Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy

by Andrew Cockburn

Book Overview

Donald Rumsfeld, who as secretary of defense oversaw the army, navy, air force, and marines from 2001 to December 2006, is widely blamed for the catastrophic state of America's involvement in Iraq. In... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416535748
• ISBN13: 9781416535744
• Release Date: February 2007
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 247 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

SOCIOPATH CIRCUS

wow. if you want to cry yourself to sleep then this is the book for you. if the book is true then this is a severely damning portrayal of our country and its' government. we have to ask ourselves how things got this crazy? our government has become a LEGALIZED MAFIA. you know in your heart that it's true but this excellent book will put all doubt to rest and show you how the politicians are doing it. but the real question is where are these sociopaths coming from? what is wrong with our schools and our churches and our universities and our culture that this country is producing people who should be described as unholy monsters. undoubtedly there have always been leaders whose love of money and power have led them to perpetrate unspeakable crimes against humanity and maybe there will always be such men. but the fact that we are allowing them to ruin the world for us is the real horror story. we are responsible for the crimes of people like rumsfeld because we all allow it to happen. we, in america are ignorant and uneducated and we have become slaves to our present-day culture of greed, money-worship, bigotry, hatred, arrogance and self-interest. we are full of hate for ourselves and our fellow-man and deep down we don't care about truth or mercy or decency. our blindness in everyday life has allowed politicians and corrupt businessmen to flourish and take advantage of the moral void that we have created. our govenment has become the true representation of what we have become as individuals and as a nation. and the only way to reverse this trend is for each one of us to change. we must replace hatred with love, ignorance with education and stop worshiping riches and money. love of money is the driving force for most of us and especially politicians and the business community that controls them. and yes, they will kill your children to get it. read on..........

Donald Rumsfeld in the hands of an Angry God

"I'm not into this detail stuff. I'm more concepty." "I don't do quagmires." "I don't do diplomacy." "I don't do foreign policy." "I don't do numbers." The above are direct quotes. They come directly out of America's corporate heartland from a man whose "accomplishment" at G. D Searle was in terrorizing the sort of people who don't matter and getting a sweetener approved that may cause brain tumors, destroying careers to do so. It has long been a right-wing fashion to blame government for everything, but the above make it clear that Rumsfeld was very much a creature of a corporate world which, during and directly after the Cold War, was expanding into an economic vacuum created by the Second World War, in which all that mattered was manipulating what other people thought. This world was so hegemonic that Job One, not only for the CEO but also for the white collar, became the capillary management of one's public relations image. "Reason" turned inside out and became strictly a matter of managing one's biography, and only fools and losers continued to be concerned with the external world. "Subjective" and "objective" reversed polarity. "Subjectivity" became a term of abuse hurled at unwanted results such as Shinseki's estimate of how many troops it would take to pacify Iraq. "Objectivity" becamse the name of success in maintaining one's reputation and the body count of careers destroyed to do so. The world was referred to as complex and unmanageable whenever the results from the field were negative. But any attempt to actually master complexity became to the province of little people trying, the night before the Big Presentation, to figure out how to survive Rumsfeld's illogical, off-topic, and incoherent objections. History became myth: a big man versus a little man, with Goliath the winner at all times, and Isaac sacrificed after all. Upon the accessing of Monkey Boy, things took a decided turn into utter absurdity. This book has GWB, well into his Presidency, asking his father what a "neocon" was. Other reports have Rove chairing discussions on how to cut Medicare and Medicaid by men who could not tell you the difference between these "entitlements". Rumsfeld himself was bone Midwestern ignorant at an early age and did not learn on the job: early in his career, he decided (using American business logic) that Paul Nitze, an archetypical Cold Warrior, must be soft on the Soviets because he knew so much about them, because in American business logic, knowing too much about any one thing is bad for the pure of heart generalist. This came about, with grievous consequences for America from the standpoint of national self-interest alone (such as the total loss of leadership of the home hemisphere), because in the USA, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Enlightenment's descent into biography, hagiography, demonology, haruspication, and myth, was at its most Power-Pointed advanced. Political life became for Players a sort of blood sport wi

A Must Read for Concerned Citizens

Andrew Cockburn's unauthorized biography of Donald Rumsfeld is a "must read" for anyone interested in understanding the systemic and dysfunctional behavour of the US government and that of the current Bush Administration in particular. While much has been written of Rumsfeld's failure as a wartime Secretary of Defense, and Cockburn adds much valuable information to this growing body of literature, less has been written about Rumsfeld's disastrous record in managing the Pentagon' programmatic and budgetary activities. Cockburn's book is pathbreaking in that it also addresses this equally important subject, and this review will focus on this latter aspect of Rumsfeld's record. First some "truth in advertising:" I have known Cockburn for almost thirty years and consider him a close friend. I am an admirer of his earlier books, and I was a minor source of information in the Rumsfeld book (see pages 207-208). I retired from the Department of Defense in 2003 after thirty three years, including twenty-six years in the Office of Secretary of Defense in Pentagon, where, as a staff analyst, I wrote numerous publicly available reports describing how the dysfunctional managerial problems plaguing the Pentagon, from the Carter presidency to that of George W. Bush, created a historical pattern of shrinking forces, aging weapons, and continual pressure to reduce combat readiness, all lubricated by corrupt accounting system that subverted the Accountability Clause of the Constitution. Most of these reports can be found on the internet ([...]) and in my book "Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch." The fact that our troops went to Iraq ill-equipped and untrained to a war of choice created by the Bush Administration is natural consequence of this dysfunctional history. Cockburn's book is an essential reading for anyone trying to understand why the Big Green Spending Machine is now completely out of control. Donald Rumsfeld cannot be blamed for the Pentagon's managerial dysfunctions. In fact, when he entered office, he promised to transform the Pentagon's management practices. To this end, he established several transformation panels, including a financial management transformation panel. The final report issued by this panel, Transforming Department of Defense Financial Management: A Strategy for Change, April 13, 2001, (aka the Friedman Report) correctly described the profound consequences of DoD's unauditable accounting system when it said these systems do not provide reliable information that ... "tells managers the costs of forces or activities that they manage and the relationship of funding levels to output, capability or performance of those forces or activities." Put another way, the management information provided by DoD's accounting system is so corrupt and unreliable that it is impossible to link budget decisions to policy intentions. Nevertheless, while the Bush Administration shovelled money into the Pentagon jacking up

It Gets Even Better With Every Reading!

I've now read this book three times, twice fairly quickly and once in depth, and the more I read it the better it gets! What really amazes me is the number of sources the author is able to draw up, particularly from within the military. The political views of Andrew Cockburn and his brothers Alexander and Patrick are well documented, but this does not seem to have restrained their sources in any way. Cockburn certainly has a sharp ear for the telling piece of insider information. Where I think this book really shines is in its tight editing. There is often a tendency for biographers to include every piece of information they have been able to find, even if it does not necessarily add to the argument. This writer does not tell us those things we already know, and nor does he include text just to show us how much research he has done. His self-restraint makes for a very compelling - and often wryly ironic - narrative. Who would have expected a biography of such a man to be such a page-turner? The current debacle in Iraq is not the result of an accident, nor of unforseen events. It is the direct result of policies instigated by Rumsfeld and his coterie. I would describe this book as essential reading for everyone interested in learning about how such mistakes can possibly be avoided in the future.

A Brilliant Piece of Work. Essential reading!

[...]. Despite the fact that the author and publisher must have moved heaven and earth to get it published so quickly, there is no sign of any undue haste: it is thoroughly researched, and clearly- (and in many places, very wittily-) written, and makes its case convincingly. Like a lot of people, I was familiar with Rumfeld's most recent "achievements", but not aware of his work in the Nixon White House. (Incidentally, Nixon referred to him as a 'ruthless little [...]' and there is a very telling dialogue between Nixon and Rumsfeld on the subject of Africans and African-Americans, where Rummy sycophantically echoes all of Nixon's worst prejudices.) Nor did I know of the role that Donald played as CEO of the GD Searle company in pushing the highly-controversial aspartame product onto the market. The whole sorry story of the invasion of Iraq and the roles of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle are described with greater insight than I have read to this date, thanks to the author's skill in getting so many officials close to the decision-making processes to speak to him. Rumfeld's responsibliity for the disgrace of Abu Ghraib is outlined in its full sickening detail. The myth of Rumsfeld's managerial abilities is effectively laid to rest, with examples of mismanagement, indecisiveness, and bullying from throughout his career. Interestingly it seems that George Bush Snr. seems to have been one of the few to have recognized this (when Rumsfeld wrote asking to be ambassador of Japan, Bush wrote on his request NO. THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN!!). Now that Rumsfeld has amassed an enormous fortune, I suppose he can turn his back on his disastrous career and enjoy Midge Decter's fawning biography of him. For the rest of us who must suffer as a result of his mistakes, this masterly work serves as a model of how we need people like Cockburn to remind us that so often our emperors are naked frauds.