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July 1, 2021 - 11:30am
Donald Rumsfeld, who served as secretary of defense under Presidents Gerald Ford and George W. Bush, died on Tuesday from multiple myeloma. Rumsfeld crammed decades of experience as a consummate Washington insider into those 88 years — as a congressman, White House staffer for Nixon, Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defence for Ford and then George W Bush, as well as manifold corporate roles — but less well known is his first career.
As a young man, Donald Rumsfeld was a blue-chip amateur wrestling recruit out of New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois. Heavily sought after by the powerhouse college wrestling programs of the Midwest, Rumsfeld instead accepted a partial scholarship to Princeton, where he would occupy a three-year starting slot at the 157-pound weight class during arguably the most competitive period in the history of the Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association — a time when conference powerhouses Penn State University and the University of Pittsburgh had arisen as serious contenders to the long-time NCAA tournament dominance of the state universities of Oklahoma and Iowa.
In his memoir Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld pushed back against commentators trying to extract deeper meaning from his wrestling experiences. “People have even tried to make it a metaphor for my approach to life,” Rumsfeld wrote, when “the fact is that wrestling was a sport I was suited for,” one in which he grew to “understand the direct link between effort and results.”
In 1953, he lost an intense 9-5 match for the EIWA’s 157-pound championship against Penn State wrestler Reed Hunt, then one of the best men at the weight class in the entire world, and a year later, he finished fourth in the conference despite wrestling most of the season with complications arising from injuries. And even after he had graduated from Princeton and begun serving as a Naval aviator, he won the All-Navy wrestling championship in 1956, qualifying for the U.S. Olympic trials before again bowing out due to recurrent shoulder problems. “My Olympic hopes, such as they were, were over,” he wrote, with trademark self-deprecation offsetting any lingering disappointment.
In another, considerably lower-profile book than his own memoir, Elite Wrestling: Your Moves for Success on and Beyond the Mat, Rumsfeld spoke more candidly about his passion for the sport. Wrestling, he noted, demanded “perseverance” and “was so complicated, nothing simple about it.” He explained that he had succeeded through the careful application of leverage — moves, counter-moves, and subtle adjustments to how one’s weight is distributed — combined with a willingness to strike preemptively. Rumsfeld’s signature move, the fireman’s carry, was intended to end matches quickly and consisted of him dropping to one knee and shooting under an opponent’s leg, then throwing the opponent over his shoulders and depositing him on the mat. But he also recalled fondly how he separated his shoulder in an EIWA tournament match against a wrestler from Cornell, then endured the pain for seven minutes and won by points.
Rumsfeld, in other words, could move quickly when needed — he was the youngest Secretary of Defense, after all — but also proved as indestructible as the cockroach, serving in that same role at age 74. And he understood pain, evidenced both by his willingness to wrestle for several years with a shoulder that frequently popped out of joint as well as a handwritten comment from his time in the Bush administration in which he matter-of-factly inquired why Guantanamo prisoners were limited to four hours of standing per day during an interrogation, when he stood for eight to ten hours each day.
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SubscribeThere is a very good Rumsfeld which was shown on Sky Documentaries and is possibly available on Netflix
A particular image of Rumsfeld sticks in my mind. It was a press conference given by him and Cheney early in the Iraq war. Characteristically, they gave no quarter to reporters and brooked no dissent.
But it was their facial expressions and body language that struck me, especially Rumsfeld’s. He absolutely exuded arrogance and contempt. I suddenly realized that’s how much of the world saw the US. Rumsfeld and Cheney were, at that time, at least as much the public face of that questionable war as President Bush.
I had the most uncomfortable feeling, really an intuition, that we were witnessing the beginning of the end of the American empire, brought down not by the 9/11 attackers but by American arrogance on the world stage.
The fact these events occurred at the dawn of the twenty-first century had, for me, uncomfortable parallels with the British Empire which was at its peak at the beginning of the twentieth century just as Queen Victoria died. It was all downhill from there.
I would not say that of Rumsfeld really – the problem was he would win, then hand off the project to people who were political appointees, those who were of a “mere mediocrity would get nowhere,” kind of person who had climbed the greasy pole of power, not by success, but by the game of patronage and owed favors.
Paul Bremer is where I trace the ending of American Greatness, the man who lost the peace after US winning the war in Iraq. He was under Rumsfield, but had total MacArthur powers, and used them to destroy the MENA by arrogance and stupidity.
“Bremer became the country’s chief executive authority.[10][11] As the holder of the “most powerful foreign post held by any American since Gen. MacArthur in Japan””
“On May 23, 2003, Bremer issued Order Number 2, in effect dissolving the entire former Iraqi army[43] and putting 400,000 former Iraqi soldiers out of work.” Then the Police, then the Baathist, and so created the insurgent army…. and lost the peace, not rebuilding the country which should have happened under any good leader, but creating endless wreckage, still going forward…
Rumsfield messed up, his temperament was too agressive, but Bush was just a complete fool, and was the real problem, the real reason for the American decline – which Biden now is taking to absolute destruction.
Rumsfeld is a classic example of neoconservatism not being driven by American nationalism, but Zionism and globalism.