MIDGE'S MASH NOTE.(The Talk of the Town)(writer Midge Decter)(Interview)

The air in Midge Decter's apartment last week was not particularly humid. Decter herself, sitting on her living-room sofa in a blue wool turtleneck, black pants, and tennis shoes, appeared cool and dry. She sat with her legs crossed and her right hand wedged between her thighs. Every now and again, she removed the hand and fiddled with the neck of her sweater. There was no sign, in other words, that she had only recently emerged from the composition of a sweaty new book about the secretary of defense, "Rumsfeld." She spoke of her subject admiringly, but without obvious emotion. "The key to him is that he is a wrestler," she said. "A wrestler is a lone figure. He battles one on one, and he either wins or loses. There is only one man on the mat at the end of a wrestling match. It is no accident, as the communists used to say, that he wrestled."

In the past, Decter (who is usually characterized, along with her husband, Norman Podhoretz, as a neocon but who might more accurately be called simply a con) has written often and gloomily about changes in sexual mores: liberated women, promiscuous women, and gay men all seemed to her to portend a rise in childish hedonism and a decline in moral fibre. But recently she began to sense a different, better sort of sexual change in the air: she noticed that Donald Rumsfeld had become a sex symbol. She observed that he was called a "virtual rock star" on CNN, a "babe magnet" on Fox, and "Rumstud" by the president. He appeared in the December 2, 2002, issue of People, having been selected as one of the world's sexiest men. "In Washington, to be anywhere he is has become chic," a friend of Rumsfeld's told Decter. "People actually follow him around."

Her curiosity aroused, Decter, who is seventy-six, began to watch the Secretary more closely, and at some point last spring she noticed that he had begun to look more pallid and wrinkly than usual. Thinking that this might be the toll taken by the strain of war, she asked his wife about it and discovered that his poor color and skin tone were due to recent weight loss. Rumsfeld had been on a diet. "Put himself on a diet at such a time?" Decter marvelled when she heard this. Clearly, she realized, "anyone who thought, or even merely hoped, to see Donald Rumsfeld vanquished . . . was well advised to think again." She felt the same way last week when her subject was criticized for being contemptuous of Congress and for ...