Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, 1932-2021

Donald Henry Rumsfeld, who died At 88, he had the unique distinction of being the youngest and oldest man to be U.S. Secretary of Defense. His speeches in this work, separated by a quarter of a century, were shaped by the Cold War and what he later called the “global war on terrorism”. With the orthodoxy challenges of Washington and the comfortable marking of American power projecting abroad, he implemented a worldview with self-confidence that bordered on arrogance.

Critics believe that the lack of will to recover dissent colored the legacy that determined it: helping to convince the president George W Bush After the September 11, 2001 attacks in 2003 to invade Iraq. Rumsfeld, who supported Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iraq in 2001, before joining the government as Bush’s defense secretary in 2001, became the chief animator of the invasion administration. He oversaw the generals in the implementation schedules and ignored the diplomats who demanded that they make detailed post-war planning. Much of the blame then lay with the swift military victory over Saddam when the U.S. turned into a severely ill-prepared counterinsurgency.

Rumsfeld was born in the Chicago area on July 9, 1932, the son of George and Jeanette Rumsfeld. He grew up in the Winnetka district of Chicago, where he became an Eagle Scout and attended New Trier High School. The Rumsfeld family also lived briefly in Coronado, California, during World War II, when George served as a servant in the U.S. Army.

After graduating from Princeton University, he was on the fighting team, Rumsfeld he became a naval pilot in 1954. In the same year he married Joyce Pierson, with whom he had two daughters and a son.

After demobilizing in 1957, he moved to Washington to work as a congressional assistant before spending two years in Chicago as an investment banker. In 1962 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican from Illinois and had three terms in office. He resigned in 1969 to join Richard Nixon’s new administration as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the agency now responsible for managing anti-poverty programs. One of the first hires he made there was Dick Cheney, who later became vice president of the United States and had a major impact on returning his tutor to the Pentagon in 2001.

Rumsfeld advanced in the nation’s capital. In 1971 he was appointed director of the economic stabilization program and two years later was sent to Brussels as a US ambassador to NATO. But Nixon’s resignation took him home in 1974, first to lead President Gerald Ford’s transition team and then as chief of staff to the White House, with deputy Cheney and his successor.

In 1975, at the age of 43, Rumsfeld became the youngest secretary of defense ever. The circumstances of the appointment were not beneficial. James Schlesinger, his predecessor, was ousted by Ford after repeatedly discussing Henry Kissinger, the then secretary of state.

Once installed in the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was proven to be a cunning bureaucrat. He seemed to have inherited a poisoned chalice. Not only was the military in a difficult transition to a voluntarily formed force, it was demoralized as a result of its defeat in the Vietnam War. Moreover, the political tide turned against the increase in defense spending.

He faced these challenges by pushing for more reform of the armed services, the development of the naval missile and the B1 bombing, the prototype that flew as a pilot, more ships for the navy and, of course, a larger budget. He justified his ambitious plans with the threat posed by the former Soviet Union that he demanded nothing less and, in his first year, secured significant extra federal funding.

But he also fell with the military brass. He removed the conservative design of the M-1 tank from above, designed as NATO’s main combat vehicle, emphasizing that it included American and European-sized pistols. And he publicly disciplined General George Brown, the then head of the U.S. military, after a blast without diplomacy, saying the British military was, among other things, a “pathetic sight.”

The democratic victory in the 1976 election prompted Rumsfeld to pursue a career in the private sector. He was the CEO and later CEO of GD Searle of the Chicago Pharmaceutical Company before directing General Instrument Corp., a pioneer of high-definition television. From 1997 to 2001 he was president of Gilead Sciences, a U.S. physician known for its HIV medications.

Although he did not return to the cabinet in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan or his longtime rival George HW Bush, he continued to be an influential spokesman on security issues, and when Reagan’s second term ended in 1988, he was the same candidate for president. Appointed in 1998 by the Republican leadership of Congress to chair the ballistic missile commission, he concluded that the threat posed by “harsh” states, such as North Korea, was serious. His report was based on a case approved by George W Bush in 2001 for a national missile defense system. He argued in public that Saddam should be removed by force if necessary.

The return of the Pentagon in 2001 did not go well at first. He immediately ordered a thorough and extensive study of the structure of the U.S. armed forces, but the subsequent consultation process alarmed the Conservative army.

Rumsfeld did not want to push for a bigger defense budget. He was hampered in a way by the fact that the new Bush administration intended to make deep tax cuts and did not want to impose a major increase in departmental spending. But his adherence was not popular in some right-wing circles. In the summer of the first year, some scientists were calling for a replacement. That changed with the September 11, 2001 attacks. After a plane entered the Pentagon, he ran out of his office to try to rescue those trapped, gaining admiration among the staff.

Rumsfeld will be remembered not only for his bureaucratic skill, but also for his aphorisms. He admitted in 2002 that the Iraqi government was “known” and “unknown” about its program for weapons of mass destruction, although it was initially mocked, but became part of the political lexicon of leaders with complex issues.

Rumsfeld resigned in 2006 after Republicans took over from Republicans in the ongoing public election in the face of the Iraq war. He largely strayed from public life, but published two books – a 2011 memoir entitled Known and unknown and the 2013 advisory volume Rumsfeld’s rules: leadership lessons in business, politics, war, and life. He also took part in it Documentary by Errol Morris about his life.

In his later years, he released a mobile gaming app called Churchill Solitaire, based on the version of the card game played by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Six months before his death, he wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post along with nine other former U.S. defense secretaries, warning that the military should not play a role in Donald Trump’s efforts to block the presidency of Joe Biden.