Page 1 of
3 BOOK
REVIEW The man who would be
king Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and
Catastrophic Legacy by Andrew
Cockburn
Reviewed by Pepe Escobar
It was four years ago today, Field
Marshal von Rumsfeld got his guns to play.
A fitting way to "celebrate" the
bombastic opening of the most astonishing blunder
in recent military/geopolitical history would be
to
read Andrew Cockburn's book. The late US president
Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon, a ruthless judge of
character himself, already in March 1971 ably
described the future Bush administration Pentagon
warlord as "a ruthless little bastard". Not only
is this the title of one of Cockburn's chapters,
it should be the book's epigraph.
Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and
Catastrophic Legacy is a book of no-nonsense
reportage to be read in one sitting. Much of what
it presents is not new. The kicker is how it
connects the dots. The picture emerges of a
ruthless opportunist, fueled by a toxic ego and
blind ambition, a master of very nasty rudeness
who perfected the killer technique of "inflicting
hours of rapid and often disconnected questions on the
people under him". What for? To win the game -
whatever the game might be. Rumsfeld was a shock
to the system - the ultimate operative, the
ultimate fixer.
Rumsfeld the corporate
honcho - at the G D Searle pharmaceutical firm -
easily molded into Rumsfeld the warlord.
Public-interest lawyer James Turner revealingly
tells Cockburn (p 65) how Rumsfeld "is not
interested in facts, not interested in truth, not
interested in finding out what the fundamental
realities are, but is much, much more interested
in setting a goal and then, by will and force,
pulling all the resources that he could possibly
pull together to achieve that goal". The goal may
be to get a dodgy sweetener - aspartame - on the
market, or to invade and control Iraq with a
nimble strike force. In the process, the
not-so-smooth operator adds value: when St
Louis-based chemical behemoth Monsanto bought G D
Searle, the family of founder Gideon Daniel Searle
got between US$600 million and $900 million; and
Rumsfeld, after a decade of faithful work, was $10
million flush.
Rumsfeld is also revealed
as a karma chameleon - the Boy George of
Washington politics. The Rumsfeld who was
ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) - when he was "rabidly
pro-European" according to a senior official, and
very close with the French ambassador - years
later would morph, in the run-up to the war on
Iraq, into a growling beast deriding France and
Germany - the EU engine - as "Old Europe".
The hands-on CEO Cockburn opens
cinematically on September 11, 2001, inside the
Pentagon, only 30 yards away from a "wall of
flame", with hands-on Rumsfeld "interfering on a
crime scene" (in the words of an aide), those very
few minutes just enough for him to build the
legend of an "I care" super-CEO. On page 3,
Cockburn writes that an officer later assured him
that "Rumsfeld had 'torn his shirt into strips' to
make bandages for the wounded". But to build the
legend, he skipped a crucial meeting at the
National Military Command Center, a 24/7, "all
very Star Trek" (according to a former
official) facility across the corridor from his
Pentagon office. When he was most needed, he was -
well, building his legend. He only got
"situational awareness" almost one hour after the
Pentagon was hit.
A pattern is
established. But Cockburn is also careful to
present how this non-stop path toward
self-aggrandizement mixed - and then kept on
mixing - with the Bush administration trait of
always changing the subject. Rumsfeld, in the
lead-up to September 11, had wildly dismissed the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in his words,
as the victim of "vast doses of al-Qaeda
disinformation" and "mortal doses of gullibility".
Now that al-Qaeda had struck, Rumsfeld, still in
the command center at 2:40pm on September 11, told
General Richard Myers in one of his famous
"snowflake" memos to find the "best info fast ...
judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. @ same
time - not only U.B.L." S.H. was of course Saddam
Hussein and U.B.L., in Pentagon spelling, was
Osama bin Laden. Cockburn goes straight to the
point: "It was the first step on the road to
Baghdad."
It's essential to follow
Rumsfeld at 35 in the Nixon White House in the
late 1960s as head of an anti-poverty program,
with an "undistinguished man from Casper, Wyoming"
in his office - Dick Cheney in his pre-Darth Vader
incarnation. At the time, writes Cockburn,
"Rumsfeld ruled; Cheney served"; he also quotes a
former newspaperman describing Cheney's private
ideology as appearing "somewhat to the right of
[Gerald] Ford, Rumsfeld, or, for that matter,
Genghis Khan". Fans of buddy-buddy movies know how
this subplot would later acquire grim overtones.
Cockburn rapidly negotiates the times when
Rumsfeld was "untainted by any of the scandals
that had brought down Nixon and were already
weakening Ford" to follow him as Ford's White
House chief of staff - and thus focus on the Big
Prize. Blind ambition: the man who would be
president. The man who would be king. William
Seidman, who was chief of Gerald Ford's Economic
Policy Board, tells Cockburn "he figured the way
to get there was to get to be Jerry Ford's vice
president, and move on from there". But there was
a problem with the Rumsfeld plot. The sitting vice
president was the Croesus-like Nelson Rockefeller.
And being chief of staff did not exactly mean
being on the road to
Head
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questions on the
people under him". What for? To win the game -
whatever the game might be. Rumsfeld was a shock
to the system - the ultimate operative, the
ultimate fixer. 
