Rumsfeld Gets Unexpected Nod for Defense Post

President-elect George W. Bush on Thursday unexpectedly nominated former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has championed a national missile defense system and is a veteran of two Republican administrations, to head the Pentagon again.

Rumsfeld, 68, has been a GOP stalwart for four decades, first coming to Washington as a congressman from Illinois, then joining the Nixon and Ford administrations.

He will bring to the Defense Department the gravitas that should make him a peer of the likes of Vice President-elect Dick Cheney and Secretary of State-designate Colin L. Powell, thus ensuring that the Pentagon’s point of view is forcefully represented.

Bush’s announcement came after days of speculation that the job would go to former Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana or to one of two former aides to Cheney. Instead, Bush named a man who had once served as Cheney’s boss as chief of staff at the White House.

With Rumsfeld’s appointment, Bush now has made eight Cabinet selections. They have the patina of corporate America, dominated by wealthy individuals who have not only served in government but also held senior private-sector jobs.

“This shows the Bush team really does prefer corporate-style managers,” said Loren Thompson, an analyst with the Lexington Institute, a defense think tank that advocates increased military spending.

Bush is expected to make at least one other Cabinet announcement today before returning to his ranch near Crawford, Texas, for the New Year’s weekend. The president-elect said that he hopes to fill remaining Cabinet posts by the end of next week.

“We feel like we’re making pretty darn good progress,” Bush said. “It’s hard to move quickly until we get the secretaries named. And obviously, we’ve been somewhat delayed in that as a result of the election taking a little longer than most people anticipated it would.”

Bush said he remains hopeful that he can persuade a Democrat to join his Cabinet, although he acknowledged that most of the Democrats he has sought out “want to stay in place.”

In announcing Rumsfeld’s appointment, Bush said:

“There’s no question in my mind that his record of service to the country is extraordinary. . . . This is a man who has got great judgment. He has got strong vision. And he’s going to be a great secretary of Defense--again.”

A former White House chief of staff and ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Rumsfeld was chosen in 1975 by President Ford to become the youngest Defense secretary in the nation’s history.

Speaking of Rumsfeld’s stature and background, Bush noted that Cheney, a former Defense secretary, and Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would have “little” undue influence at the Pentagon--”because I picked a strong leader” in Rumsfeld.

Bush and Rumsfeld said that they intend to make the armed forces more mobile in combating terrorism, protecting assets in space and defending against weapons of mass destruction.

The president-elect also said that he wants to boost morale, in part by seeking $1 billion in pay increases for servicemen and servicewomen.

Before settling on Rumsfeld, Bush considered both Coats and Paul Wolfowitz, who advised Bush during the campaign.

Neither would have brought to the job the level of experience that Rumsfeld possesses.

Bush has “totally solved that problem with this appointment,” said Daniel Goure, defense specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here and a former Defense Department official.

Rumsfeld’s selection also signals Bush’s desire for Cabinet officers who can work with people with diverse points of view, some analysts said.

When he headed the missile threats commission in 1998, Rumsfeld was able to unite liberals and conservatives on the panel in their final unanimous recommendation that America faced a growing threat of missile attack from abroad.

Though the commission stopped short of urging the Pentagon to build a specific antimissile system, the recommendation pushed the Clinton administration to move ahead on missile defense.

Bush said Thursday that he was particularly impressed by Rumsfeld’s work on that panel.

Rumsfeld will work to “change our military” by making the armed forces more mobile and swift so that it can “meet the threats of a new century,” Bush said.

Such a modernization task, he said, “requires first and foremost a top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top review of what exists today and what the military ought to look like tomorrow.”

Rumsfeld characterized “the new national security environment” as “information warfare, missile defense, terrorism, defense of our space assets and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction throughout the world.”

Also on Thursday, the Bush-Cheney transition team announced several senior White House staff appointments:

* Joshua Bolten was named assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for policy. Bolten, 46, was policy director for the Bush campaign. He served in the previous Bush administration as general counsel to the U.S. trade representative and as deputy assistant to the president for legislative affairs.

* Joseph Hagin will be assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for operations. He also is a veteran of the earlier Bush administration, having served as President Bush’s appointments secretary. Hagin was deputy manager of the Bush-Cheney campaign. He is a former executive with Chiquita Brands and with Federated Department Stores.

* Ari Fleischer was named assistant to the president and White House press secretary. Fleischer, 40, is a veteran Capitol Hill staff member and was a top advisor in the president-elect’s 2000 campaign. He served as spokesman for Sen. Pete V. Dominici (R-N.M.) and then for the House Ways and Means Committee. In 1999, he was press secretary in Elizabeth Hanford Dole’s presidential campaign.

* Lewis “Scooter” Libby will hold three titles: assistant to the president, chief of staff to Cheney, and assistant to the vice president for national security affairs. Libby, 50, was deputy Defense undersecretary for policy in the Bush administration. He is now managing partner of the Washington office of Dechert Price & Rhoads, an international law firm.

* David Addington was named counsel to the vice president. Another Bush administration veteran, Addington, 43, was general counsel at the Pentagon under Cheney and assistant general counsel at the CIA. In addition, he held senior positions on four congressional committees.

During a brief question-and-answer period, Bush on Thursday repeatedly declined to comment on developments in the Middle East, North Korea and other foreign hot spots, saying that “our nation must speak with one voice”--that of the president.

While in Washington, Bush also conducted additional job interviews. He dined Thursday night with Powell.

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Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this story.