The Unknown Known

A fine companion piece to Morris's Fog of War, this documentary interview with the cagey old Rumsfeld offers a fascinating portrait of a seminal figure in the Iraqi conflict. He's shown as a man obsessed by semantics and the definition of words as evidenced by the thousands of "snowflakes" (memos) he sent out during his tenures in the White House. At press conferences he became a master of spin offering convoluted, nonsensical statements that more often then not baffled the press and the public ("Osama bin Laden is either alive and well or alive and not too well or not alive") This "Rumsfeldiana" allowed him to sidestep the truth. In the interviews with Morris (originally 30 hours!)he was caught in a lie about WMDs in Iraq but was unfazed and avoided the traps like a slippery eel. When observed singlely, ie, away from the context of the Bush administration, the man is so articulate and charming that you are (almost) unable to regard him as evil, but rather, that he was misguided. Still, he expressed no uncertainty about his past actions and his motivations.