Lest auld acquaintance — Fredo, Colin and Rummy

Here are your weekend reads — the final speech from Alberto Gonazales, and the GQ interviews with Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld. A little Colin video in the middle.

Enjoy!

Jude

Gonzales Leaves Justice Department
LARA JAKES JORDAN, AP via HuffNews
September 14, 2007

WASHINGTON — Resigning Attorney General Alberto Gonzales left the scandal-scarred Justice Department on Friday, declaring himself hopeful about its mission of ferreting out crime and defending the truth.

Gonzales quit after 2 1/2 years at the department amid investigations into whether he broke the law and lied to Congress. He has denied any wrongdoing.

President Bush is expected to announce a nominee next week to replace his longtime friend and fellow Texan.

In a Friday morning speech, Gonzales said his time at the Justice Department made him determined to fight terrorists and sexual predators and crack down on guns, drugs and gang violence plaguing the nation’s neighborhoods.

“Over the past two and a half years, I have seen tyranny, dishonesty, corruption and depravity of types I never thought possible,” Gonzales said in prepared remarks at a Hispanic Heritage Month ceremony at Bolling Air Force Base. “I’ve seen things I didn’t know man was capable of.

“But I will tell you here and now that these things still leave me hopeful,” he said. “Because every time I see a glimmer of the evil man can do, I see the defenders of liberty, truth and justice who stand ready to fight it.”

Later, Gonzales was feted at a standing-room-only Justice Department farewell ceremony attended by, among others, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former White House chief of staff Andy Card. Card’s wife, the Rev. Kathleene Card, said a short prayer at the beginning of the ceremony, and former Solicitor General Theodore Olson, considered a top contender to replace Gonzales, also was in the audience.

Protesters who for months had dogged Gonzales at congressional hearings and other public appearances blew party horns and shook tambourines outside the Justice Department during the ceremony.

Michael Sullivan, the U.S. attorney in Boston and acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, praised Gonzales as a thoughtful man “who lives the law and is deeply patriotic in his convictions.”

Gonzales is “an outstanding advocate on behalf of ATF and U.S. attorney offices across the country, and the Department of Justice as a whole,” Sullivan told the audience.

It was a furor over the firings of nine U.S. attorneys that marked the beginning of the end of Gonzales’ tenure as attorney general. The midterm firings, planned after the 2004 elections, were unprecedented in the department’s recent memory and prompted Democrats to question whether they were politically motivated.

Gonzales’ conflicting public statements about the ousters led Democrats and Republicans alike to criticize his honesty. Their charges were compounded by his later sworn testimony about the Bush administration’s terrorist surveillance program, which was contradicted by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller and former senior Justice Department officials.

Meanwhile, former Justice Department White House liaison, Monica M. Goodling, told a House panel in May that she felt “uncomfortable” during a conversation with Gonzales shortly after the U.S. attorney firings were revealed. In sworn testimony, Goodling said Gonzales asked for her recollection of events about the firings.

Her account led to questions of whether Gonzales was coaching Goodling _ illegally tampering with a witness in the ongoing inquiry. Gonzales has said he was merely trying to comfort Goodling at an awkward time.

The Justice Department has opened an internal investigation into both of the charges against Gonzales. Its conclusions are not expected until the end of the year at the earliest.

Despite months of calls for his resignation, from lawmakers and critics, Gonzales told employees as recently as July he was going to stay to fix problems at the Justice Department. His sudden announcement on Aug. 27 that he was leaving took most of his 110,000 employees by surprise and left the White House scrambling to find a replacement.

Solicitor General Paul Clement will serve as acting attorney general until the Senate confirms Gonzales’ successor. Among those being eyed by the White House are Olson, former deputy attorney general George Terwilliger, 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Wilkins and former U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey of Manhattan.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said he spoke Friday with White House officials and was told that Wilkins, a South Carolina native, was “near the top of the stack.”

“We know that he’s in the running, but there’s a lot of stiff competition obviously,” DeMint said.

History may not be kind to Gonzales’ tenure at the Justice Department, which he is accused of using as an arm of a more political White House.

“Whether or not he did anything illegal, he took advantage of every loophole available to make sure the Justice Department served political ends to help Republicans and hurt Democrats,” said Paul F. Rothstein, a Georgetown Law School professor of legal and government ethics. “If it had gone on, the public’s confidence and impartiality of the Justice Department would have been severely eroded.”

Nearly all of those who spoke at the goodbye ceremony described the soft-spoken Gonzales as a kind and humble man. Acting Deputy Attorney General Craig Morford, who admitted being “a little concerned” when he took his post in July, said Gonzales “has never once taken the trappings of his title.” Steve Bradbury, Justice’s chief legal counsel, said Gonzales “reveres the mission of this department and the people who faithfully carry it out.”

Gonzales spoke for just over 5 minutes at the afternoon ceremony, his voice appearing to crack with emotion several times as he thanked his wife, Rebecca, and Bush for their support.

“Please know that I leave today with the highest regard and the admiration for the employees of the department,” Gonzales said. “And I leave having had the privilege and honor of serving as attorney general.” ++

GQ ICON: COLIN POWELL
He was pushed aside in the run-up to war, but as he tells Walter Isaacson, he, too, bears some of the blame
Walter Isaacson, Gentlemen’s Quarterly

“I’m a former everything,” Colin Powell jokes as he relaxes in his office in Alexandria, just across the Potomac from Washington. Indeed, he is a former national-security adviser, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former secretary of state. But before he was a former, he was a first: the first black to serve in any of those roles. And he may also, still, be a future. He turned 70 this year and makes a solid living these days giving speeches and serving on advisory boards, but he does not rule out a return to public service.

As secretary of state, when he was caught in policy struggles with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, his smile often looked tense, pasted on his face. But when he smiles now, his eyes smile as well, and he is clearly more relaxed, as though he realizes that history is proving him right about the bureaucratic battles he lost. When I came to visit him on a quiet Friday afternoon earlier this summer, he was more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him. He exudes the genial courtesy of someone who is comfortable in his own skin, and he has none of the insecurity that in Washington often gets displayed as assertions of ego. He settled in on a couch, produced a couple of cans of Diet Coke, and started talking about his life, the changes he’s seen in America, and the current situation in Iraq.

*****

In reflecting on the changes in America that have occurred in your lifetime, how important to you and the nation was President Truman’s executive order integrating the armed services in 1948?

Black people had served for 300 years, going back to the early Massachusetts militia. They had served the nation even when the nation had not served them. They chose a way to show their commitment to the nation, and that was to shed the same red blood that their white fellow citizens had shed. They did it time after time, through every one of our wars. And they did it knowing that while in the military, they would be discriminated against.

Truman changed that by executive order, because he knew that Congress would not approve it. When I came along in 1958, I hit the right timing. The army was leading the nation in integration. I was from a diverse neighborhood where everybody was a minority, and so I didn’t feel like a minority. All of us were immigrant-family kids from the West Indies or Eastern Europe or the South or Puerto Rico. And we called each other by our minority names, which you can’t use anymore. So when I entered the army, which then had essentially a white Episcopalian power structure, I had an advantage over some of the blacks who came out of the South. These were young men who had never been around the white power structure except to say “yes, suh.” And they were suddenly in an integrated environment. For them, the cultural change and the power-relationship change was shocking. They had never been to a lunchroom counter or a workplace or a school that was not segregated. They had been raised in an environment where white was power and black was not. It was a lot harder for them, yet many prevailed. I had the right mixture of diversity and education to enter a system that now said, You can go wherever you want inside the army as long as you can perform.

Do you consider yourself a beneficiary of affirmative action?

The army wouldn’t be what it is if it hadn’t practiced affirmative action. People ask me, “Did you make general on the basis of affirmative action?” No, I didn’t. I did so on my record. But Clifford Alexander [the first black secretary of the army] was pushing affirmative action, and I get tagged with it.

Tagged with it? Do you consider being the beneficiary of affirmative action a negative thing?

No! When I got command of a brigade in the 101st Airborne, one of my white friends said, “Dammit, some of the guys are saying that you’re the only one of us who got a brigade, and you got it because you’re black.” And I said, “Don’t worry about it. I don’t care how I got it—I got it. And the only thing the army is going to measure me on is, am I a good brigade commander. And that’s all I ask.”

Do you still support affirmative action?

I have always supported affirmative action. I believe there is still a place for it. I spoke at the 1996 Republican convention in San Diego with my friend Ward Connerly [a black opponent of affirmative action] sitting in the audience. He had warned me that he would walk out if I made any reference to affirmative action. And when I did express my support for it, I looked right at him, and he didn’t move. Affirmative action is a concept that is probably not a growth industry. I’m glad it will eventually go away. But when I go to these inner-city neighborhoods, including across the street here in the Washington area, you can’t tell me these kids have the same opportunity that other kids have or that my kids have. Is it because they’re black that these kids are at a disadvantage? To some extent no, to some extent yes. We can’t deny it. Therefore, to the extent that we still believe it appropriate to provide some way of balancing the legacy of the past, I think we have an obligation to do so.

Going back to Truman’s executive order that the armed services must not discriminate based on race, do you foresee a president being able to do the same for gays?

The military is unique, and it has rules that are different from any other institution. We had a policy that did not permit gays and lesbians to serve. Then President Clinton came in and told us he wanted to take a look at it. He never told us to change it, despite what people think. I was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and told him that we’re not just a bunch of old generals who cannot see the future. It’s more than that. It’s a problem with ministers in the armed services from denominations that have objections to homosexuality. Also, we will have problems in our housing communities. The military tells you who you’re going to share your bunk space with, and we’re having enough of a challenge with just two sexes, men and women. The armed forces are not ready for this.

So you think we are getting too hunkered down and scared?

Yes! We are taking too much counsel of our fears.This doesn’t mean there isn’t a terrorist threat. There is a threat. And we should send in military forces when we have a target to deal with. We should also secure our airports, if that makes us safer. But let’s welcome every foreign student we can get our hands on. Let’s make sure that foreigners come to the Mayo Clinic here, and not the Mayo facility in Dubai or somewhere else. Let’s make sure people come to Disney World and not throw them up against the wall in Orlando simply because they have a Muslim name. Let’s also remember that this country was created by immigrants and thrives as a result of immigration, and we need a sound immigration policy.

Let’s show the world a face of openness and what a democratic system can do. That’s why I want to see Guantánamo closed. It’s so harmful to what we stand for. We literally bang ourselves in the head by having that place. What are we doing this to ourselves for?
Because we’re worried about the 380 guys there? Bring them here! Give them lawyers and habeas corpus. We can deal with them. We are paying a price when the rest of the world sees an America that seems to be afraid and is not the America they remember.

You can drive up the road from here and come to a spot where there is a megachurch over here, a little Episcopal church over there, a Catholic church around the corner that’s almost cathedral-size, and between them is a huge Hindu temple. There are no police needed to guard any of this. There are not many places in the world where you would see that. Yes, there are a few dangerous nuts in Brooklyn and New Jersey who want to blow up Kennedy Airport and Fort Dix. These are dangerous criminals, and we must deal with them. But come on, this is not a threat to our survival! The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn’t do it to ourselves, and we shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex.

One of your legacies to history will be what’s known as the Powell Doctrine. How do you define it?

Essentially it says: Avoid war—and if that’s not possible, and it’s necessary to use arms to solve a political problem, then do it in a decisive way. You remove as much doubt as you can about the outcome. In addition, you need to have a clearly defined mission, and you must have some understanding of how it’s going to end.

When the first Gulf War came along, I told President Bush [the elder] that when we had 250,000 troops in the region, we could defend Saudi Arabia from an Iraqi invasion. But if he wanted to kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, then General Schwarzkopf will need an additional 250,000 troops. Everybody gasped. And I told the president exactly how we would use them all, and he agreed.

We also had a clear mission, which was to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait. And that’s how we built a coalition with almost every other country in the world. We thought through where it was going to end. We said we wanted to leave Iraq with enough of an army so that it is not threatened by Iran. And we want to accomplish the mission we were given, which is getting the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. We were not interested in taking down the government. It was never our mission to go to Baghdad. For twelve years, I had to listen to criticism about that part of the plan. I don’t hear it criticized too much now.

The current Iraq war seems to have violated almost all of these precepts. We talked about this before the war.

The military presented its plans, and I was secretary of state, so it wasn’t really my role, but I said it didn’t seem to me that the plans called for enough force to impose our will or enough troops to deal with the problems that might come up. After one of the meetings, I felt strongly enough about it that I took the liberty to call General Tommy Franks [the regional commander] directly—something I shouldn’t have done, but I did. I said, “Let’s talk general-to-general.” I said, “I have my doubts as to whether or not you have enough force to execute.” And Tommy said, “Well, I think we do, Mr. Secretary.” And then he immediately called Don Rumsfeld, which he should have. And Don correctly said, “It’s good that Colin has been up-front, and now let’s discuss it in front of the president.” And we did. The president heard from his military commanders and his joint chiefs of staff and his secretary of defense that they felt they had enough troops.

Were they right?

They were right for the first part, the capture of Baghdad. And I never really had any question about the force needed for that. My question had been, “Have you guys really thought through the aftermath?” That’s what we hadn’t done. That was the big mistake. Don had written a list of the worst things that could happen, but we didn’t do the contingency planning on what we would do about it. So we watched those buildings get burned down, and nobody told the divisions, “Hey, go in there and declare martial law and whack a few people and it will stop.”

Then the insurgency started, and we didn’t acknowledge it. They said it wasn’t an insurgency. They looked up the definition. They said it was a few dead-enders! And so we didn’t respond in a way that might have stopped it. And then the civil war started at the beginning of last year. I call it a civil war, but some say no, it’s not a civil war, it’s a war against civilians. In fact, we have total civil disorder…

Do you think the surge makes sense?

You can surge all of the American troops you want, but they can’t stop this. Suppose I’m a battalion commander. My troops ask, “What do I do today, boss?” “Let’s go fight the Shia militias!” “What do I do tomorrow?” “Let’s go fight the Sunni insurgents!” “What do I do the day after tomorrow?” “Let’s go chase Al Qaeda!” “What do we do the day after that?” “We’re going to guard streets!” Our kids are fantastic. But this is not sustainable. Our surge can work only with an Iraqi political and military surge.

Are you sorry you didn’t question things more forcefully?

At the time, when I felt the president might not have focused on all the potential consequences, I said I needed to see him. I went to the White House and had a private session with him. I told him that we could knock over Saddam’s regime but he needed to understand what we would be faced with once we had done that. It was my “When you break it, you own it” speech. I said that this invasion would tie up the better part of 40 percent of our army for an indefinite period of time. It will be hugely expensive. You will be dealing with this for a long time to come. I said, “Take it to the U.N. See if we can get something from the U.N. that might allow us to avoid this war.” He said, “Let’s share this with the others.” And a few days later, we had a discussion with everyone, some by videoconference. They eventually agreed that we should take it to the U.N., some more willingly than others. Dick [Cheney] didn’t think it would work, and Don [Rumsfeld] I was not sure about, because you couldn’t always tell his opinion. Had I done my duty? I think so.

Do you feel responsible for giving the U.N. flawed intelligence?

I didn’t know it was flawed. Everybody was using it. The CIA was saying the same thing for two years. I gave perhaps the most accurate presentation of the intelligence as we knew it—without any of the “Mushroom clouds are going to show up tomorrow morning” and all the rest of that stuff. But the fact of the matter is that a good part of it was wrong, and I am sorry that it was wrong.

Was it twisted?

Not by me. What I used was the intelligence that was also available to everyone in the administration and to the Congress. Some of these senators are now presidential candidates who are saying they didn’t read the National Intelligence Estimate they had asked for. It is fair, however, to say that some members of the administration took the intelligence to a higher plane than it deserved.You’ve met with Barack Obama a couple of times and given him advice.

Is it possible that you will support him?

I will give advice to any of the principal candidates. I’ve met with others, including John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Barack called me and came by, and we had a long talk. Right before he decided to run, we talked again about the presidency and the type of decisions and problems that come in the middle of the night. I think he’s a very impressive man, I think he’s very smart, and I think he’s going to be a formidable candidate.

Do you think he’d be a good president?

I don’t want to start saying who would be a good president and who wouldn’t. I will say that I don’t see any among the major candidates who I think is unqualified to be president.

Would you be tempted to support Obama, even though he’s a Democrat, because he would be transformational?

He is transformational because he is a black man who has become one of the leading candidates of a major party. That is exciting. It’s transformational. But am I going to support him? I am going to be for who I think is the best person. Not the best Republican, not the best Democrat, not the best black guy or the best woman. I’m going to try to figure out who could best serve this country. And that’s who I will be voting for.

You did not say that you would be inclined to support the Republican candidate.

That’s right. I did not. Because I’ve been voting now for almost fifty years, and I’ve always supported the person I thought was best. I’ve voted Democratic, I’ve voted Republican. I’m going to vote for the best person.

Might you ever go back into public service, even as something such as education secretary?

I’m not looking for work. I have a terrific life. But I could see going back into government again. I can see doing such things as chairing a commission. Just not anything that involves elective politics.

You’ve been involved with a lot of people doing business in China. Do you worry that the absence of democracy and the suppression of individual rights there make them more of a potential adversary than a partner?

My friends in China tell me, “We know you love the idea of Jeffersonian democracy, but we don’t know how to manage 1.3 billion people using such a system, and we’re not going to try.” Their political system will become more liberal over time. But in my lifetime, it will not become what we call a democracy. And I’m not sure I lose any sleep over that. I want the 1.3 billion Chinese people under some kind of control that allows them to better their lives economically and not fall apart. We need to be patient.

Would you really bet on a country that feels it necessary to censor Google?

China will not be censoring Google forever, and most Chinese teenagers know how to go to proxy servers, anyway. The Chinese leaders know they can’t block full access to the Internet forever, but they’re trying to control it.

Do you think that the Indian model, which is more democratic and allows more free thought, will end up working better?

The Indians have had a democracy for the past sixty years. And they’re now starting to realize what it takes to be successful economically. They can’t move as fast as the Chinese, because they are such a great, large democracy. Great democracies have a lot of constituents that have to be heard and dealt with.

This seems to put you solidly in what is called the realist camp, rather than the idealistic school, of foreign policy.

Yes. I can give you a lesson on Jeffersonian democracy that will bring tears to your eyes, but when I was doing business as the secretary of state, the word I used was reform, less so than democracy. When I dealt with the Arab world, we had several conferences on reform. The word democracy frightened them. As a Saudi leader said to me, “Colin, please, give us a break. Do you really want to see Jeffersonian democracy in Saudi Arabia? Do you know what would happen? Fundamentalists would win, and there wouldn’t be any more elections.” President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt would say the same thing. They all were saying, “Take a look at our history and where we are. You can talk to us about reform, but don’t tell us to become Jeffersonian democracies tomorrow. It’s not possible.”

So you think we should be a bit more on guard against arrogance when we pursue a democracy agenda?

[laughs] Very good, very good. We have a tendency to lecture and perhaps not think things through. We have to be careful what we wish for. Are we happy with the democracy that Hamas gave us? There are some places that are not ready for the kind of democracy we find so attractive for ourselves. They are not culturally ready for it, they are not historically ready for it, and they don’t have the needed institutions.

How can we restore America’s image?

We should remember what that image was, back after World War II. It was the image of a generous country that sought not to impose its will on other countries or even to impose its values. But it showed the way, and it helped other countries, and it opened its doors to people—visitors and refugees and immigrants.

America could not survive without immigration. Even the undocumented immigrants are contributing to our economy. That’s the country my parents came to. That’s the image we have to portray to the rest of the world: kind, generous, a nation of nations, touched by every nation, and we touch every nation in return. That’s what people still want to believe about us. They still want to come here. We’ve lost a bit of the image, but we haven’t lost the reality yet. And we can fix the image by reflecting a welcoming attitude—and by not taking counsel of our fears and scaring ourselves to death that everybody coming in is going to blow up something. It ain’t the case. ++

Walter Isaacson is CEO of the Aspen Institute and the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe, among other books.

Powell Warns About a U.S. “Terror Industrial Complex”
Dr. Bruce Prescott, Mainstream Baptist
Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Former Secretary of State, General Colin Powell spoke at the University of Oklahoma this afternoon. My son, Will, interviewed Powell for the OU Daily immediately before he entered the hall to give his speech.

Will asked him to expound on a comment he made to GQ Magazine about a “terror industrial complex.” He also asked his opinion of the expanded use of private contractors, like Blackwater, in Iraq and the propriety of paying them more than military personnel.

Here’s a link to the video of Will Prescott’s interview with Colin Powell. Here’s a link to Will’s story about Powell’s speech. ++

Dr. Bruce Prescott is President of the Oklahoma Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State

OFF THE RECORD WITH DON RUMSFELD
The much maligned former secretary of defense talks about his time in office—and insists he has nothing to apologize for
Lisa DePaulo, Gentlemen’s Quarterly

The private plane about to deliver Rummy and Mrs. Rummy to their getaway in Taos, New Mexico, is idling on the tarmac at Dulles when the Secretary arrives. He enters smiling, beaming, swaggering, a compact little 75-year-old package of waning testosterone, dressed in real-man-headed-to-his-ranch khaki, two dachshunds (names: Reggie and Chester) yapping at his loafers, classy, no-nonsense wife of fifty-two years Velcroed to his side. In other words, the perfect tableau of a Bush-administration official—except, of course, that he no longer is and has chosen this outing to talk at length for the first time since he was rudely banished from the kingdom last December.

Two young, studly pilots—from the private firm Rummy uses to book his private planes—greet him in the doorway of the airport lobby. They are terribly excited to have the Secretary as their charge this morning. They’ve never met the man before—were never “lucky enough”—and so, yes, they fall into the category (small, if you believe the press; huge, if you believe the Rumsfelds) of Great Admirers. They stand erect and giddy, very respectful. “Mister Secretary,” they say in unison, extending their hands, explaining that they, Jeff and Jason, will be safely delivering him to Taos this morning, sir! Rumsfeld seizes the moment. He has always known how to play to his audience. “Let me tell you, as an old navy pilot, fellas…” And he’s off and running, flashing that special Rumsfeldian ability to exude charm and arrogance at the same time: praising their fine choice of career, giving them tips on the runway layout in Taos, conspiratorially gauging whether we might have to stop for fuel, and letting them know, in that passive-aggressive way he has, that he personally has already scoped out the weather conditions. “You don’t need any final instructions or anything?” he says more than asks.

“No, sir!”

Jason and Jeff head off to the cockpit, leaving the Rummys—and their two security guys—to schlep their stuff to the plane. (Rummy still has round-the-clock government security, because of “threats and things,” but he doesn’t want to talk about that. This will be the first of a great many Things Rummy Doesn’t Want to Talk About.) But Oh Lordy, as Rummy would say, what the heck are they bringing with them to Taos? What is all this stuff? Is that a king-size mattress pad from Macy’s, with the tags still hanging off it, that they are lugging across the country? And what’s with the straw rugs? Joyce, a.k.a. Mrs. Rummy, says she found those nifty rugs at a hardware store, though her preferred shopping venue is Target. As for the mattress pad, it was on sale! And they needed a new one at the ranch. They are, they explain, frugal.

Except when it comes to their preferred mode of transport.The Lear 60 they have leased for the journey is about fifty feet away on the tarmac. Would the Secretary like a ride out to the plane? asks one of the security guys. Rummy gives him his best “You idiot, I’m Donald Rumsfeld” look. “‘Course not!” he barks.

And we are off to Taos.

“Feel free to open the windows, ladies,” says Rummy, in his oozing-charm voice. (He is either Rummy or Mr. Secretary or DHR, as he refers to himself; or DR, as his staff refers to him, with abbreviated reverence.) Open the windows? “No, no,” he says. An impatient snarl. (Is she going to take everything literally?) The shades! The shades!

We settle in on the plane. Me, Joyce (with both dogs on her lap), DHR, and in the fourth seat, DHR’s reading materials. Mounds and mounds of newspapers: USA Today, The New York Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, etc. (Though the next day, he will claim, when asked what it’s like to get excoriated in the press: “I don’t spend a lot of time reading newspapers.”) He has also brought with him a thick stack of e-mails and memos that he has printed out for the trip. He still does his famous “snowflake” thing, so named for his propensity to put every thought that crosses his mind into memos and distribute them like a blizzard (to whom, these days, it is not clear), with the exception, perhaps, of those things he does not recall, such as his role, or nonrole, in the Pat Tillman cover-up, which he will testify about a month after our trip. For much of the four-hour flight to New Mexico, he hands notes and papers, one page at a time, across the aisle to Joyce with a “Sweetheart, look at this” instruction. Or: “Here, this is interesting.” Or: “Here, now this is interesting.”

I let at least two states pass underneath us before I dare to ask: So…whatcha all reading?
Heh heh. “You see the mountains? There they are!” says DHR.

No, really, what’s so interesting?

“Bad thunderstorms, like they said.”

Finally, he begins to hand pages across the aisle to me, with a caveat: “You can read it, but you can’t use it.” Heh heh

The Rumsfelds are headed to Taos on this gorgeous summer day to greet the only creature who might be more stubborn than DR. That would be Gus, the new mule Rummy bought for Joyce for her seventy-fifth birthday. “I said to Don,” says Joyce, filing her nails, “‘I want a mule.’ Because our horses, I haven’t been on in six years. And I just feel, at this age, it’s safer for me to be on a mule than a horse. A mule is not spooked easily, very sure-footed, calm…”

DHR puts his paper down and squints. Joyce wanted a mule, he says, so he bought her one. The least he could do.And you know, says Joyce, “in the history of the army, they were on mules.” So they had that little military connection.…

“Kit Carson rode one from California to Taos, New Mexico!” says Rummy.

“Isn’t that crazy?” says Joyce.

So how, exactly, do you go about buying a mule?

“On the Internet!” Rummy says.

He goes on to explain that he found “this mule fella in Missouri. I found the man who trained them and bred them. And, uh, he sent a video. And we looked at the video and satisfied ourselves that Gus was at least a possibility. There’s always a risk! When you buy a—”

A mule online?

“You can get a bad one. But from the video, he looks like a good-looking animal.”

And you named him Gus because…?

“Oh no, it was already named. The animal’s name, technically, was Augustus. But that’s a little too grand for us. So he’s gonna be Gus.” He picks up another newspaper. The headlines are full of news about Hillary, Barack, Rudy, McCain. Surely he has an opinion on how the election is shaping up.

“The what?” says Rummy.

The presidential election.

“I think, uh…?I’m gonna eat my lunch now.”

Kevin, his security guard who’s sitting in the jump seat behind the cockpit, proffers the prepackaged lunches. “Chicken or tuna salad,” says Rummy. “Ladies?”

He eats in silence, occasionally gazing out the window, then declares that he is going to “not talk for a while.”

Joyce is less reticent. While her husband shields himself with The Wall Street Journal, she talks about how surreal it has been for them to “reenter,” as she puts it. For six years, they lived in the bubble of the Bush administration—they couldn’t even go to Taos! But now that they are “reentering,” life has gotten interesting again. Why, just the other day, they flew commercial for the first time in six years!

“It was fun,” says Rummy, piping up.

“Oh, my gosh,” says Joyce. “It was exciting. And then we went on the train to New York. Which was the first time since he left the Pentagon. It was the first time we had done anything really like that! And it was absolutely… We were like two kids on an adventure!”

DHR has his nose back in the papers as Joyce tells the rest of the story about the amazing train ride. “And then the conductor came through and said, ‘There’s been a terrible tragedy.’ And we thought—I mean, from where we’re coming from, ‘terrible tragedy’ is serious. And the conductor said, ‘Anna Nicole Smith has died.’ ”

A little snort from Rummy.”And so isn’t that…,” Joyce trails off. “I mean, it’s really… And then the darling couple in front of us, who had said nothing, they turned around and said, ‘We’ve been trying to respect your privacy, but we’re quite sure you have no idea who Anna Nicole Smith is.’ Isn’t that adorable?!”

He peers over his newspaper and snorts again.

“And Don said, ‘Help us out a little bit.’ ”

They exchange a knowing chuckle.

“But I mean, it was the real world, you know?” says Joyce.

Speaking of the real world, when the Rummys are in Taos, do they ever get to hang out with Julia Roberts?

Rummy smiles. “Noooo. But we’ve met her, and she’s very nice.”

“She just had another baby, Don. A boy,” says Joyce.

So they’ve met her?

“Well, yeah, I’d say,” says Rummy. “I sold her some land. We had land that abutted each other, and she wanted it, so we sold it to her. But don’t put that in there! I don’t want that in the story.”

(”That’s okay,” whispers Joyce. “It was all over the Taos papers.”)

For the next half hour, his lovely and open wife tells me about the love affair the two have shared for more than six decades. They met when they were 14. Freshman year in high school, Winnetka, Illinois. “I was obsessed!” she says. “But he wasn’t crazy about me.” She spent her high school years offering condolences to the other girls he shafted. Finally, she snagged him senior year. Then he got accepted to Princeton. And she made a decision—”it was deliberate,” she says—to go as far away as possible. She picked Colorado. “I went west when he went east, because I didn’t want to spend four years hoping he would call.”

Rummy pretends to be ignoring this conversation.

Then what?

Well…Joyce was no dummy. She got herself “pinned” to another guy, and Rummy went berserk. (”I think it still bothers him,” she whispers.) He instantly proposed.

DR peers over his newspaper. “Oh, come on! She was so crazy about me that she ran off and got pinned to some guy in Colorado!”

“See?” says Joyce. “That still makes him a little mad, right?”

“Do you think it was a strategy?” Rummy asks me.

I think it was a brilliant strategy!

“Yeah, well. Do you want more lunch?”He returns to the papers, and Joyce returns to the topic of reentering. I probably won’t believe this, she says, but one of the really great things that’s happened since the president did or did not fire her husband is that everywhere they go, people just adore Donald Rumsfeld. “They come up to him on the street and tell him how much they like him,” says Joyce. “They throw their arms around him! Wherever we go. Even in New York, where you’d think it would be enemy territory! People come up to him and throw their arms around him.”

She says that he got “hundreds and hundreds of letters” when he left the Pentagon. All positive. “I said to Don, ‘Did you get any bad ones?’ ” DHR squints over his papers. Well, there was one negative letter, says Joyce. “From someone who was mad because he sold property to Julia Roberts.”

Rummy grimaces.

He tosses another memo across to Joyce for her opinion. “Lisa’s gonna think all my good ideas come from you,” he says. To me: “I feel like her secretary.” (Speaking of which, Joyce reminds him, they need to thank Lynne Cheney for dinner.) Finally, he starts to share. Among the things I am allowed to read: his eulogy for Gerald Ford (yes, he carries it around with him) and a rather fascinating chronology he has typed up interspersing the life of Donald Rumsfeld with Major World Events (”1946: DHR meets Joyce.… 1947: DHR becomes an Eagle Scout.… 2003: Operation Iraqi Freedom begins”). I learn that he was born the day after the stock market hit bottom in 1932, that he was 11 on D-day, and that his father died, of Alzheimer’s, the same year Ford made Rummy chief of staff. Rummy says he stole this chronology idea from a book he read on Churchill. He thinks it might be a nifty way to start his own book—which he is, in fact, planning to write, despite coy protestations. The chronology is a reminder of the profound influence DHR has wielded for more than half a century: naval officer. Four-term congressman. The youngest (and then oldest) secretary of defense. Top aide under Ford and Nixon (who once called him “a ruthless little bastard”). Ambassador to NATO. Middle East envoy. Two lucrative stints as a CEO in private industry—

He hands over another memo. “I sat down the other day and made a list of challenges in the world,” he says. (”Subject: Challenges.”) Another is an April 26, 2006, memo addressed to President Bush titled “Some Illustrative New Approaches and Initiatives to Meet the 21st-Century Challenges.” (I can read it, but I can’t have it.)

We move on to some photographs. DHR in his Princeton-graduation photo, DHR on a unicycle, DHR with Gerald Ford in bedroom slippers. And a really creepy shot of DHR’s face on a shooting target in Iraq. “These were found in the terrorist training camp,” he explains. “Before the war even started, they were there.”

With you as the target?”Yeah. When we conquered Baghdad, we went into this terrorist training camp and this was their target, all over the place. They were using these.”

Didn’t that freak you out?

A loud belly laugh. “There are so many things that should freak me out!” Then, a straight face. “No. Not really.”

Rummy collects his papers and memos and stuffs them into his old, beat-up leather briefcase. (He’s had it since 1977.) Then he gathers up the newspapers and offers them to me. In return I toss him the New York Post, the only paper he hasn’t devoured today. On the cover: Paris Hilton, just released from jail. He reads the headline—V-D DAY!—and cracks up. Then he starts to read the story.

Suddenly, the quizzical Rumsfeldian look.

“Sweetheart?” he says to his wife. “What’s a hair extension?”

“It’s a very big thing right now,” says Joyce. “I just learned about it three weeks ago.”
Rummy looks on in horror as she describes—quite accurately—how it is done.

“Hmmmph,” he says.

As we approach Taos, he gestures out the window. Look! “There’s the Rio Grande.” And the famous Gorge Bridge. “A friend flew under that Gorge Bridge. He got arrested for it. He was foolhardy.” A beat. “And there’s Julia Roberts’s land!” (But he’d prefer I not mention that.)

When the plane touches down, the Rummys applaud. “Way to go!” DHR shouts to the cockpit. “You could have been a navy pilot!” Then to me: “He had a little runway left there, didn’t use it all.” This is apparently high praise.

Joyce tells me I should dress as casually as possible when I come to visit the farm tomorrow. Jeans? “Absolutely!” (They prefer to call it a farm, not a ranch.) “Not those shoes,” adds Rummy, pointing to my high heels. “Those aren’t Taos shoes.”

I mention that maybe we could talk about Iraq tomorrow.

A squint of the eyes. A dawning realization.

“What is this for?” he asks. “And why?”

*****

That night Rummy calls, as promised, with directions to the farm. I already have a set of directions from his guy back in Washington—with the words please destroy after use on a sticky note on top—but I indulge him. He seems in good spirits; he explains that he and Joyce are enjoying their “last night alone” before Gus arrives. His directions are complicated, military-precise, every detail mentioned—including two “cattle guards” that one must navigate correctly. Um, what’s a cattle guard? “That is such a New York question!” says Rummy, roaring with laughter.

At nine the next morning, he’s waiting in the driveway of the farm with Chester and Reggie. “C’mon, Reggie, it’s Lisa! He can’t see well.” Reggie nuzzles my ankles. “Good dog.” Today he’s dressed in real-man-on-the-farm garb: old, faded jeans, a Patagonia vest, an oxford shirt and white undershirt, New Balance sneakers. Despite a limp (he wiped out on the slopes last winter and screwed up his hip pretty good) that has added a bit of frailty to the Persona, he still has the macho thing going. He walks like a man with a ranch.”You wanna leave your gear here, and I’ll walk you around a bit?” he asks.

Though Rummy doesn’t make a habit of inviting members of the press to his farm, he seems to love showing it off. The place is—there’s just no way to say it without clichĂ©s—peaceful, quiet, rustic, stunning in its raw natural beauty. It’s his fifty-acre piece of heaven, his sanctuary—particularly now. In fact, it kinda ticked him off that he got out here only a handful of times while he was secretary of defense. “Have been a little busy for the last six and a half years,” he says, chuckling. One of the upsides to his exile—though he doesn’t call it that—is being able to come here whenever the heck he wants. He shows me every barn, every tractor, every animal on the property. “I just love it here,” he says. “Where’s my chain saw?”

If you’re expecting Don Rumsfeld—out of government now, on his farm, in a moment of repose—to play the bitter, angry, reflective, tragic fallen hero…ain’t gonna happen. If he feels any of those things, he’s not showing it. (And if he did, he probably wouldn’t be Donald H. Rumsfeld.) The man does not do regret. Over the course of the next few hours, he will answer every question asked of him, and even when the answer is “I’m not gonna talk about that,” there’s never a flash of anger. Impatience, yes, but never anger.

And anyway, he would much rather show me around. “You gotta see this,” he says, leading me past piles of horse manure, past an outhouse, over an irrigation ditch, into a series of dilapidated barns. Rummy’s spread used to be a dairy farm—he bought it from the farmer’s wife at auction, after the guy died—and he has kept everything the old man left here. His tools, his machinery, his clothes, his rifle holster (”You ever seen one?”). He even kept his dirt-encrusted delivery log. “Look at this: ‘Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Homogenized for Herman Quintana. Put it in the icebox.’ Isn’t that interesting? He pretty much ran this place by himself. So he had to do it wisely.”

The Rumsfelds lease part of their land to a friend who runs cattle out here—”They were all right here this morning,” Rummy says; “it looked to be thirty head in this patch”—and have some handsome-looking horses. In another barn, he stores his guns. Which come in handy, with the darn coyotes. He has to be careful that Chester and Reggie don’t get eaten. “They go after the young ones,” he explains. “They got a calf one night.” He tells the story of how he tried to save that calf in the middle of the night. “Joyce likes to keep the ammunition far away from the weapons. So we keep the weapons locked up in here and the ammunition somewhere else. And one night, you could hear the coyotes killing a calf. As sure as anything. It was calving season. And I raced out here, got the ammunition, then I ran to the gun locker, got that open, then I ran all the way back.” He stops for a second, stares out at the field where it happened. Did I just detect a hint of emotion? I did. “By the time I got out there, they’d finished.”Was it bad?

“Yeah.”

So then what do you do with—

“A dead calf?” That hint of emotion is suddenly gone. “Oh, they kind of pack it up,” he says matter-of-factly. “A dead horse or anything, they pack it up and take it out to the dump.”

He shows me his little workshop (”I like to fix things”), the guesthouse, the barn he converted to a playroom filled with dollhouses and a Foosball table (for the grandkids). Then, suddenly, there’s a bit of a crisis: Reggie, the older dachshund who can’t see much anymore, has somehow gotten into the corral with the horses. “Oh no! Reggie! Come, pal!” To me: “This is not good. They’ll stomp him to death. They don’t know what he is. He could be a coyote or something.… Where the hell is he? Reggie! Ho! I don’t see him. Stay here, Chester.”

He goes off and rescues Reggie. But the darn dog keeps wandering off. Will he know not to go back in there with the horses?

“No, he may not,” says DR. “But he’s gotta learn, I suppose.” He shrugs. Learning the hard way is apparently a Rumsfeld tradition.

(A week later, Reggie will have what first appears to be a stroke. And Rumsfeld—though he won’t admit this—will be crushed.)

He leads me into the farmhouse. Their main house, where Joyce is spending the morning, is across the highway, on even more land. (They’ve made quite a haul in New Mexico real estate acquisitions over the years.) But since it’s being renovated, they’ve been bunking down on the farm. The farmhouse is adorable. It’s a “real adobe” Taos house, with two-foot-thick walls and beamed ceilings. Joyce has it decorated in southwestern WASP: warm, muted colors; tasteful rugs on stone floors; a few carefully selected pieces of art (a simple wooden cross, a Curtis print of the Taos pueblo, a painting by a local artist of the famous St. Francis of Assisi church in Taos—made more famous by Georgia O’Keeffe—where they like to go to Mass on Sundays even though they’re not Catholic); framed pictures of their three children and seven grandchildren; and a touch of whimsy, like the black steel cow sprawled out in the foyer. “That scare ya?” asks DR. “Joyce found that.” To commemorate one of their favorite cows, who died birthing a calf. His wife is the type of woman who turned his old congressional spittoon into a centerpiece for dinner parties. You can see why he loves her.

“We can sit here, if you want to visit,” says Rummy, offering a sturdy chair at the kitchen table. For several minutes, he futzes around, trying to figure out how to pour me a glass of water. (Where the heck did Joyce put the glasses?) Then he sits down, crosses his legs, and gestures at the tape recorder. Right. He had asked me to remind him first about an article in yesterday’s paper speculating on whether he was shopping some tell-all book. “I don’t even want to bother with that article,” he says. (It will be a memoir, not a darn tell-all, spanning the full seventy-five years of his illustrious life and career.) Okay. “But I’ll tell you what I’m doing. Joyce and I are in the process of typing up the papers that I was working on on the plane over. To create a new foundation. But this is a foundation that will be an operating foundation. And we have four purposes at the present time.…”So he’s not, as the article speculated, about to write a book that will “correct the factual record, so he can sleep more gently”?

“Noooo! That’s nonsense!” An impatient snarl. “I sleep fine.”

He’d like to explain the four purposes of his foundation: “One is to provide fellowships for postgraduate work in a variety of areas, including economics and foreign policy and national-security affairs. Our second purpose is to sponsor a lecture series—Pipe down!” One of the dogs is barking. “We ran out of food, so he’s hungry.” He looks to the ceiling. “Oh, Joyce, tell me how to do this!” To the dog: “We don’t have any food. I’ll give you a YipYap, that’s what I’ll give ya.”

A YipYap?

“It’s something that Joyce has to calm them down. It’s a treat. Kind of a little… Here, pal. The third thing is, we’re interested in microenterprise. Most of the poor countries of the world—I shouldn’t say most—a number of the poorer countries of the world have corrupt governments, and so when nations help nations, a lot of that money doesn’t end up going to the people; it gets stuck in graft and corruption.” He explains that before he came back to government, he worked on microloans with some outfit doing work in India and was impressed by it. He wants to do it in Afghanistan. “The fourth thing we’ll do is be involved and interested in the Central Asian former Soviet republics.…” A brief history lesson, then an explanation of what the Big Goal is: “We talked about it and decided that these were four things that looked like it would be timely to be helpful on. Each of us believes in free political systems and free economic systems, and so that’s a thread that will run through. I just think there ought to be a way…to try to be helpful to these former Soviet republics in ways that make their transition from a communist system and a command economy to a free political system and a free economy better. So that is what we’re doing. If I do write a book, the funds from the book would go right into that foundation.”

Sounds ambitious.”It is!”

You could just hang out in Taos and not do anything.

“Oh, that’s not like me. I have too much energy to do that. And it’s a wonderful world, all the things that can be done.”

Is it your legacy you’re worried about?

“Nooo! I don’t think in that term.”

You don’t? Maybe a little bit?

“No. You get up and do what you do. And when it’s over, it’s over.”

He pushes out his chair, checks his watch.

But when you look back…

“You know? I am not a person who looks back. You say, ‘When you look back.’ If you asked me when was the last time I looked back, I don’t do much of it. I just don’t. Tomorrow’s what’s important, much more important than yesterday.”

But how do you want to be remembered?

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “Accurately.”

Okay, then. How do you think you’ll be remembered?

“I don’t have any idea.” He’s slightly annoyed now. But: “I know it’ll be different than it is today; it always is. I think you read in that little paper I showed you on the plane that Harry Truman went out of office with, I think, a 19 or 20 percent approval rating. And yet what was accomplished in his presidency, with all those institutions that served the world and our country so well for fifty years, it’s just amazing.”

Do you think your old buddy W. hopes he’s Harry Truman in fifty years?

“I. Don’t. Know.”

Do you miss him?

“Um, no.”

A wry Rummy smile.

How about Colin Powell? Are you still close?

“No! We’re not close. Never were.”

Cheney?

“I still see Cheney.”

Yes, they have houses right near each other on the eastern shore of Maryland. And yes, it is true they watched the last two presidential elections together over at Dick’s place, and no, Rummy is not sure if they’ll be doing that again.

“I don’t know!” he says. “He’s a busy guy.”

A few things he will say about W. He believes that someday he’ll be vindicated. He believes he’s a lot more intelligent and curious than people give him credit for. “Oh, my goodness gracious!” That’s a yes. “But you say ‘than people give him credit for.’ Than the press. Let’s lay it on the line. ‘Than the press gives him credit for.’ Just think, in my lifetime, the Republican presidential candidates: Eisenhower, considered to be a bumbler, bad syntax. Gerald Ford, the best athlete they had in decades, and they called him a stumblebum and demeaned him and made fun of him. Said he wasn’t smart, which he was. He’d gone to Michigan, he’d gone to Yale Law School. I mean… And Ronald Reagan. You read his diaries now, and the man is remarkable. And yet he was dismissed as a movie actor and not very smart. So I mean, the fact that President Bush is demeaned is no different than Eisenhower or Ford or Reagan. And the fact that people believe that to be the case is not a surprise when they’re told it day in, day out, by the, uh, eastern media.”

I can see how you and Bush got along in the loyalty department.”Now, that’s funny.”

You still like him?

“I do.”

You don’t talk, though, right?

“Uhhh…I’m trying to think. No.”

Was the last time you talked to him the day you resigned?

He can’t recall.

What he does recall is that twice before, at the height of the Abu Ghraib disgrace, he offered to resign. “I wrote a note. The first note basically said, ‘Look, this is a difficult problem for our country, and it happened on my watch, and you have my resignation anytime you feel it would be helpful.’ And then I gave him that, and he rejected it. And then I wrote out a longer resignation, and, uh, resigned as opposed to offering a resignation. And he rejected that.”

What does that tell you about him?

Long pause. “I don’t know that I want to go there. That’s none of my business. To analyze…”

A month and a half after our visit, Reuters would break the story that Rumsfeld gave his final (and apparently third) resignation letter to the president the day before the midterm elections, though Bush chose not to announce it until the day after, infuriating many Republicans who felt the election could have been won if Rummy had been sacrificed first. In Taos, I asked him if he considered resigning before the elections.

“Uhhh, no,” he replied. “But it was very clear in my mind that if the Democrats won the House or the Senate or both, that it made sense for me to…that it would be best for the department if someone else was there.”

So it could have been different for you if the Republicans had won?

“Mmm-hmm.”

I tell him there’s something I’ve been curious about. In the early days, before the invasion, where did Donald Rumsfeld stand, exactly? Were you one of the people driving the bus who wanted to invade Iraq, or—

“No.” He cuts me off. “I think [Bush] was quoted in the Woodward book as saying he didn’t ask me. And that’s true.”

But surely, at some point you must have expressed your concerns.

He did. First of all, “we—without separating me from the others—we tried not to have that happen. We tried to get Saddam Hussein to adhere to the U.N. resolutions. We tried to get other countries to put diplomatic pressure on him. Even at the very end, we tried to get him to leave the country and seek safe haven elsewhere so that that”—he means the war—”wouldn’t have to happen. And before the war, I sat and—this is on the record, all of this—I sat down and handwrote fifteen, twenty, twenty-five things that could be…could go wrong, could be real problems.”

He says he will show me the memo. (And eventually, he does. It’s just as he describes it.)

“I wrote down all of the things that could be problems: That we wouldn’t find weapons of mass destruction. That there’d be a Fortress Baghdad, and a lot of people would be killed. All of this… I read it in a National Security Council meeting. Then I went back to my office—I had handwritten it—and I dictated it and added four or five things. And I think there’s probably thirty items on it. And then I sent it around to each of the members of the National Security Council, to the president and the vice president. So that all of them had in their heads the things that were difficult, problematic, worrisome, dangerous.”And how was it received?

“Um…” A pause. He is carefully choosing his words. “I think it was…appreciated by the president that I took the time to do that.”

And do you think the president—

“Yeah, I thought he read it. Yeah.”

Almost on cue, the dogs start barking. Joyce walks in, with Blanca, their housekeeper.

“Hi, Blanca!” says DR.

“Hi, sir.”

He notices that Blanca looks upset. “You doin’ all right? What happened?”

Joyce explains that a good friend of Blanca’s just lost her son. Killed in a car accident last night. With another friend. Fifteen years old.

“Fifteen,” says Rummy, shaking his head. “Oh, that is a shame.”

He walks over to Blanca, has a private word with her.

Then we move into the parlor, so Blanca and Joyce can put the groceries away. We sit down at a big, oval wooden table next to Joyce’s piano and shelves filled with jigsaw puzzles and Scrabble games. They’re big Scrabble people.

So: Could you ever see yourself pulling a Robert McNamara and apologizing for your role in this war?

He doesn’t blink. “McNamara is a good man. And an intelligent man.…” And the rest is off the record. “Very much off the record.” (DR always adds degrees to his off-the-recordness. There is, to my count, “off the record,” “very off the record,” and “way off the record.” And he always remembers, sometimes in midsentence, to tell you when he’s back on. The man is nothing if not precise.)

At one point I ask him what the hardest time in his life was. “The hardest time, without question, was being chief of staff to President Ford,” he says. “Because [Ford] stepped into a flying airplane, with no crew! And to come in and be his chief of staff was just a terribly difficult assignment.” It was brutal being in charge, he says, “in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, when the reservoir of trust in this country had been drained,” where “you’d go out and give a press conference in the White House, and if I said, ‘That’s the ceiling,’ they would wonder why; they’d say, ‘Why is he saying that’s the ceiling?’ I mean, there was no trust in anyone for any reason. The environment was just polluted. It was just rotten in our country.”

Harder than the past six years, though?”Oh yeah. You know, people think now, Gee, isn’t everything horrible and isn’t it terrible? ” But look at the other times in history, in his own lifetime, he says. “I mean, Lyndon Johnson couldn’t leave the White House during the Vietnam War, they were throwing blood on the Pentagon… They were digging graves in my front lawn the last time I was secretary of defense! So you know, everything’s new and everything changes, and nothing changes.”

There are a lot of people who think that you guys are cold and callous, I say, that you don’t hear criticism, that it doesn’t seem to affect you when you see the death toll every day coming out of Iraq.

“Oh.” It’s more of a moan than an “oh.”

Why is that?

“Probably ignorance.”

But it has to affect you.

“Oh.” The moan again. “Off the record…” And he tells a story that, frankly, should be on the record. It’s personal and pretty heart-wrenching, the kind of thing that people who despise Donald Rumsfeld might be surprised to hear. </