When even David Brooks, who apparently has a special computer terminal logged in to the database of Republican orthodoxy, calls for your resignation, then it is probably Presidential Medal of Freedom time for Rumsfeld, err Rumsfailed.
Of course Brooks prefaces his criticisms with free oral sex, consisting of at least half of his allotted column space.
David Brooks: The Good Fight, Done Badly
Though Donald Rumsfeld is a perfect warrior for peaceful times, his virtues turn into vices during wartime.In 1955 Sloan Wilson published “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” and in 1956 William H. Whyte published “The Organization Man.” Both books captured the spirit of the times, when young men graduated from college and were absorbed into large, anonymous corporate organizations.
Whyte described the bland conformism that prevailed in these bureaucracies. The young men, he wrote, don't see the system “as something to be bucked, but as something to be cooperated with.” The Organization Men, he said, are technicians, not innovators; conformists, not rebels. They are “obtrusive in no particular, excessive in no zeal.”
At about this time, smarter and more daring young men were also entering the work force. But these renegades rebelled against the organizational mediocrity they saw around them. They may have looked and dressed like all the other corporate cogs, and they tended to go into business like the others. But inside they were hostile to stultifying organizations, and contemptuous of protective, slow-moving bureaucracies. They saw themselves as anti-Organization Men, as bureaucratic barbarians who would crash through the comfy old routines and wipe out corporate sloth.
Donald Rumsfeld, who graduated from Princeton in 1954, was of this type. Athletic, heroic, he never met an organization he didn't try to upend. He made it to Congress in the early 1960's and challenged the existing order. He was hired by Richard Nixon and quickly reorganized the Office of Economic Opportunity, slashing jobs and focusing the organization. He wrote to Nixon that he would upset the education bureaucrats and destroy “their comfortable world.”
As his career went on, he took his streamlining zeal to the Pentagon, and then to G. D. Searle & Company, where he dismissed hundreds of executives, spun off losing businesses and streamlined the bureaucracy.
Rumsfeld's style appealed to political leaders who were allied with the corporate world, but hostile to self-satisfied corporate fat cats. Nixon loved Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush, the rebel in chief, quickly hired him.
... Unfortunately, we've learned that though Rumsfeld is a perfect warrior for peaceful times, his virtues turn into vices during wartime. War is nothing but a catalog of errors, and in fluid, unpredictable circumstances, the redundancies of the World War II style of organization actually make sense. When you don't know what you will need, sometimes it is best just to throw gigantic resources at a problem. You can adapt later on.Rumsfeld the reformer never adjusted to the circumstances of wartime. Once the initiator of new ideas, he now strangles ideas. Once the modernizer, he's now the dinosaur. Amid the war on terror, he has unleashed a reign of terror on his subordinates.
If you just looked at his résumé, you might think he was the best person to lead the Pentagon in time of war, but in reality he was the worst because his whole life had misprepared him for what was to come. He was prepared to fight organizations. He was not prepared to fight enemies.
Now the bureaucracy he assaulted is rising up against him. In other times their enmity would be a mark of accomplishment, but now it's a symptom of failure. He has become a past-tense man.
Tags: David_Brooks, /incompetence
