A scathing attack on the Rumsfeld legacy

In 1962, at age 30, Rumsfeld moved to Washington, a newly elected Republican congressman from a suburban Chicago district. In 1968, he departed from the electoral side of politics to become an executive-branch bureaucrat, as a cabinet-level appointee of President Nixon. No other Republican was clamoring to direct the Office of Economic Opportunity , a favorite bureaucracy of the Democrats while conducting their so-called war on poverty. Rumsfeld grabbed the opportunity to remake the war on poverty in his own image, which meant cutting back support for the needy.

A few quotations from Cockburn's account of Rumsfeld's performance as a Nixon appointee will allow readers to understand the message and the tone of the entire book.

"Liberals quaked at the prospect of this rabid ideologue taking over the chicken coop," Cockburn writes. " Rumsfeld's record at the antipoverty agency fits neatly into the same pattern as those of his subsequent jobs. That is to say, he devoted most of his energies to imposing his unchallenged political control on the organization while cultivating an ill-merited reputation for administrative competence."

As many younger folks tend to say these days, with a touch of irony, to ideologues across the sociopolitical spectrum: "Why don't you tell us what you really think?"

Make no mistake, Cockburn the journalist is every bit as much the ideologue as Rumsfeld the politician/government bureaucrat/corporate executive/Republican functionary. A canon of quality journalism is to "show, not tell." In other words, show readers that Rumsfeld is a self-serving, incompetent ideologue willing to sacrifice the well-being of others for his own gain. Help readers reach that conclusion based on irrefutable evidence, rather than merely telling readers what to think.