TO: ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Things
I am looking for some clarification on my role here.
I understand that, as Secretary, I am automatically a member of the Homeland Security Council. And, of course, I am also a member of the National Security Council.
Are there any other bodies to which I belong? Not just at home, but considering the larger world as well.
And then internally: What are my responsibilities?
Please pull together a list of all the things I am.
Thanks.
R.
For a long time, R has been in the habit of writing memos. These are not sent by email but instead are spoken into the Dictaphone he has had since his days in the Nixon White House, then typed up by a secretary, printed, and circulated to whom they may concern. Sometimes these memos are policy directives. Sometimes they contain specific proposals for cutting back on department-wide expenditures on printer paper, ideas about what sort of sandwiches ought to be served at the next day’s luncheon with the British, requests for a copy of a political cartoon featuring his likeness that he has heard about but not yet seen. Other times, they seem to be simply musings, reflections that have occurred to him in the course of his day, so his direct subordinates, or White House legal counsel, or the under secretary of the Navy might find a crisp white sheet on their desk that reads:
“Potentialities of space. If now is the moment to act, why aren’t we acting?”
“We ought to think through what are the bad things that could happen, and what are the good things, and how we will know the difference.”
“If time were taken out of the equation, how would we view our necessities?”
R is sitting up in his bathrobe watching a cowboy movie. His wife drifted upstairs yawning hours ago. In the film, Gary Cooper is surrounded. To his front, a black-chapped desperado sneers through his oily mustache. And to his left and his right, dusty henchmen finger the pistols in their belts. The henchmen’s eyes dart between their boss and Gary Cooper. They are getting antsy. They want to know what they are waiting for. But Gary Cooper’s eyes do not dart. They are locked unflinchingly on the bandit’s sneer. Sweat beads beneath hatbands. The wind dies down. Then the desperado’s trigger finger twitches like a lizard on his gun. In a moment, it is all over. Gary Cooper stands right where he had before, his Colt smoking and the three malefactors splayed in the dirt. He slides the gun back into its holster.
But whose dark ponies are those, mustering on the horizon? R licks his lips.
Rumsfeld and Gerald Ford are sitting on opposite sides of the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. It is past midnight, and as they will be there a while longer, they have had McDonald’s brought in. Ford is crumpling up his first hamburger wrapper, while R carefully pinches open the pleats of a paper ketchup cup.
“Did you know this is what they’re for?” R asks. “So that you have room to dip.”
“You can get your fries in there just fine as it is,” says Ford, reaching into the bag for another burger.
“Not fries. It’s for your hamburger.”
Ford chews thoughtfully for a moment. He frowns.
“But you don’t like ketchup on your hamburgers.”
R, silent, looks down at his paper cup, now a waxy moon with a blood-red center, then reaches across the desk for another one and pulls it toward him.
R stands at the head of a long mahogany table in a room with lush carpeting. Around it sit the various division heads of a pharmaceutical concern that has just brought him on as CEO. He scans the table, checking in with each face. “Where’s the fat?”
They tell him that they are down to bare bones. They show him the charts and projections, say they have already cut two thousand jobs, closed one plant in Toledo and another in Lakewood. He nods understandingly. “Where’s the fat?” he says.
They explain that they have whittled down the employee benefits program, renegotiated the standard health insurance package for low-level employees, beat back union drives in three separate distribution centers. A cheaper ink has been found for drug facts labels. The packaging for most products is now fabricated in Vietnam, resulting in a savings of…
All the while, R scowls in deep consideration, nodding along. When they are finished, he wafts a benevolent smile around the room.
“Where’s the fat?”
The stars are bright over Winnetka, Illinois. It is Christmastime. The air is cold, and every other front yard is host to a Nativity. A young R disentwines his fingers and gets down on one knee. He produces a ring.
“As we know, there are known knowns…”
R on the radio:
“The case is being made, and it’s being made persuasively. And in the event force is used, there’s no doubt in my mind that the evidence as to why it had to be used will be very real.”
At Princeton, he had played George in Our Town, more or less by accident. The production went up in November, when the leaves along Nassau Street had all turned brown and were piled under the sycamore trees. People kept telling him how good he was. They spoke about his fluidity, his ease in the role. All this fuss surprised him. There was no trick, he thought. You just had to believe it.
At a Pentagon press conference, a young man raises a finger. His shirt is a whiter white than those of the other reporters, and his press lanyard has been draped carefully across the right side of his blazer to leave bare the Ivy League seal on the left.
“Given what is obviously a complicated history in the region, what makes us think that we can take control of Baghdad?” he asks with a charitable grin. R is thoughtful a moment.
“Well, it was done by the Abbasids in 812. Then again by the Buyid dynasty in 946. In 1436, one brother took it from another. Then, in 1468, the Turks came and took it from him.” The man in the blazer adjusts his lanyard and shifts in his seat. “There’s the Mongols, of course. And then Tamerlane, then the Persians — 1514, 1529, 1534, 1638. And, of course, if you want to count the British liberating it from the Ottomans in 1917…” He pauses, checks in with the cameras. “I might add that Suleiman did not have air-to-ground radar.”
Aristarchus said: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” R thinks about this often. It pleases him to repeat it to himself as he strides down the halls of the Pentagon. He loves the idea: that while everyone else concerns themselves with the small, he is able to rise above, one rung higher, to see what they cannot. And yet he cannot help but wish it were the fox who knew the one big thing.
QUESTION: Can you give some sense of your knowledge of the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden? Can you give us an idea of where you think he might be or how close you are — that type of thing?
R: The question is, how close are we to finding Osama bin Laden? And, honestly, I have tried to answer that question for myself, and I don’t know how to answer it well. My feeling is, until you have something, you don’t have it. And things can look close, and then all of a sudden they don’t look so close. And the only way I can characterize it is, it’s kind of like running around the barnyard chasing a chicken. Until you get it, you don’t have it.
It is a very, very difficult task.
But we’re looking. We’ve got lots of good folks looking.
And, besides that, we’re putting out some pretty hefty rewards, hoping that some of the local folks will get inspired and follow the principle of economics.
(LAUGHTER)
University of Chicago economics.
Yes?
A docent is leading a third-grade class around the National Air and Space Museum. The group pauses beneath the glistening bulk of the Apollo 11 command module, just a few feet away from where R stands gazing up at it in awe. He is known to come here sometimes during the workday just to wander around, to bask in the heady air of boldness and of promise achieved.
Launching into a history of the space race, the docent explains that the Soviets were in fact first to reach a number of important milestones. First to send a craft into orbit. First to hit the moon with a man-made object. First to actually put a man in space. R leans over to one of the kids standing nearest him. “There’s only one flag on the moon.” He winks.
R has been invited to give the commencement address at The Citadel. It is tropically hot. Spread out across the lawn before him, a thousand cadets sit gleaming in their full-dress uniforms.
“What Brezhnev failed to appreciate about the Afghan situation is that you cannot invade an inhospitable, mountainous country shot through with tunnels and caves, where tactical advantage will be ceded to a long-standing endogenous warrior class, overturn centuries of tradition, install your own leader and in the process dispossess local power brokers of their customary rights, and conduct bombing raids that kill or radicalize noncombatants without giving them FREEDOM.”
During a meeting with a small working group at DOJ, the deputy counsel to the president raps on the open door and comes in cheerfully waving a copy of People magazine, which has featured R in its latest issue on the sexiest men alive. Chuckles all around, a few scattered claps. “With his blunt talk and wry humor…” the deputy counsel begins to read aloud.
“I wonder if you can see that we are dealing with important things right now,” R snaps. Mumbling apologies, the man drops the magazine into the wastebasket beside the door and takes his seat.
Alone on the couch in his living room later that night, R takes the crumpled copy of the magazine out of his briefcase and flips through it, past perfume advertisements and the ageless faces of movie stars. He finds the page where he is mentioned. “With his blunt talk and wry humor…” R lets a burst of air out through his nose. The phone rings. He reads. His eyebrows raise. He shakes his head. The phone stops ringing. He reads.
At a briefing for the press corps the next day, a reporter holds up the glossy issue when he is called on.
Has R seen the piece?
He has.
And what does he think of it?
R looks down and smiles. He adjusts his glasses. Titters from the press.
“Well, what does that tell you about the trustworthiness of the media?”
Back when R was growing up in Illinois, his father bought houses, moved the family in for a spell while he fixed them up, then sold them again for a modest profit. Hearing this story, an aide describes this offhand as “flipping” and R’s father as a “flipper.” R is shocked. What can she mean by this? She explains the term and tells him about the numerous television programs devoted to it. He nods and smiles vaguely, but privately he is horrified and cannot stop repeating the term in his head. During lunch with Dick Cheney, R wants to ask if he has heard the expression, but he can’t bring himself to say it aloud. There is something small and unseemly about it, something almost sexual. It does not remind him of his father at all.
R is watching a documentary. Bombs fall on a jungle the color of bombs. At various points throughout the film, a man with glasses gives his rules for avoiding disaster in war:
“Empathize with your enemy.”
“Proportionality should be a guideline in war.”
“Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.”
“Belief and seeing are often both wrong.”
But R cannot stop thinking: Now, which planes are those?
Strolling the cobblestones of an historic township in Maryland, R and his wife stop in at their favorite ice cream shop. The floor is checkered red and white. Lids of cookie tins stamped with images from Norman Rockwell are propped up on the shelves behind the counter. Together, they scrutinize the colorful, multi-gallon tubs through the frosty glass. His wife looks up.
“I’ll have the Chunky Banana Churro,” she says to the sleepy young woman behind the counter. R is stunned.
“You always get Chocolate Fudge,” he says.
“I thought it looked good.”
He pays, and they continue in silence down to the riverwalk. Overhead, gulls bark and chatter. Smaller birds coast silently in to perch on the pilings. She offers him a lick. He shakes his head. What could have possessed her?
TO: ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Jacoby
I am seeing very little. Everyone in the room is seeing all kinds of videos and pictures and talking about them, and I have no idea what they are talking about. Why don’t you assign Jacoby? That is something useful he could do.
R is watching the TV in his office. A woman in a lavender pantsuit is saying to the camera that things are not going well. She has certain doubts about the way that circumstances have been shaping up, over there. He changes the channel, and now a man with thick, glossy hair is saying the same. R frowns and runs his hand over the top of his head. He changes the channel.
“Stuff happens, and it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes. The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase. And you see it twenty times. And you think, My goodness, were there that many vases?”
TO: ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: (no subject)
I have a feeling the things I want to do that we have to drop off the calendar don’t get put back on. For example, I still need a dentist appointment.
R and his wife pay a visit to their son at his home. The son has put up a bird feeder in the yard just outside the kitchen window so that he and his wife can sip coffee in the mornings and watch the birds come in. Offhand, he mentions that they had expected to see more wildlife.
“What sort of seeds are you giving them?” R wants to know.
“Whatever came with the feeder,” his son tells him. R looks surprised.
“You can’t just give them any old seeds,” he says. “Every bird eats a different sort of thing. There’s a lot to it, actually.”
After lunch with the family, R goes by himself to the hardware store. He spends an hour lifting bags of seeds off the shelf and scrutinizing their labels. When he returns, he empties the feeder and fills it with the blend he has chosen. This process is repeated over many months. He browses certain books he has had his assistant acquire. He consults with
And bit by bit the composition of the wildlife changes. The sparrows disperse. A huge jay that had bullied the other birds is no longer seen. One week, the feeder blooms red with cardinals, like some sort of flowering cactus. But then these, too, move on. At the same time, the neighborhood squirrels begin to make their presence felt — appearing at first in timid ones and twos, then gradually dominating the feeding frenzy, swinging the feeder so wildly with their weight that his son has to go outside multiple times a day and pick it up.
At last, it is only squirrels. Not a bird in sight. Standing at the kitchen window one afternoon with his father, watching them swarm and tussle, R’s son offers that maybe the plan isn’t working.
“Well, that’s if you insist on viewing it only as a bird feeder.”
Visiting Najaf on the last day of an unannounced tour of Iraq, R is taken to see the Wadi al-Salaam. The interpreter, who is missing a finger and has burn scars all down one side of his face, tells R that its name translates to “the Valley of Peace” and that, at six square kilometers, it is the largest cemetery in the world. Burials have been taking place there for over a thousand years. More than five million bodies lie within its walls. Since the current war began, two hundred have been added every day.
R nods. The rows of charnel houses travel out beyond the edge of his vision, their bone-white rooftops baking in the sun. He thinks of the thousand cadets, spread out in neatly ordered rows as far as the eye can see, their faces gleaming in the sunlight.
It is cold in Washington. Wind whips down the almost empty boulevards, hustling stragglers into their office buildings, clutching together the collars of their coats. Here and there among the massive gray facades, a single window hung with Christmas lights punctures the gloom. Everyone is looking forward to the holidays. It has been so long — they have been doing this for so long, and there is no end in sight. And still the memos keep drifting down from on high, finding their way onto desks across the city, piling up like snow.
His nephew:
“I remember one Thanksgiving we were all gathered around the table watching him carve the turkey when the electric knife he was using gave out. He found some way to make a joke of it, but you could see that he was embarrassed.
“After dinner, when everyone headed into the living room to relax, he disappeared into the kitchen. When I went in there later for a glass of water, I saw that he had fished out the instruction manual for the knife and found the phone number of the company. He was sitting there at the table with the receiver to his ear, visibly frustrated. It wasn’t clear to me if they were giving him the runaround or if he was just having trouble getting through to someone in charge. It was Thanksgiving, after all.
“We got to playing some game in the living room, and I remember Aunt Joyce going into the kitchen once or twice to see if she could get him to join us. But each time she came back smiling, shaking her head. He was still in there when I went to bed, rubbing his forehead, the phone cradled between his neck and shoulder, waiting for someone to take responsibility.”
R is still sitting on the couch in his robe when the sprinklers go on outside in the dark. His head turns automatically toward the windows, and he stares at them blankly until his brain recognizes the flickering hiss. He turns his attention back to the TV. A moment ago, it seemed that the Indians were all massed on the ridge. But now Indians are popping up everywhere — rising from gulches, splintering off solid bodies of rock, stepping out from shrubs that had seemed too sparse to conceal even the wind.
His wife appears in her nightgown and leans against the doorframe. The sprinklers have woken her up, as they often do. He turns and smiles at her, then turns back to the screen. She brings a hand to her mouth and yawns.
“Is it almost over?”
She watches a dust cloud bloom as the Indians thunder down the hill. The settlers kneel grim-jawed behind their overturned wagons, waiting for just the right moment. She yawns again.
“Come up soon,” she says, patting the doorframe as she turns to head back upstairs. A few seconds pass. He nods his head to no one. The horses circle.
TO: ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: waiting
I have been waiting and waiting for a report on what happens next. Have we established with any certainty where we go from here?
I have pushed, I have sent memos, I have begged and pleaded.
There must be some kind of report someone can give me.
Thanks.
R sits rocking on the front porch of his ranch in the New Mexican desert. All last night, the wind howled like a soul outside the house, but now everything is still. Far off he can see the red cliffs rising against the sky, the shreds of cloud above them lingering like puffs of smoke. And fanned through the distant foothills, rows of chalk-white pumice columns rear their heads from the soil.
He is waiting for his children.
Their plane touched down in Albuquerque an hour ago, so he will be waiting a while longer. With them are their own children, and even a few of their children’s children. What a blessing, R thinks. So many generations under one roof. He squints across the empty land. Nothing stirs. Nothing is coming over the horizon. The cliffs glow in the setting sun. The rows of white stone stand silent.