Fight-Tested Rumsfeld to Return to Familiar Battleground

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military was facing a grim picture: Reenlistments were down. Popular support had ebbed. Morale was low. Wrestling with it all was Donald H. Rumsfeld, the nation’s youngest secretary of Defense.

Since then, four administrations have pumped fresh billions into the Pentagon budget. The first loss at war in the nation’s history has been replaced by the success of the Persian Gulf War. A generation of officers and enlisted troops has come and gone. Conditions among the 1.4 million troops are far superior to those of a quarter-century ago. But weapons once again need modernizing, new threats loom, recruitment remains a struggle.

And Rumsfeld, 68, has been summoned back to the Pentagon, this time by President-elect George W. Bush.

He would inherit a post every bit as challenging as it was when he first moved into the Defense secretary’s richly appointed office on the Pentagon’s E-ring, or outer corridor.

By wide consensus, the former Navy fighter pilot and college wrestling captain performed well when he was President Ford’s Defense secretary. And, many observers agree, he is still a grappler.

The Defense job is one of the most difficult in the upper reaches of government: It is at the center of some of the most powerful and competitive bureaucracies and political establishments, requiring a firm hand that can balance the demands and practiced recalcitrance of the uniformed services, the defense industry, White House budget minders and Congress. And historically, the Defense secretary often finds himself at odds over policy with other members of the president’s national security team.

Indeed, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have said that they will need a budget boost of tens of billions of dollars. And, despite the record federal budget surplus, it will be a tough fight to get it.

Rumsfeld demonstrated in his last stint in the job, from late 1975 until early 1977, that he was a keen-eyed manager. He tried to squeeze out waste at every turn and was willing to cancel important weapon programs. That experience may come in handy.

He was not afraid to tangle with the brass.

Consider the time Air Force Gen. George Brown, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stepped out of line with sharp words that were insulting to Jews and, despite the resulting uproar, later insulted the British military. Rumsfeld called him to the Pentagon’s press room and, while the nation’s top uniformed military officer stood at attention, dressed him down. But he did not fire him.

The result: A valued member of the national security team, whose military contributions were not questioned, kept his mouth shut for the rest of his tenure--and remained on board.

Rumsfeld, known as “DR” and, less frequently, as “Rummy,” has been in and out of politics for more than four decades--from his early experience in 1957 as an administrative assistant to a member of Congress from Ohio to his service a year ago as chairman of a commission that studied the national security threats posed by ballistic missiles and served on another that looked at national security issues in space.

The graduate of Princeton University headed the Office of Economic Opportunity in the late 1960s. Among those on his staff were Dick Cheney, Christine Todd Whitman, Frank Carlucci, Bill Bradley (working a summer job) and, in the legal services shop, Mickey Kantor.

Cheney, the vice president-elect, has been a Rumsfeld protege, taking over as Gerald R. Ford’s White House chief of staff when Ford sent Rumsfeld, his first chief of staff, to the Pentagon. Whitman, the governor of New Jersey, was named last week as Bush’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Carlucci served as Defense secretary in the Reagan administration. Bradley became a New Jersey senator and was a Democratic presidential hopeful earlier this year. Kantor was a Commerce secretary in the Clinton administration.

Rumsfeld was elected to Congress at the age of 30 and served three terms before taking over the economic office during the Nixon administration.

Out of government service, Rumsfeld moved through the upper levels of the pharmaceutical giant G.D. Searle & Co. until he was chairman. He also served as chairman of General Instrument Corp., a pioneer in the development of high-definition television.

Rumsfeld is currently a member of the board of directors of the Tribune Co., which publishes the Los Angeles Times. He and his wife, Joyce, have three children and five grandchildren.

Leading the U.S. Ballistic Missile Threat Commission, Rumsfeld was able to unite liberals and conservatives in a unanimous recommendation that the nation faces a growing threat of overseas missile attack.

The commission stopped short of urging the Pentagon to build a specific antimissile system. But its recommendations pushed the Clinton administration to move ahead on missile defense.

By challenging the intelligence community’s view that there was no imminent threat of missile attack, the report also demonstrated that Rumsfeld “is not afraid to shake things up,” said one Defense Department official, who asked to remain unidentified.

John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, said any candidate Bush would have chosen “would have felt a strong obligation to go ahead with national missile defense.”

He said Rumsfeld had opposed two recent arms control initiatives: the nuclear test ban treaty and another restricting chemical weapons.

“He’s a very conservative Republican,” Isaacs said.

That Rumsfeld would reappear after a 25-year interval to become the first Defense secretary to serve twice struck some in the defense establishment as remarkable. But the last time around, Congress had a liberal cast and “he was in charge of the least popular federal agency,” said Loren Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, a defense think tank that advocates stepped-up military spending.

Thompson noted that Rumsfeld in recent years has urged the Clinton administration publicly to forge ahead with the Air Force’s expensive new fighter jet, the F-22, and also has advocated reopening the production line to build additional B-2 bombers--California’s largest defense program.

At the same time, he has not been associated with defense thinkers looking toward a major military realignment. His experience is very much in the military of yesteryear, raising questions about how much the Pentagon will put into a modernization effort.

“On paper, he’s a terrific choice,” said Lawrence Korb, who served as an assistant secretary of Defense during the Reagan years. “But can you take a guy from GM and send him to the dot-coms?”

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Profile:

Donald H. Rumsfeld

* Born: July 9, 1932.

* Education: Undergraduate degree, Princeton University, 1954.

* Career highlights: Aviator, flight instructor, U.S. Navy, 1954-57; congressional assistant, 1957-59; A.G. Becker & Co., 1960-62; U.S. representative from Illinois, 1962-69; Nixon administration positions, 1969-74, including director of Office of Economic Opportunity, director of Cost of Living Council; U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 1973-74; various Ford administration positions, 1974-77, including White House chief of staff, Defense secretary; president and chief executive officer, G.D. Searle and Co., 1977-85; corporate executive positions, 1985-present.

* Family: Wife Joyce; three children; five grandchildren.

* Quote: “We are in a new national security environment. We do need to be arranged to deal with the new threats, not the old ones . . . with information warfare, missile defense, terrorism, defense of our space assets and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction throughout the world.”

Source: Associated Press