By His Own Rules
By His Own Rules: The Story of Donald Rumsfeld
By Bradley Graham
Book Description
A penetrating political biography of the controversial Defense Secretary, by a longtime military affairs correspondent for the Washington Post.
Once considered among the best and brightest of his generation, Donald Rumsfeld was exceptionally prepared to assume the Pentagon’s top job in 2001. Yet six years later, he left office as the most controversial Defense Secretary since Robert McNamara, widely criticized for his management of the Iraq war and for his difficult relationships with Congress, administration colleagues, and military officers. Was he really the arrogant, errant, over-controlling Pentagon leader frequently portrayed–or as his supporters contend, a brilliant, hard-charging visionary caught in a whirl of polarized Washington politics, dysfunctional federal bureaucracy, and bad luck?
Bradley Graham, who closely covered Rumsfeld’s challenging tenure at the Pentagon, offers an insightful biography of a complex and immensely influential personality. What emerges is a layered and revealing portrait of a man whose impact on U.S. national security affairs will long out-live him.
By Bradley Graham, Washington Post
Face time with the president is political gold in Washington, so Donald Rumsfeld moved quickly after taking charge at the Pentagon to secure weekly private meetings with President George W. Bush. Now, nearly six years and many meetings later, the defense secretary arrived in the Oval Office prepared to raise a delicate, and personal, matter.
His opportunity came as the talk that day, in September 2006, turned to Iraq. The conflict there was going badly. Violence had metastasized into a civil war. Plans to begin a major drawdown of U.S. troops had stalled. Iraqi forces still appeared unready to assume charge of security, and the Iraqi government, riven by sectarian strife, was doing little to unite the nation. In Washington, much of the responsibility for the mess in Iraq had fallen on Rumsfeld. He had failed to plan adequately for the occupation, was slow to develop a counterinsurgency campaign and had alienated too many people with his combative, domineering personality…
Much more at The Washington Post.
Bradley Graham will be online Monday, June 15 at 12 noon ET to take your questions and comments about “Decline and Fall,” his Washington Post Magazine cover story about the dramatic end of the former defense secretary’s tenure. The article is adapted from his book, By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld, published this month by PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
Graham served as Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post for more than a decade.
