The difficulty in coordinating the military and political elements of the U.S. government and the Congress also became apparent during the Lebanon crisis. It pointed out just how important it is for there to be a tight linkage between our country’s diplomatic and military capabilities if America is to successfully meet its national security objectives.
While some believed that a decade after Vietnam, America had finally shed the baggage of our involvement in Southeast Asia, it seemed the American body politic was still a prisoner of the Vietnam experience. The country was able to deal with short operations such as the evacuation of American citizens from Grenada, which had occurred almost simultaneously with the Marine barracks bombing. But it was not well prepared to address the more complex challenge we faced in Lebanon. Our government—the Department of Defense as well as the Congress—and the media were still focused on yesterday’s war, reacting to the Vietnam experience but not confronting the growing problem of international terrorism.
Perhaps the most important lesson was that our government had not yet developed a full appreciation of the devastating effectiveness of terrorism as an instrument of policy against us and, indeed, against any free nation. We were on defense when we needed to be on offense. After the Marine barracks truck bombing, the immediate reaction was to do everything possible to defend against a similar attack. Cement barriers were put on the grounds around buildings, so that trucks with explosives couldn’t easily run into our buildings as they had before. The terrorists started using rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), lobbing them over the cement barricades. So to defend against RPG attacks, embassy buildings along the Corniche in Beirut were next draped with a metal mesh to keep them from hitting the building. Because the mesh worked reasonably well, it wasn’t long before terrorists began hitting the soft targets, namely Americans and other Westerners going to and from their work.
It should have been clear: The way to successfully deal with terrorists is not only to try to defend against them, but also to take the battle to them; to go after them where they live, where they plan, where they hide; to go after their finances and their networks; and even to go after nations that harbor and assist them. The best defense would be a good offense.
Beirut demonstrated to me the profound truth that weakness is provocative. Our withdrawal from Lebanon contributed again to an impression among our friends and enemies of a vulnerable and irresolute America. This, of course, was President Reagan’s concern all along.
One observer of our pullout from Lebanon was a young Saudi. The American response to the Beirut terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden observed, demonstrated “the decline of American power and the weakness of the American soldier, who is ready to wage cold wars but unprepared to fight long wars. This was proven in Beirut in 1983, when the Marines fled.”22 Osama bin Laden said he first conceived his attack on the World Trade Center during that period.
Referring to the destruction of the Marine barracks and the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, bin Laden later noted, “When I saw those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the oppressors should be punished in the same way and that we should destroy towers in America—so they can taste what we tasted and so they stop killing our women and children.”23
We were already entering a new age of terrorism, although many didn’t fully appreciate it. In September 1984, after U.S. forces had withdrawn from Lebanon, the U.S. embassy annex was nearly destroyed by a bomb, the third major attack on Americans in Lebanon in three years.
A month later, Prime Minister Thatcher barely escaped assassination by the Irish Republican Army. She was in her hotel room when a bomb exploded, destroying the bathroom she had been in only moments earlier. Her would-be assassins left Mrs. Thatcher a chilling note that I’ve reflected on many times since. “We have only to be lucky once,” they wrote to her. “You will have to be lucky always.”
Within weeks of Thatcher’s hairbreadth escape, George Shultz and I each delivered speeches on our recent experiences in the Middle East and the rising danger posed by terrorists. On October 17, 1984, I was awarded the George Catlett Marshall Medal presented by the Association of the U.S. Army. In my acceptance remarks, I summarized my conviction that the United States and free people everywhere needed to come to grips with terrorism as a preeminent threat of the future:
Increasingly, terrorism is not random nor the work of isolated madmen. Rather, it is state-sponsored, by nations using it as a central element of their foreign policy…. A single attack by a small weak nation, by influencing public opinion and morale, can alter the behavior of great nations or force tribute from wealthy nations. Unchecked, state-sponsored terrorism is adversely changing the balance of power in our world.24
Just a week after I gave my speech, George Shultz sounded a similar note of caution. He warned against America acting as a global Hamlet while terrorism was on the rise. “The magnitude of the threat posed by terrorism is so great that we cannot afford to confront it with halfhearted and poorly organized measures,” Shultz warned.25
In a preview of what President George W. Bush would call for less than two decades later, Shultz urged that America pursue a policy goal of preempting terrorist atrocities. He recommended strengthening U.S. intelligence capabilities, demonstrating a willingness to use force when and where needed to confront terrorism, and deploying the full range of measures available to our country.
“We will need the flexibility to respond to terrorist attacks in a variety of ways,” Shultz advised, using words that mirrored ones a future president would use, “at times and places of our own choosing.”
The Beirut bombing and its aftermath remain seared in my mind as the beginning of the modern war waged by Islamist radicals against the United States of America. It was one of those rare moments when our country was awakened, however briefly, to the dangers foreign elements could pose to our interests. Another of those moments would occur on a bright September morning in 2001. But the first, for me, took place much earlier—on a December afternoon when I was just a boy.
PART II
An American, Chicago Born
“I am an American, Chicago born…and go at things as I have taught myself….”
—Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March1
Cook County, Illinois
DECEMBER 7, 1941
In the carefree days of the early 1940s, when I was not yet ten years old, my life centered on school, chores, and, for entertainment, the family radio. Sometimes I’d tune in to Captain Midnight, which was about a U.S. Army pilot and his dangerous adventures. But it was another program that fully captured my imagination. Countless times I hurried into the living room so I wouldn’t miss its famous opening to the sounds of the “William Tell Overture”:
A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty “Hi-yo, Silver!” The Lone Ranger! With his faithful Indian companion, Tonto, the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains led the fight for law and order in the early West. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. The Lone Ranger rides again.
For many young boys in the quiet villages on the outskirts of Chicago, where the biggest neighborhood news usually was the search for a missing dog, the American West offered mystery and excitement. My friends and I sent in for the Lone Ranger’s six-shooter ring and deputy badge. And we learned the Lone Ranger credo: “I believe that to have a friend, a man must be one. That all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world. That God put the firewood there, but that every man must gather and light it himself.” Seven decades later, it is still not a bad philosophy.
The radio also was our portal into the world of professional sports. In the fall, that meant football. My father and I cheered on our favorite team, the Chicago Bears. The Bears were fighting it out one Sunday at Comiskey Park when the announcer on Chicago’s WENR radio station interrupted the action with a bulletin. “Flash: Airplanes from the empire of Japan
have launched a surprise attack on the territories of Hawaii.” A U.S. military base called Pearl Harbor was in flames.
NBC Radio broke from its regular programming to air a live report from Honolulu: “We have witnessed this morning…the severe bombing of Pearl Harbor by enemy planes, undoubtedly Japanese. The city of Honolulu has also been attacked and considerable damage done. This battle has been going on for nearly three hours…. It is no joke. It is a real war.”2 Hawaii was not yet an American state, but I had a vague idea of where it was. I didn’t know anything about Pearl Harbor or what it meant to the United States Navy. But I could feel that something terrible had happened. I saw it in my parents’ faces and heard it in the tense voices reporting the news of the attack. From that moment on, much of what was on the radio, in the newspapers, in talk on the streets, and in school centered on the attack.
For two years, Americans had followed the conflicts raging in Europe and Asia, but from the comfortable distance provided by two vast oceans. Many remembered the heavy American losses in World War I a little more than two decades earlier and wanted no part in another territorial dispute far away. That sentiment was especially strong in Chicago. The city was the national headquarters of the antiwar America First Committee. With more than eight hundred thousand members, it was one of the largest antiwar organizations in American history. The America Firsters appealed to many young Americans, including some whose paths I would cross in later life—a student at Yale Law School named Gerald Ford as well as a young John F. Kennedy, who sent the committee a check.* The America First Committee was one of the early casualties of the Pearl Harbor attack. Its membership dwindled almost overnight. And many of its supporters—Ford and Kennedy among them—soon went off to war.
Throughout the rest of that Sunday, our family huddled around the radio, listening to the latest news. New reports were coming in every hour:
President Roosevelt’s announcement of Japanese air attacks on United States Pacific bases staggered London, according to a dispatch just received, and London now awaits Prime Minister Churchill’s promise to declare war on Japan within the hour…. Political lines have been almost wiped out. Senator Wheeler of Montana, a leading isolationist says, “We must do the best we can to lick Japan.”…And the Chicago Tribune, one of the leading isolationist papers prints this headline for tomorrow morning: “OUR COUNTRY: RIGHT OR WRONG.”4
The next day, the American people heard from the President. Having first been elected four months after I was born, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only president I had known. There was something about Roosevelt’s voice that added to his authority. He had a formal, almost aristocratic tone. He certainly did not sound like any of our friends in the Midwest. Throughout the Great Depression, he had been a voice of reassurance, including to my parents. Outlining the indictment against the Japanese empire, he spoke slowly and deliberately. Every syllable was carefully enunciated, as if the words themselves were missiles of outrage and anger. That gave him a singular quality as America heard for the first time the words that have now become so familiar to history: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy…”5
The President asked Congress for a declaration of war. The fate of democracy now hung on America’s success. A war that millions at home had wanted to avoid was going to be fought, and many Americans would die in the cause. The conflict would change the lives of Americans across the country, including a boy in Illinois who wondered if we’d be able to return to the carefree world of The Lone Ranger again.
CHAPTER 3
The Last of Spring
In the desperate, hardscrabble years of the Great Depression, 1932 was, as the historian William Manchester described it, “the cruelest year” of them all.1
Even resilient, industrial Chicago had not been spared the Depression’s ravages. On the edge of the Loop, the city’s downtown business district, thousands of those left unemployed and homeless constructed a Hooverville of scrap metal shanties and cardboard tents, named as such to disparage the president who was blamed for the economic woes. Alleys and streets were given new names like Prosperity Road and Hard Times Avenue.2
On July 9, 1932, the Chicago Tribune noted grimly that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had closed the day before at 41. 22—the lowest point recorded during the Great Depression. This was the day I was born—on what may well have been the bleakest day of the cruelest year of the worst economic catastrophe in American history. Born in St. Luke’s Hospital in downtown Chicago, I was the second child of George and Jeannette Rumsfeld. As I later recorded in my first and only other attempt at an autobiography (at age thirteen) I came home from the hospital to find I had a two-year-old sister, Joan.3 Since my family moved a great deal during our early years, Joan tended to be a frequent playmate and one of my closest friends.
Our mother, Jeannette, was a small woman, but her stature belied a feisty intensity. A teacher by training, she was a stickler for proper grammar. While she was kindhearted, she was also a formidable taskmaster. One vivid memory of my mother occurred when we lived briefly in North Carolina. In the South teachers taught by rote, as opposed to the progressive education I was used to in Illinois, in which students were encouraged to learn at their own pace. As a result I was far behind my Southern classmates. When told that I was in danger of being held back a grade, Mom bridled. She told my teacher that I would attend summer school and that she would tutor me personally to get me up to speed. Every day, Mom and I went through drills to make sure I learned my division tables. It wasn’t my favorite summer, but I learned enough to make it to the next grade.
My father, George Rumsfeld, was the kind of man any young boy would look to as a role model. I certainly did. He was the most honest and ethical person I knew, and I often sought his advice. One of the reasons he might have worked so hard to be a good father is that he knew what it was like not to have one. John von Johann Heinrich Rumsfeld left the family and divorced my father’s mother soon after his birth. From an early age, it was up to my father and his older brother, Henry, to help support the family. Dad started as an office boy at the age of twelve and worked hard for most of his life, always with an upbeat manner, often whistling, and without complaint. He seemed to have a sense of urgency about things and was never one to waste time. Sometimes he’d take me to the public golf course near twilight for his version of speed golf—playing nine holes in what I remember to be less than forty-five minutes, never stopping to take a practice swing.
My earliest years were spent in the city of Chicago, which by then had become known as a settling place for large numbers of European immigrants, industrious frontiersmen seeking a second chance at fortune, and for sizable numbers of African Americans, who emigrated from the South. Yet amid the city’s diversity, Chicagoans shared a common trait: a decidedly unfriendly attitude to the pretensions of aristocratic Europe. Many in Chicago were Irish at the time, and local politicians gloried in mocking the English, and the British seemed to reciprocate. “Having seen it,” the British writer Rudyard Kipling sniffed after visiting Chicago, “I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.”4
There was some truth to the notion that the city was not for those with delicate sensibilities. The city gave America Al Capone, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, and its legendary machine politics—denizens of its cemeteries were known for voting early and often. Chicago’s residents took a certain pride in their rough-and-tumble ways. It was a city where one’s value was measured not so much by pedigree but by sweat. “Chicago,” American writer Lincoln Steffens once wrote, quite correctly, “will give you a chance.”5
My father had spent most of his youth and first years of marriage in modest apartments in the city and was eager to move his family to a house in the suburbs. When I was six, we moved to nearby Evanston, home of Northwestern University, and then finally to a house in Winnetka, a small suburb to the north. These moves were not idle decisions but ones that
my father, quite typically, had carefully thought through. Dad believed that the areas where the schools were considered the best tended to be areas where property values would increase. Winnetka, in the New Trier High School district, was such a place. We shared our house with Dad’s mother, Lizette, and her mother, Elizabeth. The older women, who had raised Dad, often spoke to each other in German.*
These days Winnetka is a well-to-do bedroom suburb of Chicago, but in the 1930s the town was economically diverse. Our neighborhood was a mix of businessmen with families and immigrant and working-class families: construction workers, a train conductor, an electrical power line worker, a gardener, and a cleaner among them.
I guess because my parents were energetic people, I must have inherited that characteristic at an early age. In addition to my studies, I played third base on Conney’s Cubs, our village hardball team, which was sponsored by the local pharmacy. I joined the Cub Scouts when I was seven, and enjoyed excursions to hike, fish, and canoe. As far back as I can remember I had odd jobs. I was not yet ten when I determined that I would earn enough money for my first Schwinn bicycle. I delivered newspapers, mowed lawns, and sold magazine subscriptions, including the Norman Rockwell–covered Saturday Evening Post. On Saturdays I earned a hefty twenty cents for delivering a neighbor’s homemade sandwiches to the employees at the Winnetka Trust & Savings Bank. When I finally earned enough money for my red Schwinn, it seemed the most perfect thing in the world. For kids in our neighborhood, our bikes were freedom. We could go anywhere we wanted. At least until it was time to come home.
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