As the current Secretary of Defense finds himself in the hot seat, take a listen to a few of Pete Hegseth's predecessors' visits to The Daily Show. Jon Stewart sits down with Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta to dig into their decisions, their legacies and everything else that comes with heading up the most powerful military in the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: How does Rumsfeld address the criticisms surrounding the Iraq War?
That's all we do. I just run around. Cursing and gay sexing each other.
No, let me go back to Colin Powell. Right.
Powell was not the only one, to be fair. Of course not. Everybody came out.
The president made the decision. Colin Powell made the presentation. There was no one in the NSC who disagreed with that. Well, I would take issue with some of that.
Before, for instance, the linkage between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda in terms of the intelligence. There wasn't much of a linkage at all. Thank you. We didn't hear that, though. What we heard was there is a direct link. You cannot talk about the war on terror.
You even came out and talked about how this fellow, you didn't mention his name, but al-Libi had described training that had been occurring from Iraq to al-Qaeda for... There had been training camps.
And there was an Al-Qaeda-connected group called Ansar al-Islam up in Kramal that was actually preparing chemicals. And we found traces of ricin and potassium chlorate there after major combat operations. And Saddam Hussein was giving $25,000 to the families of suicide bombers.
No question he was doing that.
He'd been on the State Department terrorist list for years.
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Chapter 4: What does Rumsfeld say about the importance of certainty in leadership?
Did you star those? No. No, I didn't. And I didn't believe them, but I just knew that one irrational person had to sit down and say, what are the things that could go wrong? Great. And I presented it to the president and to the National Security Council. Right. Could I give you a little background? No. Irrational...
But wouldn't a rational person... So you presented... I guess what I'm saying is... Please. The effort on presenting us the information of certainty that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat that had weapons of mass destruction capability and was in the process of disseminating that to al-Qaeda operatives, the effort to present that... You've overstated. Yeah, promise. Goodness gracious.
Do you want to... Does the... All right. We're going to go to commercial. We'll come back, and I will finish. I will try and recalibrate. Me. Yes. We'll be right back with more with Donald Rumsfeld. Welcome back. We're talking with Donald Rumsfeld. I guess my... What I'm trying to get to is this. You had a memo of Parade of Horribles. Mm-hmm. It was two pages or three pages? I don't know.
It was about 30 or 40 horribles. But you had a year and a half... Possible. Possible horribles. Yeah, I didn't know. No. I just said... You don't know if that parade's gonna happen. It could be the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Nobody knows. It'll be different. But my point is, it seemed that the effort that the administration exuded was more geared towards making the case of why we had to do this...
than examining your memo. You say yourself in the book, I gave the memo to the NSC, I don't know what happened to it. Not quite. You gave the memo to the NSC, but they didn't really pay attention.
Individuals did, and people did make preparations for some of those things. Certainly we did in the department. There were not extensive meetings on them. But that's my point. Fair enough.
The White House Iraq group met weekly. The group that was assigned the job of coordinating the presentation about going to war in Iraq met weekly.
I guess so. I don't know. That would have been at a different level. The NSC met frequently.
Did they tell you anything?
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