Old Man Misery
A Novel
– Knut Hamsun, Mysteries
“As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.”
– Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume One
Compact, tense, shrewd and irate.
The old man wore his charcoal-grey pin-striped suit were it though he’d been halved in years – cuffs brushing his wrists, still youthful and spotless, trousers slung taught across a flat gut and narrow hips – tie knotted Windsor, shirt a creaseless broadcloth, shoes black, functional, laminate-polished. Head erect and carriage stiff, matador-like, even when alone such attention to posture remained true, once it had been called pride. Born to one of the adjectives leading this tale, he had learned two of the others by professional diligence, and came to the fourth by sheer cussedness – aged, wizened and bilious, he remained defiantly contentious, a gleeful pain-in-the-ass. Eyes pinched, exasperated brow, slit-scowl mouth – laden with sarcasm, contempt – these had withered the many who had assailed him over the years, the fools and mobs and reporters that would never be his problem again. Eight minutes now separated Donald H. Rumsfeld from an end to his professional life – and all of this stress, fury and aggravation would cease. And a very uneasy retirement awaited the old man in the isolation that would follow.
As of 4:30 that afternoon, he would no longer be the secretary of defense, would no longer be answering phone calls from disgruntled generals (retired or otherwise), would no longer be forced to stand before a phalanx of impertinent, blockhead reporters who had maddened him for years, would no longer have the ear of the President nor the guts-balls-spine of the Vice-President for support, would have none of the trappings of power accrued – but neither the trap of powerlessness bestowed – when that prize became instead a snare. Donald Rumsfeld, seventy-two years old, a small-town kid from Winetka, Illinois who had sure as hell shown more than a few doubters and naysayers during his remarkable career, would be nothing but a real civilian again, not in any way associated with the Minotaur’s Maze that was the Pentagon nor the ideological steeplechase that was the Cabinet – by God, rid of them all was he and still the only emotion he could feel was that burning loathing that had accompanied him from nascence to terminus, from the Thirteenth District of Illinois to the K Street vanity brothel, from Nixon the Father to Bush the son. This was something more than mere irony. His fine classical education allowed Don the knowledge that the Greeks would append a more daunting ring to this Third-Act dénouement: what he knew now was perepeteia. What he knew now was freedom hamstrung by fate.
Freedom – for the first time in years, out of work and free and with the rest of his life to sit down, write, give interviews, issue edicts and demand retractions, file lawsuits, hinder prosecutions, craft a legacy, suborn perjury, elucidate a conscience, proffer regrets, slander the naïve and comfort the demagogues, rough-hewn a legend while humbly balking reward, amass tribute while parceling out fault, lay low with useful scoundrels, aim high with ambitious fiends, field offers from New York agents, confer with Washington pundits, dissociate from Baghdad corpses and – that one from far before on the list, that superbly useful item – write, he could write, correct some of the goddamn record and settle some goddamn scores. He was done at 4:30 EST, just minutes from now, when the recently-confirmed Robert Gates would be arriving in this very office at the back of the Old Executive Office Building and taking helm of the ship Rumsfeld had so patiently assembled. The impediments to his captaincy had been vast and at times quarrelsome. From a recalcitrant and conservative military establishment to a Congress which never seemed to remember that once Don Rumsfeld had been one of them, and therefore knew all of the little incentives, bribes and threats which were needed for their kind to get off of their asses and do what needed to be done for America – or merely Don himself – so he had faced, so he had engaged and so he had vanquished. He was rid of them all. He had lost this ship so adroitly crafted – or perhaps fabricated was a better word – but in the process gained Liberty. Off alone and despised and into that wilderness some fools dared called peace.
This should have been a moment of – yes, liberation. And yet it moved him to utter fury that someone had somehow snuck into his office during the last few hours it was still his, without one damn soul paying attention to their presence, and left a book on the corner of the desk that was government property and therefore had to be left behind. For Gates; the desk would be his now, and from the reverse of that solid burnished-oak fortress would come the plots hatched to undo all that Donald Rumsfeld had done to transform the American military. The book sat there on that abandoned desk, a literate orphan, a bundle of words, provocation and taunt. If it was some kind of practical joke, Don Rumsfeld certainly didn’t find it amusing. You don’t sneak into the secretary of defense’s office, no matter who you are, during a time of indefinite, ambiguous and dark-sided war, and leave him a going-away present, forget what you were trying to say and how clever you thought you were in saying it.
Rumsfeld examined the book swiftly, truculently. The Columbian Orator. A fine old volume, printed in the era before dust-jackets, dark green cover with a solid spine and, though this book was ninety-some years old, not likely to crumble anytime soon owing to the crisp, acid-free wood-pulp paper. Rumsfeld admired the book for its craftsmanship, opened the thing and whistled aloud when he saw the date of printing – so old that it lacked a Library of Congress code – thought this was all fine and that it would look nice on his bookshelves out on the Bay in Maryland – still, a nice parting gift, but there were other ways to give a gift. For the next eight minutes he was still the goddamn secretary of defense; and Don Rumsfeld didn’t countenance people sneaking around the lushly carpeted hallways of the nation’s central bureaucracy and seat of government, much less intruding into his very own abode and keep, no matter how short-lived said abode would now be. Somebody needed an ass-reaming, Rummy style.
But there wasn’t time for that, and nobody would listen to him any goddamn way. There was nothing to be gained by kissing his behind anymore, and the lowest staff member curtseying to the most insincere Cabinet official knew it. Various undersecretaries and policy advisors artlessly ignored him, like waves of piss-ants, and Don snarled on down the hall, doing nothing important, taking up space. He’d been a ghost for the last three weeks. The last thing left in this office was the desk, and that wasn’t even his to take. Everything else had been packed up and shipped off, weeks ago. Don’s very first tutor in the advanced arts of political infighting had once said something very bitter but also very wise, and so this discarded old warrior paraphrased that great man’s thought, sotto voce, while taking satisfaction in having looted the office in sight of all whom had conspired to depose him: You won’t have Don Rumsfeld to kick around anymore.
He took one last rueful look at the office, bare save that soon-to-be-occupied government desk, put his newest book under his arm and slammed the door shut behind him. He did not turn off the light.
At the far end of the hall was the president’s Chief of Staff, and Don winced thinking how everybody in the damn press corps made such a big deal about how young Josh Bolten was. But they didn’t seem to remember that Don’s only true ally these many years on the Hill and beyond, Dick Cheney, had been a couple years younger than Bolten when he held the same post under Ford. At least Don thought he had been younger – it was hard to think of cowboy-stoic and Big Sky-snarling Dick Cheney as young, ever – but he must have been young, because Don remembered all the work it had taken to maneuver him into the chief-of-staff post where he’d be most valuable. Where Don could use him. And from where the big house cleaning party could begin, the “Halloween Massacre”, an epithet both mot juste and Saint-Just, where Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had organized what amounted to a coûp against Kissinger, that dirty old bastard, had out-maneuvered and out-tricked him, Kissinger, and put the kibosh on the half-pint Clausewitz who had spent the past eight years nagging Nixon into making pals with the Red Chinese and goading Ford into sitting down and talking strategic arms limitations with Brezhnev.
Dick had been old enough to take on Henry Kissinger, by God, and there weren’t balls big enough on the steers in Wyoming for a man to say that in those days. Cheney had horseradish in his veins and strychnine in his soul, he pissed gasoline and fired lightning bolts from his nostrils; he was old enough then, and had stuck with Rumsfeld for over thirty years. The moment of their ultimate ascendance had been assured when first they dared topple the Prince of Detente.
Don still remembered what Dick had said when they were discussing the Kissinger question one night over whisky and insomnia, early in the administration’s unsettled fog and back when Dick still smoked three packs of Benson & Hedges a day. “You gonna sit back and be that prick’s shabbos goy, Don?” he’d said, heaving reams of smoke with his exhale, and it wasn’t a question, it was a challenge. Two weeks later Henry the Terrible had been neutered and Cheney was Ford’s chief of staff. That was Will. Forget what that jackass Liddy had chirped and clamored, idiots hold their hands over open flames but – it takes guts, balls and bile to stare down a modern day Prince like Kissinger, and Dick Cheney had all three. Josh Bolten was a goddamned notary, as far as Rumsfeld was concerned; he’d said it before, sniping in the Cabinet while Bolten was off running errands, meaning it completely, that Josh Bolten was so full of shit that if someone gave him an enema he could be buried in a matchbox. For everything that had gone wrong in these last miserable months, Josh Bolten served as shorthand and stand-in, ever the target for an old man’s unrelieved wrath.
Bolten, for his part, had noticed the secretary’s antagonistic demeanor, surmised that age was the principal ingredient in this stew of malign, and was bewildered as to how petulant this man Rumsfeld could be. He had celebrated his fifty-first birthday just a few months before, and Josh Bolten was clearly greying about the temples and acquiring deep bags under his eyes as reward for the hours of staff work required to keep the Cabinet functioning; how Don Rumsfeld could consider him a “punk kid” (as he’d heard himself referred to in the various hallways of this vast old mansion) was just further proof of how a bitter old man’s slide to disgrace was greased liberally with delusion and phantom conspiracies. Bolten would look at Rumsfeld certain days and realize, now that he was a lame duck and merely waiting to segue to uselessness with Gates coming aboard, that the secretary was fighting a host of private wars in his mind, re-visiting ages-old calumnies and dog fights from the Nixon years and through his time battling Colon Powell for the helmsmanship of the country’s foreign policy. Rumsfeld had always been known as gruff, for God’s sakes even the Dalai Lama had commented on it once at a State dinner function. But these last days of his office...Bolten knew that a man was coming undone in his presence, and that this interregnum between the neo-con Jacobins and policy-realist restoration could not pass fast enough. Don was making everyone edgy with his spiteful reminiscing, acrimony contained and never let slip for public consumption, but all the same pronounced and disquieting. Rumsfeld carried his memories like scars of conscience, sharp jagged valleys of woe and unfulfilled victories crevicing his brow and erupting in caustic facial tics, the battle never having ended fully enough for a decisive, walk-off retirement. There had been victory but never peace.
Rumsfeld had taken the length of the hallway for all of these memories to boil, and now was standing face to face with the wünderkind chief of staff.
“Don,” was Bolten’s greeting, cordial and laconic, somber and yet still aloof. He had a Starbucks cup in his left hand in festive Christmas colors. Bolten drank three or four mochas a day, double shots, he was never without the Starbucks, all that caffeine and all that sugar and the best this guy could do for a final greeting was “Don”. Rumsfeld had been the chief executive at a pharmaceuticals company, for Christ’s sakes – he knew what the hell was going on with Josh Bolten.
“Josh,” replied Rumsfeld, with the patience an old man has for a young man he despises.
“I’m sorry we’re all running late today, Don, but I know you have to leave soon and...the POTUS has a meeting with some of the new Democratic leadership – Black Caucus, majority whip, those folks. He’s down the hall with Secretary Rice and...well, Don, he wants to make sure before you leave...”
Rumsfeld hated how you could hear the ellipsis in Bolten’s voice. He also hated how he said things like “POTUS”, as if you wouldn’t know “president” meant “President of the United States”. He just flat out hated Bolten, and wondered if this kid thought he could take the old man.
“All right, let’s go – I’m not flying today anyway, too goddamned windy. I have the driver handy, you know, the uh...the limo,” Don said.
They started walking down the hallway to the president’s location. “Not taking your last chopper ride on the company dime?” Bolten said, trying to sound like one of the old timers, like he belonged. If he thought he was cute now, wait until he had to deal with Baker and Gates and all of “POTUS’s” daddy’s buddies who were lining up to come back to Washington for one more taste before the big Viking funeral that awaited that whole goddamn bunch.
“No, uh, Josh – I’m, ahhh, taking the limo. Old rule – my last lesson for you, Josh – don’t take the Chinook unless you have to. Choppers crash. Stuff happens. That’s life.”
Rumsfeld usually had a good sense of humour, but it was lost on Bolten, and especially today he thought the comment too dark. “Oh, ok, Don – ha ha, that’s good advice.” There were ten paces of absolute and uncomfortable silence which followed. Finally, Bolten spoke, unable to take one more second alone in a roving morgue with the walking dead. “So, you’re gonna go away, get out of the District for a few days, stay close?”
“I’m gonna, ah, uhhh...you know, Josh, go out to Maryland, the, ah...Bay, you know...Chesapeake Bay. My weekend place. In St. Michaels. My, uh, ahhh...Summer place.”
“Oh, ok – no need to fly there, no, not at all.”
“No, not at all, Josh,” said Rumsfeld, ready to say goodbye to Dubya and get the hell out of this lunatic asylum. Too much talk in the White House these days, everybody a bunch of garrulous do-nothings. Bolten made small talk like no one had ever told him to shut the hell up and then backed up the threat with a fist. Don was a man of instinct and knowledge. And visceral reaction. He hated small talk.
They entered the big room where Dubya was getting a last-second pep talk from some undersecretary for something or other, Don couldn’t keep them straight, there were a thousand of them and the only one he had ever liked was his own guy, Feith, squirreled away over in the Pentagon fabricating a war. Doug Feith was out of work now too, all the loyal eggs had been boiled in the scandal pot, only Wolfowitz had managed to swim to the top, roiling Rumsfeld raw.
All this was none of his concern anymore, as of six minutes from now. Don wanted nothing more to do with Leo Strauss’s pack of toadies and epigones, that Gnostic Sect of American foreign policy who were blaming old Rummy for this whole fantastic disaster in Mesopotamia.
With each of them one foot through the door, Bolten kept up the squawk, even as Dubya turned to acknowledge his soon-to-be ex-secretary of defense. “Not going to Taos, Don? – hey, I’d think the weather would be better there...”
Rumsfeld could take no more. “Josh, I have to go say goodbye to a man I care about very much. Go drink your coffee somewhere, ok?” With this dismissive swat the blathering ceased, Bolten off to a corner with only a dunce cap missing to complete his humiliation, asperity and contempt sending him away, banished from the “adults”.
Don spotted his primary secret service agent, nodded, and other than this man, the only people in the room were the undersecretary of whatever, Condi Rice, Mr. Chit-Chat and Dubya. And himself. Yep, this was goodbye, all right.
Rumsfeld held his ground about five feet from the doorway. The room was one of many in the old building devoted to nothing but waiting and prep work – sometimes to Rumsfeld all of Washington had seemed like one infernal bullpen. This one was better appointed than most, and the company was pretty tight but – you spent half of the best years of your life playing meaningless games of catch waiting to get to The Show. Rumsfeld had waited twenty-five years himself to get back on the mound, and he’d hung on for five long Winters, the last two anything but pleasant – but it was the turning of the Fall, that horrible sixth September and vulture-laden October – he’d have been lying if he hadn’t admitted to self-pity, to thinking of himself in the same breath as Billy Mitchell, Doug MacArthur, Hyman Rickover – Christ even Bob McNamara! – reformers all, men with vision, a plan – and all of them turned out and exiled, nary a word of thanks and no regret proffered for the brusqueness of the cutting blade. Rumsfeld fumed over the injustice, then snapped back to where he was when Dubya’s eye caught him square. The President gave him a salute with the wrong hand, and Don knew it was time to stop thinking of History and simply get through these next few minutes of it, the History no one ever bothered to write – the maudlin, pathetic farewells of moments not somehow elevated to dignity by catastrophe or national tragedy.
Dubya separated himself from the anonymous undersecretary and took a few confident steps towards a man he had known since his Yale days, and all this time later the relationship still was lopsided, unequal – Dubya knew it and Don did too. Here was the one man in Washington that Bush The Second knew was his boss and his better, despite all of the myriad policy wonks and politicos who could lay claim to that title. At this moment, it made Rumsfeld intensely sad – not just for Dubya, but for his father, too. Even though he despised that man with the perfect beauty of a Sicilian blood-feud.
The President looked his erstwhile secretary of defense in the eye, with that homespun folksiness that he had acquired by osmosis and guile in Texas after a childhood spent amongst the Brahmins and superannuated spooks of Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS, all come to barbecue and drink at the family compound in Maine. He squinted Rumsfeld his peculiar gash of a smile – sometimes more of a smirk to those who took it with umbrage – snared his hand in a real Texas grip, and made clear that what he said he meant, with deep gratitude and respect, no matter how it sounded to the assembled officials in the room. The President looked good in his conservative-cut blue suit with striped red tie and American flag pin in the left lapel.
“You did a heck of a job, Rummy,” the President said, and the silence engulfing the room was immediate and total. Josh Bolten cleared his throat modestly as the effortlessly tactless man continued to stare into Rumsfeld’s over-sized eyeglass frames, waiting for some kind of acknowledgement of his gracious tribute and peroration. Bolten thought disdainfully that his boss planned all of his farewells as if Norman Rockwell was going to immortalize them on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.
Rumsfeld looked at his former boss, noted the stoic earnestness behind the somewhat-dim man’s Dale Carnegie gaze, and decided he was incapable of the shrewdness nor the irony the comment would require though it were some kind of insult. It was just another glaring dart from reality for a man who still was plagued by the English language as if it were a precious, shiny thing in the hands of a bumbling lummox.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Rumsfeld said, evenly, and returned the Texas grip, humbled and shorn of hubris, one last malapropism from the boss making him the fool in his final few minutes within the cauldron of power he had longed-for and stoked with the patience and skill of a Medici. There was silence for a few seconds as the handshake lingered on, the President incapable of seeing the discomfort the situation had left this proud man in. Finally, Bolten leaned into the President’s ear and reminded him he had an appointment elsewhere, and that he needed to leave the office now. “It’s time, Mr. President,” he said, and Bush came back to cognition, a sign that the emotion had been genuine and very real to him just moments before. Rumsfeld released his grip and merely stared ahead, seeing nothing.
Dubya exited amidst his wedge of advisors, Bolten on his flank and Rice barely able to contain her sadness as she followed behind. “Good luck, Don,” she said, knowing enough not to touch him, he didn’t care for that, and why was such mawkishness needed anyway to say goodbye to whom everybody knew would be just fine, Rumsfeld was the toughest sonofabitch in the room. It had been that way for thirty-five years; even Nixon had said so.
It was now just the ex-secretary and his lone secret service guard, a handsome and youngish man specifically chosen so as not to dwarf the bantamweight frame of Rumsfeld. During the Ford administration, Rockefeller had always somehow contrived to get a veritable giant assigned to the five-foot-seven Rumsfeld, a fact Don attributed to pure politics and something he never forgave the bastard for. Don had always known he could have taken that privileged nancy-boy, vice-president or no he was still just an old-money Eastern liberal with no sack between his legs, he’d have put him in a Boston Crab and that would have been that, had he just been given a chance to settle it with a wrestling match like in the good old days at Princeton – or like Burr and Hamilton had settled their differences, that would have been even better. But these were different times. Men were not men anymore.
“Well, let’s go Sparky,” Rumsfeld said to the pleasant young agent, who knew enough of his charge to give a smile when the secretary made a joke. He’d called him ‘Sparky’ ever since being assigned to Rumsfeld months before, but then, of course, there were a slew of secret service agents assigned to the secretary and he called them all ‘Sparky’ or ‘Bo’ or ‘Popeye’ depending on the frame of reference for the sobriquet. The agent never minded and thought Rumsfeld called him ‘Sparky’ simply because he couldn’t be expected to remember the names of ten different men who were in constant proximity to him. Now, well, this was not the time to go about correcting a man who had just been fired by what amounted to a revolt by his own troops.
Quickly, with no final goodbyes to wear him down, they were out the door, into the long corridors leading to the basement car ports, and soon enough heading up the ramps to the egress behind Pennsylvania Avenue with the former secretary relaxing in the comfort and security of his bullet-proof limousine, the intolerable gray skies of Washington in early December looming out the windows like chalkboards hung from the heavens and in need of a damn good cleansing. The driver, another secret service man, had been good enough to turn on some music, Bach, the Third Brandenburg Concerto, here was a good fellow indeed who had paid attention to what his boss enjoyed. And now that he was a civilian – unemployed, essentially – Rumsfeld had the strangest sensation to tell the man to stop at a newsstand so he could get the afternoon paper. But, of course, they didn’t make afternoon newspapers anymore – and it would have been ridiculous to think Donald Rumsfeld could just get out of a car down on M Street and go buy a goddamn newspaper. Maybe in a few months, but probably never.
The car was over the Potomac in good time, the horrible DC traffic was lighter than usual for early evening, and this man was an ace driver – Rumsfeld thought, No, he’s really goddamned swell. He liked the idea of having a good driver and relaxed to the Bach, sublime stuff, really, you didn’t have to be a longhair to understand genius like this, and got back to thinking of his newspaper. Nobody read the damn paper anymore. He saw Dubya with a copy of the Austin Statesman under his arm one day and wondered who the hell he thought he was kidding. There was a time when presidents paid more attention to the papers than they did their closest advisors. Reagan had been a terrific reader of newspapers. Don had never been in his administration in a Cabinet post, he’d only served him as a special ambassador to the entire brush-fire Mid-East, but of course he knew Reagan, had fretted about him in ’76 as a challenge to Ford coming from the hard Right, knew plenty of people who had been part of his Praetorian guard, and recalled how no matter what was going on, on a weekday evening at six o’clock – the world could be ending, dammit, but Ronald Reagan was going to sit down to a cup of coffee and the Washington Star.
Cheney had called him one day years before in disbelief, he’d been elected to Congress and missed his old friend, Don was back in the private sector, paring down a failing pharmaceuticals company and had just been named one of the “Ten Harshest Employers” in the country by Fortune, same old Rummy and that was why Cheney still called him, just for some backbone. He had just been to the White House with Sam Nunn and Scoop Jackson and a couple other Hawks that Cap Weinberger trusted, and reported how Reagan had thrown them all out of the Oval Office precisely at six o’clock right when they were talking about how to take out some new asshole named Quadaffi, and he was polite enough about it but said, firmly, “Now I have to see what my most trusted advisor has to say,” and he was talking about Jack Germond’s column over at the Star. Dick couldn’t believe it. Nancy came in right behind them with a tray of petit fours and then one of the servants with a Sterling silver coffee service – except for an old ceramic mug with “Dutch” stenciled on it, and that was obviously for...Dick was horrified and wondered what would happen if the Russkies dropped the Big One during the early evening news. Dutch would be too busy with his tea-time to stage a proper retaliation.
Rumsfeld laughed out loud thinking of the incredulity in Cheney’s voice, here was a US congressman with damn good contacts who had just found out the biggest secret in American government: the president was a good-natured goofball with daily habits utterly set in stone, unyielding and totally incontrovertible and in his own unique way completely in tune with American public opinion. He was the most powerful man in the free world and his wife still brought him cookies and his favorite coffee cup every evening while he sat down and read the paper. And Rumsfeld patiently explained to Dick that this was precisely why he was the most powerful man in the free world; Reagan knew his limitations and always made time for the homey banalities that would resonate most clearly with the American people. Like Jack Germond and the goddamned Washington Star.
Rumsfeld continued to chuckle as he remembered explaining to Dick that this was why they would forever be in the shadows and never truly “the big cheese”; too forward, too gruff and far too unwilling to suffer fools gladly, a Cheney or a Rumsfeld would never be president. You needed to be able to pretend you were on their level, the great American unwashed. Except Reagan wasn’t pretending. He needed his corps of advisors and all those big brains around him because he really did think keeping up with the papers kept him ahead of the competition – whatever that was, when you were the President of The United States. Rumsfeld had been baffled about few things in his long career, but the strange propinquity of misplaced arrogance and paranoia so near the apex of power, how it remained to this very day, this was something that stole the smile from his face and left him in nodding-head bewilderment, now and forever miffed, and thus was how ended his reverie as Bach’s last notes faded from the limousine’s speakers.
The Star was long gone, 20 years out of print and now the town had a total bullshit liberal fish-wrapper and the conservative paper was owned by the Moonies. He even remembered the day that great old rag put up the shutters for the last time: August 7th, 1981. He remembered it because seven years before, missing by just one day – August 8th – was when poor old Dick Nixon had been run out of town, forced to resign and disgraced by people not fit to shine his shoes. And if it wasn’t a coincidence, he didn’t know what it was, but Rumsfeld couldn’t help but note that August 8th, 1815 was when the monarchs of Europe finally succeeded in getting rid of Napoleon, exiling him to Saint Helena. Bonaparte had been back in power for one-hundred days before his most trusted guard broke and faltered at Waterloo; Nixon’s staunchly-loyal Cubans paid out by CREEP had spied on the DNC and Daniel Ellsberg for one-hundred days before they fouled everything up at the Watergate. No, don’t bother to tell Don Rumsfeld that History didn’t enjoy a good joke.
Lots of good things were gone now, and Rumsfeld wondered if a man like Dubya could ever have appreciated the routine pleasure afforded by something so simple as reading the Washington Star. Ron Suskind had let the world know Bush wasn’t much of a reader, the Paul O’Neill book and now this last fiasco, the one that made Cheney seem like such a heathen. Everybody was so worked up over Bob Woodward’s books, but some of the things Suskind got off-the-record were uncanny. Rumsfeld had to shake his head as he thought of the truth. “Not a reader” was putting it mildly, and Reagan had been no scholar, of course, but – Dubya didn’t even read the daily PDB’s; he had them read to him, it was Josh Bolten’s number one job. There was no way he would have understood Reagan’s everyman delight in sitting down to a cup of oil-slick black coffee and the blessed old Star, as reliable as it was conservative, and never a bad word for the good old America each of them had grown up in.
Times were different. The car passed the shops and boutiques in Georgetown, went past Jack Kennedy’s old house from when he’d been a young senator and half-a-dozen Starbucks Don felt that chatterbox Bolten must know better than his own home. DC was an okay town but he remembered it best when every other storefront was some mom and pop joint and the races mixed downtown and it didn’t feel like such a mall – the chili trailer that used to park at the bottom of the Hill, sneaking out for a Senators’ game on a Tuesday afternoon, even a quick incognito run to the 1819 Club where the prettiest girls you ever saw danced naked as jaybirds and none of it seemed vulgar or obscene. Just think what would happen today if the assholes from the Post caught a congressman in that place – ever since John Jenrette there was no peace for a man in the District who wanted to take a night off from being married. Even if he was just balling his own wife on the steps of Congress.
Change had been total and DC was now a nesting ground for over-paid lawyers and their shoddily-clad wives. It had all crept up on him. He spent so much time on the job he hadn’t even noticed how much had changed. Don didn’t have much to say about it and the car was soon on Wisconsin Avenue, out towards Chevy Chase and Bethesda, and then to where the former secretary had asked to be driven: his weekend home at Mount Misery, on the Chesapeake Bay in windy, wet and cold Maryland.
Rumsfeld didn’t care much about the weather. He wouldn’t need to be outside hardly at all. Don Rumsfeld was going there to be alone, completely alone (except for the agents specifically told to keep “invisible”) and with only his Blackberry and the PC he kept at the house. A truck would be by in a day or two with the first pile of documents he had set aside since he had been fired, and then he would be free to peruse his own substantial library and begin the obligation de rigueur of all great men the moment they have been turned out to pasture: Don Rumsfeld would begin writing his memoirs.
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