Is Rumsfeld being snotty with the Senators? Good. Warner and his buddies expected Boykin to be relieved when they asked for it. Tough Toenails.
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October 24, 2003
Rumsfeld Draws Republicans' Ire
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID FIRESTONE - NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 — Last Friday, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and his top Democratic colleague sent a private letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that questioned the propriety of comments made by a top Pentagon general, William G. Boykin.
Mr. Rumsfeld not only did not respond, but on Tuesday, after the chairman, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, made the letter public, the defense secretary said he knew nothing about it. "It may be somewhere around the building," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters on Capitol Hill, "but I am not aware of it."
The episode was described this week by senior Republican Congressional officials as emblematic of what some now openly call the high-handedness and lack of respect shown by Mr. Rumsfeld, whose steps and missteps in the past month have drawn increasing Republican ire.
On issues that include General Boykin (who has likened the war against Islamic militants to a battle against Satan) and his own views about the war on terrorism (and the gap between Mr. Rumsfeld's glossy public assessments and the more roughly hewn private views that leaked out this week), senior Republicans have joined Democrats in openly complaining that the Pentagon has left them in the dark and vulnerable on critical and sensitive political issues.
In the case of General Boykin, Mr. Rumsfeld has declined to criticize the remarks made by the officer, who is the deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence, and he has portrayed an internal Pentagon review of the matter as being undertaken at the general's request.
Senator Warner, a former secretary of the Navy who as chairman of the Armed Services Committee is the Pentagon's most powerful overseer, would not comment for this article. But he was described by other senators and senior Republican staff members as being particularly angry. One senior Republican Congressional official said that he himself had concluded that Mr. Rumsfeld's approach was doing harm to the White House and that he had become "a millstone around the president's neck."
A Defense Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said on Thursday that he was "a little embarrassed" over the Pentagon's failure to swiftly acknowledge the letter from Senator Warner and his Democratic colleague, Carl Levin of Michigan. The official said the letter should have been brought to Mr. Rumsfeld's attention more quickly, but he said that a response was now being drafted.
"Don Rumsfeld is a former member of the House of Representatives, and I think he's very sensitive to the role of Congress in our system of government," the official said. "I think it's absolutely not true to say he's not respectful of members of Congress."
Still, White House officials have also made clear that they are increasingly frustrated and impatient with Mr. Rumsfeld, particularly after he publicly criticized the president's closest foreign policy adviser, Condoleezza Rice, earlier this month in an internal power struggle that the defense secretary made public.
A Republican who is close to the White House said the view there had been that Mr. Rumsfeld "went off the deep end" in his reaction earlier this month to Mr. Bush's decision to designate Ms. Rice as the overall coordinator of Iraq policy. "The worst thing that can happen in Washington is if you're a cabinet member, you think you're bigger than the president," the Republican said.
The memo by Mr. Rumsfeld that came to light this week warned of a "long, hard slog ahead" in rebuilding and pacifying Iraq, a description very different from his repeated public statements that the situation there was improving every day. Some lawmakers said on Thursday that the memo had confirmed to them that the defense secretary and his aides had until now given them too optimistic a picture.
"I think that up until the memo was leaked they were giving too rosy a scenario," Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said on Thursday. "After I came back from Iraq, I thought things were not as good as the administration was painting but not as bad as some were alleging. The leaked memo, I think, puts things in a better perspective than the briefings that we've had from them."
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a respected Democratic voice on defense matters, agreed that the memorandum revealed just how much information the Pentagon is not sharing with members of Congress, whom he said are growing increasingly restive about being kept in the dark.
"Their M.O. toward us has been pretty consistent — we're not going to tell you much, and we're reluctant to tell you even that," Mr. Reed said. "There's a growing sentiment that we need more timely and accurate information because we need to make our decisions on facts, not spin."
On Thursday afternoon, in an apparent effort to offer a fresh defense against such criticism, Mr. Rumsfeld appeared unannounced at a scheduled Pentagon briefing.
Mr. Rumsfeld said he stood by his view, as disclosed in what was to have been a private memo, that the United States faced "a long, hard slog" in Iraq. But he quickly added that his preferred definition was spelled out in the Oxford English Dictionary as "slog — to hit or strike hard, to drive with blows, to assail violently."
"We're finding these terrorists where they are, and we're rooting them out, and we're capturing them, we're killing them," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It's difficult work. It won't be over any time soon."
Republican officials, though reluctant to criticize Mr. Rumsfeld publicly, said he and his staff, including Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, have been no less dismissive of their needs than they are toward Democratic lawmakers.
"The Pentagon is not exactly Capitol Hill's favorite department anymore," said one prominent Republican staff member. "Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz just give off this sense that they know better than thou, and that they don't have to answer our questions."
Republican lawmakers and top staff members who were interviewed on Thursday would not say whether they had expressed concern about Mr. Rumsfeld to the White House. But some said they had been heartened by Mr. Bush's decision to consolidate decision-making about Iraq under Ms. Rice, the national security adviser, whom they described as having more sensitive political antennas than Mr. Rumsfeld.
In an interview on Thursday, Senator Ron D. Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, alluded to the Pentagon's problems with the Republican leadership: "Things aren't going very well with the secretary and the Hill, and he has been losing support among people with gavels in their hand."
On Wednesday, for example, Mr. Wolfowitz sent Mr. McCain a letter refusing to provide him with records on the Air Force's plan to lease 100 Boeing commercial jets as refueling tankers. Mr. McCain, who opposes the tanker plan as too expensive, had asked for details of the Pentagon's lobbying effort for the plan, but Mr. Wolfowitz responded that Congress had already been given enough information on the subject.
Mr. McCain's office said he would ask the White House to supply the information.
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