A LITTLE LEARNING.(UnderSecretary of Defense for Policy)(Douglas J. Feith)

Douglas J. Feith, who is the UnderSecretary of Defense for Policy, lives in one of the better Maryland suburbs, on a street of large and unhandsome Colonial homes. The interior of Feith's house has space and light, but it is furnished in a mostly expedient manner; Feith and his wife, Tatiana, have four children--ages eight to twenty-one--and the house feels very much theirs.

The exception is Feith's library. It is apparent that he has devoted considerable care and money to its design and, in particular, to its collection, which numbers at least five thousand volumes. The floors and shelves are dark oak, and the walls are covered in hunter-green wallpaper. The library is not in the style of the high-station Washington bureaucrat who wants to telegraph his indispensability; there are few photographs of Feith in the company of potentates and prime ministers and presidents. Instead, Feith has filled the room with images of figures who have earned his admiration. Busts of Washington and Lincoln sit on the shelves; Churchill scowls in the direction of Feith's desk. A black-and-white portrait of Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, hangs over a green leather couch. In his collection, history has displaced nearly every other subject; fiction--his favorite is Nabokov--has been exiled to the basement. The library is weighted disproportionately to the history of the British Empire, and Feith has spent many hours schooling himself in the schemes and follies of the British on the playing fields of the Middle East.

History serves another purpose, Feith suggests: it provides solace to leaders who are misunderstood by their peers. "When history looks back," he told me, "I want to be in the class of people who did the right thing, the sensible thing, and not necessarily the fashionable thing, the thing that met the aesthetic of the moment."

Feith, who announced earlier this year that he will be leaving his post by this summer--he said he hopes to write a book about his experiences--has not often met the reigning aesthetic of Washington. It has been Feith's job, as the top policy adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his departing deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to help build the intellectual framework for the Bush Administration's campaign against terrorism. His detractors see him as an ideologue who manipulated intelligence to bring about the invasion of Iraq. His main nemesis on Capitol Hill, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who serves on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told me that Feith deceived not only the White House but Congress as well. Yet the criticism of Feith in Washington goes beyond his ideology, to his competence. Even some fellow-neoconservatives, who have been lacerating in their criticism of Rumsfeld for his management of postwar Iraq, have asked whether Feith is better at reading history than at shaping it. "I don't know whether Feith deserves more praise for supporting George W. Bush's foreign policy or more criticism for being an agent of Rumsfeld," William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, said.

Fifteen hundred people report to Feith in the Pentagon, where he is known for the profligacy of his policy suggestions. Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, has been much quoted as calling Feith "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth," apparently for ideas he proposed to Franks and his planners.

Franks's view is not universally shared by the military. Marine General Peter Pace, who has just been nominated to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says of Feith, "Early on, he didn't realize that the way he presented his positions, the way he was being perceived, put him in a bit of a hole. But he changed his ways." Apparently, he became more consultative, particularly with his counterparts on the Joint Chiefs. Pace, who calls Feith a "true American patriot," said he did not understand Franks's attack. "This is not directed at any individual," Pace said, "but the less secure an individual is in his thought processes and in his own capacities, the more prone they were to be intimidated by Doug, because he's so smart." (A spokesman for Franks, Michael Hayes, said in an e-mail that the General would not comment for this article: "What do you think he has to gain by talking about Feith?")

Feith's most prominent defender is Rumsfeld, who told me that Feith is "one of the brightest people you or I will ever come across. He's diligent, very well read, and insightful." ...