WASHINGTON, 4 November 2003 — Henry Kissinger once said that of all the despots he’d had to deal with, none was more ruthless than Donald H. Rumsfeld. According to Robert Novak on CNN’s “The Capitol Gang,” Donald Rumsfeld “has no friends.” In fact, the secretary of defense and Vice President Dick Cheney are long-time friends and associates, going back to when both were Republican congressmen in the 1960s. Both later served in the same Cabinets and each has been a secretary of defense.

Yet Novak had a point. Rumsfeld is a solo operator, a grandstander who, if he cannot intimidate colleagues, cuts them off publicly. He is not a “nice guy,” except with those he considers his equals — like Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Advisory Board member Richard Perle. Right now Rumsfeld is confronted with difficult decisions as to how the Defense Department can raise money for revolutionary new weapons. He and his Republican colleagues are pushing the so-called “star wars” program, and the decisions they make will affect warfare for many years to come.

To finance these technical innovations, however, Rumsfeld must eliminate some current major weapons systems. Since most members of Congress like anything that provides jobs in their own districts, it falls to Rumsfeld to make the major decisions regarding which weapons systems will be continued and which will not. At the same time, Rumsfeld seems more and more enamored of his press notices. While he may talk uninterruptedly for several minutes at a time, he seems less and less interested in staying on topic, and more and more concerned with thinking up clever debating points and repartee. At times his dialogues are pointless and long-winded.

There are those who think he may have become a little silly in the head.

Some members of the Pentagon press corps suggest that Rumsfeld no longer represents the cutting edge of the Bush administration but instead has become a millstone around the president’s neck. With his popularity now dropping, Bush may be reluctant to make a radical change in the remaining months before election day. Others argue that dropping his defense secretary may be the only way to safeguard Bush’s re-election prospects.

How did Don Rumsfeld get into this fix? Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1932, he attended Princeton University on a scholarship, graduating in 1954. He married Joyce Pierson that same year, and the couple has three children.

Following Navy service from 1954 to 1957, Rumsfeld worked as an administrative assistant to a US congressman. After a stint at a banking firm, he was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1962, making him one of the youngest members of Congress.

He served there for six years. Resigning from Congress in 1969 to join the Nixon administration as director of the Economic Opportunity Program, Rumsfeld became a member of the president’s Cabinet from 1971 to 1972.

He served as US ambassador to NATO from 1973 to 1974, when he was called back to Washington to serve as chief of staff to President Gerald Ford. He was named secretary of defense in 1975.

Following the election of President Jimmy Carter, Rumsfeld became chairman of the G.D. Searle Company in Skokie, Illinois in 1977. In that period he received the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 1982 President Ronald Reagan appointed Rumsfeld to the General Advisory Committee on Arms Control, and as his special envoy to the Middle East in 1983 to 1984. At that time Reagan decided that the Iranians would win their war with Iraq unless Washington intervened on behalf of the Iraqis.

So, the US went on a buying spree for high-tech helicopters and other weapons much needed by Saddam Hussein. As a result, the Iran-Iraq war ended in a stalemate, but no peace treaty was signed. The US continued to support Iraq until Saddam attacked Kuwait in August 1990. When then-President George H.W. Bush said Saddam had to withdraw from Kuwait, the Iraqi leader did not.

So, half a year later, the United States sent troops into Kuwait to push the Iraqis out. Defeated, the US assumed Saddam would fall but again, he did not. Toward the end of the Clinton administration, Rumsfeld signed an “open letter” written by the Project for the New American Century, calling on the US to eliminate “the threat posed by Saddam.” It urged the US to “provide the leadership necessary to save ourselves and the world from the scourge of Saddam and the weapons of mass destruction that he refuses to relinquish.”

Others who signed the letter were such neoconservatives as Vice President Dick Cheney; I. Lewis Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff; Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; former chairman of the Pentagon Advisory Board Richard Perle; John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control; Weekly Standard editor William Kristol; and Eliot Abrams, the National Security Council’s top official on the Middle East.

When Rumsfeld moved decidedly into neocon territory is not clear. By the time he was confirmed as secretary of defense for the second time, however, he had moved much farther to the right. It has been said that Rumsfeld and the neocons consciously set out to neutralize Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Bush administration’s most popular member, and also the most moderate. Some members of the current Bush administration set traps for Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage.

Rumsfeld made things worse with his formulation dividing US allies between “Old Europe” and “New Europe.” Not only did this enrage the Europeans but it has created a huge rift in the rest of the world. Thanks to Powell’s coaching, Bush now realizes that this disastrous split must be healed. An unrepentent Rumsfeld, however — even though he no longer talks about “Old Europe” — seems to be consciously trying to keep open the wounds.

As reported by Douglas Jehl and David Firestone in The New York Times: “White House officials have made it clear that they are increasingly frustrated and impatient with Rumsfeld, particularly after he publicly criticized the president’s closest foreign policy adviser, Condoleezza Rice, in an internal power struggle that the defense secretary made public.” A Republican who is close to the White House said the view there had been that Rumsfeld “went off the deep end” in his reaction to Bush’s decision to designate Dr. Rice as the overall coordinator of Iraq policy.

Meanwhile, Rumsfeld goes right on creating new problems. He recently sent a long memo to four of his aides pointing out that the war on terrorism would be a “long, hard slog” — instead of the relentlessly rosy, and increasingly-divorced-from reality scenario Rumsfeld previously described before Congress and at press conferences.

The press immediately latched on to contradictions between Rumsfeld’s public and private utterances. It is left to Bush’s new press spokesman, Scott McClellan, to repair the damage.

Given the ever-nearing 2004 election, it’s not clear what, if anything, Bush will do about Rumsfeld. The administration’s yawning vulnerability, however, is becoming increasingly manifest.

— Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine.