Word: rumsfelds
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...Longtime Cheney ally Donald Rumsfeld was eased out as Pentagon chief in late 2006, and Bush replaced him with Robert Gates, a former CIA director and Bush-family ally. Gates was as effective a bureaucratic player as Cheney - and much more of a pragmatist. "Bush was persuaded that the day of the neoconservatives had to be over, because the direction of his presidency had become politically unsustainable," says a well-informed adviser. "It wasn't so much a repudiation of Cheney or Cheneyism but a practical judgment that the previous approach simply wasn't working." (See America's worst Vice...
...military doctrine. It was only six years ago that Air Force General Richard Myers, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, predicted that a shock-and-awe strategy would bomb Saddam Hussein's Iraq into submission. That - and the tech-heavy force that then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent into Iraq to stumble and falter for four years - hewed to the American way of war, one that was equal parts laser beams and hubris. But the military has rethought its strategy. "You can shock and awe human beings," McChrystal says, "but it doesn't last. I've seen operations...
...Rumsfeld is in many respects an honorable man, deeply patriotic, a good friend to many, and unfailingly loyal to those he has served and to a number who have served him. He is smart, cunning, and capable of great geniality, all highly desirable qualities in a leader with such power. The challenges he faced were extraordinary - waging a counterinsurgency campaign long after the U.S. military had forgotten the lessons of the last one it fought, attempting to transform a Pentagon bureaucracy notoriously resistant to change, coping with a U.S. government deficient in civilian capacity to assist in postwar stabilization...
...complexities - or perhaps because of them - Rumsfeld has an abiding interest in simple rules. During the second half of his life, he composed lists of them to live by and distributed them freely to others. The homespun compendium of lessons for coping in the federal bureaucracy and corporate world drew largely on quips, aphorisms, and adages that Rumsfeld had read or heard elsewhere. But he fused them into an approach to issues and people that was distinctly his own, confident of his way even as some close to him worried, when he struggled as defense secretary, that he was veering...
...above is excerpted from Graham's book By His Own Rules: The Story of Donald Rumsfeld...