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By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld

Eric B. Martin — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:53:59 +0000

PART I: WHY RUMSFELD, WHY THIS BOOK?

Donald Rumsfeld is my grandmother.

He is also my father. Like many of us, he is a writer; like our heroes, he wants to change the world; like our villains, he was almost great, but he almost wrought destruction. He’s the scholarship kid at Princeton, a Tobias Wolff or Harry Potter. Like all compelling characters, he mostly ends up changing himself.

This is why people cannot stop writing about Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney is opaque and static; Bush a simple prince; Condi wonky; Wolfowitz JV. Rumsfeld though—spendthrift, moral, middle class-ish, workaholic, perfectionist, judging, prolific, linguistic, on the record, enemy to the status quo, reaching highest, failing, falling, an insider with an outsider’s soul burning with something to prove. We all know Rumsfeld. We love and hate him more because that’s how we love and hate grandmothers, fathers, writers, changers, heroes, villains, Harry Potter, and ourselves.

The 5^th Biography of Rumsfeld.

Bradley Graham’s By His Own Rules is the fifth[i] biography of Donald Rumsfeld published since a sweet portrait first appeared in 2003,[ii] followed by many, many angry non-biographies featuring him prominently.[iii] Graham shares a rare pre-2009 quote from Cheney—”Don generates more paper than I do”—and it’s obviously true: the man is hugely documentable. (Cheney, on the other hand, has produced only one recorded conversation with Rumsfeld available to the public, according to the author of bio #4[iv]).

Is this the definitive Rumsfeld biography?

Probably. Bradley Graham simply has out-documented his once and future rivals: over 300 interviews by his account, primary documents galore, including many classified or privately-held ones. They don’t make a whole lot of books like Graham’s anymore, with such uncommercial journalistic restraint: few tricks, few judgments, few short cuts, few concessions by way of gloss, pacing, cinematic scenes, sensate evocation, rich language, adjectives. Brad reports, you decide. But there are some key things missing—I’ll get to that—despite the fact that By His Own Rules is 686 pages long with 60 pages of footnotes and a 20 page bibliography. Once you’re looking at a book that long, it’s hard not to ask: why not 1500 pages and make sure you get it all?

But isn’t that asking too much?

Maybe. It’s so freaking hard to write books. But the fact is, this one ends up feeling too metrical, categorical, and lifeless, which is too bad, because life in the time of Rumsfeld was not lifeless at all. No other book about the man contains more corroborated who, what, and where than this one. And because of all that data, the why is there for us to figure out mostly on our own, with very little preaching—a feat that seems truly remarkable in our age of punditry. So if you want to understand the man, and men like this, the great almost-rans who made a dent on history and how history makes them, in most of its minutiae, this is the book.

But if you also want to know what it felt like to have dinner with such men, served jail time with them, slept with them, feared them, loved them, felt the air move as they box-chopped it with their hands, if you want to feel his presence in the room as you read, the way he evoked such passion, the elites he dazzled, the men who hated his guts, the way he used to seem more human than everyone else on TV, if you want to experience rather than understand these kinds of men, you won’t.

Very few writers can do real journalism and this other thing at the same time, because either journalism and research takes over, or writer’s voice takes over, and either way you lose that chance for the glorious combo[v] of scene and scholarship. Lincoln, Kennedy and King get books like that; Rumsfeld is more like a modern day Aaron Burr without the dual or conspiracy, and this calm and thorough book is as good as he is going to get.

Should I read it?

If you’re really asking, then the answer is probably no.

PART II: WHY READ BOOK REVIEWS?

You want to know whether or not to read a book.

1. Yes! — You’re totally obsessed with Rumsfeld, the Bush years, Iraq, torture, politics and/or the impact of character on history.
2. Yes, but — You’re interested but in a more normal, general, healthy way and should skip the sucky intro, read the epilogue first, figure out which ingredients interest you, and get ready to skim heavily through the Homeric barrage of names that don’t mean diddly to you but thrill insiders because they just had lunch with that guy’s sister the other day!
3. No, but — You’re not that interested but sort of interested: finish this review.
4. No — You’re not at all interested and in fact you were looking for something else.[vi]

You want to know what a book says but you don’t really want to read it.

Who has time? Borges used to write book reviews of books that didn’t exist because that seemed more efficient. Rumsfeld would have liked that spirit of executive summary:

By His Own Rules, in which a middle class wrestler kid from the Midwest goes to Princeton on scholarship, fails to become a Navy fighter pilot, serves in Congress, learns hardball politics under Nixon, tries it out under Ford, earns big bucks and a cutthoat reputation as a CEO, launches a failed presidential bid, vanishes, returns as a triumphant cranky old man to transform the military but ends up launching and botching two wars although not without help from the Armed Services and his friends.

You want to know what a book means.

—If you hate Rumsfeld, you should hate him even more because:

1. After his unsuccessful run for president in 1988 he lost some of his principles, judgment, patience and plain mojo that could have saved lives in Iraq, prevented torture, and reformed the military.
2. On key specific issues—such as the disastrous transition of Iraq command from General McKiernan to General Sanchez—he doesn’t accept responsibility, claiming he didn’t really know what was going on.
3. Unlike McNamara, Rumsfled regrets none of his actions publicly and never will.

—If you love Rumsfeld, you should love him even more because he had guts but feels sad that he lost his touch and:

1.Picked bad partners (Sanchez, Haynes, Cambone).
2. Abandoned his own practice of questioning assumptions (WMD intel, post-war scenarios, counter-insurgency strategies).
3. Became too obsessed with military reform to manage the war.

—If you’re not sure, consider this: Graham’s story is one of how character shapes history in Washington D.C., where utopic dreams, power lust, and loyalties collide in the hearts of everyone who matters. Their strengths become our triumphs. Their flaws become our tragedies. Their mediocrity, ours. U.S. government, for better and for worse, is designed to protect us from our own character, good and evil alike. But when things get out of whack—and they were out of whack from September 11, 2001 until the mid-term elections in 2006—then this protection of government fails and character takes over, and the story of Rumsfeld’s character becomes our story too.

You want to know what a famous person thinks about a book.

Updike tackles Sallinger! Kakutani roughs up Roth! Clinton reviews Clinton! Well, Updike’s dead and Clinton’s busy, so you’ll have to settle with Kakutani[vii] and Kaplan[viii], neither of which I’m going to read until I finish writing this review.

PART III: HOW TO WRITE A 21^st CENTURY BIOGRAPHY

Act like a real journalist

Bradley Graham is a real journalist. He knows Donald grew up in a house that had an apple tree in the backyard; he’s read unpublished recollections from Joan Ramsay about childhood mischief; he interviewed Myles Cuningham and Bob Nellis on Rumsfeld’s wrestling moves—and that’s before we get to Washington. After that, all hell breaks loose on the interview front: Adelman, Holcolm, Cambone, Gebhard, Shelton, Giambastiani, Gingrich, Card, not to mention a heavy dose of Rumsfeld himself. Graham has talked to everyone. He’s read everything. Everything on every page is cited. Professional journalism may be dead and dying but Bradley Graham is a real journalist.

Admit you’re the writer

That said, the fact is real journalism exists in an age where everyone thinks about point of view; everyone knows narrators are flawed and unreliable; everyone knows the process is part of the product; everyone knows that time must pass before what matters and what doesn’t comes clear. And so it is that Bradley Graham waits too long to admit he is writing this book, that he has access to a lot of information but that there are of course pieces missing, that some people would talk to him and others wouldn’t; that Rumsfeld himself was helpful in this way but resistant in that one; that it was probably too soon to publish this thing and that’s why he has to include everything, because who knows who might be right or telling the truth?

I’m not looking for the David Foster Wallace biography of Rumsfeld, but the 21^st century biography needs to have some ongoing recognition of the imperfect process, or else risk the reader thinking: why didn’t you talk to Jay Garner or Donald’s kids? Did you ask Rumsfeld about the war being right or wrong? Why don’t we know that he looks off to the left when he’s thinking, or that he often inflects non-question sentences like questions, or that he wears old cords in the office on Saturday? The fact that Graham proves himself one of the last non-fiction writers in the world who refuses to make stuff up does not release him from the fact that credibility, objectivity and omniscience are dead, and to pretend otherwise is suspicious, especially you’re writing a book about how character determines everything.

Don’t let sources run the show

As we get deeper into the machinations of Washington and the war, Graham relies more and more on secondary sources—Woodward’s Bush books[ix], Doug Feith’s memoir[x]—and becomes increasingly obsessive about multiple perspectives, leading to cacophony and info overload. Rumsfeld begins to disappear as a man of flesh and blood. Scenes and senses begin to fade and fog. He becomes an invisible verb: decided, met with, planned, approved. There’s simply too much information—names, reports, committees, background—to keep him alive and get in all Graham’s data. By the time Graham brings him back to life towards the end of the book—a visit to the grandkids, a rare and insightful squash game anecdote—it’s too late. Without making the book longer or trusting more information to endnotes, Rumsfeld the man must die.

Teach the reader how to read

Graham tries to provide us with a narrative hook in his crappy prologue: the resignation of Rumsfeld. Start at the end. Work backwards. See that ending and beginning anew. Except it doesn’t work: there’s no moment of surprise in those first pages that makes you want to read a 700 page book about a guy you suspect you already know or actually don’t care much about in the first place.

Every book must teach the reader how to read it. And since this is the definitive biography, this intro needs not just a better hook, not simply a more vivid scene, not simply a sense of paradox and surprise to propel us through the surprising and paradoxical life of Donald Rumsfeld. No, this intro needs to say, in so many words: I have set out to write the definitive history of this man and his role as Secretary of Defense from 2001-2006. There’s a lot of crap in here but it’s worth it, because you will understand exactly what happened, why it happened, and how it can happen again, because as rare as the guy was, we are all of us, every one of us, closer to being Donald Rumsfeld than we think.

[i]http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/fullview/ROCUBHA0XD5S8/ref=cm_lm_pthnk_view?ie=UTF8&lm%5Fbb=#height=171

[ii]http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060561106/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=304485901&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0060560916&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0VH0DJKFS2S0K3S8G32V

[iii]http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/fullview/R3NKXF4XUWOGPP/ref=cm_lm_pthnk_view?ie=UTF8&lm%5Fbb=#height=171

[iv] http://www.amazon.com/Rumsfeld-Rise-Fall-Catastrophic-Legacy/dp/B000NY12TG/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248115841&sr=8-2

[v]http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/fullview/RJ70Y2G81VRUQ/ref=cm_lm_pthnk_view?ie=UTF8&lm%5Fbb=#height=171

[vi] http://www.maxum.com/Rumpus/HomePage.html

[vii] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/books/23kaku.html

[viii] http://www.newsweek.com/id/202525

[ix] http://www.amazon.com/Bush-at-War-Bob-Woodward/dp/0743204735

[x] http://www.amazon.com/War-Decision-Inside-Pentagon-Terrorism/dp/0061373664/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248110761&sr=1-1

Rumsfeld painting by Roberto Parada

Beyond the Pleasure Principle: One Woman’s Reading History

The Blurb — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:00:18 +0000

by Rose Garrett

I recently read that revenge, in addition to sex and food, stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain, which explains why the settling of scores is often pursued with as much unbounded enthusiasm as philandering and doughnut holes. To that short list I would add book-reading, which might appear more high-minded than the rest, but which has revealed itself to me to be as base, vulgar, and fucking incredible as any of the seven sins.

Children are encouraged to believe that reading is good for them, like community service, flossing and green beans—and as with these things, that implication is often enough to turn them off completely. But when I began reading as a child, books were less about exploring the human condition than they were about the pulse-quickening, mind-reeling pleasures of suspense, imagination, and assured gratification. Reading was an immoderate, late-night indulgence of sweaty palmed, pupil-dilating gluttony. No matter if the prose was workmanlike and the themes well-trodden. No matter that J. R. R. Tolkien ’s characters were static archetypes, C. S. Lewis ’s plots were exasperatingly moralistic, and J. K. Rowling’s books became stultifyingly popular. Books were a drug, and civilized society was the pusher. And I got really really high.

Freud’s concept of the “pleasure principle” maintains that to some extent our actions are governed not by reason, but by an abiding pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of discomfort and pain. Food, drugs, sex, and video games are the pleasure incentives of choice for many adults, and each of these can become addictive to the exclusion of exterior reality. My personal history of pleasure-reading-abuse confirms that it shares features with all of the above: foregoing social opportunities to hole up alone; bingeing to the point of delirium; losing myself in an illusory world; waking up blearily the next morning, catching sight of my book, and wondering, “What the fuck happened last night?”

Not all books lend themselves to literary benders. Or maybe it’s that not all readers feel the effects. As a young reader, not surprisingly, fantasy books with an abundance of wizards, swords, and talking animals was my catnip. I craved the comforting, structured pleasure of stories where virtue is rewarded, ordinariness is surmountable, and the forces of good and evil are etched in unsubtle diametric opposition. If a character skulks, looms, or sports a black cloak, you can be damn well sure he’s an agent of evil. If the protagonist is thrown into company with an attractive but prickly member of the opposite sex, you can pretty much bet they’ll be getting it on by book’s end. These books are predictable in their rewards, but varied enough in their plots to keep readers wriggling expectantly on the hook. They tamp down anxieties by simultaneously introducing conflict and guaranteeing resolution, pairing “What’s going to happen?” with “Whatever it is, I’m going to like it.”

Easy pleasure, however, leaves little room for growth, and maturing adolescents and educated adults are encouraged to venture past the safety of snug plots and simplistic ideologies. Postponing gratification for hard-earned gains isn’t easy, whether it’s in intellectual growth and emotional depth or a steady paycheck. But with maturity, according to Freud, comes the “reality principle,” pleasure’s grim repo man, where the exigencies of life take center stage and personal pleasures must regularly take a rain check.

The transition to literary novels, like adolescence itself, was a strange and uncomfortable process. After exhausting library shelves of fantasy trilogies, cat mysteries, and low-hanging YA fruit, I moved on to the adult section’s more high-minded fiction. This proved to be thematically and structurally jarring, especially since I had no concept of my own preferences, and chose books mostly by their cover art. More importantly, these books were work—and I wasn’t used to having to invest before seeing dividends.

But what about reading? Bruegel's "The Seven Deadly Sins"

Literary novels, which I still sometimes think of as “grown-up books,” tend to require more commitment, focus, and willingness to set aside easy pleasures than your typical swashbuckler. In these books, characters are often unlikable, plots stunted, romances ill-fated, short-lived, or absent altogether. Protagonists are untrustworthy or fatally flawed. The facile dichotomy of good and evil is supplanted by a set of self-interested entities, led by personal incentives along convergent or divergent paths. The drama is psychological, emotional, aesthetic, or all of these.

The alienation, violence, trickery and weird sex that I encountered in these books made me leery, at times, of the whole sorry necessity of growing up. If literary novels set out to more closely approximate reality, I wasn’t so sure reality was for me. But although Freud stated that “an ego thus educated has become reasonable; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle,” he lets on that the reality principle “also at bottom seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed.”*

Gradually, I found the pleasures, and there are many, in more demanding literature, which offers great rewards to readers and is not always so arduous as it seemed when I was fourteen. Well-honed, drum-tight sentences that twang like a bowstring provide more adventuresome reading than many conventional tales of derring-do. And there are no better moments in reading than encountering an idea or feeling one has had, but never really recognized until the moment when it suddenly hums in counterpoint to the written word.

Back to reality?

By the time I entered college, I was primed and ready to take on the knotty questions behind life, literature, and the uniquely human urge to write and read. I majored in Comparative Literature, an interdisciplinary catchall of literary theory, literature in translation, foreign language, and literature and the other arts. I took classes with names like “European Modernism and the World” and “Itineraries of Postmodernism.” I wrote papers, with only a pinch of irony, about hypertext, “the unpresentable,” the death of the author, and the subaltern. I read books that drove me bonkers, like de Chirico’s Hebdomeros, and others, like To the Lighthouse, that blew my mind to pieces and put it back together, better.

After graduation, however, I felt suddenly adrift in a non-academic world where my interests and talents were meaningless, and my intellectual investments in default. My shelves were full of Duras and Dazai, Kafka and Soyinka. But I felt drained and weak-willed. I felt the pull of easy pleasure. I picked up a book, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, about a young WWII nurse who falls through a Scottish circle of stones, travels back in time 200 years, and falls in love with an unusually tall and virile highlander. Yes. Not really Harlequin grade material, but closer to it than, say, Infinite Jest. I quickly fell off the wagon and went back to my old ways. Freud might have called it, returning to the pleasure principle.

The kind of books that thrilled me as a child now operated as a kind of literary security blanket, which I clung to through apartment stress, job hunting, and a breakup. As I read, I worried that I might be regressing emotionally to a pre-pubescent state, and wondered if I was betraying some sort of intellectual obligation to elevated literature. Could rereading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at age 23 do damage to my brain? As these anxieties grew, I self-medicated: I read more books.

Rose's guilty pleasure

But while easy reading, my substance abuse of choice, shares the pleasures of other good-to-be-bad activities like drugs and overeating, it really doesn’t carry a price. No physical dependencies form, no diseases are transmitted, arteries don’t clog and livers don’t fail. My reading compulsion doesn’t hurt others. And the distinction between pleasure and reality, high-minded literary novels and page-turners, is much more porous than I had allowed myself to see. Just because a book is pleasurable to read doesn’t mean it lacks depth, just as a book that demands extra reader effort doesn’t always deserve it. Books, like people, are all different, and what I read does less to define me than it does the changing moods and circumstances of any life. I’m a person who likes different kinds of books at different times, for different reasons—and that’s okay.

These days, I feel ready to work harder for the returns I get out of good books. After all, some things are more important than quick pleasure. I’ve got a whole list of books I want to read, and I’m excited to tackle the stack. I just need to get through Twilight, and then I’ll get started.

[* Freud is quoted from his Introductory Lectures on Psychology, translated by James Strachey]