Review: Known and Unknown: A Memoir

Known and Unknown: A Memoir by Donald Rumsfeld
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s not easy to determine whether Rumsfeld is a good guy or a bad guy based on his memoir. I tend to believe the best in people, but Rumsfeld offers plenty of proof why he wasn’t always the best guy to have in the room. I’ve never read an autobiography where the author says that he meant to say A, but instead people heard him say B, but that’s not what he meant, and people don’t believe he meant A. Strangely, this happens to Rumsfeld with regularity, and given that he’s covering the high and low points in his career, this was a big problem for him. He mentions more than a dozen of these anecdotes here. I’m left with the feeling that Rumsfeld operated at too high a speed to always get things right, or to think things through, or to always pay attention. This aspect of his personality is kind of scary given his jobs. Rumsfeld shares his thoughts on many of the people he worked with in government, and it ends up he didn’t like quite a few. He was equal opportunity here, sharing negative stories about folks from both parties. Here, he trashes Jimmy Carter, General Powell, and Condoleezza Rice, generally for poor decision-making or people management skills. Rumsfeld also shared anecdotes about his decision making, and this seemed quite strong, and a reason he was able to hold high responsibility jobs in government and private industry for decades. Overall, Rumsfeld comes across as a decent manager, but with flaws. His anecdotes from his work in private industry, his early elections and time in Congress, and his work with the Ford and Bush administrations (heaviest on the Bush war years) are quite interesting and telling about the times he impacted.

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