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Firedoglake is pleased to announce that Andrew Cockburn will join us on Book Salon this coming Sunday, April 8, to discuss his new book, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy. Many of you know Cockburn as a respected journalist and author of several books including (with Patrick Cockburn) the highly acclaimed Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein. I'm about half way through Rumsfeld and I'm convinced Cockburn's new book on Rumsfeld is headed for at least equal acclaim.

Cockburn's Rumsfeld is a fascinating, highly readable book, not only for the focus on Rumsfeld's disastrous role in the Iraq invasion and occupation and his lifelong ambition to be President -- staggers the mind, doesn't it? -- but for the perspective it provides on the Administrations of Nixon, Ford and Bush 41 -- and ultimately Bush 43. Here we meet the officials who emerged in those early years and then disappeared, only to be resurrected and empowered in their most extreme forms in the Bush 43 regime.

After summarizing Rumsfeld's early terms in Congress and his stint at the Office of Economic Opportunity, Cockburn relates how WH Chief of Staff Rumsfeld brought in the young Dick Cheney to help run the Ford White House, allowing Rumsfeld to focus on his Machiavellian schemes to get Ford to dump Rockefeller as his Vice President. That scheme, which also required that his rival, G.H.W. Bush be sidelined by sending him to head the CIA, was aimed at getting Ford to select Rumsfeld as his VP in 1976. That would give Ford a conservative shield against the rise of Ronald Reagan. The scheme derailed Rockefeller and for the moment, Bush Sr., but it failed to get Rumsfeld the VP nod. But while Rockefeller got his revenge, the episode probably marked the turning point in the disappearance of the moderate wing of the Republican Party.

One by one, Cockburn introduces the key members of the neocon team -- Wolfowitz, Perle, Cambone, Paul Nitze and others. Here we learn about the origins of the Committee for the Present Danger, the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, and the Project for the New American Century. And guess what they were doing in these earlier decades? Not much; just doing whatever they could to scare Americans into higher defense budgets and a more belligerent military and foreign policy -- like making up bogus intelligence analysis to convince Congress to commit billions of dollars building expensive weapons systems we didn't need and that didn't work as advertised to confront a Soviet threat that turned out to be grossly exaggerated. The methods are familiar: with only a little effort, we could substitute 2001-03 for what Cockburn describes happened in 1976:

Clearly, there was much work still to be done. One of the problems was the CIA, which persisted in reporting that the Soviets were by no means as formidable as claimed by the Pentagon. To correct this state of affiars, the alarmists lobbied vigorously for a reconsideration of the CIA conclusions by an "independent" group. In May 1976, newly installed CIA director Goerge H.W. Bush agreed, and "Team B," codirected by Nitze, was in business. Among it's senior staff members was an affable young defense intellectual out of the University of Chicago named Paul Wolfowitz, who had gotten his start in the national security world when hired by Nitze to lobby for missile defense in 1969. Now he joined his fellow team members in rummaging through the agency's classified files, sniffing out neglected evidence of Soviet perfidy.

Predictably, given its staff and sponsors, the team's final report duly endorsed the wildest speculations of the right-wing defense lobby.

"Team B" of course became the model for Doug Feith who made the news just this morning, and the Office of Special Plans, another rump group set up 25 years later in Rumsfeld's DoD shop to manufacture phony analysis from raw intelligence deliberately misread by men who already knew the answer they wanted and were determined to present it to decision makers. And Cockburn notes they never skipped a beat when the Soviet Union collasped and the Russian bear was no longer a threat. Instead, by 1998 "the principal threats were North Korea, iran, and Iraq -- the trio that would later be notoriously labeled the 'axis of evil.'" And the global war on terror filled in quite well for the missing communist under every bed.

In addition to Rumsfeld's early government history, there's also a disturbing chapter on the period in the late 70s and early 80's when, with Jimmy Carter now President, Rumsfeld left government to join the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle and became its president and CEO. The chapter focuses on Searle's efforts to win FDA approval of aspartame, which you know as the artificial sweetners NutraSweet and Equal. It seems the problem was that Searle was suspected of misreporting and then covering up tests which showed a possible connection with increased incidences of brain tumors in rats. Rumsfeld's role was in getting FDA to reverse its initial assessment and grant approval. The drug didn't change, nor did the test results; what changed was the politics. Searle would eventually arrange a bogus hearing and politicized approval in 1981 by Reagan's new FDA administrator, Arthur Hull Hayes. That travesty was followed by getting Senator Howell Heflin (D-Ala) to insert an obscure provision in legislation that granted Searle an extension of its expiring patent on aspartame. And it gets worse. You'll want to read this chapter carefully. Everyone who wants to know what's wrong with conservatives in government should read this book just for this chapter. And after you do, you may never again use anything with NutraSweet or Equal, or trust FDA.

History, of course, repeats itself in many ways, and in Rumsfeld, we get a chilling warning during the Searle era of what happens when US Attorneys are continuously cycled from the Justice Department to private law firms who, it just so happens, were representing the very companies they were asked to prosecute for fraud. One by one, a succession of US Attorneys joined the law firm that was representing Searle, or left for other reasons, with the result that no case was every presented to a Grand Jury. Sound familiar?

That's just a peak at snippets in the first half of the book, which I can't wait to get back to. Get the book. (You can order here.) Read it. But no matter what, please join us for Sunday's Book Salon to meet and chat with the author, Andrew Cockburn. See you then.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Selise, who found these interviews of Cockburn on Rummy: truthdig and Democracy Now.