Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [153]
Those arguments made little headway with senators such as Carl Levin, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Over the years I would differ many times with Levin, who often wore his partisan-ship, like his half-glasses, right on the tip of his nose. Levin cloaked his passion with his studied prosecutorial demeanor but seemed curiously immune to reason on missile defense.
After forging no new ground on missile defense, the senators at the hearing turned to other matters. Senator Pat Roberts posed what I thought was the most interesting and important question at my confirmation hearing. “What’s the one big thing that keeps you up at night?” the Kansan asked. There were a number of things I might have mentioned—North Korea, Iran, Iraq, nuclear proliferation, cyberwarfare, or terrorism. But if anything were to keep me up at night, I knew it was my concern about the quality of our intelligence. As I had said to Bush during our meeting in Austin, our country’s most important national security challenge was “improving our intelligence capabilities so that we know more about what people think and how they behave and how their behavior can be altered.”9 We needed an ability to uncover what our enemies were thinking and what motivated them. I believed that with more knowledge of that sort we would be better able to alter an enemy’s behavior before they launched an attack, rather than waiting and having to take action after an attack.10
The hearing ended on a pleasant note when my confirmation received the committee’s unanimous support.* Among others, Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from my home state of Illinois, said positive words about my record in government and on the wrestling mat. I knew enough about Washington to suspect that, given the decisions ahead, such approbation was unlikely to last.
Six days after the President was inaugurated, Joyce and our family were welcomed to the White House for my public swearing-in ceremony. I had been privately sworn in right after the inauguration parade so I could begin my duties at the Department of Defense immediately, but the public event was special for Joyce and me because of those who had gathered with our family. Judge Larry Silberman, a friend and colleague from the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, performed the ceremony. I was again in the Oval Office with Dick Cheney for the first time in twenty-four years.
“Don asked me to join him here in the White House staff, some thirty-two years ago, and [it] was a turning point for me, from the standpoint of my career,” the new Vice President recalled.11 “From that day on, he kept me busy enough so that I forgot about my graduate studies, gave up any idea of ever returning to academia, and set me on a path that I’ve never regretted.”
Dick noted that we’d both gone on to hold jobs as White House chief of staff and secretary of defense. “Some regard him as the best secretary of defense we ever had,” Cheney said. Then with a smile he added, “I would say he was one of the best.”
To commemorate the moment, Vice President Cheney later sent me two pictures. One was of the two of us as young men when we worked together at the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Nixon administration. The second was a more recent picture of us from the swearing-in ceremony. At the bottom, Cheney had written, “To Don, here we go again.”
CHAPTER 22
Dogs Don’t Bark at Parked Cars
“If you are not being criticized, you may not be doing much.”
—Rumsfeld’s Rules
My first day at the Pentagon included the ceremony that traditionally accompanies the arrival of a secretary of defense: a military parade and a nineteen-gun salute. It also included something I hadn