Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense to presidents Gerald Ford and George W. Bush, has died at 88, his family announced in a statement on June 30.
“It is with deep sadness that we share the news of the passing of Donald Rumsfeld, an American statesman and devoted husband, father, grandfather, and great grandfather. At 88, he was surrounded by family in his beloved Taos, New Mexico,” the statement said. “History may remember him for his extraordinary accomplishments over six decades of public service, but for those who knew him best and whose lives were forever changed as a result, we will remember his unwavering love for his wife, Joyce, his family and friends, and the integrity he brought to a life dedicated to country.”
How history will remember Rumsfeld is an interesting question. According to a Department of Defense (DOD) bio, Rumsfeld was a former Navy pilot, White House chief of staff, U.S. NATO ambassador, congressman, and CEO of two Fortune 500 companies by the time he became secretary of defense for the second time in 2001. According to the Gerald Ford Foundation, Rumsfeld worked in Richard’s Nixon presidential administration before being promoted by Ford, eventually becoming defense secretary.
According to the Atlantic, he spent part of the Reagan years working clandestine presidential security programs with Dick Cheney, another stalwart Republican power broker, who would join him in the White House when George W. Bush took office. Following the September 11 attacks, defense secretary Rumsfeld became one of the primary architects of the U.S. invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Months after the U.S. had invaded Afghanistan, secretary Rumsfeld was seeking information about what languages were spoken there, the Intercept reported in 2018, one tidbit from a trove of internal memos showing how Rumsfeld handled Afghanistan and laid the groundwork for the invasion of Iraq.
In a 2011 book, Rumsfeld admitted that he made a “misstatement” about the confirmed presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. The Bush administration’s lies about WMDs helped justify the 2003 invasion. A major United Nations investigation never found any WMDs, as the Guardian reported in 2004. A 2008 Center for Public Integrity article reported that a database of pre-war rhetoric found at least 935 false statements about the national security threat Iraq posed made by administration officials in the two years following 9/11, 109 of them by Rumsfeld.
As the defense secretary during the beginning of the War on Terror, Rumsfeld’s legacy also includes the U.S. torture programs that have characterized this era. What Rumsfeld himself actually did and what he was responsible for as the head of the DOD have been litigated time and again.
In 2010, HuffPost reported he personally signed a 2002 memorandum authorizing interrogation techniques, asking in a handwritten note why forcing detainees to stand was limited to only four hours a day.
The ACLU represented nine men who sued Rumsfeld and others for torture in 2005. Rumsfeld even faced a war crimes suit in Germany, as stated in a 2006 report. A 2008 report from the Senate Armed Forces Committee placed much of the blame for the U.S. use of torture tactics on Rumsfeld and other senior officials, as Reuters reported at the time.
While U.S. courts have held that Rumsfeld is not liable, Rumsfeld, Cheney, George W. Bush, and other senior officials were all found guilty by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission in 2012, Vice reported at the time.
“We have no plan to arrest them,” commissioner Musa Bin Ismail told Vice in 2012. “They will be haunted all their lives by the fact that they're war criminals who have murdered countless people and affected countless lives through their acts and policy while in office. Their lives will be unsettling, full of regret and the feeling of guilt, punctuated with long stretches of sorrow and unabated sadness. They will die with disgruntled souls.”
Rumsfeld was named “sexiest cabinet member” by People magazine in 2002, UPI reported.
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