Donald Rumsfeld: A ‘tough guy’ image balanced by kindness

I knew two Donald Rumsfelds — the only person to serve two nonconsecutive terms as Secretary of Defense — who we lost on Tuesday. There was Don Rumsfeld who came across as the “tough guy” to the news media, and often to his staff and the military. He could discomfit a military briefer, interrupting him or her after viewing but one slide of a lengthy presentation and tearing it to shreds, leaving the presenter shaking. At staff meetings, he could cut down any one of his senior officials who seemed unprepared, or who merely came across as pompous, with critiques such as “a trained ape could do better than that.” He never let one forget that he was a college wrestler: He once threatened to break my kneecaps after I told him a particularly bad joke.

Yet when he arrived at the Pentagon for the second time in 2001, Rumsfeld planned to reform the place. He was shocked that the department’s leisurely bureaucratic pace and its tolerance for inefficiency had actually worsened in the 25 years that he was away. During that time away, he had succeeded as a captain of industry and chaired pathbreaking commissions, such as on missile defense, which is when I met him. 

He supported centralization of business operations, whether in the realm of financial activity or human resources management. At the Pentagon, he sought to change the longstanding system whereby longevity, rather than performance, was the primary basis for promotion. He tasked me to create what became the Defense Business Board, which became the source of numerous studies and recommendations to improve the Department of Defense’s (DOD) business processes.

Rumsfeld advocated military as well as business transformation. To that end, he was a strong supporter of the need for both unmanned aerial vehicles and special operating forces. He overrode initial Air Force opposition to support UAV programs; he angered traditionalists who looked down on Special Forces as uncultivated “snake-eaters.” Both became central to not only the George W. Bush administration’s national security policy but also that of the Obama administration.

Critically, ahead of many others, Rumsfeld anticipated the emergent security threat that China would pose to American interests. He had been struck by a visit  in 2000 that we took to the People’s Liberation Army’s military museum in Beijing, where he saw a life-sized display of a Chinese amphibious assault on Taiwan. When he returned to the Pentagon under Bush, he commissioned Andrew Marshall, the long-tenured director of net assessment who long had warned of China’s growing military capabilities, to review American force posture. In so doing, Rumsfeld angered many of the senior military, but he nevertheless shared and supported Marshall’s emphasis on the need for long-range offensive capabilities — which, two decades later, has become a central tenet of American military strategy. 

In all of these matters, Rumsfeld’s focus was less on foreign policy per se — the staple of many of his predecessors — than on reform, in all its guises. He needed to be tough.

When 9/11 forced him to metamorphose overnight from Secretary of Defense to Secretary of War, he was briefly a hero as American forces overthrew the Taliban, only to bear the brunt of criticism as America suffered from the bloody aftermath of what had been a successful effort to topple Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld was not cowed; he was prepared to deflect the heat of attacks from President Bush to himself.

In reality, Rumsfeld was not among those who dreamed of bringing the “end of history” to a new democratic Middle East. He was a hard-boiled realist to the end. It was only after Bush had little choice but to fire him, following the 2006 midterm elections, that Bush himself became the object of anger over the war. There was no Rumsfeld to run interference for him anymore.

Rumsfeld’s combative persona masked an exceedingly decent human being. He was a moderate Republican, whom today’s party extremists would call a “RINO” (Republican in name only). He was exceedingly charitable, very caring of staff. But he kept these and other kindnesses — and there were many — private. He did not want to tarnish that tough-guy image.

Consistent with that image, he would never allow himself to be one-upped. Once, my son Roger asked me if I had heard of Robert McNamara. I told him that I knew Bob McNamara. He seemed surprised and said, “But Dad, he’s in my history book.” I thought the incident amusing and when I saw Rumsfeld some time later, I related it to him. His reply was, “Oh yeah, you know what my son says to me…” — and I knew I was about to be one-upped — “Dad, YOU’re in my history book.” 

And, after decades of serving his country with utter devotion, so he will be. 

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was under secretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy under secretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.