TDS Time Machine | Secretaries of Defense
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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What insights does Donald Rumsfeld share about his time as Secretary of Defense?
Tonight, served as Secretary of Defense in two different presidential administrations, most recently under George W. Bush, his new memoir is called Known and Unknown. Please welcome to the program Donald Rumsfeld.
Sir. Nice to see you. Thank you. Please come and join us. Thank you.
Please, thank you for being here. We appreciate it. The book is known and unknown, and that's you right there in a vest. In Taos, New Mexico. Is that Taos, New Mexico? Lovely place, by the way. Obviously, elephant in the room, tension between. I think I know why you're here, and let me just deflate the tension right off the bat. Apology accepted.
And now we can move on. Have a nice day, a nice conversation.
I know this has been troubling you for some time now. I do thank you for being here. I don't even know where to start. So let's start with Iraq. Okay. Why am I not surprised? I don't know. I will take your stony silence as acceptance. All right. There's an... There's an interesting quote that you had in the book about John Ehrlichman, who was in the Nixon White House, and you worked with Ehrlichman. And you say about him, he seemed to have a high degree of certainty about his views that bordered on arrogance, a trait that did him no favors as he gathered more influence in the White House. Certainty without power can be interesting, even amusing. Certainty with power can be dangerous. And I thought, boy, if there was ever a solid critique of how I felt about the administration you served under President Bush, it would be that.
Certainty with power is dangerous. True or false?
If you go to the website that I put up, rumsfeld.com, there are hundreds of documents, thousands of pages, and what you will see is the absence of certainty. You will see probing, questioning, wondering, do we have enough information? Are there more things we ought to know? It's quite exactly the opposite. If you would go to my TiVo... He doesn't think I know what that means.
What I think you... You said rumsfeld.com. You're way ahead of me, brother. I'm still licking stamps and putting them on envelopes and hoping it gets to wherever it's going. I think there is, I guess I'm drawing a distinction perhaps between the internal deliberations and what was presented to the American public. Because presented to the American public was a picture of not just relative certainty, Certainty bordering on arrogance. And there was a dismissiveness to anyone who would challenge that certainty.
And that's not how you remember it. It isn't at all, really. I mean, I know what was going through my mind. And I know the kinds of questions the president would ask and the questions that Colin Powell or Condi Rice or the vice president would ask. And there was a searching. There was lots of questions. A yearning, if you will. Well. It's not quite the word I would use.
Do you, so you disagree that the administration showed it's a face of certainty when it came to the intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq war? Is that? No.
Now we're, okay. In that respect, you're exactly right. There's no question but that the intelligence community presented that information. Colin Powell made the presentation at the United Nations. He probably had as much experience dealing with intelligence products as anyone in the government, including the director of CIA. He spent days on it. He worked hard on it. He believed every word he said. And yet he, and he presented it that way. Now, intelligence always is never perfect. I mean, it's always questioned. You have to question it. Did you guys know intelligence was never perfect? Oh my goodness, yes. I feel like we're just sitting on a porch now sipping lemonade. I said what I shouldn't have said.
Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Gee willikers, let me say this. You made fun of me talking. He makes fun of that, but there are a lot of people in the heartland of America who talk like I do. No, I know. Maybe not on the coast, but in the heartland, they do. Yes, on the coast, we just curse and have gay sex.
How does Rumsfeld address the criticisms surrounding the Iraq War?
That's all we do.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:18
2
What insights does Donald Rumsfeld share about his time as Secretary of Defense?
0:18–5:14
3
How does Rumsfeld address the criticisms surrounding the Iraq War?
5:14–8:12
4
What does Rumsfeld say about the importance of certainty in leadership?
8:12–43:56
Speakers
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