There is now no doubt in my mind. The New York Times' abandonment of its term "Op Ed" was not merely a change in nomenclature. The brilliantly curated "Guest Essays" have made the Opinion section sparkle as nothing in my forty-six years of reading the newspaper has. The following are excerpts from 'Donald Rumsfeld’s Fog of Memos' by Errol Morris, director of the 2013 documentary 'The Unknown Known.'
Trying to understand another human being is often a dismal task. And if not dismal, thankless. What am I supposed to do? Disapprove of Donald Rumsfeld? That’s easy. Perhaps too easy...
It is impossible for me to write about Mr. Rumsfeld, the former U.S. secretary of defense who died on Tuesday, without writing about his memos. He played a role in making memo-writing the new frontier in governmental accountability. He also pioneered the memo as an obfuscatory instrument. Write one memo saying one thing, write another memo saying the exact opposite.
As I interviewed Mr. Rumsfeld for my documentary about him...it became (at least for me) a story about a man lost in his endless archive, adrift in a sea of his own verbiage.
In 1966, early in his public service career, Representative Rumsfeld, Republican of Illinois, co-sponsored the Freedom of Information Act, a vehicle for understanding the intentions of high political figures. Then, as a member of President Gerald Ford’s administration — first as the president’s chief of staff, then as secretary of defense — he found a way to effectively undermine [FOIA].
...Nixon was undone by his attempts to conceal and excise the official record. Mr. Rumsfeld knew better by the time he was serving under Mr. Nixon’s successor. The trick was to marginalize the record, to litter it with so many contradictions that a rebuttal to any future historian could always be found. His memos (known as “yellow perils” in the Nixon administration and “snowflakes” under Ford) would pile up in drifts, disguising the underlying historical landscape. It’s a level of genius that has not been acknowledged in the press...
And what accounts for his seeming change of heart? The metamorphosis from a liberal Rockefeller Republican congressman, a confidant of the civil rights and antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein, to one of the most reviled neoconservatives?
It’s easy to blame everything on opportunism, a swiftly changing environment of success and more success. Vocational greed … I don’t know.
Trying to understand another human being is often a dismal task. And if not dismal, thankless. What am I supposed to do? Disapprove of Donald Rumsfeld? That’s easy. Perhaps too easy...
It is impossible for me to write about Mr. Rumsfeld, the former U.S. secretary of defense who died on Tuesday, without writing about his memos. He played a role in making memo-writing the new frontier in governmental accountability. He also pioneered the memo as an obfuscatory instrument. Write one memo saying one thing, write another memo saying the exact opposite.
As I interviewed Mr. Rumsfeld for my documentary about him...it became (at least for me) a story about a man lost in his endless archive, adrift in a sea of his own verbiage.
In 1966, early in his public service career, Representative Rumsfeld, Republican of Illinois, co-sponsored the Freedom of Information Act, a vehicle for understanding the intentions of high political figures. Then, as a member of President Gerald Ford’s administration — first as the president’s chief of staff, then as secretary of defense — he found a way to effectively undermine [FOIA].
...Nixon was undone by his attempts to conceal and excise the official record. Mr. Rumsfeld knew better by the time he was serving under Mr. Nixon’s successor. The trick was to marginalize the record, to litter it with so many contradictions that a rebuttal to any future historian could always be found. His memos (known as “yellow perils” in the Nixon administration and “snowflakes” under Ford) would pile up in drifts, disguising the underlying historical landscape. It’s a level of genius that has not been acknowledged in the press...
And what accounts for his seeming change of heart? The metamorphosis from a liberal Rockefeller Republican congressman, a confidant of the civil rights and antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein, to one of the most reviled neoconservatives?
It’s easy to blame everything on opportunism, a swiftly changing environment of success and more success. Vocational greed … I don’t know.
His first stint as secretary of defense is the start of the story — Team B, in particular. That was an exercise in which a dozen or so defense industry wonks and Russia hawks were given carte blanche to undermine and effectively rewrite the latest National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet Union, which they argued didn’t reflect the true peril facing America. They called it a “competitive stress assessment” — more confusing verbiage.
How does it work? Put simply, you have a body of evidence. You don’t trust it. Or maybe you don’t like it. It conflicts with other beliefs you have. So you create another body of evidence, supporting your alternative view. I’m tempted to say, an alternative view of the facts. But just what the facts are is exactly what comes into question.
I think of Mr. Rumsfeld as the epistemologist from hell. What are the grounds for rational belief? As often as not, the goal for Mr. Rumsfeld was not justifying belief but undermining it.
When you set up a group of people to look for evidence to justify a prior conclusion...[t]he charitable explanation is “reasoning backward,” from consequent to antecedent —affirming the consequent. That’s just a logical fallacy. The less charitable version is reasoning without reason...the appearance of thought floating over the surface of things — unknown knowns and the like — masking an underlying absence of anything. This is what Mr. Rumsfeld ultimately excelled at.
Wow.
