Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
2011
ISBN 978-1-59523-067-6
815 pages
Hardcover
$45.00 Cdn
2 June 2011
In his book Leadership, General Rick Hillier sharply distinguished between a leader and a manager in a leadership position. Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense in the Bush Administration, is an example of a leader in a management position.
Why should Canadians be interested in reading a book about American politics by an American luminary? One reason is to gain a perspective in the differences in the quality of government between the American and Canadian systems.
The Canadian system of government almost never produces men of the Rumsfeld type. The closest Canadian equivalent is probably C.D. Howe, the “Minister of Everything” in Liberal governments from the 1930s to 1957. Howe was a successful businessman before he became a politician. American politics abounds in the Rumsfeld type: Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Dick Cheney are other exemplars of the type. These are business executives, academics, retired generals who move back and forth between the private and public sectors in the course of their careers.
In Canadian politics, to hold an executive position in government, you either have to be elected to the House of Commons, or rise to the top positions in the civil service, which takes a career’s worth of time. In America, executive positions are the political appointments of the president, and academics, successful businessmen, and even community organizers are routinely appointed to them. The American system thus tends to gain a wider variety of life experiences in executive positions than the Canadian system.
Although Rumsfeld spent the early part of his working career as a congressman, the bulk of his career was spent alternately in high executive positions in the private sector and in Republican administrations. Rumsfeld served as Richard Nixon’s Ambassador to NATO, Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense, as special envoy to the Middle East under Ronald Reagan, and Secretary of Defense again in the George W. Bush Administration. In the private sector Rumsfeld was the CEO of G.D. Searle & Co., a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, and CEO of General Instrument Corporation, a supplier of electronics to the cable and satellite television industry. As a result of his time in the private sector, Rumsfeld became personally wealthy. And having private wealth added to his value in government because he did not need the job. His advice and work tended to be fearless anyhow.
Rumsfeld’s management and executive skills kept him involved in Republican politics even when he was working in the private sector. His preference was for executive rather than advisory positions, an inclination which kept him out of the Nixon White House during the critical Watergate scandal. His service as Reagan’s envoy to the Middle East, during which he met the president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, occurred while he was on leave from Searle.
His physical courage, developed as a collegiate and Olympic-quality wrestler and as a navy flyer, enabled him to function effectively in some strange and dangerous places. He deliberately wandered into the riots outside the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, he worked effectively in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983 while coming under fire in the middle of the civil war, and most famously he was a calming influence at the Pentagon after it was struck on 9/11.
But Rumsfeld also possessed the moral courage to ask questions and to accept challenges to his own assumptions. Rumsfeld already had a lifetime of legislative, executive, and business experience by the time he became Secretary of Defense, again, in 2001. His “snowflakes” were what the Pentagon bureaucracy called his memoranda in which he challenged one thing after another in the way that bureaucracy thought and acted. Particularly after the 9/11 attacks, he constantly challenged the Pentagon bureaucracy to think harder, to rethink positions, to come up with new ideas, and to challenge old assumptions. He insisted that people challenge him and his ideas and assumptions.
Rumsfeld was a skeptic about the attempt at nation building in Iraq. He tries to explain and come to terms with the failure to find WMD’s after the war. He is satisfied with the way in which Afghanistan was handled between 2002 and 2006. He is not a believer in a “small America” but is doubtful about trying to export the American experience in government and American values to other countries whose cultures are very old. He is not as wedded to Realpolitik as Henry Kissinger is, but neither is he a crusading moralist.
The advice that President Bush was getting from Rumsfeld and the work that he put in to make the American effort successful could not get any better, even if it was not always right and did not always work out. That too is life, and a life’s lesson.
Rumsfeld provides very useful insights into the thinking going on behind the scenes in the Bush Administration during the war, and gives numerous examples of how inaccurate and even vicious news reporting and political commentary can blight a nation’s effort.
The book is extremely well written, and shows a discipline of mind and thinking that began with a mother who was a strict grammarian. Rumsfeld’s almost philosophical turn of mind is much in the manner of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who looked to grammar for much of his philosophical insight.
Rumsfeld’s book is a much finer read than Hillier’s. But for those who are willing to put in the effort, one can learn much about American politics and about how really successful people work and think.
The proceeds from sales of Known and Unknown are donated to the military charities supported by the Rumsfeld foundation.
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