Into the Breach

Donald Rumsfeld, with typical self-deprecating humor, likes to tell the story of coming home one evening after Richard Nixon appointed him director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. When he reached into the refrigerator for a beer, there was a note in doggerel from his wife saying, "He tackled a job that couldn't be done ..." At the bottom was the kicker: "... and couldn't do it." If ever there was a job that seemed to defy success, it was the one Rumsfeld accepted last week from President Reagan: that of special envoy to the Middle East.

Rumsfeld's resume reads like a litany of challenging tasks. Before 1977, when he began a successful career as president of the pharmaceutical firm G.D. Searle & Co. (1982 profits: $140 million on $1.04 billion in sales), Rumsfeld handled the war on poverty and then wage and price controls for Nixon, and served as Chief of Staff and Defense Secretary for Gerald Ford. But although highly ambitious, the former Illinois Congressman and Princeton wrestling captain does not go in for suicide missions. When Watergate loomed over the Nixon Administration, Rumsfeld engineered an appointment as Ambassador to NATO, as far away as possible from the gathering storm. "He was a cool and careful planner," noted Speech writer Robert Hartmann, who tussled with him for influence at the Ford White House. "As a politician, he recognized and respected fate; as a wrestler, he was ever alert for an opening to take fate by the forelock."

Rumsfeld, 51, was generally a hardliner as Defense Secretary, arguing that the U.S. must struggle to overcome what he saw as the Soviets' military superiority. Yet as a pragmatic politician and the latest in a line of Ford alumni advising Reagan, he may provoke some criticism from the far right. Dealing with the Gordian knot of Middle East politics and coping with the inflammable situation in Lebanon, however, are tasks far more suited to a wrestler than an ideologue. Rumsfeld's first move will have to be an attempt to get a hammer lock on the shifting complexities of the situation in Lebanese "reconciliation talks" in Geneva.