Known and Unknown
Donald Rumsfeld
Known and Unknown
A MEMOIR
SENTINEL
SENTINEL
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First published in 2011 by Sentinel,
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Copyright © Donald Rumsfeld, 2011
All rights reserved
Credits for photographs in the inserts appear on backmatter.
Map illustrations by Jeffrey L. Ward
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rumsfeld, Donald, 1932-
Known and unknown: a memoir / Donald Rumsfeld.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-1-101-50249-5
1. Rumsfeld, Donald, 1932- 2. Cabinet officers—United States—Biography. 3. United States. Dept. of Defense—Official and employees—Biography. 4. United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. 5. United States—Politics and government—1989–6. War on Terrorism, 2001-2009. 7. Iraq War, 2003- I. Title.
E840.8.R84A3 2011
352.293092—dc22
[B]
2010042050
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Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
To Joyce
“What one needs in life are the pessimism of intelligence and the optimism of will.”
—former Belgian ambassador to NATO and dean of the North Atlantic Council, André de Staercke, as quoted in Rumsfeld’s Rules*
Contents
Author’s Note
PART I
Lessons in Terror
CHAPTER 1 Smiling Death
CHAPTER 2 Into the Swamp
PART II
An American, Chicago Born
CHAPTER 3 The Last of Spring
CHAPTER 4 The Longest of Long Shots
PART III
The U.S. Congress: From Camelot to Quagmire
CHAPTER 5 “Here, Sir, the People Govern”
CHAPTER 6 Young Turks
PART IV
In Nixon’s Arena
CHAPTER 7 1968: Year of Turmoil
CHAPTER 8 The Job That Couldn’t Be Done
CHAPTER 9 Counsellor
CHAPTER 10 NATO and Nixon’s Fall
PART V
Javelin Catcher: Inside the Ford White House
CHAPTER 11 Restoring Trust
CHAPTER 12 A Rocky Start
CHAPTER 13 An Agonizing Reappraisal
PART VI
Fighting the Cold War
CHAPTER 14 Unfinished Business
CHAPTER 15 Turning On the Lights
CHAPTER 16 Hold the SALT: Tension over Détente
CHAPTER 17 The 1976 Defeat
PART VII
Back to Reality
CHAPTER 18 Searle’s Sweet Success
CHAPTER 19 From Malaise to Morning in America
CHAPTER 20 Our Rural Period, Interrupted
PART VIII
Leaning Forward
CHAPTER 21 Here We Go Again
CHAPTER 22 Dogs Don’t Bark at Parked Cars
CHAPTER 23 Bears in the Woods
CHAPTER 24 The National Security Council
CHAPTER 25 The Agony of Surprise
CHAPTER 26 War President
PART IX
Into the Graveyard of Empires
CHAPTER 27 Special Operations
CHAPTER 28 Little Birds in a Nest
CHAPTER 29 Kabul Falls, Karzai Rises
PART X
Saddam’s Miscalculation
CHAPTER 30 Out of the Box
CHAPTER 31 The Case for Regime Change
CHAPTER 32 A Failure of Diplomacy
CHAPTER 33 Exit the Butcher of Baghdad
PART XI
The Occupation of Iraq
CHAPTER 34 Catastrophic Success
CHAPTER 35 Mission Accomplished?
CHAPTER 36 Too Many Hands on the Steering Wheel
CHAPTER 37 Liberation from the Occupation
PART XII
Wartime Detention
CHAPTER 38 The Least Worst Place
CHAPTER 39 The Twentieth Hijacker
CHAPTER 40 Law in a Time of War
CHAPTER 41 The Road Not Traveled
PART XIII
Pulling On Our Boots: Challenges and Controversies Beyond the War Zones
CHAPTER 42 Katrina and the Challenge of New Institutions
CHAPTER 43 Gardening
CHAPTER 44 The Army We Had
PART XIV
The Long, Hard Slog
CHAPTER 45 Hands Off the Bicycle Seat
CHAPTER 46 The Dead Enders
CHAPTER 47 Eyes on Afghanistan
CHAPTER 48 Iraq’s Summer of Violence
CHAPTER 49 Farewells
CHAPTER 50 After Tides and Hurricanes
Acknowledgments
List of Acronyms
List of Illustrations
Notes
Photographic Insert
Author’s Note
An internet search of “known unknown” in the autumn of 2010 resulted in more than three hundred thousand entries, a quarter million of which were linked to my name. There is an entry on Wikipedia. The reference has been turned into “poetry.” That poetry has been set to music. And that was just on the first page of the search results.
Yet for a phrase seemingly so well known, there is some irony in the fact that its origins and meaning remain largely unknown.
The phrase first became publicly linked to me in early 2002. Toward the end of one of my Pentagon press briefings, a journalist told me that “reports” were suggesting the absence of a link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and terrorists seeking weapons of mass destruction. These unidentified reports, the questioner suggested, were evidence of a lack of a “direct link.”
Putting aside the substance of the reporter’s question—at least for the moment—I raised a larger point about the limits of huma
n knowledge. I responded:
Reports that say something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me because as we know, there are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: that is to say we know there are some things [we know] we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one.
At first glance, the logic may seem obscure. But behind the enigmatic language is a simple truth about knowledge: There are many things of which we are completely unaware—in fact, there are things of which we are so unaware, we don’t even know we are unaware of them.
Known knowns are facts, rules, and laws that we know with certainty. We know, for example, that gravity is what makes an object fall to the ground.
Known unknowns are gaps in our knowledge, but they are gaps that we know exist. We know, for example, that we don’t know the exact extent of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. If we ask the right questions we can potentially fill this gap in our knowledge, eventually making it a known known.
The category of unknown unknowns is the most difficult to grasp. They are gaps in our knowledge, but gaps that we don’t know exist. Genuine surprises tend to arise out of this category. Nineteen hijackers using commercial airliners as guided missiles to incinerate three thousand men, women, and children was perhaps the most horrific single unknown unknown America has experienced.
I first heard a variant of the phrase “known unknowns” in a discussion with former NASA administrator William R. Graham, when we served together on the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission in the late 1990s. Members of our bipartisan commission were concerned that some briefers from the U.S. intelligence community treated the fact that they lacked information about a possible activity to infer that the activity had not happened and would not. In other words, if something could not be proven to be true, then it could be assumed not to be true. This led to misjudgments about the ballistic missile capabilities of other nations, which in some cases proved to be more advanced than previously thought.
The idea of known and unknown unknowns recognizes that the information those in positions of responsibility in government, as well as in other human endeavors, have at their disposal is almost always incomplete. It emphasizes the importance of intellectual humility, a valuable attribute in decision making and in formulating strategy. It is difficult to accept—to know—that there may be important unknowns. The best strategists try to imagine and consider the possible, even if it seems unlikely. They are then more likely to be prepared and agile enough to adjust course if and when new and surprising information requires it—when things that were previously unknown become known.
I also encountered this concept in Thomas Schelling’s foreword to Roberta Wohlstetter’s book Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, in which Schelling identified a “poverty of expectations” as the primary explanation for America’s inability to anticipate and thwart the Japanese attack on Hawaii.1 Schelling’s message was as clear as it was prescient: We needed to prepare for the likelihood that we would be attacked by an unanticipated foe in ways that we may not imagine. Going back in history, the influential nineteenth-century German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz emphasized the challenges of dealing with incomplete or faulty intelligence and the inevitability of surprise.2 Some with an interest in philosophy have made note of a line attributed to Socrates: “I neither know nor think that I know.”3 This has been interpreted to mean that the beginning of wisdom is the realization of how little one truly knows.
One known unknown for me was how to write a book. I had never tried to do so before. I didn’t know whether or how to incorporate the hundreds of thousands of pages of primary source documents in my personal archive. I still have my parents’ almost daily letters to each other during World War II, hundreds of notes on the reasons I cast my votes while serving in the Congress during the 1960s, and my detailed memos of my meetings with President Ford as White House chief of staff to ensure that his requests and directions were executed. I also have some twenty thousand memos humorously characterized as “snowflakes” from my tenure as secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration, some recording momentous decisions, others simply scheduling a time for a haircut. Thousands more documents reside in classified archives at the Library of Congress, the State Department, and the Department of Defense.
Despite its challenging volume, I decided my archive could augment my personal recollections. On the one hand, the documents would add detail and context to my memories, and on the other, they would cause me to more rigorously challenge what I remembered. A portion of my archive will be available in digital form on my web site, www.rumsfeld.com, which accompanies and supports this memoir. I have also released and will continue to release additional documents not directly cited in this book but of historical interest nonetheless.
My life has spanned more than one third of the history of the United States. As I thought more about this memoir and a title, the idea of the known and the unknown seemed to fit. Not only are there things in this book people believe they know about my life, but there are also things that may surprise and differ from what many may have read or heard or assumed. The same holds true about many of the events I observed—from my years in Congress during the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War era, through the Cold War and my service as secretary of defense during the age of terrorism. The known and the unknown are what I have attempted to present in this memoir—that slice of our amazing country’s history of which I have been privileged to be a part.
—Donald Rumsfeld,
December 2010
PART I
Lessons in Terror
“The wind in the tower presages the coming of the storm.”
—Chinese proverb, as quoted in Rumsfeld’s Rules
Baghdad
DECEMBER 20, 1983
“Ambassador Rumsfeld, may I present to you his Excellency, Saddam Hussein, the President of Iraq.”
As his aide announced him, the infamous Iraqi leader approached me confidently. Like other strongmen who pose as popular revolutionaries, Saddam wore military fatigues with a pistol on his hip. Saddam’s “revolution,” of course, was in reality a coup in which he arrested or murdered his political opponents.
He was above average height and build, and his hair and mustache were so black that I wondered whether he dyed his hair. It was December 20, 1983, the only time I met the man who would become known as the “Butcher of Baghdad.”
Saddam stopped a few feet in front of me and smiled. I extended my hand, which he clasped. The cameras rolled.
In later years, this inelegant video still became one of the most widely viewed political images on the internet.1
My trip to Baghdad that winter as President Reagan’s envoy—my official title was Personal Representative of the President of the United States in the Middle East—was the highest-level contact by any U.S. official with Iraq’s leadership in twenty-five years. None of us in the Reagan administration harbored illusions about Saddam. Like most despots, his career was forged in conflict and hardened by bloodshed. He had used chemical toxins in the war he initiated with Iran three years earlier. But given the reality of the Middle East, then as now, America often had to deal with rulers who were deemed “less bad” than the others. The sands constantly shifted during evaluations of our country’s potential friends and possible foes. And in 1983, at least, some leaders in the region seemed even less appetizing to deal with than Saddam Hussein.
Iraq’s Baathist regime was at the time the bitter adversary of two nations that threatened the interests of the United States—Syria and Iran. Syria, under President Hafez al-Assad, was a leading supporter of international terrorism and occupied portions of Lebanon, a country that when left to its own devices favored the West. Iran had been a close friend of the United States until the 1979 coup
by militant Islamists led by a radical cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini. The subsequent abduction of sixty-six Americans at the U.S. embassy in Tehran by pro-Khomeini revolutionaries poisoned U.S.-Iranian relations and further damaged the troubled presidency of Jimmy Carter, whose response appeared hapless.*
Iraq sat between these two menaces—Syria and Iran. It must have taken a good deal of effort, or more likely some mistakes, for America to be on the bad side of all three countries. By 1983, there was a clear logic in trying to cultivate warmer relations with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The tide of the Iran-Iraq war had turned against Iraq. Iran was launching human mass wave attacks—children as young as twelve were sent marching toward Iraqi lines, clearing a way through minefields with their bodies. Whatever misgivings we had about reaching out to Saddam Hussein, the alternative of Iranian hegemony in the Middle East was decidedly worse. The Reagan administration had recognized this reality and had begun to make lower-level diplomatic contacts with the Iraqis some months earlier.
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