Donald Rumsfeld’s death sent me back to his memoir, Known and Unknown. I wasn’t grabbed by his counterattacks on his critics and colleagues in the Bush Administration. (Years after disasters in Iraq, I doubt anyone would be won over by his case that nation-building-was-not-his-job-and-Bremer-Condi-were-incompetent.) What struck me were his (few) moments of clarity about his own dimness. Such as his reflection on his failure to check in with his wife on 9/11:
“Have you called Mrs. R.?” More than 12 hours after the attack on the Pentagon—I had been so engaged I hadn’t thought of calling her. After 47 years of marriage one takes some things—perhaps too many things—for granted…[A Defense Department official] looked at me with the stare of a woman who was also a wife: “You son of a bitch.” She had a point.
I want to make a different point about the model of mind on offer in Known and Unknown. In his memoir, Rumsfeld embodied not the Ugly American of leftist nightmares, but America the unimagining. He was Old School. A man’s man for whom Known and Unknown could’ve referred to the traditional gendered break between public (male) and private (female) realms. What seems to have been unknown—or at best barely known—to Rumsfeld was felt life.
A nod to his lost friendship with civil rights warrior/dove Allard Lowenstein hints at what went missing from his memoir. Lowenstein and Rumsfeld grew tight in the 60s—”We were an odd pairing, me with my crew-cut and Lowenstein with his rumpled hair and untucked shirtsleeves…I found him humorous, passionate and interesting.” Lowenstein was at home with Mrs. R. timing her contractions before she gave birth to the Rumsfelds’ son. When Lowenstein ran against a Republican for Congress in 1970, Rumsfeld issued a statement affirming his friend’s good faith. But Rumsfeld’s attempt to distance himself from those who “subscribe to the notion that raising questions about national issues, including war, is undermining support for our men in uniform” proved unacceptable to the GOP. Rumsfeld had his assistant Dick Cheney walk it back. Lowenstein was then accused by his opponent of having lied about his link to Rumsfeld who never corrected the record. His friendship with Lowenstein (who went on to lose the election) suffered: “I’d like to think if I’d dealt with the matter personally. I might have found a way to meet the needs of both friendship and politics.”
But Known and Unknown hinted he still wouldn’t have a clue. Personal “stuff” didn’t meld with politics in his autobiography. While he let on that two of his children had become addicts—his son suffered a relapse around the time of 9/11—their emotional lives hardly figured in his memoir. Glimpses of Rumsfeld’s son, though, took on added pathos once a reader found out about the boy’s history of addiction. Nick Rumsfeld had a weakness for Richard Nixon who once let him sit at the president’s desk. (His parents avoided talking about Watergate in their son’s presence because they knew he couldn’t take bad news about his idol.) The thought of Rumsfeld’s son going down slow with Nixon reminded me of a scene in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan that nails one young urban haute bourgeois’s pique at a world turned upside down. This U.H.B. recoils from the image of Dustin Hoffman’s 60s anti-hero in The Graduate and stands up for the film’s stand-in for the Establishment—the preppie groom (and “make-out king”) whose bride runs off with Hoffman’s “Benjamin.” His absurd diatribe is light stuff, but it’s no joke to ponder why Rumsfeld’s kid—timed into the world by that supremely 60s figure Al Lowenstein—ended up needing serious pain reduction after solidarizing with Richard Nixon in the 70s.