Not surprisingly, Casey then called Riggs. If the administration wanted to punish Riggs for his heresy, it had a club with which to beat him: in early , an anonymous tipster charged that Riggs had delegated too much authority to private contractors and had had an affair with one.
That prompted General John M. By most accounts, it was a slap on the wrist for a petty infraction. Other pleas to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were in vain; in April , Casey gave Riggs 24 hours to get out of the army. When, the next day, some sergeant in a basement at Fort Myer, Virginia, handed him a flag and a form letter from George W. And Riggs believes that Brownlee, seeking to curry favor with the defense secretary, was happy to do his dirty work. Riggs fled Washington for Florida, where he began selling and installing modular homes.
Later, he went into consulting. Of the six, he may be the most explicitly vindicated: everyone, including the president of the United States, now says the army is too small. His fractured family helps explain why the toughest of the six dissenting generals is also the most fragile and regretful.
Confederate general Stonewall Jackson is his hero, and in his living room is a print of Stonewall, praying. At West Point, he was captain of the golf team, and he can still drive a ball forever. He bade Iraq good-bye by hitting six Stratas into the Euphrates.
Swannack went to Iraq twice, first in early , when 7, paratroopers of the 82nd marched into Baghdad rather than jumped in, as had originally been planned. Then, from August to March , he commanded the force occupying and attempting to pacify the notorious al-Anbar Province. It was classic counter-insurgency: meeting with the locals, buying them off, giving them jobs, respecting them, mollifying them, intimidating them, and, when necessary, fighting and killing them.
Sometimes, at press conferences, he aired his complaints. His marriage, which had managed to survive all those deployments abroad, finally disintegrated, and he had an affair—fairly routine in civilian life, but enough in the military to trigger an investigation. He began taking antidepressants. It became evident that he would not get a third star, and he had to think about life post-military. Abu Ghraib, the Marine assault on Fallujah, the assault on the militia of Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr: all, he feels, undid the good work he had done in Iraq.
Early last April, as teams of reporters fanned out to find additional anti-Rumsfeld generals, Eric Schmitt of The New York Times caught up with Swannack, who added his name to the list. Then he changed his mind. Then, with Schmitt pleading the importance of making his views known, he jumped back in. There was one angry e-mail: a West Point classmate called him a traitor. And Booz Allen Hamilton, the global-strategy firm which he says was poised to offer him a lucrative consulting job, got cold feet once he made the papers.
The company acknowledges the discussion but says Swannack had not yet been formally interviewed. But most upsetting was the reaction from his own soldiers, who were flabbergasted—and, depending on how well they knew him, either disappointed or enraged—by what he had done. And by the time it is all over? Asigned photograph of former president George H. Bush hangs in the home of Lieutenant General and Mrs. Paul Van Riper, in Williamsburg, Virginia, near his enormous library on the art and science of war, not far from the bullet-scarred helmet and belt he wore in Southeast Asia.
At 68, Van Riper is the oldest of the six generals, old enough to have had two tours in Vietnam, where he left behind his spleen and a piece of his intestines. Gladwell depicts him as shrewd, iconoclastic, and fearless—a sophisticated gunslinger. He retired as a Marine three-star four years before Bush the younger put Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. But Van Riper kept bumping up against him. Then the real war came. Then his son, Steve, 36, a Marine major, returned from Iraq with fresh horror stories.
Van Riper had devoted his career to fixing a military broken by Vietnam, and here it was all unraveling. Whenever Rumsfeld appeared on television, he told the interviewer, he had to shut off his set. Only once before had he done something like that: when men first landed on the moon. Myers joked about it with Tim Russert. Pentagon briefers knew better than to employ the word. There was little danger Newbold ever would again; Rumsfeld essentially banned him from further public appearances.
That was fine by Newbold; putting himself on public display had never been something he relished, and, besides, it kept him from his real work. Among the six generals, Newbold is the most reticent.
You have to chase him down, though he is unfailingly courteous once caught. Amid the ramrods, he stands straightest. Newbold waived that rule last year to back his old friend James Webb, another retired Marine, who is now the Democratic senator from Virginia, even though he warned Webb beforehand that a radioactive general might do him more harm than good.
Newbold, 58, who met his wife while both were Marine captains training newly commissioned lieutenants at Quantico, speaks in a deep baritone that belies his slight stature. He has a dry wit. He is self-effacing, even self-lacerating. The other generals talk about how much they took on Rumsfeld; Newbold talks about how little, and how much more he should have.
In the summer of , the Marine Corps commandant, James Jones, picked Newbold to be the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or J3, supervising employees at the Pentagon. And, because he came along in the wrong administration, it proved his undoing. You make sure he knows it.
Of far greater concern to him was the headlong rush to war in Iraq. Then, at a meeting a few months later, as the Americans chased the leadership of al-Qaeda, he says he heard Wolfowitz say essentially the same thing. We have this three-penny dictator, this bantam rooster of no consequence. Then came what was, to Newbold, that fateful meeting in late when Rumsfeld requested the war plan for Iraq. Newbold had just begun his slide show, describing the size of the force and means of deployment, when the belittlement began.
According to Newbold, so did Myers, and so did Pace, who, when Myers retired as chairman, would be elevated to his spot. Afghanistan fell in late , and as it became increasingly apparent that a war with Iraq, based on what he considered to be manipulated and cherry-picked evidence, was in the offing, Newbold took the step General Harold Johnson never had: he offered his resignation, to General Jones, the commandant.
And it came with a message: Jones should feel free to tell everyone he was resigning in protest. Jones was noncommittal, and Newbold stayed: the president, at least, was still saying war was not inevitable. But by June , Newbold had given up. Unwilling to move his family yet again, eager to clear a bureaucratic bottleneck and open a path for some younger Marine, he again offered his resignation, even though, by leaving ahead of schedule, he could have lost two stars.
This time, Jones accepted. Before departing, Newbold says he reiterated his objections to the impending war to the chairman, vice-chairman, and key generals and admirals in the Pentagon hierarchy. Such a war was justified, he argued, only if Iraq threatened its neighbors, harbored terrorists, or had weapons of mass destruction. None of those, he believed, was true. In late September, Rumsfeld and Pace said good-bye to him before the Pentagon press corps.
Just about the only man in uniform to come was his old friend John Abizaid. Education: Princeton University, B. Other Facts. Was captain of the football and wrestling teams at Princeton. Becker in Chicago. Johnson's "Great Society" programs. December 28, - Nominated by President-elect George W.
Bush as secretary of defense. January 20, - Rumsfeld becomes the secretary of defense. At the time, he is the oldest person appointed as defense secretary. When Rumsfeld served as secretary of defense in the Ford Administration, he was the youngest person to hold that post. March 23, - Rumsfeld testifies before the Commission. That decision was certainly costly for Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld toyed with a run for the Republican nomination in , but ultimately decided against it.
Once in office, Bush appointed Dick Cheney—a former Rumsfeld protege—as his secretary of defense. Bush as there is with Rumsfeld. But the two men did disagree about policy.
In the lead-up to the first Gulf War in , Bush wanted to get congressional authorization to attack Iraq. Cheney argued against it , saying the administration should act on its own.
Bush went to Congress, which approved the war. As Jake Tapper reported in , Cheney also oversaw the production of a very hawkish defense-planning report—written by Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz—which the Bush administration disavowed. The idea that George W. One reason for that shift, surely, was that George W. George W.
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