Donald Rumsfeld
Donald Rumsfeld
Donald Henry Rumsfeldis an American politician and businessman. Rumsfeld served as the 13th Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under President Gerald Ford, and as the 21st Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006 under President George W. Bush. He is both the youngest and the second oldestperson to have served as Secretary of Defense. Additionally, Rumsfeld was a three-term U.S. Congressman from Illinois, Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Counsellor to the President, the United States Permanent...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth9 July 1932
CityEvanston, IL
CountryUnited States of America
It is hard to put a price on some things. What is the value of having prevented nuclear weapons from getting into the hands of a dictator like Saddam Hussein - or of Gadhafi ?
We are in the process of trying to liberate that country. And at the moment where the war ends and the coalition forces occupy the areas where those capabilities - chemical and biological weapons - are likely to be, to the extent they haven't been moved out of the country, it obviously is important to find them.
It is easier to get into something than to get out of it.
If you try to please everybody, somebody's not going to like it.
After the German abstention at the UN, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle commented that Germany doesn't always have to stand on the side of its traditional allies. Berlin can look for new partners all over the world.
In our system leadership is by consent, not command. To lead a President must persuade. Personal contacts and experiences help shape his thinking. They can be critical to his persuasiveness and thus to his leadership.
Don't be a bottleneck. If a matter is not a decision for the President or you, delegate it. Force responsibility down and out. Find problem areas, add structure and delegate. The pressure is to do the reverse. Resist it.
The way to do well is to do well.
Test ideas in the marketplace. You learn from hearing a range of perspectives. Consultation helps engender the support decisions need to be successfully implemented.
The Federal Government should be the last resort, not the first. Ask if a potential program is truly a federal responsibility or whether it can better be handled privately, by voluntary organizations, or by local or state governments.
The dead-enders are still with us, those remnants of the defeated regimes who'll go on fighting long after their cause is lost.
There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist.
Keep your sense of humor. As General Joe Stillwell said, 'The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of his behind'.
In 2003, at the time I made my "Old Europe" comment, the center of gravity in NATO and Europe had long since shifted to the East. With the former Warsaw Pact countries joining NATO, the alliance has a different mix today. Some people were sensitive about my comment because they thought it was a pejorative way of highlighting demographic realities. Apparently they felt it pointed a white light at a weakness in Europe - an aging population. Europe has come some distance since World War II in becoming Europe.