Rumsfeld: Older But Wiser?

It wasn't so very long ago that the name Donald Rumsfeld sent shivers down the spines of Washington's most battle-hardened bureaucratic warriors. In the 1970s, when Rumsfeld was chief of staff and later Secretary of Defense under President Gerald R. Ford, he was a fearless backroom operator. Henry Kissinger once admitted that Rumsfeld was the only person ever to get the best of him in a political fight. Rumsfeld's inside moves during the Ford years were so clever and complex that he developed a cult following among conservatives. He was the man who would stop at almost nothing to win, and almost always did. In 1974, he wrote a small pamphlet--Rumsfeld's Rules--about how to make things happen in Washington. He has updated it regularly ever since. Rule No. 25: "Don't blame the boss. He has enough problems."

That one still applies. In seven months as Pentagon chief, Rumsfeld has managed to spook the military, alienate defense contractors, mobilize much of Capitol Hill against him--and even make some in the White House question his toughness. It's usually a Democrat who puts the Pentagon on a wartime footing, but Rumsfeld, 69, is an armor-plated Republican and a military man to boot (he served as a Navy pilot). He has stirred up these problems by launching a much needed but oddly secretive review of the U.S. military that until last week threatened to sink ships, ground planes and retire soldiers in order to reduce U.S. forces overseas and free up money for more research in areas such as missile defense. "This is one of the most interesting situations I've seen in a long time," says Representative Norm Dicks, a pro-military Democrat from Washington State. "He says he wants the military to stop saying they can fight two wars on two fronts simultaneously. But he has opened more fronts in Washington than any Defense Secretary in memory."

Which helps explain why, all of a sudden last Friday, Rumsfeld sued for peace. After hinting for months that the new Administration might force the Army, Navy and Air Force to cut two or three divisions, 40 to 50 ships and as many as 72 fighters, the Pentagon chief said, in effect, never mind. The three services, he announced, can decide for themselves how to prepare for the future. "This is a big organization," he said. "The services make lots of decisions. It would be foolhardy to try to micromanage from the top...every aspect of everything that is going on."

This is the story of how Don Rumsfeld tried and has so far failed to conquer the Pentagon--the story of a man who played by the rules of a bygone age, when power in Washington was less diffuse, when the military brass were more subservient and when options could be hammered out in a place that barely exists anymore--in secret. It's the story of how Washington has changed in the 24 years since Rumsfeld left the capital for the private sector. After his announcement last Friday, Rumsfeld denied that he had executed an abrupt about-face. He insisted he had never committed to force reductions in the first place. But he admitted, in an interview with TIME, that he was "surprised" by how much Washington has changed since 1976. After leaving town "I was not into the rhythm of the place," he said, and the changes in the intervening years took him by storm. "My Lord, in this place, all you have to do is think about something, and it is leaked. It's like there are eavesdropping microphones on your brain." It's enough to make a man devise some new rules for coping. Here are a few that Rumsfeld might want to adopt.

New Rule No. 1

Times change. So do the Rules.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had a simple message for their audiences, particularly those in military towns: "Help is on the way." To most men and women in uniform, that meant more money was on the way. But after Bush and Cheney took over last winter and installed Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, the new team shocked hard-liners in Washington by proposing little new money for the military this year. Instead, Rumsfeld announced that he was conducting a "top-down" review of the Pentagon's strategy and forces, with an eye toward transforming the hidebound institution and getting it ready for the wars of the future. Help would have to wait.

Rumsfeld's review was a good idea, everyone agreed, because the Pentagon was still spending about the same amount in the post-cold war world as it had when the Soviet Union was a threat. With the big old enemy gone, it made sense to re-examine how America trains and equips itself to fight. Besides, the huge budget surpluses that were being forecast seemed to make genuine reform a possibility for the first time in decades. "There was reason to do the review even if the cold war hadn't ended, but it had," says Lawrence Korb, a Reagan-era Pentagon official now at the Council on Foreign Relations. Korb notes that the Joint Chiefs were behind the idea. After eight years of Clinton, he said, they "were dying to have these guys back."