The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld
By Roger Morris, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on February 21, 2007, Printed on February 21, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/48085/
"... the finest Secretary of Defense this nation has ever had." -- Vice President Dick Cheney
"The past was not predictable when it started." -- Donald Rumsfeld
On
a farewell flight to Baghdad in early December 2006, the departing
Secretary of Defense reminisced about his start in politics more than
forty years before. Aides leaned in to listen intently, but came away
with no memorable revelations. It hardly mattered. As usual with this
man who dominated government as no cabinet officer before him --
including the power-ravenous Henry Kissinger he so despised and outdid
in effect, if not celebrity -- authentic history and Don Rumsfeld's
version of it bore little resemblance.
There was portent in those
beginnings. He came out of an affluent Chicago suburb in the 1950s with
brusque confidence and usable contacts at Princeton, among them Frank
Carlucci, a future Defense Secretary of mediocre mind, yet the iron
conceit and shrewd fealty far more effectual in government than
intellect or sensibility. After college and two years as a Navy pilot,
Rumsfeld did politic stints as a Capitol Hill intern and Republican
campaign aide, and by twenty-nine, back in Chicago in investment
banking, was running for Congress.
As with much to come, a darker
thread lay beneath the surface from the start. In a Republican primary
tantamount to election, he was outwardly the boyish, speak-no-evil,
underfunded, underdog challenger of an old party stalwart set to
inherit the open seat. In fact, he was generously financed by wealthy
friends, while his operatives -- including Jeb Stuart Magruder of later
Watergate infamy -- furtively harried and smeared his opponent, using
tactics never traced to Rumsfeld.
He went to Washington in
December 1962 a handsome, square-jawed, safe-seat tribune from the
North Shore's lakeside preserves, epitomized by the leafy estates of
Winnetka and high-end Evanston. The old Thirteenth District of Illinois
was one of the wealthiest in the nation and had been smoothly in
Republican grip for most of a century. In the House, Rumsfeld was soon
seen by some as he always saw himself -- a prodigy in the dull ranks of
his Party.
Then, as afterward, he had no authentic qualifications
or independent achievements. But that was always masked by the same
muscular, aggressive style he took onto the mat as an Ivy League
wrestler -- "sharp elbows," a meeker, envious colleague called it -- as
well as by the flaccid banality of most of the GOP in the 1960s. The
Republican Party Rumsfeld strode into was already caught between the
wasting death of Eisenhower worldliness and moderation (with Richard
Nixon's haunted succession in the wings) and a fitful right-wing urge
to seize control that, in little more than a decade, would deliver the
Reagan Reaction.
Rumsfeld's own rightist mentality, his New
Deal-phobic corporatist cant and Cold War chauvinism, came dressed more
in modish vigor than telltale substance -- and he was already attracted
by a tough-minded layman's zeal for the era's pre-micro-processing but
grandly prospering military technology. Like most of his generation
born in the early 1930s, the scrap-drive, victory-bond children of
World War II who came to govern the postwar world and would be the
decisive elders of the post-9/11 era, he had no doubt about the natural
nobility of America's sway or the invincibility of its arms; all this
made ever sleeker, ever more irresistible by the demonstrable twin
deities of American capitalism -- technology and "modern" management.
That,
after all, was the unquestioned, unquestioning faith of North Shore
fathers and other successes like them across the nation. That was the
world, according to postwar Princeton, as well as Harvard Business
School. That was the supposed genius of future Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara's duly quantified Ford Motor Company as well as his
Vietnam-era "systems analysis" Pentagon, and so much more.
In the
early 1960s, that received world ended just beyond the suites and
suburbs. Given America's moral and material omnipotence, its exemplary
excellence (so evident on the North Shore), the remainder of the planet
required no particular exploration, knowledge, or historical-political
understanding, nor did such men need to have the slightest recognition
of America's own non-mythologized past. Alert decision-makers, busy
with the numbered bottom-line results, had no time for such "academic"
ephemera.
When money or force needed to be applied to Asians,
Arabs, Latins, or Africans, a crisp briefing by some underling who had
read the necessary memos would always do. Caught up as we all have been
in Rumsfeld's kinetic, churlish descent into the bloody chaos of his
Iraq, it has been easy to neglect how richly cultural it all was from
the beginning -- America's haunted half-century of vast might and
presumption set beside our still vaster ignorance and irresponsibility.
It was in 1963, during Don Rumsfeld's first months in Congress, that
the Iraqi Ba'ath Party -- since 1959 recruited, funded, marshaled and
directed by the CIA, and trailing a twenty-six-year-old Tikriti street
thug named Saddam Hussein (himself a CIA-paid assassin) along with
lists of hundreds of left-leaning Iraqi political figures and
professionals to be murdered after the coup -- seized power in Baghdad.
On
Capitol Hill, the spirited young Republican legislator was then
absorbed in exhilarating new appropriations in aeronautics and
weaponry. His trademark clipped fervor and biting sarcasm in questions
and speeches already held a hint of the Pentagon E-Ring canon four
decades later: the superpower military as classic wrestler -- lithe,
superbly equipped, swift to pin a dazed foe, dominant beyond doubt, and
with garlands all around. It was only a matter -- he began to learn
early from helpful briefings and testimony by military-industrial
executives -- of making the commanders (the branch managers, after all)
change their sluggish old ways. The by-word would be: Procure to
prevail. So superior was new technology and the management that went
with it that it scarcely mattered who the competitor might be. In those
long-gone days, in obscure Washington hearings unheard, in colloquies
before empty chambers, there were the first faint drums of distant
disaster in the Hindu Kush, Mesopotamia, and beyond.
Of course,
in the 1960s, Rumsfeld's ardor for a high-tech military was only
stirring, a minor dalliance compared to his preoccupation with
advancement. While few seemed to notice, the brash freshman made an
extraordinary rush at the lumbering House. In 1964, before the end of
his first term, he captained a revolt against GOP Leader Charles
Halleck, a Dwight D. Eisenhower loyalist prone to bipartisanship and
skepticism of both Pentagon budgets and foreign intervention. By only
six votes in the Republican Caucus, Rumsfeld managed to replace the
folksy Indianan with Michigan's Gerald Ford.
In the inner
politics of the House, the likeable, agreeable, unoriginal Ford was
always more right-wing than his benign post-Nixon, and now posthumous,
presidential image would have it. Richard Nixon called Ford "a wink and
a nod guy," whose artlessness and integrity left him no real match for
the steelier, more cunning figures around him. To push Ford was one of
those darting Capitol Hill insider moves that seemed, at the time, to
win Rumsfeld only limited, parochial prizes -- choice committee seats,
a rung on the leadership ladder, useful allies.
Taken with
Rumsfeld's burly style that year was Kansas Congressman Robert
Ellsworth, a wheat-field small-town lawyer of decidedly modest gifts
but outsized ambitions and close connections to Nixon. "Just another
Young Turk thing," one of their House cohorts casually called the
toppling of Halleck.
It seems hard now to exaggerate the endless
sequels to this small but decisive act. The lifting of the honest but
mediocre Ford higher into line for appointment as vice president amid
the ruin of President Richard Nixon and his Vice President, Spiro
Agnew; Ford's lackluster, if relatively harmless, interval in the Oval
Office and later as Party leader with the abject passing of the GOP to
Ronald Reagan in 1980; Ellsworth's boosting of Rumsfeld into prominent
but scandal-immune posts under Nixon; and then, during Ford's
presidency, Rumsfeld's reward, his elevation to White House Chief of
Staff, and with him the rise of one of his aides from the Nixon era, a
previously unnoticed young Wyoming reactionary named Dick Cheney; next,
in 1975-1976, the first Rumsfeld tenure at a Vietnam-disgraced but
impenitent Pentagon that would shape his fateful second term after
2001; and eventually, of course, the Rumsfeld-Cheney monopoly of power
in a George W. Bush White House followed by their catastrophic policies
after 9/11 -- all derived from making decent, diffident Gerry Ford
Minority Leader that forgotten winter of 1964.
Burial party
They
were Nixon men. Rumsfeld and Cheney rose via the half-shunned political
paternity of a cynical president who abided and used some he
distrusted, even came to deplore. Brought into Nixon's 1968
presidential campaign through Ellsworth's influence, Rumsfeld fell into
an opportune role -- spying on the Democratic Convention in Chicago,
which exploded in the infamous "police riot" against antiwar
demonstrators that tore apart the Democrats and lent the spy's reports
unexpected gravity. (Among faces in the crowd watching the mayhem was
another onlooker out of a comfortable Republican suburb, a
twenty-one-year-old Wellesley student from Park Ridge named Hillary
Rodham.) Though he gained attention in the Democrats' disaster,
Rumsfeld ran up against Nixon's equally barbed campaign manager, Bob
Haldeman and, despite their election victory, returned to Congress in
1969 without reward.
Bipartisan collusion rescued him. By 1968,
President Lyndon Johnson's four year-old Office of Economic Opportunity
(OEO), the heralded antipoverty program with its grassroots "Community
Action" and its Legal Services for the poor, had become a potential
success story -- and thus anathema for powerful Democrats as well as
Republicans. Denied a 1964 cigarette tax (that would have funded it
securely) by the tobacco lobby, then starved by the sinking of
resources into the maw of the Vietnam War, OEO was ultimately doomed
when the nascent political, economic, and legal assertiveness it
nurtured among the thirty to fifty million dispossessed threatened the
hold of vested-interest donors and the mingled power bases of governors
and mayors, congressmen and legislators of both parties. As early as
1966 they began trooping in numbers through the Old Executive Office
Building -- liberal and conservative but uniformly self-preserving, the
single party of incumbent power -- to lobby Vice President Hubert
Humphrey, who planned to cut the program when he himself became
president.
With Nixon's victory over Humphrey, OEO's death became
a certainty, though a tough infighter was needed as director to take
out the agency's life support systems. Nixon first ignored the
appointment; then, later in 1969, at the urging of ranking Senate and
House Democrats as well as Ford and Ellsworth, named Rumsfeld to the
post. He, in turn, chose as his deputy Princeton pal Frank Carlucci,
already off to a buccaneering start in the Foreign Service amid early
1960s CIA coups and assassinations in the Congo. The writ was plain. On
Capitol Hill, they called Rumsfeld "the undertaker."
So it was
that a slight, already balding 28 year-old Republican Congressional
intern, Richard Bruce Cheney, soon steered to the new OEO Director a
12-page memo setting out how to run the agency in a way that would kill
what they all deplored. Cheney had failed at Yale. Returning to his
native Casper to work as a telephone lineman, he eventually went to
college in Wyoming and, avoiding the Vietnam draft like the plague, on
to graduate school and a DC internship meant to satisfy his ambitious
fiancée Lynn and to retrieve a white-collar career. Like so many in the
neo-conservative swarm he came to head after 2001, Cheney brought to
public life no intellectual distinction or curiosity, and certainly no
knowledge of the wider nation and world. Washington in 1968 marked the
first time he had lived in a town of more than 200,000.
Over his
glacial insularity, though, lay a reassuringly phlegmatic manner. In
Washington, he found he had an instinct for the quiet, diligent
subordinate's exploitation of institutional indolence, and he brought
with him a clenched-teeth, right-wing animus that more visible
Republicans judged impolitic to express but impressive in a backroom
staff man.
"Dick said what they all thought but didn't say
aloud," a Hill aide (and later Congressman) recalled of often raw
conversations about money, race, partisanship, and particularly
Cheney's angry, acid scorn for college antiwar protests that gave
reassuring voice to the publicly muted abhorrence of Republican
politicians. Having earlier rejected him as a House intern, Rumsfeld
now made the young right-winger his key personal assistant at OEO,
where he proved devotedly efficient. The hiring brought three future
Secretaries of Defense -- Rumsfeld, Carlucci, and Cheney -- into the
same office, toiling to abort the unwanted embryonic empowerment of the
poor.
When they became celebrities, there would be much written
about how the styles of Rumsfeld and Cheney meshed - Rummy's sheer
brio, his relishing combat and the limelight, his free-wheeling way of
sparking ideas and decisions helter-skelter (his famous routine of
dropping to the floor for one-arm push-ups, a tic that a
bureaucrat-benumbed Washington media always found fetching); and
steady, backroom Dick, the methodical organizer, the modest detail man
seeing to practical execution.
Close up, the bond was even
deeper. Across an age gap of almost a decade, despite the distance
between charged and calm, North Shore and Casper, Princeton and
Wyoming, country club Congressman and lumpen-proletarian repairman,
they shared something rarely then so openly admitted on the right: an
abhorrence of the liberations sweeping the 1960s, not just the right's
pet scourges of bureaucracy, crime, drugs, social fragmentation, and
(however suitably coded) racial integration, but the unsettling ferment
of newfound freedoms and honesty, the defiance of cultural and
institutional oppressions -- especially by minorities and women. They
detested Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the way it seemed to advance
beyond the New Deal and Progressivism at the expense of settled money
and power.
Altogether it was a moment of hurtling change that
many saw as ominous weakness and laxity, of new public programs for the
long-excluded, which the world of Rumsfeld and Cheney imagined as
"socialism." For them, the balancing regulation of long-dominant
business power was nothing short of "tyranny"; the new arrangements of
race and class, the myriad threats of sheer liberty in a more equitable
society and economy, were menacing.
Whatever their other ties,
Rumsfeld and Cheney were two of the era's visceral reactionaries in the
classic sense of the term. Musing with younger aides on one of his last
days in the White House, Johnson came up with a telling term for their
ilk. "The haters," he called them. "They hate what they can't run any
more" was the way he put it. The calamity Rumsfeld and Cheney later
wrought in American foreign policy traced not only to profound
ignorance and immense, careless pretense about the world at large, but
in some part to a four-decade-old kindred fear and loathing at home.
OEO
began the Rumsfeld myths. "He saved it," Carlucci would blithely tell
oblivious post-9/11 reporters hardly apt to check the actual fate of
the agency. Carlucci would spin an image of an ever-energetic Rumsfeld
taking up the cause of the needy, streamlining and fortifying the
laggard agency despite the funeral that had been ordered. It was a
blasé postmortem lie. Community Action, Head Start, VISTA, Job Corps,
and most decisively Legal Services (whose leadership Rumsfeld and
Cheney together decapitated in 1970) -- one by one, each of these
beleaguered efforts was stifled or sloughed off to political sterility.
This mission, at least, was accomplished. By the time the burial was
complete -- with the agency's quiet extinction in 1973, unmourned by
the powers of either party -- the undertaker had moved on to higher
office.
In 1971, Nixon had been stymied in his plan to use
Rumsfeld in a cabinet shakeup and so took him into the White House as a
domestic affairs "counselor." The Rumsfeld White House interval over
the next two years is captured on Nixon's infamous secret tapes. With
his ever-aggressive, if not megalomaniacal, 40 year-old aide, the 60
year-old president adopts an avuncular tone, while Rumsfeld angles
brazenly to supplant Henry Kissinger as a special envoy on Vietnam or
even to replace Vice President Spiro Agnew on the 1972 ticket.
Patiently, yet with audible derision and occasional incredulity, Nixon
suggests seasoning in more modest positions. Thus, after the
president's 1972 reelection triumph, an eager Rummy would be made
ambassador to NATO, spoils previously in the hands of their mutual
friend Ellsworth, who urged Rumsfeld for the job.
It all yielded
more myths, more confected history by a submissive, uninformed media
profiling post-9/11 power. There would be the image of Rumsfeld as
White House "dove" on Vietnam, when his bent was exactly the opposite;
or that Nixon, it would be claimed, saw him as uniquely in touch with
the diversity of the country, especially the young -- when the reality
was that Rumsfeld, having served an impatient three terms from his
lavishly unrepresentative rotten borough of Winnetka wealth, with his
generic contempt for the 1960s and his part at OEO suppressing the
emergence of millions of the young poor, was anything but.
At the
time, privately at least, his grasping shallowness led to withering --
now long-forgotten -- verdicts from knowing witnesses. Even a jaded
Nixon would eventually deplore him as "a man without idealism." His
extensive experience with despots giving the judgment added weight,
Henry Kissinger came to think Rumsfeld the "most ruthless" official he
had ever known.
In a Washington that routinely hides its ugly
inner truths of character and incompetence, none of it mattered. Away
at NATO in Brussels, frustrated by multinational diplomacy but
expanding his own sense of political-military mastery, Rumsfeld managed
to escape the Watergate incriminations of 1973-74. Instead, he seemed
like a fresh face when Gerald Ford succeeded the disgraced Nixon in
August 1974. Anxious to be rid of Nixon co-conspirators like then-White
House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, but facing a period of rule with
inadequate crony aides, the earnest new president called back clean,
hard-charging Don to be his chief of staff. Rumsfeld promptly brought
in Cheney, just on the verge of vanishing mercifully into private
business -- and the rest is history.
Massacres
Barely
a year after moving next to the Oval Office (and contrary to Ford's
innocent, prideful recollection decades later that it was his own
idea), Don and Dick characteristically engineered their "Halloween
Massacre." Subtly exploiting Ford's unease (and Kissinger's jealous
rivalry) with cerebral, acerbic Defense Secretary James Schlesinger,
they managed to pass the Pentagon baton to Rumsfeld at only 43, and
slot Cheney, suddenly a wunderkind at 34, in as presidential Chief of Staff.
In
the process, they even maneuvered Ford into humbling Kissinger by
stripping him of his long-held dual role as National Security Advisor
as well as Secretary of State, giving a diffident Brent Scowcroft the
National Security Council job and further enhancing both Cheney's
inherited power at the White House and Rumsfeld's as Kissinger's chief
cabinet rival. A master schemer himself, Super K, as an adoring media
called him, would be so stunned by the Rumsfeld-Cheney coup that he
would call an after-hours séance of cronies at a safe house in Chevy
Chase to plot a petulant resignation as Secretary of State, only to
relent, overcome as usual by the majesty of his own gifts.
With
such past trophies on their shelves, it would never be a contest for
Rumsfeld and Cheney after 2001. That fall of 1975, 29 year-old George
W. Bush, the lineage's least fortunate son, was in Midland, Texas,
partying heartily and scrounging for some role on the rusty fringes of
the panhandle oil business.
By December 1975 having pushed aside
Watergate-appointed Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, the longtime
abomination of the Republican right, Rumsfeld was already positioning
himself to be Ford's 1976 running mate -- and eventual successor. But
that spring Ronald Reagan came so close to wresting the nomination from
Ford, with primary victories in North Carolina and Texas, that the
President's other advisors, many of whom detested Rumsfeld anyway,
sprang to appease the Reagan camp by persuading the President to put
choleric right-wing Kansas Senator Bob Dole on the ticket instead.
Among
those advisors was George H.W. Bush, then-CIA Director. (He had gotten
the job thanks to a cynical recommendation from Rumsfeld, calculating
that to put Bush at the scandal-ridden agency would eliminate him as a
potential rival). Another was Bush's onetime Texas campaign aide, a
moneyed corporate lawyer and would-be power-broker from Houston, and
now an obscure Commerce Department official who became Ford's 1976
campaign manager, James Baker III. It was an adroit back-corridor move,
the sort Rumsfeld himself had been practicing so adeptly, and it
embittered him for years toward his old patron Ford as well as Bush,
Baker, and others -- one more wisp of a seamy, unseen history, of
customary Republican cannibalism that wafted ironically over the last
days of 2006 with Baker's Iraq Study Group and the Ford funeral.
Designs
on the Oval Office thwarted but by no means given up, Rumsfeld spent
scarcely fifteen months at the Pentagon in 1975-1976, but they were
quietly, ominously historic. It was an interval, however brief, that
proved far more significant and premonitory than commonly portrayed. In
many ways, it both foreshadowed 9/11 and prepared the way for the
fateful sequel to it.
At every turn, the new SecDef pulled policy
to the right -- aligning Washington even more egregiously than usual
with reactionary regimes in Asia and Latin America, smothering the
nation's only serious attempt at intelligence reform, beginning the
demolition of détente with Russia that would climax in its extinction
under Jimmy Carter. At home and abroad, Rumsfeld seeded the Middle East
for future crises and, even more insidiously, joined the military
leadership in cravenly abandoning the post-Vietnam battlefield of
historical understanding and institutional change.
In his first
days in office, he quickly allied himself with the longtime (but until
then vain) efforts of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stall the pending
Strategic Arms Control Agreement with Moscow. He also pushed Kissinger
and Ford into one of the more disgraceful acts of that presidency
(discreetly ignored in the recent Ford retrospectives) -- the assuring
of the Indonesian military junta that U.S. support and arms would
continue to flow, despite the brutal suppression about to be unleashed
on East Timor.
It was only a taste of the Rumsfeld preference for
uniformed right-wing tyrants, indulged over the next year in an ever
closer Defense Department liaison with military dictatorships in Latin
America, most notably through Operation Condor, joint covert actions
involving several regimes, among them Gen. Augusto Pinochet's Chile and
the Argentine military dictatorship, with Pentagon attaches and
intelligence advisors looking on approvingly. The result was a plague
of kidnappings, disappearances, and assassinations throughout the
Hemisphere, including, in 1976, the brazen car bomb murder of former
Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American colleague on
Massachusetts Avenue in downtown Washington. Unfailingly backed and
expanded by Rumsfeld, the collusion with Indonesian and Latin American
despots underwrote more than a decade of some of the most savage
repressions of the second half of the twentieth century.
The
customary Pentagon-State Department bureaucratic war Rumsfeld waged
against Kissinger (with a vengeance fired by the Defense Secretary's
presidential ambitions) involved a furtive alliance with Capitol Hill's
ubër-hard-line Democrat, Armed Services Committee Chairman (and
Kissinger nemesis) Henry "Scoop" Jackson. A Washington State backwoods,
shoreline-county prosecutor, he had become the "Senator from Boeing."
Jackson's Russophobia, demagoguery on arms control, and zealous backing
of Israel (especially on the then-charged issue of Jewish emigration
from the USSR) would land Rumsfeld in the milieu of the Israeli lobby,
already formidable if only a kernel of the special interest colossus it
would later become.
Jackson's Cold War mania was fattening
military budgets along with the requisite Puget Sound contracts, not to
speak of the senator's own war chest for a 1976 presidential run, and
all this was being fomented by a bustling, pretentious, pear-shaped
young Jackson aide named Richard Perle. Perle's somber, if oily, manner
hid his own considerable lack of intellect or knowledge about either
Russia or the Middle East, but his hard-line anti-Soviet and Zionist
zeal gave him, as Jackson's policy broker in the politics of the
moment, a cachet and following far beyond his meager substance.
Rumsfeld's collusion with Jackson would thus introduce him to some of
the still marginal publicists, ideologues, and Washington hangers-on
who would take the term neoconservative as the label for their
career-plumping chauvinism and, less audibly, their tragically
intermingled allegiances to right-wings in both the U.S. and Israel.
In
Rumsfeld's early tie to this wanna-be-establishment claque were omens
of the history they would make together after 2001. It was his "sharp
elbows" that were thrown to create the notorious "Team B," a collection
of incipient neocons and Russophobes in and out of government,
including Paul Wolfowitz. They were summoned to offer a fearsome
analysis of Soviet capabilities and intentions that would be an
alternative to comparatively unfrightening (and accurate) CIA
assessments being attacked by Ronald Reagan and his right-wing minions
in the 1976 campaign. In this surrender to election-year demagoguery
could be found the hands of the White House and the elder Bush at the
CIA (more Ford regime shame politely forgotten in the mournful, anxiety
ridden, anyone-compared-to-George-W. fin de 2006 moment), but Rumsfeld's role was crucial -- and the consequences historic.
The
absurdity and ideological corruption of Team B's "analysis" of the
Soviet bogeyman (along with a desired future confrontation with China,
a nakedly racist, essentially right-wing Israeli view of the Arab
world, and a refusal to face the Vietnam defeat) would be plain even
then; though decades later, the post-Soviet archives would definitively
reveal it for the fraud it was. As it was meant to, it fed the massive
arms buildup of the Reagan 80s, and with it the engorging of the
military-industrial colossus that, in turn, filled Republican campaign
coffers. And all of this, of course, including the ensuing distortions
in domestic priorities, would pave the way for Rumsfeld's eventual
return to power.
The "Team B" scandal also foreshadowed an
insidious post-9/11 plague, the right-wing assault on relatively
non-ideological national intelligence that was to lead to the blatant
substitution of alternative "intelligence" operations in Rumsfeld's
Pentagon and Cheney's vice-presidential office (full-time versions of
"Team B," as it were), as well as the coercion and corruption of
conventional CIA channels.
In 1976, Rumsfeld worked assiduously
to undercut any intelligence that challenged his right-wing bias and,
with Cheney helpfully in the background at the White House, fought hard
to drown any meaningful intelligence reforms after mid-1970s hearings
chaired by Senator Frank Church and Congressman Otis Pike offered
shocking revelations of CIA covert-operations abuses. The resulting
half-measures and truncated accountability sent unmistakable signals
through Washington, setting the stage for various CIA rampages of the
1980s under Reagan campaign manager William Casey (and one of Casey's
ambitious, agreeable aides named Robert Gates). The direct consequences
in blowback and loss of professional integrity would be felt for
decades to come.
Then, there was the Middle East. In mid-1976,
exiled Palestinians allied with a Lebanese nationalist coalition to
politically and economically challenge the traditional privileged rule
of the West's Christian-dominated client regime in Beirut. Faced with
this, the Secretary of Defense was decisive in the secret US-Israeli
instigation of a Syrian military intervention meant to thwart both the
Palestinians and the Lebanese rebels. Rumsfeld muscled the covert
action through, despite Kissinger's initial hesitation. It ushered in a
three-decade-long Syrian occupation of Lebanon, with relentless
machinations in the Levant involving the Israeli intelligence service,
the Mossad, the CIA and, beginning under Rumsfeld as never before, the
Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Already significant
in the 1950s, the CIA-Mossad collaboration in Lebanon and elsewhere
certainly pre-dated Rumsfeld, and crucial decisions in the deepening
collusion would come after him. But the 1976 intervention, which he
backed so strongly, would take the complicity to a new level, with a
twisting sequel of tumult and intrigue that directly paved the way for
the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and thus for the eventual rise of
Hizbullah.
At the same time, Rumsfeld avidly stepped up ongoing
U.S. arms shipments to the Shah of Iran's corrupt, U.S.-installed
oligarchic tyranny -- its torture-ready SAVAK secret police intimately
allied with the Mossad, the CIA and the DIA. In 1976, Rumsfeld also
pressed the sale to the waning Shah of up to eight nuclear reactors
with fuel and lasers capable of enriching uranium to weapons grade
levels. Ford was prudently uneasy at first, but relented under
unanimous pressure from his men. Cheney backed Rumsfeld from the start
in urging an Iranian nuclear capability; and, in this at least, they
were joined by their arch-rival Kissinger, ever solicitous of his
admirer the Shah, ever oblivious to internal Islamic politics - he
himself primed by an obscure but vocal thirty-three-year-old State
Department aide named Paul Wolfowitz.
At its Rumsfeldian peak in
1976, U.S. weapons and intelligence trafficking with the rotting
Iranian imperial regime took up the time of some eight hundred Pentagon
officers. Barely two years later, the Shah's regime would fall to the
Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution, in part under the sheer weight
and waste of the Pentagon's patronage. Like CIA-DIA connivance with
SAVAK -- which included coordinated assassinations of Iranian
opposition political figures or clerics and, in 1977, even Khomeini's
son -- Pentagon complicity with the hated old order made all but
inevitable the widespread anti-American sentiment in Iran that would in
the future be so effectively exploited by the Islamic regime's
propaganda. Detonating in the 1979 seizure of U.S. embassy hostages in
Tehran, popular Iranian hostility would burn out of a history of
intervention and intrigue few Americans ever knew the slightest thing
about.
In this way, Rumsfeld and others, including Gates and his
slightly mad patron Casey at the CIA, would all, in some degree, become
policy godfathers of the mullahs' regime in Tehran as well as of
Hizbullah.
"The Dark Ages"
Even more costly would be
the toll the Rumsfeld interregnum would exact deep inside the American
military. However brief, Rumsfeld's mid-1970s rule over the Defense
Department proved, in certain respects, the most crucial moment at the
Pentagon since World War II. In seven tumultuous years from Johnson's
fall to Nixon's, spanned by defeat and de facto mutiny in Vietnam, four
secretaries would troop through Defense, each consumed by war or
politics, none engaging the institution's historic plight.
Taking
office six months after the fall of Saigon, Rumsfeld would inherit the
first truly post-Vietnam military. Fittingly, the institutional crisis
he faced had come into being over the full two decades of his adult
life since the 1950s. By the time he settled in at the Pentagon, that
crisis had already been extensively studied and well documented.
Conclusions were available for the asking -- or hearing or reading --
in any Pentagon ring, at any military post at home or abroad as well as
in Congress, the White House, and the press, not to speak of the
American public. It was unmistakable in the searing experiences of a
war whose dark-soil graves at nearby Arlington were still fresh.
By
any measure, Rumsfeld arrived at a rare, and exceedingly fleeting
moment when the enormous U.S. war machine might have come to terms with
its past, and so the future. The failure to do so -- hardly Rumsfeld's
alone, but his role was decisive -- would haunt America and the world
into the twenty-first century.
Vietnam had laid bare the
malignant decaying of America's armed forces that began in the wake of
their first unwon war in Korea. There was "no substitute for victory,"
General Douglas MacArthur had written a Congressman in the letter that
finally prodded President Harry Truman to fire him as commander of
U.S.-U.N. forces in Korea in 1951. The services nonetheless promptly
found a perfectly reasonable substitute -- for a while -- in the warm
bath of a careerist managerial ethic.
Ruled in World War II by an
ever-growing bureaucracy, ever more inhospitable to the officer as
individual, America's superpower military was, as the Korean War began
in 1950, already a sclerotic giant. "A glandular thing" was how
Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett would describe it a decade later to
John Kennedy. The brutal Korean stalemate, following on the early rout
of a billet-flabby, semi-demobilized occupation army from Japan, and
later the frozen, bloody retreat from a heedless, MacArthur-led advance
to conquer North Korea right up to the Chinese border, added to the
curse.
Faced with the demanding, unnerving politics of a
nuclear-armed peace, a supposedly matchless force met its match in
Korea not just on the battlefield, but in the murky realms of political
sophistication. In response, grappling to redefine its place (and
reassure itself at the same time), the military in the 1950s came to
produce a preponderance of what one critic called the "formlessly
ambitious" officer; one who saw climbing the military ladder like
ascent in any other corporate culture. To a blight that Charles de
Gaulle once deplored in his French Army as "solely careerism," the
post-Korea U.S. military added the fetish and pseudoscience of
"management" -- warriors astride desks, commanding paper flow and
brandishing the numerology of budgets with ever-more expensive weapons
systems.
Procurement plunder and corruption, the venal revolving
door between senior officers and corporate contractors, the inveterate
lack of authentic accounting and accountability at almost every level
-- all the old Pentagon scourges now ran rampant. The good staff life
rather than active command, "ticket punching," the right job at the
right time -- all of this fostered an officer corps overwhelmingly
pursuing rank as an end itself, at pains to do no more than what one
embittered combat colonel recalled as "a necessary but minimal amount
of field duty."
As credentials merely accumulated, as efficiency
reports inflated and grew meaningless, there was the inevitable atrophy
of ethics and the military art. Oddly enough, management itself, the
faith and practice of the new creed, was the first casualty of
institutional shallowness and self-protection. Winners emerged
compromised and cynical; losers, alienated and contemptuous of
superiors. General morale, credible command authority, and
old-fashioned élan as well as esprit de corps were decimated in the
process. Graduates and non-graduates alike trained their disillusion on
institutions like West Point, which, by the early 1960s, many privately
mocked as the South Hudson Institute of Technology -- SHIT. The
Academy's sacred "duty, honor, country" now seemed eclipsed in practice
by any mammoth organization's immutable rule of survival: Cover your
ass.
Despite the need to understand the history and politics of
vast new arenas of American policy -- regions of potential military
embroilment such as Asia or the Middle East -- once-elite service
graduate schools like the War Colleges became what one study termed
"usually superficial and vapid." There would be no twentieth-century
American Clausewitz, wrote Ward Just, the best of the era's
military-affairs journalists, surveying the wreckage of a defense
establishment driven by corporate inanity, "because the writing of Von
Krieg (On War) took time and serious thought."
Much of this
bureaucratic decadence overtook other arms of government in the 1950s,
not least the State Department. As Vietnam soon would prove, however, a
craven ethos and command mediocrity in a military -- whose business, as
Korea savagely reminded everyone, is sometimes to fight wars -- would
be catastrophic.
Within the system, there were predictable if
vain attempts to hide the approaching disgrace. When, in 1970, a
war-college study of "professionalism" in Vietnam was done with
implications (as a pair of reviewing experts described it) "devastating
to the officer corps," the Joint Chiefs of Staff quickly classified and
suppressed the findings. Yet none of the inner withering was a secret,
or even arcane knowledge, in government. Before, during, and after
Rumsfeld's first regime at the Pentagon, Congressional hearings,
journalism and memoirs exposed the reality for what it was; while
nationally noted, amply documented books, often written by veteran
officers or based on their testimony, appeared under titles that spoke
eloquently of the disaster still to come: Crisis in Command:
Mismanagement in the Army, Defeated: Inside America's Military Machine,
Self-Destruction: The Disintegration and Decay of the United States
Military, The Death of the Army.
Vietnam nearly made the
figurative death literal. Ironically, there had been a portent of the
debacle ahead in Southeast Asia (and of Iraq and Afghanistan 30 years
later, for that matter) in a book discussed in Washington to the point
of fad just as Rumsfeld began his political career in the early 1960s.
General
Maxwell Taylor was a handsome, much-decorated World War II airborne
hero, a Missouri country boy who became a reputed military
intellectual, albeit given to the pandemic provincialism yet gall
typical of postwar American officialdom, whose nation's new world power
so outstripped its knowledge of the planet. The general could thus
unabashedly extol the Shah's repressive Iranian troops as among the
"armies of freedom," and instruct a West Point class on the eve of
Vietnam that they were entering a world in which "the ascendancy of
American arms and American military concepts is accepted as [a] matter
of course."
More grandly, Taylor proposed to correct the errors
of the key strategic doctrine of the Eisenhower presidency, the policy
of "massive retaliation" in which America's overwhelming nuclear
superiority -- its bombers ringing the USSR and China, some within
minutes of their targets -- was to deter any move by Soviet or Chinese
forces across the Cold War's post-Korea established boundaries. That
strategy might keep the Red Armies in their kennels, Taylor argued, but
it was hardly a response to campaigns waged by proxy communists on the
periphery in the Third World.
To meet that threat -- and, not
incidentally, to rescue his beloved Army from the mission and budget
predations of the nuclear-armed Air Force throughout the 1950s --
Taylor proposed a new orthodoxy of "limited wars," adding to nuclear
deterrence a "strategy of flexible response." He defined his
breakthrough in a celebrated book, Uncertain Trumpet, as "the
need for a capability to react across the entire spectrum of possible
challenge for coping with anything from general atomic war to
infiltration and aggressions..."
On whether the United States
could practically, or should politically, as a matter of national
interest cope "with anything," the confident paratrooper Taylor wisely
did not elaborate. His point, after all, was at heart a bigger, better
army with bigger better budgets. Properly selected "limited wars," with
newly created forces chafing to be used, would presumably take care of
themselves. But Taylor at least did warn that it would be necessary "to
deter or win quickly," dictating an overwhelming application of men and
weaponry and a victory so swift and decisive that everyone, including
the defeated enemy, would accept it. "Otherwise," he noted ominously in
a passage the general as well as his admirers later tended to overlook,
"the limited war which we cannot win quickly may result in our
piecemeal attrition."
Minus this gloomy caveat, Taylor's theme
enjoyed swift vogue in the early 1960s -- with both Republicans and
Democrats eager to engage what were seen as ubiquitous Russians and
native communists scavenging post-colonial turmoil in the Third World.
Among them were right-wingers like Rumsfeld, impatient with the aged
caution of the Eisenhowers and Hallecks in their own Party, and among
the Democrats, President John F. Kennedy himself. He promptly made
Taylor a ranking advisor on Southeast Asia and other matters. Crippled
by careerism, the military thus readied itself to fight in reassuring
theory what in Vietnamese reality would be Maxwell Taylor's oxymoronic
nightmare -- a limited war of attrition.
That war, of course, had
its men of courage and integrity. More than ever, though, they were the
exceptions to the prevailing system, and few of them made it as intact
survivors to highest rank in the twenty-first century. The machinery
that in peacetime routinely ground out rhapsodic officer efficiency
reports instantly applied the same practiced reflexes to the surreal
paper work of Saigon and its offshore carrier groups, fattening
Vietcong body counts, bombing damage assessments, and accounts of South
Vietnamese client efficacy that seemed to prove victory ever on the
way. When intelligence reports discovered awkward enemy strength and
resilience or detected unwanted signs of another losing war, they were
simply falsified, destroyed, or buried.
The massively beribboned
chests of commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan three decades later, many
of whom had been junior officers in Southeast Asia, would be unintended
reminders of how much the Vietnam fraud fed on even the old honor of
citations. Like a debased currency, ribbons for courage or exceptional
service lost value as they accumulated, with awards snidely known as
"gongs" and oak leaf clusters as "rat turds." Once-respected air medals
(800,000 of them) were handed out for almost any non-combat flight in
that helicopter-swarming war, or even for hauling holiday frozen
turkeys snugly behind the lines.
Decorations were heaped so
bountifully on generals along with lesser staff officers that valor in
such numbers, wrote one combat veteran, was "incomprehensible." To
Vietnam's "grunts," as they related again and again, the war was too
often fought with their officers 2,000 feet up in the comparative
safety of "eye in the sky" command helicopters rather than with their
"ass in the grass" with their troops.
Casualty figures were
telling. In over a decade of fighting, with over 58,000 American dead,
only four generals and eight colonels fell in combat. Commissioned rank
was a guarantee of survival as for no other modern military at war
(save perhaps in Iraq and Afghanistan in figures yet to come, but where
we know high ranking officers were seldom at the front). "The officer
corps simply did not die in sufficient numbers or in the presence of
their men often enough," concluded two postwar analysts of the army's
resulting "crisis."
With the corruption of standards came an
inevitable loss of morale. To soldiers of honor at every level the
ignorance, self-protection, and widespread opportunism of so many
superiors made Vietnam what one colonel called "the dark ages in the
army's history." Through the ranks, unprecedented, ran the unchecked
contagion of disintegration -- refusal of orders amounting to mutiny;
desertions in the tens of thousands; a drug epidemic and race riots;
uncounted, unaccountable atrocities; and not least the assassination of
officers and noncoms by their own men.
The American military's
internecine murder acquired its own ugly Vietnam name, "fragging."
Among the officer corps, according to a war-college appraisal, there
had been "a clear loss of military ethic," not to be explained simply
by a largely citizen-soldier, draft-dependent army. Altogether, another
study concluded still more clinically and bluntly, the Armed Forces in
Vietnam bordered on "an undisciplined, ineffective, almost anomic
mass," its commanders high and low manifesting "severe pathologies."
Added
to the war's vast profiteering and waste, all this spurred an exodus of
disillusioned military professionals (unprecedented and unmatched until
the Iraq War), depriving the services of most of their most promising
young leaders. It also produced by 1975-1976 an unparalleled outpouring
of public and internal criticism with often shocking revelations by
officers, enlisted men, and other knowledgeable observers in and out of
government.
The great evasion
Yet atop the Pentagon
at the immediate postwar height of the now furious, anguished outcry --
what an admiral witnessing it called a "real rebellion of the heart" --
Rumsfeld took no meaningful part in the airing or soul-searching; nor
did he take control of, or cleanse, the pestilent contract and
accounting scandals. What he did was effectively ignore, dismiss, or on
occasion repress and even punish critics and whistle-blowers.
Typically
-- yet another grim foreshadowing of Iraq with its Abu Ghraib and
Afghanistan with its Bagram prison in cavernous structures at the old
Afghan and Soviet air base-- when new Congressional questions began to
be asked about the involvement of the U.S. military as well as the CIA
in the Saigon regime's infamous "Tiger Cage" torture camps in South
Vietnam, an issue that surfaced well before his tenure at the Pentagon
but which arose anew in 1975-1976 after fresh revelations of US-aided
torture and assassinations, Rumsfeld led the Ford Administration in
blocking damaging disclosures until the issue eventually trailed off.
It was one more plot of buried history -- along with a seedy CIA front,
the Office of Public Safety, implicated in advising and abetting the
secret police "renditions" and torture practices of client regimes
worldwide until its quiet disbanding by Congress in 1975 -- with echoes
into the twenty-first century.
Officially, the crumbling of
discipline and performance in Vietnam would be blamed not on the
military's long-festering venality and incompetence, but on the ready
scapegoats of antiwar agitation and the larger social turbulence of the
1960s, a perfect fit with Rumsfeld-Cheney demonology. To the relief of
the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Defense scoffed at, or swiftly
suppressed, any institutional self-examination; yet the counterattack
on critics was vicious. "Overlong in battle and emotionally
unbalanced," was the way one Pentagon-kept military columnist smeared
an officer of legendary heroism who publicly deplored service careerism.
As
America gladly celebrated its Bicentennial under Gerald Ford's calming,
anodyne post-Watergate presidency, the tide of self-awareness in the
Pentagon was "allowed to recede," as a later study recorded, and
officers "whose careers were deeply rooted in the polices and practices
[of the war] finally prevailed." The latter included leaders of the
1991 Gulf War and 2003 Iraq debacle, most famously Colin Powell, who as
a mid-grade careerist was personally involved in a whitewash of the My
Lai massacre.
When a superintendent of West Point was earlier
removed for his implication in the My Lai cover-up, he bid farewell to
a dining hall full of sympathetic cadets with the old adage of General
Joe Stillwell, "Don't let the bastards grind you down." Who the
Superintendent's "bastards" were, the new Secretary of Defense and his
unreconstructed high command had no doubt in 1975-1976.
In the
siege mentality of Rumsfeld's post-Vietnam Pentagon, the besieging
force was never a blindly misjudged nationalism, an intrepid
insurgency, corrupt, untenable clients, or persistent myopia, folly,
self-delusion, and ultimate self-betrayal of U.S. policy. It was the
curse of wavering civilian masters at home -- craven Washington
politicians and the old foreign policy establishment, especially
Democrats -- and a public too easily swayed by the treachery of a
mythological "liberal media." Humiliation in Vietnam had come not from
colossal blunder, but from homefront perfidy, from the hoary stab in
the back. "Do we get to win this time?" Rambo famously asks about his
return to Vietnam, echoing in popular lore that denial of debacle.
It
was Rumsfeld's historic legacy to rubber stamp the Great Evasion
performed by America's military and sullen ideological right, as both
fled headlong from the Vietnam reckoning. In the process, they all
jettisoned responsibility, much as Saigon's American-bred profiteers
cast cumbersome loot from their Mercedes sedans as they honked south
through pitiful hordes of refugees just ahead of the final North
Vietnamese offensive in the spring of 1975.
While U.S. foreign
policy -- in heedless covert action as well as an orgy of globalism
begun even before the fall of the Soviet Union, and then the
reactionary mania loosed by 9/11 -- broadcast the seeds of new
insurgencies (the prospects for what a handful of largely ignored
theorists were calling "Fourth Generation Warfare"), serious study of
counterinsurgency all but vanished from Pentagon planning and even from
the service schools' curricula. The Iraq war would be years old and
long lost by the time the Army revised, postmortem as it were, its
little-read counterinsurgency manual written two decades before and
anachronistic even then.
With Vietnam lessons unlearned and
careerist blight as well as contract pillage uninterrupted, the
military system's answer -- already emerging as orthodoxy under
Rumsfeld in 1976 -- would be the simplistic, foolproof dictum, claimed
by Colin Powell but hardly his originally, of fighting only with
overwhelming forces, crushing firepower, and uncontested air cover (and
even then having a precise "exit strategy" in place). This was, in sum,
a version of General Taylor's "deter and win quickly." (As a
"doctrine," it was as if the Army or Navy football team would only go
on the field with its own rules, its own referees, and a 33-man team in
the latest equipment to face an opposite 11 without helmets, pads, or
the ability to pass.)
The so-called Powell Doctrine would soon be
applied in settings allowing the post-Vietnam Pentagon's ever costlier,
ever more "managed" high-tech bludgeon to be wielded against suitably
feeble foes, without troublesome duration of engagement or the need for
political understanding. Intelligence gaffes and the usual civilian
carnage ("collateral damage") aside, the results looked encouraging in
Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1990, and most notably the 1991 "turkey
shoot" of the First Gulf War, carefully conducted to keep American
casualties to the level of industrial accidents.
Fastidious,
blameless brevity and detachment tended, of course, to sacrifice
controlling the political outcome in any geopolitically meaningful
arena -- as in, for instance, allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in
power after his troops were expelled from Kuwait, and then, in defeat,
to butcher Shiite rebels who, at the call of the first Bush
administration in the persons of Baker, Cheney, Powell, and Scowcroft,
thought the moment ripe to overthrow the tyrant themselves.
Regrettably, they misread Pentagon imperatives. Chilled by a ghost they
stoutly denied for decades, joint chiefs and defense secretaries would
not repeat hot pursuit into North Korea or Vietnam's limited war of
attrition -- not until the undertaker's fortuitous last chance at
greatness arrived so explosively and irresistibly on September 11,
2001.
Roger Morris, who served in the State Department and on the
Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson
and Nixon. He is an award-winning historian and investigative
journalist, including a National Book Award Silver Medal winner, and
the author of books. His latest work, Shadows of the Eagle, will be
published in 2007 by Knopf.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/48085/
