Known and Unknown: A Memoir

"Rumsfeld has always fascinated me. I’ve written about him in my columns. He was an incredibly intelligent person, in my view. I don’t know if he was quite Walter Isaacson biography level, but he was very, very smart. Very capable. He talks a lot about this famous quote: about how there are knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. I actually think that framework is extremely insightful and helpful for thinking about things. But then—his signature endeavour in his long career was the Iraq War, which, to me, is one of history’s biggest examples of not understanding what you know and what you don’t know. He thought there were weapons of mass destruction. He thought that the United States could go in and change Iraq. Neither one of those things were true, and it was a failure of knowledge and understanding. So that contradiction always really fascinated me. Reading his book tapped into the curiosity. It’s a good book. It’s self-serving in a number of ways, as you might expect from an autobiography of somebody who has been very heavily criticised. But, nonetheless, it’s an interesting read. That’s a big strain of it. It varies by individual. Some people come to autobiography with a very storng desire to ‘fix the record,’ ‘correct errors.’ Other people are more open. It depends on their personality. I mean, it’s refreshing to read an autobiography that is heavily critical. Obama’s, for example, in contrast to Rumsfeld’s is much more self-critical, much more willing to say: ‘we got this wrong.’ Now, Obama makes arguments too, and I think a big part of his impulse is to set the record straight, historically. But you get varying degrees of that, depending on the author and their approach. It’s much more refreshing to me to hear people try to be open and honest. And they are taking on the hardest jobs in the world—whether it is the Presidency or Secretary of State or Defense. It’s not like everything is going to go perfectly, and if you act like that’s what happened that can be revealing. Reading his book, you are reminded that he was actually very rational in a lot of ways. And he did a lot of good. I mean, when he came into his job as the Secretary of Defense, the Cold War had been over for ten years, but our general posture—where we had our troops, how we were spending our money—was still a Cold War posture. Rumsfeld was advocating, even before September 11, was that they would have to deal with asymmetric threats like terrorism. September 11 accelerated that focus, and he was effective in a lot of ways. But then there are these contradictions that I find so fascinating: how someone so apparently smart and rational can make such big mistakes. So, yes, I think you are reminded that this was an intelligent person trying to do their best, and sometimes you can forget that when all you see is the criticism of his biggest mistakes. Yes, I think personal ambition plays a huge role in these events and circumstances. Part of why Rumsfeld wanted to go into Iraq and to transform it into a vibrant democracy was that he himself could be, along with Bush and Cheney, what finally changed the Middle East, after decade after decade of failures. I think his personal ambition to be the historical figure that solved the problem by building a democracy in Iraq, and then having democracy spread throughout the region. That was his stated goal. I think it clouded his judgement—he saw everything clearly within his field of vision, except his own self-image. That played a big role."