June 22, 2006

One of the Great Public Servants of Our Time...

...our Secretary of Defense is one of the great public servants of our time, Donald Rumsfeld. I've heard it suggested on occasion that Don might even be the best Secretary of Defense we've ever had. Well, he's pretty close. (Laughter.) But without question Don does hold a very special distinction because, after all, he is the only man to serve as Secretary of Defense in two different centuries. (Laughter.)

Everyone here knows I've worked closely with Don for many years, and that my career would not have been the same but for the confidence he placed in me a long time ago. I have always considered him to be the very ideal of a public servant -- a man of rectitude, loyalty, and integrity. He asks a great deal of those who work for him, but never more than he demands of himself. Throughout the military and indeed throughout the country, you'll find people who have never met Don Rumsfeld, but who look to him as a role model. And those of us who know Don are extremely fortunate to have his friendship and all that goes with it -- the wisdom, the humor, and the great personal decency in the man.

Not long ago, Gerald Ford himself said that President Bush made a wise choice in Don Rumsfeld, because he was, "extremely well suited to take on this challenge and contend with a bureaucracy that has a built-in resistance to change." President Ford continued, "Successfully carrying out these missions, against stiff resistance takes someone with a certain amount of steel."

That "certain amount of steel" is exactly what we've needed in the E Ring of the Pentagon these last five years as the United States of America is a stronger and safer nation thanks to the intellect, the judgment, and the character of Secretary Rumsfeld. With that, I am pleased to present him now. And I give you a great American: Our colleague, our friend, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.

Vice President Dick Cheney, introducing Don Rumsfeld on June 19th.

This intra-St. Michaels stroking is quite charming, if rather on the effusive side. More seriously, however, Don Rumsfeld may well have been remembered as "one of the great public servants of our time", that is, before the Iraq war. Now all his impressive prior service will be but a footnote, and his abysmal bungling of the Iraq conflict will be front and center of any historical treatment of his career. Rumsfeld is likely too hubris-ridden to understand this, and Cheney too blind (and/or perhaps guilty of too enthusiastic Ford-era nostalgia). But history will bring a keener lens to it all. And it won't be pretty.

UPDATE: Reader JEB writes in:

I really think study of Sec. Rumsfeld's previous tenure at the Pentagon is worthwhile for those seeking to understand his performance over the last few years. Where you see hubris influencing the substance of policy, I see a focus on controlling the making of policy. What counts for Rumsfeld is primarily the bureaucratic battle, not the policy that results from its aftermath -- which could be a radical policy, or no policy, depending on the circumstances. Cheney thinks the same way. This has all happened before. Rumsfeld's famous clash with Henry Kissinger some 30 years ago was not fundamentally about their different views of the Soviet Union; it was about a policy process that Kissinger had dominated during the Watergate period, a dominance Rumsfeld was determined to end. The substantive result -- which was that the most important aspects of American foreign policy ground to a halt during 1976 -- was secondary. So has been the ongoing battle against the Iraqi insurgency, and the marching in place with regard to Afghanistan too for that matter. Rumsfeld got engaged in moving the intelligence community outside the Pentagon to the sidelines in the campaign against terrorism, and was willing to battle to keep State (and the UN, which goes without saying) on the sidelines in Iraq. The mission was accomplished as far as he was concerned when those battles were won. So also has the struggle over how to handle detainees been from Rumsfeld's point of view a matter of holding onto bureaucratic turf, and only secondarily about anything else. If, say, the CIA had had control of all detainees from the beginning and been accused of abuses, I have not the slightest doubt that Rumsfeld would from the Pentagon have been making all the arguments you have about American honor and the rule of law. Realistically, the preoccupation with position and control is as central to the lives of appointed officials as the preoccupation with ensuring reelection is to elected officials. It just goes with the territory. If it is the main thing that goes with the territory, though, you can wind up with an official unworthy of public confidence -- which, I agree with you, is what we have in Rumsfeld now. It is also what we had 30 years ago.

An equally damning assessment, albeit from a different vantage point. Don't get me wrong. No self-respecting Washington policy baron isn't going to care about expanding and protecting his turf. That goes without saying. But when that becomes the end all and be all, you lose perspective. And you risk doing the public (in Rumsfeld's case not only all of us, but also millions of Iraqis and Afghanis), a huge disservice. In the single-minded pursuit of bureaucratic omnipotence, particularly when your policy predilections are misguided to begin with, you can cause great harm. (One quibble with JEB's note. I disagree that, had the CIA been in charge of detainee policy, Rumsfeld would have been making arguments to preserve Geneva-compliance across all classes of combatants. This wouldn't gel well with the Princeton jock Jacksonian schtick he's carefully cultivated over the years, you know, standing 8 hours a day and all that cool, manly stuff). Posted by Gregory at June 22, 2006 02:41 AM