Donald Rumsfeld's delicate sensibilities

The Washington Post Magazine has an article on the decline and fall of Donald Rumsfeld, extracted from a new biography of the former US Defense Secretary by Post journalist Bradley Graham. The events described in the article took place less than three years ago but it feels like last decade's news, so radically has the scene changed in the interim.

Rumsfeld is one of Washington's great swaggerers. So it is surprising to read that after he resigned from office he went to the trouble of collecting all the congratulatory letters he received, collating them by source, filing them in ringbinders and making them available to his biographer. I'm not sure that these final commendations ever bear much resemblance to reality and I wouldn't have thought Rumsfeld's psyche was so delicate as to put much store in them.

The anecdote does include a cameo by then PM John Howard, however, who wrote to congratulate Rummy on his 'good humor and willingness to engage the news media.'

Photo by Flickr user wallyg, used under a Creative Commons license.