THE
UNDERTAKER'S TALLY, Part 1 Donald Rumsfeld's sharp
elbows By Roger Morris
"... The finest secretary of defense
this nation has ever had." - US Vice
President Dick Cheney
"The past
was not predictable when it started." -
Donald Rumsfeld
On a
farewell flight to Baghdad in early December, the
departing US secretary of defense reminisced about
his start in politics
more
than 40 years before. Aides leaned in to listen
intently, but came away with no memorable
revelations. It hardly mattered. As usual with
this man who dominated government as no US cabinet
officer before him - including the power-ravenous
Henry Kissinger he so despised and outdid in
effect, if not celebrity - authentic history and
Don Rumsfeld's version of it bore little
resemblance.
There was portent in those
beginnings. He came out of an affluent Chicago
suburb in the 1950s with brusque confidence and
usable contacts at Princeton, among them Frank
Carlucci, a future defense secretary of mediocre
mind, yet the iron conceit and shrewd fealty far
more effectual in government than intellect or
sensibility. After college and two years as a US
Navy pilot, Rumsfeld did politic stints as a
Capitol Hill intern and Republican campaign aide,
and by age 29, back in Chicago in investment
banking, was running for Congress.
As with
much to come, a darker thread lay beneath the
surface from the start. In a Republican primary
tantamount to election, he was outwardly the
boyish, speak-no-evil, underfunded, underdog
challenger of an old party stalwart set to inherit
the open seat. In fact, he was generously financed
by wealthy friends, while his operatives -
including Jeb Stuart Magruder of later Watergate
infamy - furtively harried and smeared his
opponent, using tactics never traced to Rumsfeld.
He went to Washington in December 1962 a
handsome, square-jawed, safe-seat tribune from the
Chicago North Shore's lakeside preserves,
epitomized by the leafy estates of Winnetka and
high-end Evanston, Illinois. The old 13th District
of Illinois was one of the wealthiest in the
United States and had been smoothly in Republican
grip for most of a century. In the House of
Representatives, Rumsfeld was soon seen by some as
he always saw himself - a prodigy in the dull
ranks of his party.
Then, as afterward, he
had no authentic qualifications or independent
achievements. But that was always masked by the
same muscular, aggressive style he took on to the
mat as an Ivy League wrestler - "sharp elbows", a
meeker, envious colleague called it - as well as
by the flaccid banality of most of the Republican
Party in the 1960s. The party Rumsfeld strode into
was already caught between the wasting death of
Dwight Eisenhower's worldliness and moderation
(with Richard Nixon's haunted succession in the
wings) and a fitful right-wing urge to seize
control that, in little more than a decade, would
deliver the Reagan Reaction.
Rumsfeld's
own rightist mentality, his New Deal-phobic
corporatist cant and Cold War chauvinism, came
dressed more in modish vigor than telltale
substance - and he was already attracted by a
tough-minded layman's zeal for the era's
pre-microprocessing but grandly prospering
military technology. Like most of his generation
born in the early 1930s, the scrap-drive, Victory
Bond children of World War II who came to govern
the postwar world and would be the decisive elders
of the era post-September 11, 2001, he had no
doubt about the natural nobility of America's sway
or the invincibility of its arms; all this made
ever sleeker, ever more irresistible by the
demonstrable twin deities of US capitalism -
technology and "modern" management.
That,
after all, was the unquestioned, unquestioning
faith of North Shore fathers and other successes
like them across the US. That was the world,
according to postwar Princeton, as well as Harvard
Business School. That was the supposed genius of
future secretary of defense Robert McNamara's duly
quantified Ford Motor Co as well as his
Vietnam-era "systems analysis" Pentagon, and so
much more.
In the early 1960s, that
received world ended just beyond the suites and
suburbs. Given America's moral and material
omnipotence, its exemplary excellence (so evident
on the North Shore), the remainder of the planet
required no particular exploration, knowledge, or
historical-political understanding, nor did such
men need to have the slightest recognition of
America's own non-mythologized past. Alert
decision-makers, busy with the numbered
bottom-line results, had no time for such
"academic" ephemera.
When money or force
needed to be applied to Asians, Arabs, Latins or
Africans, a crisp briefing by some underling who
had read the necessary memos would always do.
Caught up as we all have been in Rumsfeld's
kinetic, churlish descent into the bloody chaos of
his Iraq, it has been easy to neglect how richly
cultural it all was from the beginning - America's
haunted half-century of vast might and presumption
set beside its still vaster ignorance and
irresponsibility. It was in 1963, during Don
Rumsfeld's first months in Congress, that the
Iraqi Ba'ath Party - since 1959 recruited, funded,
marshaled and directed by the US Central
Intelligence Agency, and trailing a 26-year-old
Tikriti street thug named Saddam Hussein (himself
a CIA-paid assassin) along with lists of hundreds
of left-leaning Iraqi political figures and
professionals to be murdered after the coup -
seized power in Baghdad.
On Capitol Hill,
the spirited young Republican legislator was then
absorbed in exhilarating new appropriations in
aeronautics and weaponry. His trademark clipped
fervor and biting sarcasm in questions and
speeches already held a hint of the Pentagon
E-Ring canon four decades later: the superpower
military as classic wrestler - lithe, superbly
equipped, swift to pin a dazed foe, dominant
beyond doubt, and with garlands all around. It was
only a matter - he began to learn early from
helpful briefings and testimony by
military-industrial executives - of making the
commanders (the branch managers, after all) change
their sluggish old ways. The byword would be:
procure to prevail. So superior were new
technology and the management that went with it
that it scarcely mattered who the competitor might
be. In those long-gone days, in obscure Washington
hearings unheard, in colloquies before empty
chambers, there were the first faint drums of
distant disaster in the Hindu Kush, Mesopotamia,
and beyond.
Of course, in the 1960s,
Rumsfeld's ardor for a high-tech military was only
stirring, a minor dalliance compared with his
preoccupation with advancement. While few seemed
to notice, the brash freshman made an
extraordinary rush at the lumbering House. In
1964, before the end of his first term, he
captained a revolt against Republican leader
Charles Halleck, an Eisenhower loyalist prone to
bipartisanship and skepticism of both Pentagon
budgets and foreign intervention. By only six
votes in the Republican caucus, Rumsfeld managed
to replace the folksy Indianan with Michigan's
Gerald Ford.
In the inner politics of the
House, the likable, agreeable, unoriginal Ford was
always more right-wing than his benign post-Nixon,
and now posthumous, presidential image would have
it. Richard Nixon called Ford "a wink-and-a-nod
guy" whose artlessness and integrity left him no
real match for the steelier, more cunning figures
around him. To push Ford was one of those darting
Capitol Hill insider moves that seemed, at the
time, to win Rumsfeld only limited, parochial
prizes - choice committee seats, a rung on the
leadership ladder, useful allies.
Taken
with Rumsfeld's burly style that year was Kansas
congressman Robert Ellsworth, a wheat-field
small-town lawyer of decidedly modest gifts but
outsized ambitions and close connections to Nixon.
"Just another Young Turk thing," one of their
House cohorts casually called the toppling of
Halleck.
It seems hard now to exaggerate
the endless sequels to this small but decisive
act. The lifting of the honest but mediocre Ford
higher into line for appointment as vice president
amid the ruin of president Richard Nixon and his
vice president, Spiro Agnew; Ford's lackluster, if
relatively harmless, interval in the Oval Office
and later as party leader with the abject passing
of the Republican Party to Ronald Reagan in 1980;
Ellsworth's boosting of Rumsfeld into prominent
but scandal-immune posts under Nixon; and then,
during Ford's presidency, Rumsfeld's reward, his
elevation to White House chief of staff, and with
him the rise of one of his aides from the Nixon
era, a previously unnoticed young Wyoming
reactionary named Dick Cheney; next, in 1975-76,
the first Rumsfeld tenure at a Vietnam-disgraced
but impenitent Pentagon that would shape his
fateful second term after 2001; and eventually, of
course, the Rumsfeld-Cheney monopoly of power in a
George W Bush White House followed by their
catastrophic policies after September 11, 2001 -
all derived from making decent, diffident Gerry
Ford minority leader that forgotten winter of
1964.
Burial party They were
Nixon men. Rumsfeld and Cheney rose via the
half-shunned political paternity of a cynical
president who abided and used some he distrusted,
even came to deplore. Brought into Nixon's 1968
presidential campaign through Ellsworth's
influence, Rumsfeld fell into an opportune role -
spying on the Democratic Convention in Chicago,
which exploded in the infamous "police riot"
against anti-war demonstrators that tore apart the
Democrats and lent the spy's reports unexpected
gravity. (Among faces in the crowd watching the
mayhem was another onlooker out of a comfortable
Republican Chicago suburb, a 21-year-old Wellesley
student from Park Ridge named Hillary Rodham.)
Though he gained attention in the Democrats'
disaster, Rumsfeld ran up against Nixon's equally
barbed campaign manager, Bob Haldeman, and,
despite their election victory, returned to
Congress in 1969 without reward.
Bipartisan collusion rescued him. By 1968,
president Lyndon Johnson's four-year-old Office of
Economic Opportunity (OEO), the heralded
anti-poverty program with its grassroots
"Community Action" and its Legal Services for the
poor, had become a potential success story - and
thus anathema for powerful Democrats as well as
Republicans. Denied a 1964 cigarette tax (which
would have funded it securely) by the tobacco
lobby, then starved by the sinking of resources
into the maw of the Vietnam War, OEO was
ultimately doomed when the nascent political,
economic and legal assertiveness it nurtured among
the 30 million to 50 million dispossessed
threatened the hold of vested-interest donors and
the mingled power bases of governors and mayors,
congress members and legislators of both parties.
As early as 1966 they began trooping in numbers
through the Old Executive Office Building -
liberal and conservative but uniformly
self-preserving, the single party of incumbent
power - to lobby vice president Hubert Humphrey,
who planned to cut the program when he himself
became president.
With Nixon's victory
over Humphrey, OEO's death became a certainty,
though a tough infighter was needed as director to
take out the agency's life-support systems. Nixon
first ignored the appointment; then, later in
1969, at the urging of ranking Senate and House
Democrats as well as Ford and Ellsworth, named
Rumsfeld to the post. He, in turn, chose as his
deputy Princeton pal Frank Carlucci, already off
to a buccaneering start in the Foreign Service
amid early-1960s CIA coups and assassinations in
the Congo. The writ was plain. On Capitol Hill,
they called Rumsfeld "the undertaker".
So
it was that a slight, already balding 28-year-old
Republican congressional intern, Richard Bruce
Cheney, soon steered to the new OEO director a
12-page memo setting out how to run the agency in
a way that would kill what they all deplored.
Cheney had failed at Yale. Returning to his native
Casper, Wyoming, to work as a telephone lineman,
he eventually went to college in his home state
and, avoiding the Vietnam draft like the plague,
on to graduate school and a Washington, DC,
internship meant to satisfy his ambitious fiancee
Lynn and to retrieve a white-collar career. Like
so many in the neo-conservative swarm he came to
head after 2001, Cheney brought to public life no
intellectual distinction or curiosity, and
certainly no knowledge of the wider nation and
world. Washington in 1968 marked the first time he
had lived in a town of more than 200,000.
Over his glacial insularity, though, lay a
reassuringly phlegmatic manner. In Washington, he
found he had an instinct for the quiet, diligent
subordinate's exploitation of institutional
indolence, and he brought with him a
clenched-teeth, right-wing animus that more
visible Republicans judged impolitic to express
but impressive in a backroom staff man.
"Dick said what they all thought but
didn't say aloud," a Hill aide (and later
congressman) recalled of often-raw conversations
about money, race, partisanship, and particularly
Cheney's angry, acid scorn for college anti-war
protests that gave reassuring voice to the
publicly muted abhorrence of Republican
politicians. Having earlier rejected him as a
House intern, Rumsfeld now made the young
right-winger his key personal assistant at OEO,
where he proved devotedly efficient. The hiring
brought three future secretaries of defense -
Rumsfeld, Carlucci and Cheney - into the same
office, toiling to abort the unwanted embryonic
empowerment of the poor.
When they became
celebrities, there would be much written about how
the styles of Rumsfeld and Cheney meshed -
Rummy's
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