- Rumsfeld, Donald.
Known and Unknown.
New York: Sentinel, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-59523-067-6.
-
In his career in public life and the private sector, spanning more
than half a century, the author was:
- A Naval aviator, reaching the rank of Captain.
- A Republican member of the House of Representatives
from Illinois spanning the Kennedy, Johnson, and
Nixon administrations.
- Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity and
the Economic Stabilization Program in the Nixon
administration, both agencies he voted against
creating while in Congress.
- Ambassador to NATO in Brussels.
- White House Chief of Staff for Gerald Ford.
- Secretary of Defense in the Ford administration, the
youngest person to have ever held that office.
- CEO of G. D. Searle, a multinational pharmaceutical
company, which he arranged to be sold to Monsanto.
- Special Envoy to the Middle East during the Reagan
administration.
- National chairman of Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign.
- Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration,
the oldest person to have ever held that office.
This is an extraordinary trajectory through life, and Rumsfeld's
memoir is correspondingly massive: 832 pages in the hardcover
edition. The parts which will be most extensively dissected and
discussed are those dealing with his second stint at DOD, and
the contentious issues regarding the Afghanistan and Iraq wars,
treatment of detainees, interrogation methods, and
other issues which made him a lightning rod during the administration
of Bush fils. While it was interesting
to see his recollection of how these consequential decisions were
made, documented by extensive citations of contemporary records, I
found the overall perspective of how decision-making was done over
his career most enlightening. Nixon, Ford, and Bush all had very different
ways of operating their administrations, all of which were very
unlike those of an organisation such as NATO or a private
company, and Rumsfeld, who experienced all of them in a senior management
capacity, has much wisdom to share about what works and what
doesn't, and how one must adapt management style and the flow of
information to the circumstances which obtain in each structure.
Many supportive outside observers of the G. W. Bush presidency were
dismayed at how little effort was made by the administration to
explain its goals, strategy, and actions to the public. Certainly,
the fact that it was confronted with a hostile legacy media which
often seemed to cross the line from being antiwar to rooting for
the other side didn't help, but Rumsfeld, the consummate insider, felt
that the administration forfeited opportunity after opportunity to
present its own case, even by releasing source documents which would
in no way compromise national security but show the basis upon which
decisions were made in the face of the kind of ambiguous and incomplete
information which confronts executives in all circumstances.
The
author's Web site provides a massive
archive of source documents cited in the book, along with a copy of the
book's end notes which links to them. Authors, this is how it's
done! A
transcript
of an extended interview with the author is available; it was hearing this
interview which persuaded me to buy the book. Having read it, I recommend
it to anybody who wishes to comprehend how difficult it is to be in a position
where one must make decisions in a fog of uncertainty, knowing the
responsibility for them will rest solely with the decider, and that
not to decide is a decision in itself which may have even more dire consequences.
As much as Bush's national security team was reviled at the time, one had
the sense that adults were in charge.
A well-produced Kindle edition is available,
with the table of contents, footnotes, and source citations all properly
linked to the text. One curiosity in the Kindle edition is that in the last
40% of the book the word “after” is capitalised everywhere
it appears, even in the middle of a sentence. It seems that somebody
in the production process accidentally hit “global replace”
when attempting to fix a single instance. While such fat-finger errors
happen all the time whilst editing documents, it's odd that a prestigious
publisher (Sentinel is a member of the Penguin Group) would not catch
such a blunder in a high profile book which went on to top the
New York Times best seller list.
April 2011 