Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld conversation with Marvin Kalb (April 10, 2002)
Kalb: Thank you very much. Hello, and welcome to
another edition of the Kalb Report. It’s a monthly public
policy forum that is cosponsored by the George Washington
University, the National Press Club, and the Shorenstein Center
on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. It is
generously funded by the Knight Foundation. Hodding Carter is
here someplace. And thank you, Mr. Carter.
I’m Marvin Kalb, executive director of the Washington office of the Shorenstein Center. This is a very special edition of the Kalb Report for two reasons. First, we’re part of an annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and in that capacity we are both proud and honored to be here. And second, because our guest is one of the busiest people in this very busy capital, a Cabinet officer who meets regularly with the press, so regularly, in fact, he’s become an
instantly recognizable celebrity on C-SPAN, and it’s none other than the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
The secretary, as we all know, is no newcomer to
Washington. He was first elected to Congress in 1962. He
joined the Nixon administration in 1969, serving as director of
the Office of Economic Opportunity. In 1973 he entered the
world of diplomacy, becoming the U.S. ambassador to the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization. In 1974, returning to Washington,
he joined the Ford Administration, acting first as chief of
staff, then as secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977. From
then until now, Secretary Rumsfeld has worked as a senior
executive in the business world, but also as a special envoy, an
ambassador, and a member of many presidential commissions.
Okay, Mr. Secretary, let me start with a story from Ron
Nessen’s book, it’s called “It Sure Looks Different From the
Inside.”
Rumsfeld: Be careful. I still think of you as “Private Kalb.”
Kalb: I know! (Laughter.) And I’m ready, sir — (laughing) —
at any time!
Rumsfeld: (Laughs.)
Kalb: I had one stripe, and very proud of it!
But let’s put our minds back, and in this audience I’m
sure there are those old enough to put their minds back, to
April 30, 1975. It was the last day of the U.S. military
engagement in Vietnam. And Nessen read a presidential statement
to the White House press corps saying that the U.S. evacuation
from Saigon had then been completed. Only then did everyone
learn that that’s not quite true, there were still 129 U.S.
Marines still at the embassy, still waiting to be evacuated.
So the question came up as to what are we now going to
say to the public. And Secretary Kissinger, perhaps humorously,
said, “Why don’t we blame it on the Pentagon?” And then one
presidential adviser suggested that we “say nothing.” But you,
Secretary Rumsfeld, were quoted as saying; “This war has been
marked by so many lies and evasions that it’s not right to have
the war end with one last lie. We ought to be perfectly honest.”
Quote, unquote.
I think that’s a remarkable statement, and it ought to be in not one book, but
many.
And I’d like to start with that concept of how a major
government official deals with the public through the press in
the midst of a war.
During the Vietnam War, for example, when you made a
comment like that, looking back, did you, yourself, ever feel
the need, for whatever reason which you would explain, to engage
in evasions, lying, if necessary?
Rumsfeld: No. I have — I’ve never had any need to lie
to the press or felt any desire to. What you have is your
credibility, and that is the only thing that gives people and
governments traction.
I’ll never forget coming back as ambassador to NATO and
serving as President Ford’s — chairman of his transition, and
chief of staff of the White House thereafter, and there was such
a feeling of distrust in this country and in the press corps
that you could say, “That’s the ceiling,” and the reaction would
be, “Why is he saying that? What does he really mean?”
And there’s no question but that I don’t answer things I
don’t want to answer. I don’t discuss future operations. I
don’t discuss intelligence matters. I don’t reveal classified
information. But the idea that government needs, for whatever
reason, to actually actively tell something that’s not true to
the American people or the press, I just haven’t in — gosh —
you actually started me here a little later than I actually
came. I came in 1957 to work on Capital Hill, right out of the
Navy, when Eisenhower was president. And in that time, I’ve
just not ever known a situation where it was necessary to do
anything other than what I do.
Kalb: But there were — you wouldn’t have made the
comment if there were not, in fact, many lies that were uttered
by government officials and a great deal of evasion during the
Vietnam War. Why do you think that government felt it necessary
to do that?
Rumsfeld: Well, I’ll give you an example. When I was a
congressman, just before the — I came into the executive branch
— I was in Laos, as I recall, and meeting there with people.
And it became clear that the United States was conducting
bombing out of there in targets that were in Cambodia, as I
recall.
Kalb: Right.
Rumsfeld: And the United States government made a
conscious decision to, in effect, deny that we were doing that
because it was the view of the governments of those two
countries that they — it would be awkward for them if, in fact,
it became known that they were allowing the United States
government to drop bombs on the territory of their country.
Fair enough.
Now in the current war we’re in, there are plenty of
countries that don’t want their people or the world to know how
they’re helping us. They’re helping us with intelligence.
There may be even some cases where we have people on their
bases, and they don’t want it known in their country that
American aircraft or American pilots or people are physically in
their country. All we do is, we just don’t discuss it. We
don’t go out and say they’re not there. We just simply go about
our business and ask the press if they come in to not mention
that — what’s going on in that country. And that’s part of the
understanding. Seems to me a perfectly acceptable way to do it.
The reality is, however, that countries that do that may have
very good reason. But it — over time, the truth comes out.
(Chuckles.) So it’s kind of a short-term policy, I think.
Q: And during the Vietnam War again — I keep going
back there because so many of the roots of the disputes and
disagreements between the press and the government go back to
Vietnam — did you feel, and you were a congressman in a lot of
that war and then after within the government — that lying or
evading the truth paid off? Did it help — you were saying it’s
a short-term benefit, perhaps — did it actually help win the
war? Is there a single illustration where lying in pursuit of a
certain objective in the war actually helped us win the war?
Rumsfeld: It seems to me that if you take that
instance, the answer is no, it probably didn’t help. And there
probably would’ve been a way to do it short of lying when you’re
talking about the Vietnam conflict —
Kalb: Yes.
Rumsfeld: And just by not discussing something. And on
the other hand, if you take the war on terrorism but that if a
country comes to us and we say to them, “We’d like to share
intelligence with you. We’d like to have base over-flight
rights. We’d like to be able to do X, Y and Z,” and they say,
“Look, we’ll do all of those things, but we don’t want you to
discuss it publicly,” and we’ve got a choice of either accepting
that arrangement and gaining the information we might need to
catch terrorists, to stop them from killing thousands more
Americans, you bet your life. We take it on that basis. But we
don’t go out and say something that’s inaccurate about it. The
reason you don’t do that, it seems to me is pretty simple. You
lose so much more if in fact people cannot believe what you’re
saying. And you —
Kalb: The people of the U.S. cannot believe what you’re saying, or the
allies?
Rumsfeld: People in the U.S. or people around the world
— allies too. You simply must be believable if you’re going to
get any kind of traction in what it is you’re trying to
accomplish.
Take the classic example with General Eisenhower’s
invasion of Normandy. He did not — to my recollection, anyway
— go out and actively lie, but he engaged in a lot of
disinformation. He had General Patton training people over in
England. He had everyone doing a lot of things that made it
look like they were going to go into another target area —
Calais, as I recall — and trying to create the impression and
confusion in the minds of the Germans, to save American lives.
Now was that appropriate? You bet.
Kalb: But he could do that and deal with the press at
that time on a pretty firm assumption that the press corps was
not going to run that kind of a story. They would hold back
even if they were brought into the loop. Can you do that today?
Rumsfeld: Oh, sure.
Kalb: You’ve got —
Rumsfeld: Oh, sure. We do it. I mean, we have people
who have been embedded in Special Forces units that have agreed
not to use the names of those people, not to use their faces,
and to not discuss a specific direct action, and yet they come
away, having been positioned with these folks, so that they have
a very clear understanding of what a wonderful job they’re doing
and what a difficult job they do, and then come back and report
on it within the constraints, which is roughly what happened
during World War II. There were constraints, although it was
much more severe in those days. There was actually censorship.
Kalb: I read from many of the reports — I mean, I’ve
been reading and preparing for this interview — any number of
reporters, for major newspapers and less-than-major newspapers,
a deep irritation with the constraints that were imposed by the
Pentagon upon their ability to function in Afghanistan, for
example. And they don’t feel that they were treated — many of
them don’t feel that they were treated right at all and that you
guys were leaning all over them, and excessively.
I don’t have the impression that Eisenhower had that
kind of rebellion under way among the press corps, because the
press corps at that time was sort of on board. Do you — again,
it’s the same question. Do you have the feeling that they are
at this point, or should they be?
Rumsfeld: Oh, goodness, now you’re asking me
Harvard-type questions. (Laughter.) I — (chuckles) — I don’t
know if I want to leap into those — “or should they be?” The
fact of the matter is that this is a different period. It’s the
age of television, and the press corps is a very different press
corps than it was when I came here in the ’50s and the ’60s and
worked here in the ’70s.
Kalb: In what way?
Rumsfeld: Well, it’s larger. It — the appetite is
just enormous for information — 24 hours, seven days a week
news. The numbers of people involved are — is much larger. So
coping with that appetite is not an easy thing to do for
government. The —
I guess the thing that I think about with the press is
that they’ve got their job, and we’ve got ours. Anything we can
do to communicate with the people in the Defense establishment,
millions of people, the people in the United States of America,
the allies and coalition partners we’re dealing with, where we
can communicate with them through the press, is probably useful
to help them understand what it is we’re doing, why we’re doing
it, and what we hope to accomplish. That means that you can
deal with people —
People are uneven, just like people in government or
business, and the press are uneven. Some are very experienced
and have a great body of knowledge; some are quite new at it, as
everyone has to be at some point. And therefore it is not a
bloc that you’re dealing with, you’re dealing with individuals,
it seems to me, who happen to be together. And one can deal
with some on a total background basis and have high confidence.
You can deal with others where you might not want to do that.
Kalb: You’ve been disappointed yourself in the course
of this war with press performance?
Rumsfeld: No, I haven’t, particularly. I guess it’s
because I really didn’t have any expectation level to be —
(laughter).
Kalb: You mean you had very low expectation? (Laughter.)
Rumsfeld: No. No, I was without an expectation as to
what I expected. (Laughs.) But therefore I haven’t been
disappointed. I think you take the world like you find it. You
get up in the morning, and you deal with what you have to deal
with.
I would correct something. Maybe I’m wrong, and the
people in this room certainly know more about it than I do, but
I think the idea of characterizing what’s going on in the press
with respect to the Pentagon as a rebellion is just a misuse of
the word.
Kalb: Okay. Good.
Rumsfeld: Yeah, I — we ought to get you a dictionary.
Kalb: What would — (laughter).
Rumsfeld: I mean, I’ve seen rebellions, and this isn’t one.
Kalb: The idea of using the dictionary — (laughs) — that’s the
important —
Rumsfeld: Yeah. But, I mean, there’s no question that
there have been some people who have criticized the Pentagon.
Sometimes there are people who didn’t really know what was going
on. And their criticism was misdirected. Other cases, it was a
difference of opinion.
My impression is from the press that there’s almost no
level to which you can feed them that they will not want more.
(Laughter.) And therefore I expect a certain amount of
unhappiness and unease, because, I mean, what’s their goal?
Their goal is to get into the paper and to get on the television
and to see that that information out of the institution they
happen to be covering gets out there. And some days it’s a dry
well, and some days I just smile and say, I don’t know the
answers, or, We don’t — We’re not going to talk about that.
And that’s not a happy day for the press.
Kalb: But would you acknowledge that there’s a
difference between the quantity of information provided and the
quality of the information?
Rumsfeld: Of course there’s a difference. I understand
the meaning of those two words.
Kalb: Right. (Laughter.) And because you do, there
would be — there would be an effort made, perhaps, to limit the
quality of the information that is provided. In other words —
Rumsfeld: Why would one want to do that?
Kalb: I don’t know. That is a good question —
(laughter) — that would be asked of the Pentagon.
Rumsfeld: I mean, I wouldn’t want to limit the quality or the quantity.
Kalb: I mean, I have sat —
Rumsfeld: Unless there’s a very good reason to —
Kalb: I’ve sat in on a couple of sessions that your
Assistant Secretary of Defense Torie Clarke has had with
scholars and journalists, and she meets very regularly with
bureau chiefs. There are quite a few contentious sessions.
Rumsfeld: I’ve been in a couple.
Kalb: There are serious questions. You’ve been at some of them
yourself.
Rumsfeld: Sure.
Kalb: So maybe the word “rebellion” is wrong, but there
is dissatisfaction. And I’m wondering —
Rumsfeld: Has there ever not been dissatisfaction on the part of the
press —
Kalb: You’re anticipating my question. (Light
laughter.) Is there, then, in your mind, as you see it, a
general expectation that the relationship is never going to be a
cozy one, there’s always going to be many rough edges, and you
guys do the best you can and reporters will try to push the
limits of what it is that they can get, and you are prepared to
live with that as a common arrangement?
Rumsfeld: Absolutely.
Kalb: Okay.
Rumsfeld: And we do live with it. But if you think
about it, we have put press people on ships, we’ve put press
people in Special Forces units, where I don’t believe they’ve
been before during the kinds of activities that these people
have been in.
There was an expectation on the part of some folks that
this was going to be like Desert Storm 10 years ago, that there
was going to be a long period of getting ready, we’d have the
press there reporting getting ready, then they’d go in and
there’d be a line, and they could work like Ernie Pyle and Bill Malden did behind the lines and be there. This war’s different.
It’s a totally different situation. And so people were wishing,
my goodness, why can’t we get more information? The fact of the
matter is, we didn’t have people on the ground for a while.
When we did, they were in very dangerous circumstances. As they
got a little better adjusted and in closer cooperation with
Afghan units we began putting press people in.
So the fact that they wished for more does not make them
bad people, it just was an unrealistic expectation.
Kalb: I don’t think they’re bad people at all, I think
they’re doing their job. And there are quite a few reporters
who believe that — go back to the Vietnam War again — that
after the Vietnam War the Pentagon made up its mind to limit
press access to the battlefield as much as it possibly could.
And if you go through the record of —
Rumsfeld: All the people who were in the Pentagon back then have long
since retired.
Kalb: Well, they seem to have left some children
behind, because you’ve got — (laughter) —
Rumsfeld: (Laughs.)
Kalb: — you’ve got Panama, Grenada, the Gulf War, the
beginning of this war, even aspects of the continuation of this
war where free press access to the battlefield is denied.
Rumsfeld: Oh, no. No. Any press person can go in any
part of Afghanistan any day of the week. They could before.
All they had to do was go.
Kalb: But they couldn’t go with American troops.
Rumsfeld: They did. The minute we could put — the
minute we put American troops in, within a very short period of
time press people were connected to them.
Now, the press people did not — a lot of — some of them who went in got killed, going into Afghanistan.
Kalb: Yes. Yes.
Rumsfeld: It’s not a very tidy place, even today. But
no one was denied ability to go in and be in any part of that
country or any part of the battlefield.
Kalb: Mr. Secretary, how —
Rumsfeld: And then saying that we denied them that it seems to me is
unfortunate.
Kalb: No, but how — no, but how do you — how do you
account for the fact that an American officer would use his
weapon in a threatening way against an American — a reporter
simply trying to cover a story? And this did happen to a
Washington Post reporter. I am astounded by that. And I don’t
understand it, and I’m sure you’ve been asked this question
before, but maybe you could help us all understand it. How do
you do that? You know that it’s an American reporter, he’s
doing his job, and it’s the Washington Post. How do you turn a
gun on a guy like that?
Rumsfeld: First of all, I’ve not been asked that
question before that I recall. And I wish I had. (light
laughter.) I’d have a better answer. (laughter) I have not
had a chance to talk to the reporter. And if the reporter’s
here, I’d like to see him afterwards and hear about it, because
—
Kalb: Okay.
Rumsfeld: — I don’t know that it happened quite that way myself.
Kalb: Okay.
Rumsfeld: I find that if three people observe an event
— a car accident — and you take him away and ask him what
happened, you get three different impressions of it. And that’s
why we have more than one newspaper in America, because we get
—
Kalb: (Laughs.)
Rumsfeld: — it’s a useful thing.
Is it possible that one person in the United States
armed forces who had never been in that circumstance before and
was faced with a decision and was holding a weapon and was asked
a question, or was challenged by a person, and he turned around,
and the weapon happened to be coming around with him, and that
the person legitimately felt threatened, and that the person
with the weapon legitimately did not feel that he was
threatening that person, or that that person conceivably could
be threatening the reporter because he had concluded, for
whatever reason, that if that reporter did what the reporter had
said he intended to do, that it could put some of his people at
risk or inhibit his ability to carry out his mission? There are
a lot of ways that that circumstance could have happened in a
way that is less black and white than you’re characterizing it.
Kalb: I’m sure that’s true. I’m sure that’s true. I’m
only going with what it is that the reporter said happened to
him, and he’s a good, experienced reporter.
Rumsfeld: And he was there and I wasn’t. And I’m going with putting
my —
Kalb: And he’s got pretty good contacts with these people.
Rumsfeld: Yeah. I’m trying to put myself in the shoes
of the person with the weapon and ask, what might have happened
that would have led that reporter to legitimately feel
threatened. And —
Kalb: Did you have — did you feel the need to check that out?
Rumsfeld: Apparently not sufficiently. (Laughter.)
Kalb: Mr. Secretary, let’s talk about leaks for a minute. On September 12
—
Rumsfeld: I’m not — I’m against leaks.
Kalb: I know that. (Light laughter.) Shortly after
the 9/11 attacks you said on September 12 — in fact, you were
furious —
Rumsfeld: No, I wasn’t. I don’t get —
Kalb: You — you seemed furious.
Rumsfeld: I don’t get furious. No. I get cool.
Kalb: You get cool.
Rumsfeld: I get angry, but not furious, yeah.
Kalb: You were coolly angry — (light laughter) — at
Pentagon officials who you said had leaked classified
information to reporters. And you were —
Rumsfeld: True. No, to anybody.
Kalb: To anyone.
Rumsfeld: Doesn’t matter about reporters. I’m —
Kalb: You said, They have violated the law, they
frustrate our efforts to track down and deal with terrorists.
My question is —
Rumsfeld: And it can cost people’s lives.
Kalb: Absolutely. Six months later now, have you ever
taken action against a Pentagon-leaker of information?
Rumsfeld: Not that I can think of.
Kalb: Does that mean that there have been no leaks?
Rumsfeld: Oh! (Laughs.) Goodness, no. (Laughter.)
Goodness, no. This place would be out of business. (Laughter.)
No, I’ll tell you about leaks. When a person takes
classified information and gives it to someone who is not
cleared for classified information, whether the person’s from
the Pentagon or any department of government, they’re violating
federal criminal law. And they ought to go to jail. That’s not
complicated.
Kalb: What are the laws they are violating? Just —
Rumsfeld: The laws relating to classified information
are quite strict as to who may be given access to that
information. And so to the extent that people violate the rules
with respect to classified information, they are breaking
federal criminal law.
Now, they are also potentially putting people’s lives at
risk, and that’s a very — it’s a terrible thing to do. So,
then that’s one problem.
The other problem is what do you do about it. Now, I
get up early, and I stay there late at night, and I work when I
get home, and I like working, so I don’t feel like a martyr, so
don’t get me wrong. But I do not have time — nor does anyone I
know have time to spend — to engage in witch hunts inside the
department, trying to find people who have tried to make
themselves look important and butter up to some newspaper
reporter or some other person in government, or some person in
the neighborhood — to make themselves look big.
I have seen instances in government where these kinds of
hunts have gone on, and people are brought in for polygraphs,
and everyone is —
Kalb: You have not done that?
Rumsfeld: I’ve never done it. I know people who have. And I
have seen it happening.
Kalb: But on this stint as secretary of Defense, that has not happened?
Rumsfeld: I have not. I have not.
Kalb: You shifted from you have not done that to it has
not happened. “I have not done it.”
Rumsfeld: It has not happened to my knowledge in the Department of
Defense.
Kalb: I mean, because you’re the boss at the Pentagon,
and if there was a witch-hunt or people were being called in and
polygraphed, you would know it?
Rumsfeld: I would think I would know about a polygraph.
I might not know if people had been called in a department well
below me — there are dozens and dozens of departments. It’s
entirely possible that some middle-level person could know of a
leak in the office and call people in and discuss it with them.
I haven’t.
Kalb: And you’re not aware of it?
Rumsfeld: And I’m not aware of it. But —
Kalb: What about —
Rumsfeld: Well, what happens is it chills an institution.
Kalb: Yes, it does.
Rumsfeld: If you start taking people who get up, work
hard, care about the country, dedicated, and you don’t know who
leaked, and then you start calling in all these innocent people,
and pretty soon you are slapping a heavy case on them that —
“You were only one of five people who knew this — we don’t know
whether to believe you or not.” And you think of the loss of
productivity and the loss of morale, and the difficulty in an
organization. My impression is we will find enough people who
do it by accident, without going around chilling your own
organization and distracting them from their very important
work. So I just don’t do it.
Kalb: Mr. Secretary, you were on this September 12
occasion, and again on October 22nd you returned to the subject
of leaks. You spoke about the violation of federal criminal
law. On both of those occasions you spoke very vigorously and
forcefully on this issue. And a number of the reporters who
cover the Pentagon have told me in preparation for this that
there was in fact a chilling impact that your comments had on
the building, and only now in the recent month or so have people
in the building who normally would talk to a reporter begun
again to talk to reporters.
Rumsfeld: I better go back down there. (Laughter.)
Kalb: You mean and frighten them again?
Rumsfeld: Look, when I used the word “chilling,” I was
talking about chilling meaning that people who are honest and
not leaking being called into an office and slapped with a
polygraph, or if not accused at least a question raised about
their integrity. That is what I meant by “chilling.”
If what you meant by “chilling” is that the people who
used to leak are afraid to now, then God bless chilling.
(Laughter.)
Kalb: Then we get to a definition — we get then to a
definition of what is a leak, because —
Rumsfeld: Well, I’m talking about the taking classified
information from a person who is cleared for it and giving it to
someone who is not, regardless of who that person is.
Kalb: Supposing a reporter comes to an office of an
assistant secretary, and says, talk to me about Iraq. I mean,
what are we going to do? How does it work out? And the
reporter, as you said yourself at the beginning — there are
serious reporters who are trying to do serious work. And what
they are trying to do is figure out what is really going on —
what is the U.S. going to do here? That to me is not a leak.
That to me is sort of a background session, right?
Rumsfeld: Sure, yeah.
Kalb: Okay. But you are dealing with classified information.
Rumsfeld: No, you’re not. You shouldn’t be — or you should be in
the slammer.
Kalb: But everything is classified, isn’t it?
Rumsfeld: Everything is not classified.
Kalb: No?
Rumsfeld: No, indeed. No indeed.
Kalb: What about the conversations that —
Rumsfeld: Let’s take Iraq. Let’s pretend that the
president was thinking about doing something about Iraq.
Kalb: Okay.
Rumsfeld: Let’s not use Iraq, it will end up in the
newspaper. (Laughter.) Let use Iraq — take Country X. Let’s
say that the president was thinking about doing something in
Country X, and he went to your assistant secretary, and he said,
Develop me some plans as to what we might do about Country X.
And in comes his favorite reporter, and says, Gee, what are you
thinking about in Country X? And the fellow feels the
compulsion to say, Gee, we are thinking of doing this to Country
X, and the fellow goes off and writes it in the newspaper. Now,
is that good for the United States? Is that helpful to people’s
lives who might be involved in doing something to country X? I
think not.
Kalb: What about stories that — you just cited one
that I think we could both agree on very easily, because if it’s
going to hurt the troops or —
Rumsfeld: You bet.
Kalb: — whatever, nobody is going to do that. What I
am talking about are stories, which end up being not really
military operations and secrets of that sort but embarrassments,
political embarrassments —
Rumsfeld: Get them out.
Kalb: — saying the wrong thing that sort of stuff.
Rumsfeld: Yeah, get them out. Embarrassments happen
every day. Everyone makes mistakes. They all get out
eventually. My rule is —
Kalb: That’s not —
Rumsfeld: Shove it out.
Kalb: That’s not what bothers you then?
Rumsfeld: No, of course not.
Kalb: That sort of thing?
Rumsfeld: Of course not.
Kalb: Okay.
Rumsfeld: Absolutely not.
Kalb: Okay. There was an odd sequence a month or so
ago about the Office of Strategic Influence.
Rumsfeld: There was an odd what?
Kalb: Sequence of events. You know, it erupted one day
in the New York Times on the front page, and then suddenly
within a week the office was disbanded, and it seemed to some of
us it was almost like a calculated Pentagon leak designed
somehow to undercut the viability of an operation of this sort.
You are the boss — how did that happen?
Rumsfeld: I don’t know. I did not spend a lot of time
going back and trying to figure it out. You are right; it did
smell a little like somebody might have done it. But I — as I
say, I didn’t devote any time to doing it, trying to track down
who did what to whom.
When something is as soiled as that office became in a
relatively short period of time, it struck me that you’d be
swimming against the current so hard trying to leave it that the
attitude was cashier it and start fresh. We still have to do
what we have to do, as I said in the press briefing today, we
indicated that the office had been decided that it would be
disbanded by the director of policy, Doug Feith, who was in
charge of that. That was a minor piece of all of his
responsibilities. And he made a conscious judgment to do that,
and I told the press that that’s the case. And — but I have
not gone back and tried to track it down.
What we do have to do is to see that we as an
institution do an awful lot better job of dealing with the
important kinds of information that are important to our
success. And I mean the terrorist training manuals taught
people to lie about who was hurt in a battle, and to go out and
tell people that they were innocent civilians, and to say that
they were hospitals, and to take people from hospitals and move
them over into buildings that had been bombed, and pretend they
were hospitals — and then call the press in and have them get
pictures of these quote/unquote “hospitals” that weren’t
hospitals, and make the United States look bad. There were
efforts to make it look like it was against their religion, the
Moslem religion. There were efforts to make it look like it was
against Arabs or against the Afghan people.
We can’t just sit there and allow the press to report
everything that Osama bin Laden is saying and everything the
Taliban are saying and everything the terrorists are saying, and
have it repeated and repeated and repeated, and not find a way
to rebut it when it is not true. I mean, the fact that the
United States had been giving $137 million a year to that year
prior to September 11th in Afghanistan because of the drought
and because of the starvation, says something, it seems to me.
Kalb: You want to get that message out above and beyond
the fact that it has been reported in the press and by the
press, picked up by foreign news agencies all around the world.
I mean, it wasn’t a secret that we were giving that kind of
money. You were dissatisfied that it didn’t have a sufficient
oomph, enough of a bounce? And you —
Rumsfeld: Well, let me put it this way: I have not had
time to go back and count column inches or minutes on
television. But if you think — if you think that the stories
about what we were doing from a humanitarian standpoint, the
positive stories, received one- twentieth of the coverage —
that false stories about civilian casualties — I mean, it isn’t
even a close comparison. And if we just said, okay, fine,
that’s how the press does it — anything that is against the
United States or against civilians or is bad is a lot more
newsworthy, and you know that, and everyone in this room knows
that. And as a result it gets on the front page of the paper.
Anything that is humanitarian or is constructive is not going to
sell newspapers. It is not going to grab attention on evening
news, and as a result it’s not going to get the attention. Now,
you know that.
Kalb: I know that. And what I am trying to get at from
you is to understand what it is that you feel you can do — I
mean, you made this effort with the Strategic Influence Office
— clearly it didn’t work. But the problem remains.
Rumsfeld: It does.
Kalb: And so, as you said your self — and I can read
you the quote, but it’s too long — that you are going to find
other ways of doing the same thing. And the question then
becomes: What is it that you would actually do to get your
message out? Would it in any way involve — let me be direct —
the hiring of a subsidiary organization to give inaccurate
information or misleading information to a foreign news
organization?
Rumsfeld: No that’s not the business the Pentagon is in.
Kalb: You’re not going to do that? Okay. And you will
not engage, as you said before, in dissembling or lying, but
telling the truth to the American people? That’s a fact?
Right?
Rumsfeld: That’s right.
Kalb: Okay. So do you have a way of handling this
problem now, or is it still something that you are working on?
Rumsfeld: We don’t do it very well. I mean, let’s face
it. For one thing, you have got to know what’s being said. And
it’s hard to know what’s being said. It’s a big world. And
someone has to look at what’s going on al Jazeera. What are
they saying on the —
Kalb: So it’s a lot of research that has to be done —
Rumsfeld: It takes a good deal of understanding of who
is saying what, and why are they saying it? And what needs to
be done by whom to get the counter to it, the truth out, and see
that it is rebutted in some reasonably timely fashion?
Now, when you are in the middle of a war, and you have
got a whole pile of people out spreading information that is not
correct, you have to — you can’t just hope that it’s all going
to work out well.
Kalb: I got you. Okay. Mr. Secretary, in the time
that I have left, I have two questions. One, I find it
fascinating that a Secretary of Defense — you — spend so much
time with the press. You must consider it very important. It’s
a big piece of your day.
Rumsfeld: Well, first of all, let’s get the facts right. It is —
Kalb: Okay, you spend no time with the press. (Laughter.)
Rumsfeld: I mean, it is not a big piece of my day.
Kalb: It is not?
Rumsfeld: No. I get up at five o’clock, come into the
office about 6:30. I leave about 7:00, 7:30 at night, work an
hour and a half at home. And I’ll bet you I spend preparing for
a press briefing — well, today is a good example —
Kalb: You didn’t prepare at all? (Laughter.)
Rumsfeld: I didn’t prepare. (Laughter.) My — I mean,
when I prepare for a press briefing it’s somewhere between three
and five minutes. Why? Because I tend to talk about things I
know something about, and I tend to say “I don’t know” if I
don’t know about them. Therefore I don’t have to do a lot of
stuff. I —
Kalb: So why do you appear before the press? You could
still spend that hour doing something else.
Rumsfeld: I could. It’s actually a half hour. You’ve —
Kalb: Or a half-hour — well, you are spending an hour here.
Rumsfeld: You’re wrong by 50 percent. But it is
literally the press briefings are somewhere between 30 are 40
minutes, generally, and I may do — I suppose I’ve done in the
time I’ve been secretary of Defense an average of one to two a
week. I occasionally come over to the old Shoreham and see you
— like now.
Kalb: Right. We are very grateful to you.
Rumsfeld: I have some meetings on background with press
people, because I think giving them a chance — and me a chance
to talk to them without being quoted is a useful thing from time
to time.
Kalb: Why do you spend the time with the press? What’s
in your mind? What is the value?
Rumsfeld: I get asked to do it by people in government
and by people in other countries.
Kalb: In other countries?
Rumsfeld: Mmm-hmm. (Affirming.) Who feel that the
person who is intimately involved in the global war on terrorism
can be helpful to them by seeing that the subject matter has
some structure on a fairly regular basis, because it tends to
get tugged away by a lot of multiple voices talking about it,
different press perceptions of what’s going on in the global war
on terrorism, different views by people who are against it. So
you get all of these different views. And to the extent a
person who has a relatively central role in it can once a week
or twice a week — or three times a week, whatever it may be in
a given week — take the subject, readdress it, develop a
construct for the phase we are in, and enable people in the
department, in the government and elsewhere, to test that as a
way of approaching it that it’s helpful.
Now, I don’t know if it’s helpful or not, but I keep
getting asked to do it, so I tend to do it.
Kalb: Well, I have a feeling — let me just — my vote
is keep doing it. I think it’s quite remarkable for a
government official to provide that kind of access to the press
on a regular basis, and journalists pressure access. And let me
just tell you that there was an article in the Wall Street
Journal on December 31st of that year, of last year, and I have
it right here, and it says: “The best new show on television?
Rumsfeld press briefings — Americans relax and swoon.” CNN
described you as a rock star. (Laughter.) Fox described you as
a babe —
Rumsfeld: What you see is what you get. (Laughter.) No rock
star.
Kalb: “A babe magnet” for the — (laughs) — 70-year-old set.
(Laughter.)
Rumsfeld: Listen, with your gray hair, I wouldn’t knock the 70-year-old set. (Laughter.)
Kalb: I’m talking about the 80-year — (laughs) —
Rumsfeld: I’m 70 in a month or two.
Kalb: And you’re also famous for talking straight. And
one illustration of that, you were asked a month or two ago
about where is Osama bin Laden. And you answered, “We do hear
six, seven, eight, 10, 12 conflicting reports every day. I’ve
stopped chasing them. We do know of certain knowledge that he
is” — (laughs) — “that he is either in Afghanistan, or in some
other country, or dead.” (Laughter.)
So in straight talk — that kind of straight talk — (laughter) —
Rumsfeld: (Laughs.)
Kalb: — give us — by the way, we’re going to the
audience now, and there are microphones around, and stands for
mikes. So if you want to ask a question, please go to the
microphones, stand up, and we’ll get the secretary’s last answer
and then we’ll turn directly to you.
Rumsfeld: Let’s have some questions from the Pentagon
press corps who felt chilled. (Laughs.)
Kalb: Ah — oh, that’s good. That’s good. That’s
good. Maybe tomorrow you can get them.
But anyway, in straight talk, how are we doing overall
in this war against terrorism? We’ve had it six, seven months
now. The remaining superpower in the world. How are we doing?
Rumsfeld: Well, we’re doing pretty well. It’s a whole
new experience for this country to be dealing with not against
— going against armies, navies or air forces, but going against
terrorist organizations that are very difficult to confront.
But if our first goal was to stop the Taliban from governing
Afghanistan, that’s been achieved. If a goal was to put so much
pressure on the global terrorist networks that it makes it
difficult for them to conduct terrorist activities, to recruit
people, to raise money, to easily move from country to country,
we’re doing that. Does that mean there won’t be any more
terrorists attacks? No. There are plenty of cells and people
out there who have been trained and who know what they’re doing
and probably will be able to get enough money and fake passports
to do what they want to do. But it is — the pressure is
working, and we’ve gotten wonderful cooperation from countries.
NATO has got AWACS planes flying over our country as we talk
today. And so many other countries — dozens and dozens — have
been cooperating.
So I feel quite good about the first phase. We’re
trying to train some folks in Yemen and the Philippines and in
Georgia — local people — to do a better job at their special
forces direct action against terrorists. And we are doing
maritime interdiction in — and a lot of things that aren’t seen
that are out there happening. People are being arrested, people
are being interrogated, and bank accounts are being frozen. And
so I feel that this first phase has worked pretty well.
Kalb: Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
Start. Give us a name and a question.
Q: Thank you. Sir, I’m Judy Christie. I’m the editor
of The Times in Shreveport, Louisiana, the home of Barksdale Air
Force Base. And I’m very interested in what you’re saying about
the need to limit classified information. I appreciate that.
However, as the editor of a community newspaper in a
military community, I do feel like there is non-classified
information that we have difficulty getting from the Department
of Defense. We’ve sought access to Diego Garcia and been
denied. We had great luck, and we appreciate your help with
going to Guantanamo Bay. We’ve been told by the Air Force, for
example, that we’re not to use the last names of people we
interview by telephone who are on the mission in Afghanistan.
Some of those restrictions, to be quite honest, don’t seem to be
fair to the people in our community who want to follow these
military people who are over there fighting for our country.
And we really appreciate those people.
Could you just comment on ways we might deal better with
the non- classified aspects of this war and the people affected?
Rumsfeld: Goodness. I’ll try.
If you think of an enormously — an enormous
institution, the Department of Defense, and the fact that there
are multiple leadership centers throughout it, and they go down
through hundreds of thousands of people, and no one is going to
write instructions at the top that are sufficiently micro that
they could be executed by some public affairs officer way down
at the bottom and, therefore, they have to make decisions, and
they undoubtedly make some right and some wrong.
And I — all of us have trouble getting information out
of the Department of Defense — (laughter) — not just the
press. (Chuckles.) It is a difficult thing because it is such a
big institution.
We’re trying to create a culture, a feeling in the
department that the press has a perfectly legitimate role, we
respect it, and we want the department to deal with them as
straightforwardly as is humanly possible, and just draw the line
on classified information. There is no question but that there
are a number of people in the defense establishment who do jobs
where their lives would be more at risk if their names were
known. And to the extent they’re doing various types of
antiterrorist activity, their families conceivably could be at
risk if their names were known. And therefore, there is a
policy that certain categories of people’s names are not
permitted to be used.
Kalb: Thank you very much.
Right here.
Q: Yes, Mr. Secretary. I’m Kay Reed, editor of the
Albany Herald in Albany, Georgia. I’m not asking for classified
information, but if you were to lay out for us as to how far out
the Department of Defense has its strategy in the war on terror,
how far out does that go, and in what detail, acknowledging the
fact that at any given time you have to shift your plan?
Rumsfeld: There was no road map available to the
president or to me on September 11th. What we have said is that
it is policy to go after terrorists where they are and to go
after countries that harbor terrorists and provide sanctuary and
haven for terrorists.
The problem with terrorism is there isn’t any way to
defend against it, because they can go at you at any place, at
any time, using any technique, and it’s physically impossible to
defend everywhere at every time, against every technique.
Therefore, you must go after them so that the plan is that. And
the president has listed a series of terrorist organizations
that exist. He has listed a series of countries that have been
harboring or financing or providing sanctuary to terrorists, and
he has suggested to people that if you’re on their side, you’re
on the wrong side. And the coalition partners that have been
developed around the world are systematically looking and going
after those folks wherever they are. And that, essentially, is
the plan.
Kalb: Thank you.
Yes, please.
Q: Deborah Howell, Newhouse News Service.
We recently had a reporter in with the 10th Mountain
Division in Afghanistan. And it was generally a very good
experience. And we had lots of access and got lots of great
stories. And so what you’re —
Rumsfeld: Are you listening, Marvin?
Kalb: I am — with both ears. (Laughter.)
Q: So what you were saying about that is true. On the
other hand, Rumsfeld: Uh-oh. (Laughter.)
Kalb: I hope you’re listening to this. (Laughter.)
Q: — we had to agree and did to military censorship of our
stories. And —
Rumsfeld: You didn’t have to.
Q: Well, no, but then we didn’t get any —
Rumsfeld: You voluntarily did to go in there.
Q: Right, right, right. And that we made that trade-off —
Rumsfeld: No — slight distinction.
Q: We agreed to that.
Rumsfeld: Right.
Q: For the access. But the reporters’ stories were
censored of information that he — he couldn’t tell us the
information that was censored from his stories. Okay. But then
he finds out the next day that the information censored from his
stories was in the Pentagon briefing the day before, and leaving
us in a very strange position of not being able to put into his
story information that was already public, because he had made
an agreement. And so I wonder if you could make some
refinements on that.
Rumsfeld: Well, we ought to try.
Q: It happened not once but several times.
Rumsfeld: Yeah. First of all, you have to appreciate
who’s doing the censoring. These are people that are asked to
come in and serve in the military. They’re young people.
They’re trained to shoot a rifle and fly an airplane and drive a
ship. And at some moment they’re asked to censor press people’s
writing. Are they experts at it? No. Are they likely to make
mistakes? You bet. So can we ever expect anything
approximating near perfection with respect to people who censor?
I doubt it. We — it can get better if the war’s long and if
the people stay in the jobs long enough — the individuals do —
to get better at doing it.
The second answer I would make is this:
There is a country that invited us in, and we accepted,
on the basis that we would not let the world know that we were
there and that we would not bring press people in unless they
had agreed to that. And at a certain moment in recent weeks, I
was meeting with the head of that country again, and I said to
that individual, “Say, we’re still not telling people we’re
there, but it’s getting to be a pretty well-known secret, and
don’t you think it’s about time that you allowed us to do that?
And don’t you think your people are now sufficiently acclimated
to the idea that we’ve been there and Afghanistan’s been dealt
with? And I would think that you would feel less at risk than
you would have, and did, when we first asked to come in.”
He said, “You’re right. Go ahead and say it.” And I did.
So it may have happened that the person censoring did
exactly the right thing and that — just didn’t know that I had
talked to the head of that country, and the head of that country
had at that moment — the day before allowed us to use the name
of the country and the name of the base.
That’s an example. That’s illustrative. It may not fit your facts,
but —
Q: I would just suggest that an appeal process to the
military censorship that goes up the line might be very
valuable.
Rumsfeld: I think it would be. And if I had been Torie
Clarke, I would have had one by now. Where’s Torie? (Laughs.)
(Laughter.) I think that’s a good idea, because what it does,
it’s like lessons learned. And we do that all the time with
military activities, and you need to keep improving the process.
Q: And Torie does know about this.
Rumsfeld: Good.
Kalb: Thank you.
We’re running out of time, so if these two gentlemen
would just ask their questions one behind the other, and then
the secretary could answer them. Go ahead.
Q: Jay Shelledy, the Salt Lake Tribune. Mr. Secretary,
you believe that members of your staff who leak classified
information should be punished. Would that belief also extend
to members of Congress? And as you’ll recall, that within 48
hours of September 11th, one good senator from the state of Utah
was telling the world that we have the capability of monitoring
cell-phone calls of terrorists, to a national television
audience.
Kalb: Thank you very much.
The next question, please?
Q: Mr. Secretary, if you look at the wrinkles on my
face, you’ll know I’ve been listening to you for a long time.
And I’ve especially been listening to your press conferences.
And I wish — I know it’s not in your job description, but if
you were an editor, you would get high marks from me. My
question is, these questions that you get, some of them are
inane, some of them show that we are not researching our
subject. If you had — this is not in your job description
either, but if you could just — you’ve got a nice audience
here. If there are two or three things you’d like for reporters
to prepare for before they come to one of your press
conferences, if you’d share that with us, we’d appreciate it.
Kalb: An interesting question. Go ahead, Mr. Secretary.
Rumsfeld: Well, with respect to the first question, the
problem of classified material is not a problem for my staff
uniquely, it’s for anybody who has access to classified
information to be more careful with it. On the other hand,
people can make mistakes. I mean, I understand that. People
can not know something is classified or they can not have been
reminded that something was classified, and make an honest
mistake. And we live with that as a society.
What advice would I give to people? Golly. I really
don’t think about it that way. I do not get up and say to
myself, “How can they do their job differently than they’re
doing it?” I keep worrying about how I can do my job better
than I’m doing it. I think that I — I happen to like people in
the press. I just I know it’s a strange, idiosyncratic —
(laughter) aspect, but I do. And I’ve enjoyed them, and they
for the most part are knowledgeable and interested in things
that I’m interested in. So I don’t feel it’s a burden to deal
with people at all. And I know we all have areas of ignorance.
Goodness knows I do. I demonstrate it every day, that there are
things that I just don’t know about. And the fact that someone
from the press may not know something when they ask a question I
think is not something that should be surprising. We’re all
human beings, and we all get up and stick our legs in our
britches one at a time.
Kalb: Thank you, sir.
Our time is up.
I want to thank ASNE for having us. We’d like to come
back. I want to thank C-SPAN for being here. I want to thank
the Knight Foundation for making this possible. I want to thank
our cosponsors, the George Washington University, the National
Press Club, the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public
Policy at Harvard.
But most important, I want to thank the Secretary of
Defense for being so generous with his time and so thoughtful
and needling at the same time in some of his answers.
You’ve been very generous indeed, and I thank you, sir.
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