‘State of Denial’

It was Bush’s decision. But Rumsfeld drove the dynamic on Iraq. How the SecDef blew it. An exclusive excerpt

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (left) had concerns about the ‘overbearing style’ of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (right), according to Woodward’s book

Oct. 9, 2006 issue - A movie of the George W. Bush presidency might open in the Oval Office on January 26, 2001, when Donald H. Rumsfeld was sworn in as defense secretary. A White House photographer captured the scene. Rumsfeld wears a pin­stripe suit, and rests his left hand on a Bible held by Joyce, his wife of 46 years. His right hand is raised. Bush stands almost at attention, his head forward, his eyes cocked sharply leftward, looking intently at Rumsfeld. Vice President Dick Cheney stands slightly off to the side, his trademark half smile on his face. It is a cold, dry day, and the barren branches of the trees outside can be seen through the Oval Office windows.

Back in the days of the Ford presidency, in the wake of Watergate—the pardon of Nixon, the fall of Saigon—Cheney and Rumsfeld had worked almost daily in the same Oval Office where they once again stood. The new man in the photo, Bush, five years younger than Cheney and nearly 14 years younger than Rumsfeld, had been a student at Harvard Business School. He came to the presidency with less experience and time in government than any incoming president since Woodrow Wilson in 1913.

Well into his seventh decade, many of Rumsfeld’s peers and friends had retired, but he now stood eagerly on the cusp, ready to run the race again. He resembled John le Carre’s fictional Cold War British intelligence chief, George Smiley, a man who “had been given, in late age, a chance to return to the rained-out contests of his life and play them after all.”
“Get it right this time,” Cheney told Rumsfeld.

In his first Pentagon tour, as Ford’s secretary of defense from 1975-1977, Rumsfeld had acquired a disdain for large parts of the system he was to oversee once again. He had found the Pentagon and the vast U.S. military complex unmanageable. One night at a dinner at my house a dozen years after he had left the Pentagon the first time, he said that being secretary was “like having an electric appliance in one hand and the plug in the other and you are running around trying to find a place to put it in.” It was an image that stuck with me—Rumsfeld charging around the Pentagon E-ring, the Man with the Appliance, seeking an elusive electrical socket, trying to make things work and feeling unplugged by the generals and admirals.

“After two months on the job, it is clear that the Defense establishment is tangled in its anchor chain,” Rumsfeld dictated in a four-page memo on March 21, 2001, two months into his second tour. He was already frustrated. Congress required hundreds of reports. It seemed there might be more auditors, investigators, testing groups and monitors looking over their shoulders than there were “front-line troops with weapons.”

Damien Donck for Newsweek

“The maze of constraints on the Department force it to operate in a manner that is so slow, so ponderous and so inefficient that whatever it ultimately does will inevitably be a decade or so late.”

This “Anchor Chain” memo, which Rumsfeld revised and added to, became notorious among Rumsfeld’s staff as they watched and tried to help him define the universe of his problems. It sounded like he had almost given up fixing the Pentagon during the George W. Bush presidency. The task was so hard and would take so long, he dictated in a later version, that “our job, therefore, is to work together to sharpen the sword that the next president will wield.”

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