The Axeman cometh.(Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait)(Book Review)

Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait, by Midge Decter (Regan, 240 pp., $24.95)

IN the summer of 2001, the smart money in Washington was betting that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would be the first member of the Bush cabinet to resign. There was rumored to be a Pentagon pool on the date of his departure; but, to quote the subject of Midge Decter's new book, "The only thing we know for certain is that it is unlikely that any of us knows what is likely." A few months later, convinced feminists were calling him "Rumstud," and optometrists were selling out of the rimless frames he had made a fashion statement to middle-aged executives yearning for mojo by association.

This slim, quick-reading volume provides a glimpse of this extraordinary man. It does not pretend to be a comprehensive biography, and in some respects is very cursory. One gets mere hints of his spirit as athlete and adventurer. He was a champion wrestler and naval aviator, ran with the bulls at Pamplona, and once--as a congressman--apprehended a fleeing criminal. Age never dampened his physical courage, and Rumsfeld famously dashed from his office on 9/11 to tend to the injured.

When he was called upon to return to the Pentagon in 2001, he had nothing to prove. Life, as he said, was good. He had accomplished more than most men will in their professional lives, and was past the age when many would have retired. In the 1960s he was a four-term congressman, who--as leader of a group of Young Turks ("Rumsfeld's Raiders")--helped secure Gerald Ford's ascent to the office of minority leader; Ford later made Rumsfeld the youngest secretary of defense in history. In 1977, he became CEO of the Searle pharmaceutical company--where he became known as "The Axeman," a pitiless downsizer who fired employees and sold off unprofitable assets. When he arrived, Searle stock sold for $10; several years later Monsanto bought the company for $65 per share. It was a great achievement for a businessman who had started out as an assistant watermelon seller.

The Pentagon Rumsfeld inherited in 2001 was badly in need of reform. For the Clinton administration, it had been bureaucratic dumping ground; lack of leadership had allowed the department to fragment into its numerous tribes. The acquisition system was weakened by politics, and promotions were marked by cronyism. Congressional controls and oversight requirements had blossomed, providing a case study in Parkinson's Law: In 1975, the Defense Authorization Bill was 75 pages, but by 2001 it had grown to 988, even though defense manpower was down by a third and defense outlays as a percentage of GDP had declined by 40 percent.

Furthermore, for all the money being spent on defense, there was no clear national strategy. Rumsfeld turned to Andrew Marshall, longtime head of the Pentagon Office of Net Assessment, who had impressed him in his first tour in the 1970s. Marshall produced a strategic vision that highlighted the need for joint war-fighting, expeditionary forces, flexibility, and technological adaptability--emphasizing networks over weapons platforms, precision effects over big-ticket programs. The overarching concept was Defense Transformation, a means of reconceptualizing threat assessment and balancing risks with resources to cope with a rapidly changing global security environment.

Unfortunately, the Department of Defense is not Searle pharmaceuticals. The virtues of private-sector management are, in the public sector, considered deadly sins. The Axeman faced employees he could not fire, assets he could not sell off, a dysfunctional board of directors (namely, Congress), and no threat of bankruptcy to discipline the process. His first eight months on the job were frustrating, or so it was ...