Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense when President George W. Bush dispatched US troops to Afghanistan in pursuit of al-Qaeda and to Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein, died in Taos, New Mexico, at the age of 88.
Ascend to the Top: Rumsfeld was born in Chicago on July 9, 1932, and received a bachelor’s degree in politics from Princeton University in 1954. He studied law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center, but did not graduate from either. Instead, he joined the United States Navy and served as a naval aviator and flying instructor from 1954 to 1957. He joined the Naval Reserve in 1957 and remained there until 1989, when he retired with the rank of captain.
Rumsfeld moved to Washington in 1957 and worked as a political staffer to two Republican lawmakers before winning election to the Illinois 13th congressional district in 1962. He was re-elected three times before resigning in 1969 to join President Richard M. Nixon’s cabinet as director of the United States Office of Economic Opportunity.
Rumsfeld resigned as director in December 1970, but stayed in Nixon’s White House as an adviser until February 1973, when he was appointed US Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Rumsfeld was named White House chief of staff by Nixon’s successor, Gerald R. Ford, when he resigned. He was confirmed as Secretary of Defense in October 1975, a position he held until January 1977. For his federal work, Ford awarded Rumsfeld the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Return To The Pentagon: After leaving the Defense Department, Rumsfeld had CEO positions at a number of companies, including the pharmaceutical firm G. D. Searle & Company, the technology firm General Instrument Corporation, and the biopharmaceutical firm Gilead Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: GILD).
When he met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in December 1983, Rumsfeld was special envoy to the Middle East, special envoy on the Law of the Sea Treaty, and a member of the National Economic Commission in President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet.
Rumsfeld ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, but pulled out before the primaries, instead focusing on becoming the national chairman for Senator Bob Dole’s campaign. George H.W. Bush won the election and the primary, but he did not give Rumsfeld a job in his cabinet.
In 2001, Rumsfeld was sent to the Pentagon by Bush’s son, George W. Bush, in what would become one of the most contentious tenures in the history of the office of Secretary of Defense. Even though there was no evidence of Iraqi involvement in the attacks on the American mainland, Rumsfeld was a vocal advocate for initiating a war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq following the 9/11 attacks. Later allegations by the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs were proven to be untrue.
While a global force joined U.S. soldiers in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan to evict al-Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban rule, the United States’ choice to wage war on Iraq split the country and alienated many of its allies.
The US military’s occupation of Iraq was hampered by allegations of human rights violations against detainees and a failure to bring the country’s disparate groups together.
In 2004, a German prosecutor filed a criminal case against Rumsfeld, accusing him of war crimes. After Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections, his relationship with military brass within the Pentagon and NATO deteriorated rapidly, and he resigned.
The Last Years of Donald Rumsfeld: Rumsfeld founded a nonprofit to encourage civic service in 2007 and wrote an autobiography in 2011. He was the subject of Errol Morris’ documentary “The Unknown Known” in 2013 and, unexpectedly, released a digital solitaire app in 2016.
Rumsfeld was reportedly described by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as “the most ruthless man” he had ever met.
Rumsfeld was described as “an exceptional public servant and a very decent man” by former President Bush in a statement.
(Photo courtesy of the National Archives of the United States of America.)
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