DOWNFALL.

The improbable restoration of Donald H. Rumsfeld to the seat of American military power was consummated on a cold Friday afternoon in January, 2001, when he was welcomed back to the Pentagon with a full-honors review. The ceremony, a ritual display of martial pomp and fanfare, was staged on the River Parade Field, the vast lawn on the Potomac side of the Pentagon, where Rumsfeld had been welcomed as Gerald Ford's Defense Secretary a quarter century earlier. Standing before the assemblage, Rumsfeld seemed like a figure lifted from another age. He had run the Pentagon in the time of the Berlin Wall, the era of Brezhnev and Kissinger, and the reunification of Vietnam under a Communist regime. Then he was the youngest-ever Secretary of Defense; now, at sixty-eight, he became one of the oldest, and the only man ever to serve in the position twice. His selection by George W. Bush had been a surprise, not least to Rumsfeld himself ("What in the world am I doing here?" he sometimes asked himself). Rumsfeld had been out of government since 1977, and although he was still well connected, he had not been a particularly close Bush adviser during the campaign. Even so, when General Henry H. Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who introduced Rumsfeld at the day's event, and declared him "exactly the right man for the job in this new century," everyone knew what he meant. Bush and Cheney had campaigned as friends of the military--"Help is on the way," the candidates had repeatedly proclaimed--and Rumsfeld, a totem of the Republican national-security establishment, was a promise delivered.

At the ceremony, Rumsfeld declared that the new President's first goal for defense was "to strengthen the bond of trust with the American military." Earlier that day, at Rumsfeld's swearing-in at the White House, the President had used the same phrase and promised to give Americans in uniform "the respect they deserve." The refrain was repeated so often that a reporter finally pressed Rumsfeld to spell out what he and the President really meant: had the "bond of trust" been ruptured by eight years of Bill Clinton? Rumsfeld allowed the question to speak for itself ("I'm looking forward, not back," he said), but no one missed the point: a central message of the Bush-Cheney campaign had been that the American military had somehow needed to be rescued from its Commander-in-Chief.

Of the several partisan fevers that afflicted the Clinton era, none was more acute than that having to do with Clinton and the military. Some of the disaffection reflected Clinton's moment in history: the end of the Cold War offered the chance for a "peace dividend" of a smaller military, which Clinton seized, but, in the eyes of many military leaders, he lacked a consistent doctrine for the use of American power. Early in his first term, a relief mission begun by the elder Bush in Somalia became a military mission aimed at capturing the nettlesome clan leader General Muhammad Farah Aydid. When eighteen Army Rangers were killed and one was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Clinton pulled out. The following year, when a humanitarian disaster unfolded in Rwanda, the United States stood aside, at the price of countless lives--for which Clinton later apologized on America's behalf. A "Clinton doctrine" eventually evolved, which defined the national interest partly in terms of humanitarian interventions, a construct that justified bombing in Bosnia, an air war in Kosovo, and the open-ended commitment of American troops to both. To Clinton's critics, it seemed as if American foreign policy were shaped by the latest ghastly images from the nightly news cycle, and Clinton himself seemed to confirm it, saying his aim was a world where "we don't have to worry about seeing scenes every night for the next forty years of ethnic cleansing in some part of the world." The military was deeply skeptical about what it called "operations other than war," such as peacekeeping and nation-building. The added duty for a smaller force put serious strains on the military's readiness for combat as well as its ability to retain people. Toward the end of Clinton's tenure, the Army, Navy, and Air Force each failed to meet its recruitment goals.

The revelation that President Clinton had had sexual relations with a female subordinate in the Oval Office, and then lied about it, struck a particular nerve in the military, and some of the deeply felt resentments began to surface. One Marine major wrote an article in the Navy Times referring to Clinton as "an adulterous liar." Another marine, a reserve officer, wrote an opinion article, in November, 1998, questioning a military officer's obligation to obey the orders of "a morally defective leader." The Marine Corps Deputy Commandant, General Terrence Drake, issued an order to all the Corps's generals to remind their officers of Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice--the provision prohibiting officers from using "contemptuous words" about the civilian authority.

And so, that January of 2001, when Donald Rumsfeld was officially welcomed back to the Pentagon, "There was just great relief in the military," recalled Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan arms-control official, who was among the invited guests that day. "There was the feeling that now somebody was going to be on their side."

Bush had inherited a pressing problem. The American military continued through the nineteen-nineties to train, plan, and equip itself to fight an enemy--the Soviet Union--that no longer existed. It was hardly a secret that the military was badly in need of reform; everyone in uniform knew it, and those analysts and scholars who populated the think tanks of Washington had been fixated on the subject for most of a decade.

As a pro-defense Republican, Bush would have the political capital to bring about genuine, even historic, change. During the campaign, he had vowed to give his Secretary of Defense "a broad mandate to challenge the status quo and envision a new architecture of American defense for decades to come," and he had chosen Rumsfeld because he believed that he would be more willing and better able than the other candidates to pursue his agenda. The contents and scope of that agenda were not yet known, but Rumsfeld made it clear that his approach to the military was very much hands-on.