Page 2 of
5 THE UNDERTAKER'S TALLY, Part 1
Donald Rumsfeld's
sharp
elbows By Roger Morris
sheer brio, his relishing combat
and the limelight, his free-wheeling way of
sparking ideas and decisions helter-skelter (his
famous routine of dropping to the floor for
one-arm push-ups, a tic that bureaucrat-benumbed
Washington media always found fetching); and
steady, backroom Dick, the methodical organizer,
the modest detail man seeing to practical
execution.
Close up, the bond was even
deeper. Across an age gap of
almost
a decade, despite the distance between charged and
calm, North Shore and Casper, Princeton and
Wyoming, country-club congressman and
lumpenproletarian repairman, they shared something
rarely then so openly admitted on the right: an
abhorrence of the liberations sweeping the 1960s,
not just the right's pet scourges of bureaucracy,
crime, drugs, social fragmentation, and (however
suitably coded) racial integration, but the
unsettling ferment of newfound freedoms and
honesty, the defiance of cultural and
institutional oppressions - especially by
minorities and women. They detested Lyndon
Johnson's Great Society, the way it seemed to
advance beyond the New Deal and Progressivism at
the expense of settled money and power.
Altogether it was a moment of hurtling
change that many saw as ominous weakness and
laxity, of new public programs for the
long-excluded, which the world of Rumsfeld and
Cheney imagined as "socialism". For them, the
balancing regulation of long-dominant business
power was nothing short of "tyranny"; the new
arrangements of race and class, the myriad threats
of sheer liberty in a more equitable society and
economy, were menacing.
Whatever their
other ties, Rumsfeld and Cheney were two of the
era's visceral reactionaries in the classic sense
of the term. Musing with younger aides on one of
his last days in the White House, Johnson came up
with a telling term for their ilk. "The haters,"
he called them. "They hate what they can't run
anymore" was the way he put it. The calamity
Rumsfeld and Cheney later wrought in US foreign
policy traced not only to profound ignorance and
immense, careless pretense about the world at
large, but in some part to a four-decade-old
kindred fear and loathing at home.
OEO
began the Rumsfeld myths. "He saved it," Carlucci
would blithely tell oblivious post-September 11
reporters hardly apt to check the actual fate of
the agency. Carlucci would spin an image of an
ever-energetic Rumsfeld taking up the cause of the
needy, streamlining and fortifying the laggard
agency despite the funeral that had been ordered.
It was a blase postmortem lie. Community Action,
Head Start, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to
America), Job Corps, and most decisively Legal
Services (whose leadership Rumsfeld and Cheney
together decapitated in 1970) - one by one, each
of these beleaguered efforts was stifled or
sloughed off to political sterility. This mission,
at least, was accomplished. By the time the burial
was complete - with the agency's quiet extinction
in 1973, unmourned by the powers of either party -
the undertaker had moved on to higher office.
In 1971, Nixon had been stymied in his
plan to use Rumsfeld in a cabinet shakeup and so
took him into the White House as a
domestic-affairs "counselor". The Rumsfeld White
House interval over the next two years is captured
on Nixon's infamous secret tapes. With his
ever-aggressive, if not megalomaniacal,
40-year-old aide, the 60-year-old president adopts
an avuncular tone, while Rumsfeld angles brazenly
to supplant Henry Kissinger as a special envoy on
Vietnam or even to replace vice president Spiro
Agnew on the 1972 ticket. Patiently, yet with
audible derision and occasional incredulity, Nixon
suggests seasoning in more modest positions. Thus,
after the president's 1972 re-election triumph, an
eager Rummy would be made ambassador to the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), spoils
previously in the hands of their mutual friend
Ellsworth, who urged Rumsfeld for the job.
It all yielded more myths, more confected
history by submissive, uninformed media profiling
post-September 11 power. There would be the image
of Rumsfeld as White House "dove" on Vietnam, when
his bent was exactly the opposite; or that Nixon,
it would be claimed, saw him as uniquely in touch
with the diversity of the country, especially the
young - when the reality was that Rumsfeld, having
served an impatient three terms from his lavishly
unrepresentative rotten borough of Winnetka
wealth, with his generic contempt for the 1960s
and his part at OEO suppressing the emergence of
millions of the young poor, was anything but.
At the time, privately at least, his
grasping shallowness led to withering - now
long-forgotten - verdicts from knowing witnesses.
Even a jaded Nixon would eventually deplore him as
"a man without idealism". His extensive experience
with despots giving the judgment added weight,
Henry Kissinger came to think Rumsfeld the "most
ruthless" official he had ever known.
In a
Washington that routinely hides its ugly inner
truths of character and incompetence, none of it
mattered. Away at NATO in Brussels, frustrated by
multinational diplomacy but expanding his own
sense of political-military mastery, Rumsfeld
managed to escape the Watergate incriminations of
1973-74. Instead, he seemed like a fresh face when
Gerald Ford succeeded the disgraced Nixon in
August 1974. Anxious to be rid of Nixon
co-conspirators such as White House chief of staff
Alexander Haig, but facing a period of rule with
inadequate crony aides, the earnest new president
called back clean, hard-charging Don to be his
chief of staff. Rumsfeld promptly brought in
Cheney, just on the verge of vanishing mercifully
into private business - and the rest is history.
Massacres Barely a year after
moving next to the Oval Office (and contrary to
Ford's innocent, prideful recollection decades
later that it was his own idea), Don and Dick
characteristically engineered their "Halloween
Massacre". Subtly exploiting Ford's unease (and
Kissinger's jealous rivalry) with cerebral,
acerbic defense secretary James Schlesinger, they
managed to pass the Pentagon baton to Rumsfeld at
only 43, and slot Cheney, suddenly a
wunderkind at 34, in as presidential chief
of staff.
In the process, they even
maneuvered Ford into humbling Kissinger by
stripping him of his long-held dual role as
national security adviser as well as secretary of
state, giving a diffident Brent Scowcroft the
National Security Council job and further
enhancing both Cheney's inherited power at the
White House and Rumsfeld's as Kissinger's chief
cabinet rival. A master schemer himself, Super K,
as adoring media called him, would be so stunned
by the Rumsfeld-Cheney coup that he would call an
after-hours seance of cronies at a safe house in
the Washington neighborhood of Chevy Chase to plot
a petulant resignation as secretary of state, only
to relent, overcome as usual by the majesty of his
own gifts.
With such past trophies on
their shelves, it would never be a contest for
Rumsfeld and Cheney after 2001. That autumn of
1975, 29-year-old George W Bush, the lineage's
least fortunate son, was in Midland, Texas,
partying heartily and scrounging for some role on
the rusty fringes of the panhandle oil business.
By December 1975 having pushed aside
Watergate-appointed vice president Nelson
Rockefeller, the longtime abomination of the
Republican right, Rumsfeld was already positioning
himself to be Ford's 1976 running mate - and
eventual successor. But that spring Ronald Reagan
came so close to wresting the nomination from
Ford, with primary victories in North Carolina and
Texas, that the president's other advisers, many
of whom detested Rumsfeld anyway, sprang to
appease the Reagan camp by persuading the
president to put choleric right-wing Kansas
senator Bob Dole on the ticket instead.
Among those advisers was George H W Bush,
then CIA director. (He had gotten the job thanks
to a cynical recommendation from Rumsfeld,
calculating that to put Bush at the scandal-ridden
agency would eliminate him as a potential rival).
Another was Bush's onetime Texas campaign aide, a
moneyed corporate lawyer and would-be power-broker
from Houston, and now an obscure Commerce
Department official who became Ford's 1976
campaign manager, James Baker III. It was an
adroit back-corridor move, the sort Rumsfeld
himself had been practicing so adeptly, and it
embittered him for years toward his old patron
Ford as well as Bush, Baker and others - one more
wisp of a seamy, unseen history of customary
Republican cannibalism that wafted ironically over
the last days of 2006 with Baker's Iraq Study
Group and the Ford funeral.
Designs on the
Oval Office thwarted but by no means given up,
Rumsfeld spent scarcely 15 months at the Pentagon
in 1975-76, but they were quietly, ominously
historic. It was an interval, however brief, that
proved far more significant and premonitory than
commonly portrayed. In many ways, it both
foreshadowed September 11, 2001, and prepared the
way for the fateful sequel to it.
At every
turn, the new SecDef pulled policy to the right -
aligning Washington even more egregiously than
usual with reactionary regimes in Asia and Latin
America, smothering the nation's only serious
attempt at intelligence reform, beginning the
demolition of detente with Russia that would
climax in its extinction under Jimmy Carter. At
home and abroad, Rumsfeld seeded the Middle East
for future crises and, even more insidiously,
joined the military leadership in cravenly
abandoning the post-Vietnam battlefield of
historical understanding and institutional change.
In his first days in office, he quickly
allied himself with the longtime (but until then
vain) efforts of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to
stall the pending Strategic Arms Control Agreement
with Moscow. He also pushed Kissinger and Ford
into one of the more disgraceful acts of that
presidency (discreetly ignored in the recent Ford
retrospectives) - the assuring of the Indonesian
military junta that US support and arms would
continue to flow, despite the brutal suppression
about to be unleashed on East Timor.
It
was only a taste of the Rumsfeld preference for
uniformed right-wing tyrants, indulged over the
next year in an ever closer Defense Department
liaison with military dictatorships in Latin
America, most notably through Operation Condor,
joint covert actions involving several regimes,
among them General Augusto Pinochet's Chile and
the Argentine military dictatorship, with Pentagon
attaches and intelligence advisers looking on
approvingly. The result was a plague of
kidnappings, disappearances and assassinations
throughout the hemisphere, including, in 1976, the
brazen car-bomb murder of former Chilean foreign
minister Orlando Letelier and an American
colleague on Massachusetts Avenue in downtown
Washington. Unfailingly backed and expanded by
Rumsfeld, the collusion with Indonesian and Latin
American despots underwrote more than a decade of
some of the most savage repressions of the second
half of the 20th century.
The customary
Pentagon-State Department bureaucratic war
Rumsfeld waged against Kissinger (with a vengeance
fired by the defense secretary's presidential
ambitions) involved a furtive alliance with
Capitol Hill's ueber-hardline Democrat,
Armed Services Committee chairman (and Kissinger
nemesis) Henry "Scoop" Jackson. A Washington state
backwoods, shoreline-county prosecutor, he had
become the "Senator from Boeing". Jackson's
Russophobia, demagoguery on arms control, and
zealous backing of Israel (especially on the
then-charged issue of Jewish emigration from the
USSR) would land Rumsfeld in the milieu of the
Israeli lobby, already formidable if only a kernel
of the special-interest colossus it would later
become.
Jackson's Cold War mania was
fattening military budgets along with the
requisite Puget Sound contracts, not to speak of
the senator's own war chest for a 1976
presidential run, and all this was being fomented
by a bustling, pretentious, pear-shaped
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