Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [441]
* I had known Weinberger from our time in the Nixon administration. He had served as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where he was known as “Cap the Knife” for his cost-cutting efforts, and later as secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). When he became Secretary of Defense, he had a different task. The Carter administration had systematically reversed the DoD budget increases James Schlesinger and I had initiated under President Ford, and when Reagan came in, the DoD budget needed to be increased. Cap and I were friends, and when he died in 2006, Colin Powell, who had been one of his senior military assistants, and I delivered eulogies.10
* Every presidential administration since Richard Nixon’s has held that the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional.
* The military adviser in Lebanon was Brigadier General Carl Stiner, a pivotal figure in the development of U.S. special operations forces.5
* The shelling from the New Jersey kicked up dust but did no damage whatsoever. As I learned from my former senior military assistant, Vice Admiral Staser Holcomb, then serving as commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe, the President’s orders to respond to the shelling had come down the military chain of command “through multiple sets of clenched teeth.” In other words, no one had been insubordinate, but the reluctance at each level had the effect of substantially modifying the response Reagan intended.
† The dangers confronting the Gemayel family did not end with the murder of Bashir, and they did not disappear after the United States withdrew from Lebanon. Amine’s son, Pierre, was openly critical of Syria’s influence in his country. Twice elected to the country’s parliament, Pierre was serving as Lebanon’s industry minister when he was assassinated on November 21, 2006.
* The Kennedy who most aided the cause of the America Firsters was Joseph P. Kennedy, John’s father and a former U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. Returning to the United States in 1940, he announced that the British would have to seek an accord with Nazi Germany. “Democracy is finished in England,” he was quoted in a notorious front-page article. “It may be here.”3
* The Rumsfelds trace their roots to a small farm on the outskirts of Sudweye in Schleswig-Holstein. Members of our family can still be found there. In the late nineteenth century, my great-grandfather Johann Hermann Rumsfeld, a merchant seaman, immigrated to America. After settling initially on the East Coast, his son John von Johann Heinrich eventually made his way westward to Chicago.
* She itemized her expenses for Dad, including $70.00 for the house payment, $6.52 for gas and electricity, $2.60 for water; $8.37 for milk; $47.00 for six months’ taxes, and $7.00 for my new pair of shoes. Mom supplemented our income by working as a substitute schoolteacher. The tight finances were yet another challenge that she—like so many other military wives—was facing on her own.6
* Our entire primary campaign cost a whopping twelve thousand dollars. It was at the time the most money that had been spent in that district on a congressional race.
* There were some memorable characters. I was once on the House floor reading a bill that we were about to vote on later that day. Congressman John Byrnes of Wisconsin, well known as a serious legislator, came up to me. “Don’t start reading that stuff, Don,” he said jokingly, “or you’ll never make it around here.”
* Around the same time I found myself in similar circumstances regarding Japan. My father had volunteered to serve in the Navy in World War II and was assigned to the Pacific theater against the Japanese, then our bitter enemies. Less than two decades later Japan had embraced democracy and a Western economic system. I began involving myself in issues