Donald Rumsfeld, the two-time defense secretary who steered America to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, has died at 88.
His office released a statement on Wednesday that said Rumsfeld died surrounded by his family in Taos, New Mexico. A cause of death was not disclosed.
A statement from the family of Donald Rumsfeld: pic.twitter.com/AlKYxVvqgF
— Donald Rumsfeld (@RumsfeldOffice) June 30, 2021
Rumsfeld, a collegiate wrestler, Navy pilot, three-term Illinois congressman, NATO ambassador, White House chief of staff, and drug company executive, was the only person to serve twice as U.S. defense secretary.
A lifelong Republican, Rumsfeld led the Pentagon first in 1975 under President Gerald Ford and then again during the administration of George W. Bush after the 2000 election.
When Rumsfeld took charge of the Pentagon in 2001, he believed his biggest challenge would be to reform the Defense Department’s bloated bureaucracy and transform the U.S. military into a more nimble, agile fighting force.
But the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks eight months later thrust Rumsfeld into the role of a wartime secretary, and he quickly became the most visible and vocal advocate for Bush’s wartime policies.
A believer in strong civilian control of the military, Rumsfeld directed his generals to devise a plan to topple the Taliban within weeks using a relatively small number of U.S. special operations forces allied with Afghan opposition fighters, instead of waiting months to mount a more conventional campaign that relied solely on American military might.
Early in his tenure, Rumsfeld earned rock-star status with frequent Pentagon briefings that became must-see TV.
His masterful handling of reporters was parodied on Saturday Night Live, with Darrell Hammond portraying Rumsfeld as browbeating timid reporters into backing off hard questions.
Rumsfeld’s star began to fade after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when what he had confidently predicted would last no longer than five or six months devolved into a stubborn insurgency that continued for more than a decade.
In the run-up to the war, Rumsfeld was emphatic that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological munitions and an active program to develop nuclear bombs.
“There’s no debate in the world as to whether they have those weapons,” he told reporters in September 2002. “We all know that. A trained ape knows that.”
When looting broke out in Baghdad, “stuff happens,” he told reporters. “It’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”
When it became clear a few months in that U.S. troops were facing a protracted guerrilla war, Rumsfeld downplayed the insurgents as “pockets of dead-enders” and predicted they would be quickly dispatched.
As the Iraq War dragged on, Rumsfeld stubbornly resisted increasing the size of the Army or ramping up the production of mine-resistant armored vehicles to protect American forces from roadside bombs, convinced that in the time it would take to train and equip more troops or to deliver better-armored vehicles, the war would be over and U.S. troops would be leaving.
When questioned by a soldier in Kuwait in 2004 about why U.S. troops had to dig through local landfills for scrap metal to armor their Humvees, Rumsfeld famously answered, “You go to war with the army you have. They’re not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
Rumsfeld lasted six years at the Pentagon before Bush replaced him in 2006 with former CIA Director Robert Gates.
Rumsfeld was born July 9, 1932, in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Princeton University on a scholarship, and after graduating in 1954 received a commission in the Navy, flying seaplanes and serving as a flight instructor.
Elected to Congress to represent Illinois in 1962 at age 30, he was reelected four times and left in 1969 to serve in President Richard Nixon’s Cabinet.
He later became Ford’s chief of staff, and then defense secretary.
Rumsfeld was not a rich man when he left government in 1977, but he made his fortune as the head of G.D. Searle & Co., where he returned the pharmaceutical company to profitability and shepherded a new artificial sweetener, aspartame, better known as NutraSweet or Equal, through the regulatory process.
By the time Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon in 2001, his financial disclosure forms showed his net worth to be between $200 million and $500 million.
Rumsfeld is survived by his wife Joyce, whom he met and dated in high school and married after he graduated college.
Through most of his life, Rumsfeld joked that he was too young to write a book, but in 2011, he wrote Known and Unknown. The memoir is a heavily annotated account of his life and career, with a meticulous recounting and vigorous defense of all his decisions.
The title comes from his famous description during a 2002 Pentagon briefing, in which Rumsfeld opined on the shortcomings of intelligence regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know,” he said.
While some critics at the time accused Rumsfeld of rambling incoherently, he wrote the thought, which was not original to him, stated a simple truth about knowledge, namely that “there are things of which we are so unaware, we don’t even know we’re unaware of them.”
Asked in 2006 as he was preparing to leave the Pentagon how he wanted history to remember him, Rumsfeld joked, “My goodness, better than the local press,” before turning serious.
“I wish I could say that everything we’ve done here has gone perfectly, but that’s not how life works, regrettably. When thousands of people make dozens of difficult decisions on hundreds of pressing issues, for the most part matters that are new and unfamiliar, where there’s no road map, no guidebook that says, ‘Here’s exactly how you should do something.’ The hope has to be not perfection but that most decisions, with the perspective of time, will turn out to be the right ones and that the perspective of history will judge the overwhelming majority of those decisions favorably.”
