The hawk who oversaw the U.S. invasion of Iraq

1932–2021

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was seated at his desk in the Pentagon watching news footage from New York City, where two planes had just smashed into the World Trade Center. Suddenly, his office began to shake—a hijacked Boeing 757 had slammed into the Pentagon’s southwest wing. Rumsfeld ran to the crash site to help in the rescue work, then moved to the military command center. He quickly emerged as the hawkish face of the Bush administration’s War on Terror, achieving fleeting popularity as U.S. forces ousted Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers, who had harbored al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. But Rumsfeld and fellow neoconservatives were soon pushing President George W. Bush to strike Iraq, claiming—with no hard evidence—that dictator Saddam Hussein also had ties to al-Qaida, and weapons of mass destruction. “The best and in some cases the only defense,” Rumsfeld said, “is a good offense.” No WMDs were found following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the country rapidly descended into bloody sectarian conflict. Rumsfeld offered no mea culpas in his 2011 memoir, insisting that the Iraq War, which cost the U.S. $700 billion and resulted in the deaths of 4,400 American service members and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, “created a more stable and secure world.” Rumsfeld was born in Evanston, Ill., to parents who were successful real estate agents, said The New York Times. He earned a scholarship to Princeton University, where he was captain of the wrestling and football teams. After a stint as a Navy fighter pilot, Rumsfeld won a long-shot bid in 1962 for a House of Representatives seat in an affluent Chicago suburb. “A strikingly handsome Midwesterner radiating confidence,” the Republican formed a group of aggressive young lawmakers dubbed “Rumsfeld’s Raiders” and easily won three more terms. Richard Nixon admiringly called Rumsfeld a “ruthless little bastard” and hired him after winning the presidency.

As head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Rumsfeld pared the anti-poverty agency down sharply, said The Times (U.K.).

Donald Rumsfeld

Then, having rankled Nixon’s top aides, he was dispatched to Brussels as ambassador to NATO in 1973, leaving him “untainted when the full fury of the Watergate scandal broke.” President Gerald Ford named Rumsfeld his chief of staff, then defense secretary, where he clashed with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, foiling a major arms-control deal with the Soviet Union. The Pentagon’s youngest-ever chief— he took the post at age 43—Rumsfeld was an intense manager who sent out flurries of memos that came to be known as “snowflakes.” After Ford’s 1976 election defeat, Rumsfeld went into business as a pharmaceutical and tech executive, making millions of dollars from his role in the development of NutraSweet and high-definition TV. In his second Pentagon stint, Rumsfeld had ambitious plans to “streamline and modernize the military,” said The Wall Street Journal. He dismissed a request from top generals for a 480,000-strong Iraq invasion force, calling it “old thinking,” and capped the maximum deployment at 125,000 troops. Baghdad fell in three weeks, but the occupying force was too small to restore order. “Stuff happens,” Rumsfeld remarked when Iraqis went on a looting spree. Pentagon officials said the chaos was fueled by the defense secretary’s decision to disband Iraq’s army, which left some 300,000 men jobless; many went on to join ISIS. Rumsfeld often “came across as insensitive to strains on the U.S. military,” said The Washington Post. In 2004, he told Army reservists worried about the lack of armor on their vehicles that “you go to war with the Army you have.” Asked about the failure to find WMDs, Rumsfeld insisted that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

“As the war dragged on with little sign of progress,” President Bush resisted calls to fire Rumsfeld, said The Guardian (U.K.). But after Republicans suffered a drubbing in the 2006 midterm elections, “Rumsfeld was immediately sacked, and largely disappeared from public life.” In a 2015 interview, he said the U.S.’s fatal mistake in Iraq was trying to build a democracy. “You can be helpful, you can provide assistance,” Rumsfeld said, but eventually, “you’re going to have to take your hand off the bicycle seat.”