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Jonathan Freedland speaks to Yasmeen Abutaleb, author of a new book that details just how serious the president’s condition was when he contracted Covid-19 last October
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When Donald Trump was hospitalised last October after testing positive for Covid-19, some in the White House were hoping it would change his approach to the pandemic. In their new book, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic that Changed History, the Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta look at the Trump administration’s failure to control the coronavirus outbreak in the US. They also examine those chaotic few days during which the president tested positive and was given radical treatment in hospital. In their discussion, Jonathan Freedland and Yasmeen Abutaleb also look at the history of presidents battling illnesses while occupying the Oval Office, and why any ailments, no matter how serious, are often kept a secret. Special thanks to David Smith for recording audio from the Trump rally Check out The Guardian’s new audiovisual project, Auditorial Send us your questions and feedback to [email protected] Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More
The US supreme court has upheld two Arizona voting restrictions in a ruling that dealt a major blow to the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 civil rights law designed to prevent voting discrimination.In a 6-3 ruling, the justices upheld Arizona statutes that prohibit anyone other than a close family member or caregiver from collecting mail-in ballots, which are widely used in the state.The court also upheld a statute that requires officials to wholly reject votes from people who show up to cast a ballot in the wrong precinct, even if the person is otherwise entitled to vote in the state.“Neither Arizona’s out-of-precinct rule nor its ballot-collection law violates §2 of the VRA. Arizona’s out-of-precinct rule enforces the requirement that voters who choose to vote in person on election day must do so in their assigned precincts,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for a majority that included the court’s five other conservative justices, referring to section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.He added: “Having to identify one’s own polling place and then travel there to vote does not exceed the ‘usual burdens of voting’.”The decision means that the Arizona statutes will remain in effect and make it harder to challenge discriminatory voting laws across the US at a time when a swath of Republican-run state legislatures are pushing a wave of new voting restrictions that voting rights advocates say are aimed at suppressing the vote and especially target communities of color.“Today the supreme court made it much harder to challenge discriminatory voting laws in court. The justices stopped short of eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, but nevertheless did significant damage to this vital civil rights law and to the freedom to vote,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in a statement.Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California, Irvine, said the decision was a significant blow to the Voting Rights Act, one of America’s landmark civil rights laws.“The conservative supreme court has taken away all the major available tools for going after voting restrictions. This at a time when some Republican states are passing new restrictive voting law[s],” he wrote in a blogpost. “This is not a death blow for section 2 claims, but it will make it much, much harder for such challenges to succeed.”The larger dispute in the case, Brnovich v Democratic National Committee, was how courts should interpret section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits any voting practice that results in the “denial or abridgment” of the right to vote based on race. The provision has become a critical tool for civil rights lawyers to challenge discriminatory voting laws in recent years, especially after a 2013 supreme court ruling that dramatically weakened the Voting Rights Act.Alito declined to endorse a specific test for future section 2 cases, but outlined five “guideposts” that could be applied in future cases.Courts should weigh the size of the burden that a voting law imposes, the magnitude of disparities in how they affect different minority groups, the state’s interest in enacting such a law, as well as how far the challenged law departs from standard practice in 1982, the year when the relevant portion of the Voting Rights Act was adopted, Alito wrote.And when courts evaluate a voting law, they need to consider the accessibility of a state’s entire electoral system, rather than just the law at hand, Alito added.Alito used those five factors to set an extremely high bar for challenging the Arizona law.Arizona’s prohibition on out-of-precinct voting only required voters to ensure they showed up at the right precinct on election day, a minimal burden in Alito’s view. Alito also dismissed evidence that minority voters were about twice as likely to have their provisional ballots rejected than white voters, noting that only a small percentage of Arizona voters overall cast an out-of-precinct provisional ballot on election day.“A policy that appears to work for 98% or more of voters to whom it applies – minority and non-minority alike – is unlikely to render a system unequally open,” he stated.Alito took a similar approach in upholding Arizona’s ban on third-party ballot collection. He noted that voters who cast their ballot by mail have several ways to return the ballot other than having someone collect it. The plaintiffs in the case also failed to provide statistically significant evidence, Alito said, that the ban disproportionately harmed Native American voters.Alito also gave states significant leeway to use voter fraud – which is extremely rare – as an excuse to restrict voting. “It should go without saying that a state may take action to prevent election fraud without waiting for it to occur and be detected within its own borders,” he wrote.Justice Elena Kagan wrote a searing dissenting opinion for the court’s three liberal justices, bluntly saying the majority opinion “enables voting discrimination”.The Voting Rights Act, Kagan wrote, makes any voting law that results in racial discrimination illegal, no matter how small the burden is for the voter, since even burdens that seem small can lead to discrimination in voting.She also rejected Alito’s suggestion that the Arizona laws did not provide more of a burden on minority voters because 98% of voters overall were unaffected.“Suppose a state decided to throw out 1% of the Hispanic vote each election. Presumably, the majority would not approve the action just because 99% of the Hispanic vote is unaffected,” she wrote.She also dismissed Alito’s acceptance of voter fraud as an excuse to pass voting restrictions. “Of course preventing voter intimidation is an important state interest. And of course preventing election fraud is the same. But those interests are also easy to assert groundlessly or pre-textually in voting discrimination cases,” she wrote.Joe Biden said in a statement he was “deeply disappointed” with the ruling and renewed his call for federal voting legislation, which Republicans blocked in the US Senate last month.“In a span of just eight years, the court has now done severe damage to two of the most important provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – a law that took years of struggle and strife to secure,” he said in a statement.Biden added: “While this broad assault against voting rights is sadly not unprecedented, it is taking on new forms. It is no longer just about a fight over who gets to vote and making it easier for eligible voters to vote. It is about who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all.”Democrats in Washington are scrambling to find a way to pass new federal voting rights protections.One of the bills under consideration would restore the portion of the Voting Rights Act that section 2 has been used in lieu of in recent years and require certain states across the country to get voting changes approved by the federal government before they go into effect, in a bid to minimize discrimination.Kagan also noted in her dissenting opinion that the case came to the court at a time when states were considering hundreds of laws that would make it harder to vote, a moment she described as uniquely dangerous for American democracy.“The court decides this Voting Rights Act case at a perilous moment for the nation’s commitment to equal citizenship. It decides this case in an era of voting-rights retrenchment,” she wrote. “What is tragic here is that the court has (yet again) rewritten – in order to weaken – a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting’.” More
Nancy Pelosi is poised to take a hard line should Republicans try to derail her recently announced select committee into the 6 January Capitol attack and she may appoint its members at her sole discretion, according to a source familiar with the matter.The committee, which passed the House in a near-party-line vote on Wednesday, will have eight members appointed by Democrats and four members appointed by Republicans, as well as broad subpoena power and no deadline to complete its work.“We have the duty, to the constitution and the country, to find the truth of the January 6th insurrection and to ensure that such an assault on our Democracy cannot happen again,” the House speaker wrote in a letter to colleagues.But, deeply distrustful of the GOP, Pelosi is prepared to veto any Republican member and is considering not allowing any Republican who objected to the certification of Joe Biden’s election win to serve on the select committee, the source said.The thinly veiled warning being sent behind the scenes to the Republican House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, reflects Pelosi’s resolve to investigate the root causes of the Capitol attack that left five dead and scores more injured and shocked many Americans.It also underscored Pelosi’s far-reaching power over the select committee in the Democratic-controlled House and her ability to shape the contours of an investigation that could continue through the midterm elections in 2022 and give Democrats a powerful tool to hit Republicans with.The speaker remains acutely aware of how Republicans, in a stark display of loyalty to Trump and self-interest to shield themselves from an inquiry that could tarnish their party, blocked the creation of a 9/11-style commission into the Capitol attack.Pelosi has expressed in private that she will not allow the select committee to be derailed, the source said, and could block the appointment of extremist Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who refused to accept Biden’s win.An additional concern raised by some Democrats, but not Pelosi herself, revolves around how to approach conflict of interest situations with Republicans who might be named to the select committee but also be connected to events on or before 6 January.McCarthy is likely to be deposed by the select committee himself over his phone call to Trump as the insurrection unfolded. McCarthy begged Trump to call off the rioters, only for the former president to side with his supporters.The top Republican on the House judiciary committee, Jim Jordan – a likely pick by McCarthy for the select committee – also appeared to suggest in recent months that he spoke with Trump during the insurrection.Such conversations between Trump and top House Republicans are significant as they address the crucial question of what Trump was doing and saying as the Capitol was overrun, and will almost certainly be of central importance to the committee’s investigation.The deliberations over whether to take that kind of aggressive move – which would in effect see Pelosi unilaterally decide appointments to the select committee – come as the speaker prepares to decide on a chair and her other Democratic members.Among the leading contenders to lead the committee is the House homeland security committee chair, Bennie Thompson, who negotiated the framework of the aborted 9/11-style commission into 6 January, and has the backing of the House majority whip, Jim Clyburn.As for the other Democratic appointments, members of Pelosi’s leadership and whip teams are not expecting the speaker to name any managers from Trump’s second impeachment trial to the committee, with the possible exception of congressman Jamie Raskin, the source said.The fraught situation surrounding the select committee, which would hand Democrats sweeping power to issue subpoenas for witnesses and documents that could reveal new information about the Capitol attack, is indicative of a highly partisan dynamic on Capitol Hill.The bill to create the select committee became a lightning rod for Republicans after the framework mirrored the language the GOP used for the 2014 select committee to investigate the attack on a US compound in Benghazi, Libya.Pelosi has reiterated the 6 January select committee will examine the root causes of the Capitol attack, though for months, Republicans have argued Democrats are fixated on 6 as a way of tarnishing Trump and their party.Pelosi moved to create a special House select committee – among the top weapons for congressional oversight – after Senate Republicans blocked the commission, fearful that a close accounting of the Capitol attack could pose an existential threat to the GOP.The speaker maintained that she preferred an independent inquiry modeled on the commission set up after the September 11 terrorist attacks. But with Republicans opposed and downplaying the riot, she eventually conceded that only a select committee was possible.“It is imperative that we seek the truth,” Pelosi said. “It is clear the Republicans are afraid of the truth.”Several investigations into the Capitol attack are already under way across the justice department and Capitol Hill, but they have lacked a mandate to conduct a forensic examination of both the circumstances and causes of the assault. More
The Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, have been charged in a tax-related investigation, marking the first criminal charges against the former president’s company since prosecutors began investigating it three years ago, two people familiar with the matter told the Associated Press.Multiple news outlets including the New York Times and the Washington Post reported the indictment on Wednesday evening, citing sources familiar with the matter.The move marks the latest stage of an escalating battle between New York prosecutors and the former president. The charges against the Trump Organization and Weisselberg remained sealed Wednesday night, but were expected to involve alleged tax violations related to benefits the company gave to top executives, possibly including use of apartments, cars and school tuition, people familiar with the case said.While no charges are expected to be brought against Trump personally the charges mark an extraordinary turning point for the former president and more are likely to follow. New York prosecutors are still investigating allegations of “hush money” paid to women who say they had sexual relations with Trump, and claims of real-estate price manipulation.The charges are a severe blow to the Trump Organization, which may now find it more difficult to raise money as the case continues. They also pose a challenge to Trump’s apparent political ambitions. The former president has begun a series of campaign style rallies and is positioning himself for another run at the presidency in 2024.Prosecutors have been pressing Weisselberg, 73, to cooperate with their investigations but with little success so far.No one other than Trump has such a thorough knowledge of the Trump Organization. “They are like Batman and Robin,” Jennifer Weisselberg, ex-wife of Allen Weisselberg’s son Barry told the New York Times. Jennifer Weisselberg has aided Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance investigation into Trump’s business after a contentious divorce, supplying hundreds of pages of tax documents.Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, testified before Congress in 2019 that Weisselberg helped orchestrate a cover-up to reimburse him for a $130,000 payment made to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, who has claimed she had sex with Trump.Cohen also testified that he and Weisselberg concocted phoney valuations of Trump’s real estate holdings to devalue assets for tax purposes while inflating them for loan agreements.Vance and the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, are investigating both those allegations.A grand jury was recently empaneled to weigh evidence, and James said she was assigning two of her lawyers to work with Vance on the criminal inquiry while she continues a civil investigation of Trump.The Manhattan district attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.Trump had blasted the investigation in a statement Monday, deriding Vance’s office as “rude, nasty, and totally biased”.Trump Organization lawyers met virtually with Manhattan prosecutors last week in a last-ditch attempt to dissuade them from charging the company. Prosecutors gave the lawyers a Monday deadline to make the case that criminal charges shouldn’t be filed.Ron Fischetti, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, told the AP this week that there was no indication Trump himself was included in the first batch of charges.“There is no indictment coming down this week against the former president,” Fischetti said. “I can’t say he’s out of the woods yet completely.”Weisselberg, a loyal lieutenant to Trump and his real estate-developer father, Fred, came under scrutiny, in part, because of questions about his son’s use of a Trump apartment at little or no cost.Prosecutors investigating untaxed benefits to Trump executives have also been looking at Matthew Calamari, a former Trump bodyguard turned chief operating officer, and his son, the company’s corporate director of security. However, a lawyer for the Calamaris said Wednesday that he didn’t expect them to be charged.“Although the DA’s investigation obviously is ongoing, I do not expect charges to be filed against either of my clients at this time,” said the lawyer, Nicholas Gravante.The company and Weisselberg were expected to make their first court appearance Thursday. More
Donald Rumsfeld, who has died aged 88, arguably did more damage to the US’s military reputation than any previous secretary of defence. An unbendingly ideological approach to international affairs, and a conviction that he could micromanage the vast resources of the Pentagon like those of a private company, ensured not only that the US became enmeshed in a disastrous and costly campaign in Iraq from 2003 but that it would be vilified for its harsh treatment of the country’s citizens.As the war dragged on with little sign of progress and pressure grew for him to be replaced, President George W Bush initially declared that Rumsfeld would hold his post until the end of the presidency in January 2009. But in November 2006, in the aftermath of the scandal of torture and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib military detention centre in Baghdad, the Army Times, voice of an outraged military, roundly declared that “Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised.”A few days later, voters in that year’s midterm elections endorsed this blast with an electoral drubbing for the Bush administration. Rumsfeld was immediately sacked, and largely disappeared from public life. In 2011 he published a memoir, Known and Unknown, in which he defended his handling of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – and used to lay into any member of the Bush administration who had dared to dissent from his views. He took the title of the book from the celebrated remark he had made in 2002, when asked about the lack of evidence to support the White House’s assertion that Iraq was supplying terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction: “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”Rumsfeld was the only politician to have taken charge of the Pentagon twice. In 1975, at 43, he became its youngest-ever head under President Gerald Ford, holding the post for just over a year, and then, at 68, its second oldest, when Bush junior brought him back in 2001.In his second period in the role, he was at first was compared to his 1960s predecessor Robert McNamara, who had effectively outwitted a bloated military bureaucracy to rationalise America’s defence posture. But McNamara had stuck to broad strategy and left the fighting to the generals (disastrously, as it turned out in Vietnam). Rumsfeld, a successful businessman with an unrivalled understanding of Washington’s bureaucratic maze, believed he could tear the whole structure up by the roots and drag it, totally reformed, into the new century.His abrasive administrative style became notorious, taking the form of a blizzard of short, unsigned notes, which questioned anything and everything about equipment and doctrine. But he had barely settled in to his Pentagon office when his wide-ranging plans were brought sharply to earth by 19 men wielding Stanley knives.The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 not only made members of the new Bush administration realise that there was no such thing as Fortress America, but also had an immediate personal impact on Rumsfeld. He was at his desk being briefed by CIA officials when the hijacked American Airlines Boeing 757 crashed into the south-west wing of the building. He rushed to help in the rescue work before moving into the military command centre to deal with the wider crisis. His then became the most resolute voice at the cabinet table and he acted as the administration’s hardline front man in America’s call for a worldwide coalition against terrorism.Between October and December 2001 the administration, with British support, launched retaliatory attacks on the Afghan Taliban regime for sheltering Osama bin Laden. The regime, though not its resistance, collapsed, but the seemingly irrelevant issue of attacking Iraq had also been proposed by Rumsfeld and such administration hawks as the vice-president, Dick Cheney. The two had earlier served together under presidents Richard Nixon and Ford; when Rumsfeld became Ford’s chief of staff at the White House in 1974, Cheney was originally his deputy and later took over the job when Rumsfeld went to the Pentagon.During the Ronald Reagan years, Rumsfeld – by then running a highly profitable business – was sent to meet Saddam Hussein in the US’s effort to counter the Khomeini regime in Iran by re-establishing diplomatic relations with Iraq. His briefing for the visit included intelligence reports on Saddam’s use of chemical weapons both in the war with Iran and against his own people.In 2001 Rumsfeld was still obsessed with the issue and cited it as one of the reasons to justify an attack, a proposition strongly resisted by the secretary of state, Colin Powell. When Powell was eventually won over, the US’s international campaign against Iraq’s reputed weapons of mass destruction got under way, culminating in the military assault opened by the US and its coalition partners in March 2003.Underlying the chaos of the subsequent occupation had been Rumsfeld’s unshakeable belief that the Iraqi population would greet the invading coalition forces with jubilation and that everyday life in the ensuing secular democracy would resume within weeks. This view was constantly reinforced by one of his own key appointees, Douglas Feith, whom he put in charge of defence policy planning.Feith launched a fierce bureaucratic struggle with the CIA and the state department. On Rumsfeld’s orders, and in some secrecy, he established an intelligence operation, dubbed the Office of Special Plans, devoted to collating reports of Saddam’s continued production of weapons of mass destruction.Moreover, Feith (and therefore Rumsfeld) was encouraged by the exiled leader of the Iraqi national congress, Ahmed Chalabi, to believe that the Iraqi people would rise in their millions to greet their liberators and that America’s military presence could rapidly be reduced once the actual fighting was over. (It was a view firmly rejected by the State Department, which had produced an enormous set of briefings about the complexities of running Iraq after Saddam’s fall.)This increased Rumsfeld’s resistance to the army’s assessment of the forces needed to conquer Iraq. The initial version of Operations Plan 1003-98 for Iraq, which had been regularly tested in Pentagon war games, envisaged the deployment of 500,000 troops, which Rumsfeld immediately dismissed as absurd. When the army argued that, having needed 40,000 peacekeepers to control 2 million inhabitants in Kosovo, it would clearly need at least 480,000 to cope with 24 million Iraqis, Rumsfeld dismissed this as “old thinking” and set the absolute maximum at 125,000.This was based on what turned out to be two critical fallacies. The first was that Iraqi army units would defect en masse and fight alongside coalition forces (the Pentagon had even printed special “Articles of Capitulation” for Iraqi force commanders to sign). The second was that there would be only a limited need for US involvement in any postwar civilian administration.Once Rumsfeld had accepted these propositions, what followed was almost inevitable. Central to the Pentagon’s planning for any major military excursion is a vast computerised project known as the time-phased force and deployment list, or TPFDL (colloquially called the “tip-fiddle”), used to work out in minute detail the order in which equipment, troops and supplies must be assembled and dispatched to any field of operations.The Iraq tip-fiddle covered everything from tanks to soap, and generated some 40 pages of dates, times, ships, combat troops and support staff. It represented all that Rumsfeld hated about the lumbering military bureaucracy he had sworn to reform. He not only rejected the number of troops and the gear they would need, but decreed that the whole plan should be junked so that the size, composition and deployment of the invading force could be tightly controlled by him.The abysmal consequences of this decision became apparent as the war evolved and the compromise total of 140,000 American soldiers began their advance on Baghdad. There had, of course, been none of the anticipated Iraqi defections: instead, the advancing US troops met stiff resistance and needed rapid reinforcement.The obvious source in the original tip-fiddle deployment was the 4th Infantry Division, the army’s most technologically advanced unit. But all its tanks and equipment were still aboard 30 vessels that had been cruising around the Mediterranean for weeks while Washington vainly tried to persuade Ankara to let them land in Turkey and attack Iraq from the north (a diplomatic negotiation that the cancelled tip-fiddle would have triggered). In the end, a squadron of the 2nd Armoured Cavalry Regiment and all its equipment had to be scrambled into an emergency airlift from its US base.In his 2011 memoir, Rumsfeld wrote that the cause of the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib by their American guards was partly “a lack of training. Part of it was a lack of discipline and supervision. And part of it was the failure from the outset of the department of the army and joint staff to provide the appropriate and agreed-upon staff and support to General Sanchez’s headquarters in Iraq.”Notably absent from this list was the name of the official who had overruled the military deployment plan – Rumsfeld himself. An official inquiry into the mistreatment, chaired by James Schlesinger, blamed a failure of leadership in the Pentagon and painted an extraordinary picture. Published in August 2004, the report stated that one of the brigade commanders had told the inquiry panel that the loss of the tip-fiddle ensured that “anything that could go wrong went wrong”.The 800th Military Police (MP) Brigade, a reserve unit of civilian volunteers, had been assigned to handle detainees. During initial preparation for the war, the part-time military police had been separated from their equipment for so long that they had not been able to train before deployment. When they arrived in Iraq, their equipment still did not follow them. “Brigade commanders did not know who would be deployed next … A recently arrived battalion HQ would be assigned the next arriving MP companies, regardless of their capabilities or any other prior command and training relationships.”This eventually meant that poorly trained civilian volunteers became responsible for guarding around 7,000 rebellious prisoners at Abu Ghraib, many of whom had no idea why they had been arrested. The guards often could not communicate with one another because they had the wrong sort of radio, and therefore had little idea of what was happening elsewhere in the prison. Most did not know who was authorised to give them orders, or whether such orders were legal. The upshot of this chapter of Rumsfeld’s war on bureaucracy was the torture and abuse of prisoners revealed in a series of shocking photographs that were published around the world.Rumsfeld’s miscalculation of Iraqi citizens’ response to the invasion compounded the widespread chaos which followed Saddam’s fall in April 2003. (He defended the looting of Baghdad as an inevitable part of the transition process, with the notorious remark “stuff happens”.) Rumsfeld had originally asked a retired general, Jay Garner, to establish a postwar civil administration, but he had been given few resources. The general also blotted his political copybook with Rumsfeld by falling out with Chalabi and by recruiting State Department Arabists to help him out. Within three weeks Rumsfeld arbitrarily replaced Garner with Paul Bremer, a former diplomat and long-time associate of Henry Kissinger. Bremer insisted he could only do the job with powers analogous to those of an imperial viceroy. Rumsfeld persuaded President Bush to agree and so set the scene for the most egregious misjudgments of the whole Iraqi adventure.Even Kissinger described Bremer as a control freak and his record in Baghdad confirmed it. He created the Coalition Provisional Authority and its first executive order, issued within days of his arrival, barred the first four levels of Ba’ath party members from official employment. This immediately stripped 30,000 of the most knowledgable Iraqi civil servants and teachers of their jobs and salaries.A week later, Bremer’s second executive order disbanded the Iraqi army and its associated organisations, throwing a further 300,000 people into penury, causing widespread rioting, and removing the only organisation which might have abated the increasing anarchy. Many of the affected troops inevitably joined the armed opposition. This disbandment was in total contravention of official US policy, as Bush himself later publicly acknowledged, but Bremer’s boss at the Pentagon neither countermanded the order nor undid what was acknowledged as the worst political mistake of the Iraq campaign.After 13 disastrous months Bremer quit, signing over sovereignty to the Iraqi interim government, leaving Baghdad to the suicide bombers and to its own squabbling politicians. Rumsfeld admitted that the rise of Islamic State was ‘something that, generally, people had not anticipated’In later years, Rumsfeld continued to defend his handling of the war, showing no remorse for the mess he had created, nor for his erroneous claims about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. He did later admit that the subsequent disorder in Iraq and Syria, including the rise of Islamic State, was “something that, generally, people had not anticipated”.Born in Chicago, Donald was the son of George Rumsfeld, an estate agent, and his wife, Jeannette (nee Husted). He was educated at New Trier high school, in Winnetka, Illinois, and then won a scholarship to Princeton. In 1954, he graduated, married Joyce Pierson and signed on for three years as a naval pilot. Determined that politics would be his preferred career, he moved to Washington as a congressional administrative assistant and then, after a brief period in merchant banking, ran for Congress in his home suburb on Chicago’s North Side, winning the first of three terms in the House of Representatives (1963-69). He quickly established his reputation as a vigorous rightwinger, organising a group of reform-minded young legislators, known as Rumsfeld’s Raiders, with policies including massive increases in defence spending and reductions in the anti-poverty programmes of the time. His energy attracted the notice of Nixon, then positioning himself for the 1968 election.As president, Nixon brought Rumsfeld into his first cabinet to run the Office of Economic Opportunity. The implicit brief was to cut back on the Democratic extravagance of the Kennedy-Johnson years, but Rumsfeld’s principal achievement was, in fact, to make the office far more efficient and its anti-poverty programmes therefore more effective.When the 1972 economic crisis obliged Nixon to impose a wage and price freeze, abandon the dollar’s fixed convertibility, and impose import surcharges, Rumsfeld was put in charge of the ensuing “economic stabilisation programme”. It proved a political bed of nails on which he was rapidly skewered by enraged business leaders, trade unionists and America’s international trading partners.After Nixon’s re-election in 1972, Rumsfeld moved to Brussels as US ambassador to Nato, remaining there until brought back to head the team preparing for the imminent change of presidency, with the clouds gathering over the Watergate scandal. When vice-president Ford took over in August 1974, Rumsfeld became White House chief of staff.The following year, when Schlesinger was unexpectedly turfed out of the Pentagon, Rumsfeld took over. At 43, it made him the youngest defence secretary in US history. In office, Rumsfeld confirmed his brisk administrative skills and continued the hawkish stance he had displayed as a congressman. He increased the defence budget and accelerated the development of the B-1 bomber, the Trident submarine missile and the land-based MX missile. He also embarked on an aggressive sales drive for US weaponry and staged a resolute campaign against the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), then under negotiation with the Soviet Union.With the accession of Jimmy Carter, Rumsfeld had a spell as lecturer at Princeton before being recruited as chief executive of the international pharmaceutical company GD Searle, then in serious financial trouble. Within eight years its fortunes were transformed and Rumsfeld was lauded as a remarkable company doctor.In 1985 he resigned from Searle’s to go into business for himself, and in 1990, he was again asked to rescue an ailing business, the General Instrument Corporation, making it sufficiently profitable for a successful stock-market flotation within three years.Meanwhile, he was assiduous in maintaining his political contacts, and when George HW Bush took office Rumsfeld served as a presidential adviser on economic policy. During the Clinton years he chaired a commission to assess the potential threat from ballistic missiles (1998), and a similar probe into the security problems of space (2000). This networking paid off and in 2001 George W Bush gave him the second term at the Pentagon that provided the platform for him to apply business principles to military operations.He is survived by Joyce and their three children, Valerie, Marcy and Nick. Donald Henry Rumsfeld, politician and businessman, born 9 July 1932; died 29 June 2021 More
