To the benefit of all humanity, Donald Rumsfeld is no longer the Secretary of Defense. But once in a while, we gain some insights into just how peculiar a man ol’ Rummy really was during his lengthy — he was the longest serving Defense Secretary in U.S. history — tenure at the Pentagon.
Consider, for example, his constant stream of memos, which came to be known as “snowflakes. Rumsfeld produced up to 60 memos a day, and the WaPo obtained a whole bunch of them. There aren’t any shocking new revelations, per se, but we do get a sense of an intolerant man with unusually thin skin.
In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid “physical labor” and wrote of the need to “keep elevating the threat,” “link Iraq to Iran” and develop “bumper sticker statements” to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war. […]
Under siege in April 2006, when a series of retired generals denounced him and called for his resignation in newspaper op-ed pieces, Rumsfeld produced a memo after a conference call with military analysts. “Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists,” he wrote.
People will “rally” to sacrifice, he noted after the meeting. “They are looking for leadership. Sacrifice = Victory.”
The meeting also led Rumsfeld to write that he needed a team to help him “go out and push people back, rather than simply defending” Iraq policy and strategy. “I am always on the defense. They say I do it well, but you can’t win on the defense,” he wrote. “We can’t just keep taking hits.”
By “hits,” of course, Rumsfeld wasn’t referring to attacks on U.S. troops. He meant he personally couldn’t “keep taking” public criticism. Rummy was feeling rather sorry for himself.
One of the more notable points from the WaPo article is that Rumsfeld, despite leading the Pentagon during two wars, took a very personal interest in newspaper columns that critiqued his job performance.
He was even personally involved in the Defense Department’s message development.
As public discontent and congressional questioning grew in 2006, his final year at the Pentagon, a series of snowflakes revealed a man determined to counter the chorus of media criticism in one- or two-line zingers to staff members about specific articles.
“I think you ought to get a letter off about Ralph Peters’ op-ed in the New York Post. It is terrible,” he writes on Feb. 6, 2006. In a Feb. 2 New York Post column, Peters decried “chronic troop shortages in Iraq” while the Pentagon buys “high-tech toys that have no missions.” […]
On March 20, Rumsfeld ordered a point-by-point analysis of the seven “mistakes” columnist Trudy Rubin wrote about in the Philadelphia Inquirer and a response to her essay — which he wanted to see before it was sent out. Rubin wrote that the war had “gone sour.”
The Secretary of Defense didn’t have better things to do than coordinate a response to a columnist from the Philadelphia Inquirer? Seriously?
Apparently, the snowflakes were still falling even after Rumsfeld was thrown under the bus, the day after the midterm elections.
A November 2006 editorial in the New York Times that said the Army was ruined “is disgraceful,” Rumsfeld wrote to Smith. The editorial said that “one welcome dividend” of Rumsfeld’s departure was that the United States would “now have a chance to rebuild the Army he spent most of his tenure running down.”
Rumsfeld later reprimanded his staff, writing, “I read the letter we sent in rebuttal. I thought it rather weak and not signed at the level it should have been.” He then instructed staffers to prepare an article about the Army. “We need to get that story out,” he wrote on Nov. 28, 2006, a Tuesday. He ordered a draft by Friday.
As Jason Zengerle put it, “There’s something almost kind of poignant about this one. By this point, after all, Rummy had been fired. He was just biding his time at the Pentagon until Bob Gates got confirmed. But there he was still imperiously chewing out his staff and complaining that they weren’t sufficiently supporting him. You can almost imagine Rummy’s underlings not even bothering to read his memos and just tossing them straight in the trash.”