Donald Henry Rumsfeld (9 July 1932 – 29 June 2021) was a member of the US House of Representatives (R-IL 13) from 3 January 1963 to 20 March 1969 (succeeding Marguerite Church and preceding Phil Crane), White House Chief of Staff from 21 September 1974 to 20 November 1975 (succeeding Alexander Haig and preceding Dick Cheney), and United States Secretary of Defense from 20 November 1975 to 20 January 1977 (succeeding James Schlesinger and preceding Harold Brown) and from 20 January 2001 to 18 December 2006 (succeeding William Cohen and preceding Robert Gates). He was best known for his central role in the launching of the War on Terror, especially for fabricating an allegation that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, justifying the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Biography[]
Donald Henry Rumsfeld was born in Chicago, Illinois on 9 July 1932, and he was raised in Winnetka and then in Coronado, California during his father's US Navy service amid World War II. Rumsfeld himself served in the Navy from 1954 to 1957, and he became an aide to Republican congressman David S. Dennison Jr. in 1957 and worked for an investment banking firm from 1960 to 1962 before deciding to commit to a career in politics. Rumsfeld was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1962, and he was a leading co-sponsor of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and supported the civil rights acts of the 1960s. He also masterminded Gerald Ford's rise to the leadership of the House Republicans in 1965, and he resigned from the US Congress in 1969 to serve as President Richard Nixon's Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity from 1969 to 1970, Counselor to the President from 1970 to 1971, Director of the Cost of Living Council from 1971 to 1973, and as the United States Ambassador to NATO from 1973 to 1974. Under President Ford, Rumsfeld served as his White House Chief of Staff from 1974 to 1975 and as Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977, recruiting his staffer Dick Cheney to succeed him as Chief of Staff before coming to head the Defense Department. After Ford lost re-election in 1976, Rumsfeld returned to the private sector, and he became President and CEO of G. D. Searle & Company and served as CEO of General Instrument from 1990 to 1993 and as chairman of Gilead Sciences from 1997 to 2001. In January 2001, Rumsfeld was appointed Secretary of Defense by President George W. Bush, who assembled a cabinet of prominent neoconservatives and veterans of the Nixon-Ford era, including his Vice President, Dick Cheney. Following the 9/11 attacks, which had occurred a day after Rumsfeld announced that the Pentagon could not account for $2.3 trillion worth of transactions, Rumsfeld championed the "Rumsfeld Doctrine", which advocated for the sending of as small a force as soon as possible to deal with the Afghanistan conflict. On 27 November 2001, Rumsfeld wrote a memo on possible justifications for a war with Iraq, and he falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein was in possession of "weapons of mass destruction" in order to justify a 2003 invasion of Iraq by a "Coalition of the Willing". Rumsfeld's tenure was met with controversy over the military's use of torture to extract intelligence from detained terror suspects, and, having gradually lost his political support, Rumsfeld resigned in 2006. During his retirement, he continued to be active in politics, endorsing Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. He died in Taos, New Mexico in 2021 at the age of 88.