic pleas from his control room regarding Rumsfeld’s whereabouts. “It was ‘Dr. Cambone [Rumsfeld’s closest aide] is asking, Dr. Cambone wants to find the secretary.’ I kept saying, ‘We’ve got him,’ but the system was overloaded, everyone on the frequency was talking, everything jumbled, so I couldn’t get through and they went on asking.”

An emergency worker approached, saying that equipment and medical supplies were needed. “Tell this man what you need,” said Rumsfeld, gesturing to the communications aide, apparently oblivious of the fact that there were no communications.

Once they had pushed the wounded man on the gurney over to the road, the bodyguard was finally able to lead his charge back inside the building. “I’d say we were gone fifteen minutes, max,” he told me in his account of what happened that morning. Given the time it took to make their way down those Pentagon corridors—each side of the enormous building is the length of three football fields—Rumsfeld was actually at the crash site for only a fraction of that period.

Yet those few minutes made Rumsfeld famous, changed him from a half-forgotten twentieth-century political figure to America’s twenty-first-century warlord. On a day when the president was intermittently visible, only Rumsfeld, along with New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, gave the country an image of decisive, courageous leadership. According to his spokesman, the sixty-nine-year-old defense secretary’s “first instinct was to go out through the building to the crash site and help.” Over time, the legend grew. One of the staffers in the office later assured me that Rumsfeld had “torn his shirt into strips” to make bandages for the wounded.

As we shall see, Rumsfeld was first and foremost a politician, though not always a successful one. The weeks before the attacks had been one of the unsuccessful phases, with rumors spreading in Washington that he would shortly be removed from his post. Only the day before he had lashed out at the Pentagon workforce, denouncing the assembled soldiers and civilians as “a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America.” Now, his instinctive dash to the crash site could inspire loyalty and support among those he had derided. An official in the Office of Plans, Analysis and Evaluation, whose office was close to Rumsfeld’s, saw him walking swiftly down the hall in the first minutes after the crash. Later, when he heard where Rumsfeld had been, he thought, “very astute, politically.”

Hatred and resentment among those in his wake had been a regular feature of Rumsfeld’s career, and 9/11 proved no exception. I first realized this while discussing that day with a senior WhiteHouse official who had been in the Situation Room, desperately trying to coordinate a response to the bewildering disaster of the attacks. As he reminisced, I mentioned that despite the legend, it didn’t seem as if Rumsfeld could have had much time for rescue work that morning.

“What was Rumsfeld doing on 9/11?” said the former official with sudden anger. “He deserted his post. He disappeared. The country was under attack. Where was the guy who controls America’s defense? Out of touch!”

“He wasn’t gone for very long,” I observed mildly.

My friend waved his coffee mug in emphatic rebuttal. “How long does it take for something bad to happen? No one knew what was happening. What if this had been the opening shot of a coordinated attack by a hostile power? Outrageous, to abandon your responsibilities and go off and do what you don’t need to be doing, grandstanding.”

This conversation took place in March 2006, just before it became commonplace in Washington to speak disrespectfully of Rumsfeld, at least in anything louder than a whisper, so I was taken aback by the vehemence of his response. A minute later, this sober bureaucrat burst forth with renewed passion. “He’s a megalomaniac who has to be in control at all times,” he fumed. “He is the worst secretary of defense there has ever been, worse than [Robert] McNamara. He is playing a major part in destroying this...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Scribner
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1416535764
• ISBN 13: 9781416535768
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 258
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande