INNER OFFICE.(The Talk of the Town)

Two months ago, Kenneth Adelman, the former director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, received a call from the Pentagon: Donald Rumsfeld would like to see him as soon as possible. Adelman said he knew then that this meeting might be their last.

The two men had been friends for thirty-six years. Adelman first worked for Rumsfeld in the Nixon Administration, and then served as Rumsfeld's assistant during his more rewarding term as the Secretary of Defense, under President Ford. Rumsfeld drafted Adelman to help him in his brief, ineffectual campaign for President, in 1988. Their families sometimes spent vacations together, and Rumsfeld continued to call on Adelman for advice. In 2001, Rumsfeld appointed his friend to the Defense Policy Board, a group of lobbyists, defense intellectuals, and politicians of once high standing, who gather periodically to give the Secretary unvarnished advice on strategy and management.

Rumsfeld had apparently come to see Adelman's advice as a bit too unvarnished. Before the war, Adelman famously remarked that the invasion would be a "cakewalk." He wasn't wrong about that. Seizing Baghdad was comparatively easy; holding it quickly became the problem. "When Rumsfeld said, in reaction to all the looting, 'Stuff happens,' and 'That's what free people do,' I was just so disappointed," Adelman recalled last week. "This wasn't what free people did; it's what barbarians did." Within the confines of the policy board, Adelman became blunt about his disenchantment with the Pentagon's management of the war. At the board's meeting this summer, Adelman said, he argued that the American military needed a new strategy.

"I suggested that we were losing the war," Adelman said. "What was astonishing to me was the number of Iraqi professional people who were leaving the country. People were voting with their feet, and I said that it looked like we needed a Plan B. I said, 'What's the alternative? Because what we're doing now is just losing.' "

Adelman said that Rumsfeld didn't take to the message well. "He was in deep denial--deep, deep denial. And then he did a strange thing. He did fifteen or twenty minutes of posing questions to himself, and then answering them. He made the statement that we can only lose the war in America, that we can't lose it in Iraq. And I tried to interrupt this interrogatory soliloquy to say, 'Yes, we are actually losing the war in Iraq.' He got upset and cut me off. He said, 'Excuse me,' and went right on with it."

The meeting ended disagreeably. In any case, the two men had stopped socializing some time ago. Adelman's wife, Carol, hoped to maintain the friendship, but he had become unsure. "On Christmas in ...