https www nytimes com 2021 07 03 opinion errol-morris-donald-rumsfeld html GUEST ESSAY Donald Rumsfeld’s Fog of Memos July 3 2021 By Errol Morris Mr Morris is the director of a 2013 film about Donald Rumsfeld “The Unknown Known ” Trying to understand another human being is often a dismal task And if not dismal thankless What am I supposed to do Disapprove of Donald Rumsfeld That’s easy Perhaps too easy He was ambitious driven — also lucky And as we all know he was one of the chief architects of the disastrous war in Iraq It is impossible for me to write about Mr Rumsfeld the former U S secretary of defense who died on Tuesday without writing about his memos He played a role in making memo-writing the new frontier in governmental accountability He also pioneered the memo as an obfuscatory instrument Write one memo saying one thing write another memo saying the exact opposite As I interviewed Mr Rumsfeld for my documentary about him “The Unknown Known ” it became at least for me a story about a man lost in his endless archive adrift in a sea of his own verbiage In 1966 early in his public service career Representative Rumsfeld Republican of Illinois co-sponsored the Freedom of Information Act a vehicle for understanding the intentions of high political figures Then as a member of President Gerald Ford’s administration — first as the president’s chief of staff then as secretary of defense — he found a way to effectively undermine it President Richard Nixon was undone by his attempts to conceal and excise the official record Mr Rumsfeld knew better by the time he was serving under Mr Nixon’s successor The trick was to marginalize the record to litter it with so many contradictions that a rebuttal to any future historian could always be found His memos known as “yellow perils” in the Nixon administration and “snowflakes” under Ford would pile up in drifts disguising the underlying historical landscape It’s a level of genius that has not been acknowledged in the press — the founder of FOIA the Freedom of Information Act is the guy who figured out how to render it almost totally worthless And what accounts for his seeming change of heart The metamorphosis from a liberal Rockefeller Republican congressman a confidant of the civil rights and antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein to one of the most reviled neoconservatives It’s easy to blame everything on opportunism a swiftly changing environment of success and more success Vocational greed … I don’t know But whatever the reason a new Donald Rumsfeld emerged during the Ford administration His first stint as secretary of defense is the start of the story — Team B in particular That was an exercise in which a dozen or so defense industry wonks and Russia hawks were given carte blanche to undermine and effectively rewrite the latest National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet Union which they argued didn’t reflect the true peril facing America They called it a “competitive stress assessment” — more confusing verbiage How does it work Put simply you have a body of evidence You don’t trust it Or maybe you don’t like it It conflicts with other beliefs you have So you create another body of evidence supporting your alternative view I’m tempted to say an alternative view of the facts But just what the facts are is exactly what comes into question I think of Mr Rumsfeld as the epistemologist from hell What are the grounds for rational belief As often as not the goal for Mr Rumsfeld was not justifying belief but undermining it For example many people believed in the possibility of détente Team B aimed to show that belief was stupid or at best misplaced When you set up a group of people to look for evidence to justify a prior conclusion you have opened the proverbial can of worms It’s not hard to see Team B as a precursor to the Office of Special Plans — the ad hoc group within the Department of Defense that gave us much of the “intelligence” that led the United States to war with Iraq And arguably there’s a progression from there to the current-day justifications for re-examining the 2020 election The charitable explanation is “reasoning backward ” from consequent to antecedent —affirming the consequent That’s just a logical fallacy The less charitable version is reasoning without reason While I was making my documentary film about Robert McNamara “The Fog of War ” I remember being shocked by his dire assessment of Vietnam Reason will not save us Alas it seems clear that lack of reason will not save us either Nothing could be more frightening than the appearance of thought floating over the surface of things — unknown knowns and the like — masking an underlying absence of anything This is what Mr Rumsfeld ultimately excelled at George Packer recently called Mr Rumsfeld America’s worst secretary of defense But this isn’t a popularity contest It’s not the man so much as the methodology And the methodology alas seems ubiquitous It’s not just him It’s all of us Errol Morris @errolmorris is a writer and filmmaker in Cambridge Mass He is the director of a film about Donald Rumsfeld “The Unknown Known ” and wrote a series on the former defense secretary for The Times “The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld ” The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles Here are some tips And here’s our email letters@nytimes com Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook Twitter @NYTopinion and Instagram