Donald rumsfeld

Donald Rumsfeld died this week — and it’s just so easy, isn’t it? It’s so convenient to dance on the grave of the man who helped bring about the disastrous Iraq war. For Rumsfeld, the old dictum, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, seems to have been discarded almost from the start. The obituaries, mostly in left-leaning publications like the Atlantic and the Daily Beast, have been downright vicious. Rumsfeld was George W. Bush’s first defense secretary who, alongside Dick Cheney, pushed hard for deposing Saddam Hussein after 9/11. Because of this, he’s been labeled a war criminal. He’s been held responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan where he refused to accept a Taliban surrender.

What kind of man was Donald Rumsfeld? A successful one, by almost every measure. Ivy League scholar-athlete, captain of Princeton’s football and wrestling teams. Successful candidate for office, easily reelected to Congress twice before he left to join the Richard Nixon administration. There he proved a success at navigating both the federal bureaucracy and the internal politics of the scandal-consumed administration. He survived Nixon’s resignation and soon became Gerald Ford’s chief of staff — and after that, the youngest man ever to serve as secretary of defense, taking charge of a newly-minted all-volunteer force whose morale and discipline were in shambles after Vietnam.