Like his counterpart of long ago, Mr. Rumsfeld in Iraq waged a costly and divisive war that ultimately destroyed his political life and outlived his tenure by many years. But unlike McNamara, who offered mea culpas in a 2003 documentary, “The Fog of War,” Mr. Rumsfeld acknowledged no serious failings and warned in a farewell valedictory at the Pentagon that quitting Iraq would be a terrible mistake, even though the war, the country learned, had been based on a false premise — that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, had been harboring weapons of mass destruction.

“A conclusion by our enemies that the United States lacks the will or the resolve to carry out our missions that demand sacrifice and demand patience is every bit as dangerous as an imbalance of conventional military power,” he said. “It may well be comforting to some to consider graceful exits from the agonies and, indeed, the ugliness of combat. But the enemy thinks differently.”

In his 2011 memoir, “Known and Unknown,” Mr. Rumsfeld, more than four years out of office, still expressed no regrets over the decision to invade Iraq, which had cost the United States $700 billion and 4,400 American lives, insisting that the removal of President Hussein had justified the effort. “Ridding the region of Saddam’s brutal regime has created a more stable and secure world,” he wrote.

He sidestepped the issue of whether the Iraq war had diverted resources from the conflict in Afghanistan, leading to a Taliban resurgence there after the United States had invaded the country for harboring terrorists involved in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “It was precisely during the toughest period in the Iraq war that Afghanistan, with coalition help, took some of its most promising steps toward a free and better future,” he declared.

Positions of Power

Mr. Rumsfeld had been an athlete at Princeton and a Navy fighter pilot after the Korean War, and when he got to Washington in 1957 he seemed like an All-American who had stepped off the Wheaties box — a strikingly handsome Midwesterner radiating confidence, taking on big tasks and doing everything well. He worked for a couple of congressmen, then was elected to four terms in the House of Representatives himself.

He worked for four presidents in a succession of personal triumphs, migrating from Capitol Hill to the Nixon administration’s Office of Economic Opportunity, to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as ambassador, and into the Ford White House as chief of staff. Between Pentagon stints, he was President Ronald Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East and made fortunes as an executive with pharmaceutical, electronics and biotechnology companies.

As President Bush’s defense secretary, Mr. Rumsfeld had hoped to modernize an antiquated military establishment by cutting the bloated Pentagon bureaucracy, streamlining weapons systems, developing a missile defense shield and creating smaller, more mobile and lethal forces that could move swiftly around the globe to put down regional flare-ups in the new century.

But his innovative plans were all but forgotten on the morning of 9/11, when terrorists crashed hijacked jetliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and into the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people. (A fourth plane went down in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers had tried to regain control.)

Mr. Rumsfeld was in his Pentagon office that day as the building shook and collapsed on one side. As 20,000 military and civilian employees were evacuated, he helped carry the wounded into ambulances. Through the day, as Mr. Bush was shuttled from a Florida school visit to secure locales in Louisiana and Nebraska and Mr. Cheney took charge at the White House, Mr. Rumsfeld, in a Pentagon bunker, conveyed orders to safeguard national leaders, activate defense measures across the country and place American forces on alert around the world.

That evening he held a televised news conference. “The United States government is functioning in the face of this terrible act,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, and he announced that the Pentagon would be open for business in the morning.

As Americans woke to a perilous new era, Mr. Bush declared war on terrorism, and Mr. Rumsfeld became chief executor of the strategic plans. In October, American forces invaded Afghanistan to suppress a fanatical Taliban regime that had sheltered terrorists and imposed a brutal theocracy on the Afghan people, and to hunt for Osama bin Laden, who had masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks.

He went to Washington in 1957 and for a few years was an aide to two Republican congressmen, David Dennison of Ohio and Robert Griffin of Michigan. The experience whetted his appetite for politics. After working briefly as a banker, Mr. Rumsfeld, at 30, won a seat in Congress as a Republican in 1962, representing an affluent district north of Chicago.

In the House he backed Representative Gerald R. Ford’s successful bid for the Republican leadership and compiled a generally conservative voting record, opposing the social programs of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and taking a hard line on Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro. But he also voted for the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and for freedom of information laws. He easily won re-election in 1964, 1966 and 1968.

In 1968, he was Richard M. Nixon’s floor manager at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach and campaigned energetically in his successful race against Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.

Impressed with his performance, President Nixon in 1969 asked Mr. Rumsfeld to run the Office of Economic Opportunity, the federal antipoverty agency. Mr. Rumsfeld quit his House seat to accept the post.

The appointment alarmed critics. Mr. Rumsfeld had opposed the agency’s creation, as well as food stamps and Medicare. He did not dismantle the agency, as some had feared, but he pared it down sharply.

Mr. Rumsfeld became known as a tough administrator who slashed costs and personnel in social programs, and as an aggressive bureaucratic infighter who made enemies but got things done. In 1971 and 1972, he ran President Nixon’s Cost of Living Council, administering wage and price controls. He also joined the inner circle of Nixon advisers, including his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, and his domestic adviser, John D. Ehrlichman.

Andrew Cockburn, in “Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy” (2007), called him an inveterate schemer who had tried to evade responsibility for disastrous failures.

Bradley Graham’s “By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld” (2009) drew a more nuanced portrait of a man of wisdom, ruthlessness and ambition, but concluded that Iraq had doomed his career and the lives of thousands.

On the day of Mr. Rumsfeld’s resignation, Mr. Graham wrote, “the tally of U.S. troops who had died in the Iraq war had reached 2,939,” the “number wounded in action had exceeded 22,000,” and “countless others were mentally and emotionally traumatized from the nightmarish conflict.”

In 2007, after leaving government service, Mr. Rumsfeld created the Rumsfeld Foundation to encourage public service with study fellowships and grants to support the growth of free political and economic systems abroad.

He was the subject of a documentary, “The Unknown Known” (2014), by the filmmaker Errol Morris, who interviewed him about his years of government service. The title, like that of Mr. Rumsfeld’s memoir, “Known and Unknown,” referred to his comment at a 2002 news conference in which he argued that a major Pentagon objective was to evaluate “unknown knowns” — or “the things you think you know, that it turns out you did not.”

 

 

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

 

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