Donald Rumsfeld

Errol Morris’s new film wants to get inside Donald Rumsfeld’s head. Good luck.

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The recent edition of Time magazine contains a story describing the last days of the Bush-Cheney Administration. By then, Dick Cheney had developed a near-singular focus on obtaining a pardon for his former chief of staff, Scooter Libby. The issue was one of only a few on which George W. Bush disagreed with with his second-in-command. Libby had been found guilty of lying to investigators looking into the Valerie Plaine incident, in which Plame was outted as a CIA agent by officials in the administration. Cheney’s aide was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and to pay a fine of $250,000. President Bush, who had earlier vowed that he would fire anyone involved in the incident, decided to commute Libby’s prison term, to much criticism from the Democrats and the press. His decision nonetheless upheld the conviction, leaving Libby, a former high-profile lawyer, facing permanent disbarment.

In a world of imponderables, some old-fashioned detachment might serve us better

A long article about Donald Rumsfeld in GQ reveals the peculiar juxtaposition of Biblical texts on the cover of daily top-secret war briefings for President Bush, prepared by Pentagon staff and often hand-delivered by Rumsfeld. The article is written by Robert Draper, who interviewed Bush six times, as well as most of his senior cabinet secretaries, for his book Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush.