‘The Unknown Known’ Explores How Rumsfeld Sees Himself
By FRED KAPLAN
MARCH 28, 2014
Donald H. Rumsfeld in Errol Morris’s “The Unknown Known.” CreditRadius
Errol Morris recalls that when he first met Donald H. Rumsfeld, he asked that former defense secretary for President George W. Bush what he thought of “The Fog of War,” Mr. Morris’s 2003 Oscar-winning documentary about Robert S. McNamara, another towering Pentagon chief toppled by a misguided war.
Mr. Rumsfeld said that he disliked it because McNamara, who spent much of the film regretting past mistakes, had nothing to apologize for.
In short, a film about this man wasn’t likely to reveal any deep, dark secrets. Instead, Mr. Morris decided to focus on the memos that Mr. Rumsfeld wrote — “snowflakes,” they were called, because he blanketed his staff with thousands of them, like blizzards of white paper — as a Rosetta stone to his subject’s character.
The resulting film, “The Unknown Known,” which opens on Friday, is structured much like “The Fog of War.” For 96 minutes (cut down from 34 hours of conversation), Mr. Rumsfeld looks into the camera, answering, or finessing, questions about Iraq, his work for several presidents, the nature of truth and more.
Errol Morris, with the producer Amanda Branson Gill, interviewed Donald Rumsfeld, on the screen, for 34 hours to make his film. CreditNubar Alexanian
Throughout the dialogue, Mr. Morris uses the memos as the opening wedges of inquiry. Several times, his camera pans vast stacks of file cabinets, while Danny Elfman’s score (like Philip Glass’s for “The Fog of War” but less minimalist, more celestial) cues a choir to chant ominously.
The goal, Mr. Morris said in a phone interview in late November, when the film was on the festival circuit, was “to tell history from the inside out, not from the outside in,” to explore “how Donald Rumsfeld sees himself and accounts for himself.”
Yet this technique has its limits when confronting a figure so practiced in evasion and so averse to introspection.
McNamara was 85 when “The Fog of War” was made, but he was still sharp, more than three decades beyond his own public disgrace, and eager to recite the lessons he’d since learned. He was deceptive, or at best forgetful, about the Vietnam War and the Cuban missile crisis, recounting his role as more dovish than the archives indicate. But the film was a fascinating, almost tragic portrait of a man still lost in the fog, grappling with his legacy.
No one could expect Mr. Rumsfeld, now 81, to engage in self-criticism, certainly not in front of a camera. Still, some of his replies are so vapid that it’s hard to tell whether he’s slippery or shallow.
Asked whether invading Iraq was a mistake, Mr. Rumsfeld plaintively says, “I guess time will tell.”
Through the 1960s and ‘70s, he watched the Vietnam War unfold as a congressman, an ambassador to NATO and a White House chief of staff. Yet when Mr. Morris asks him about that war’s lessons, he replies: “Some things work out, some things don’t. That didn’t. If that’s a lesson, yes, it’s a lesson.”
The film’s title comes from Mr. Rumsfeld’s famous memo of Feb. 4, 2002, in which he wrote, “There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns,” adding in a less-famous passage, “There are also unknown knowns: things you think you know that it turns out you did not.”
Parsing documents is Mr. Morris’s specialty. His posts for the Opinionator blog of The New York Times, analyzing which of two slightly different Crimean War photos had been altered and why, were a tour de force of intellectual detective work. So were his probings of the court records for murder cases against Jeffrey MacDonald, in his 2012 book “A Wilderness of Error,” and Randall Adams, in the 1988 film “The Thin Blue Line.” (The latter led to the reversal of Mr. Adams’s conviction.)
But Mr. Rumsfeld’s snowflakes obscure more than clarify, and, in many cases, that was their purpose. For instance, one scene in the film shows a news conference at which Mr. Rumsfeld recited his “unknown unknowns” memo as a way of deflecting questions about whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. A few times during the film, Mr. Morris catches his subject in a direct contradiction and holds the camera on his face, hoping to see him squirm, but Mr. Rumsfeld stares right back.
“Almost all of his answers are designed to deflect and manipulate,” Mr. Morris said in our conversation. “But I think he’s also manipulating himself. Any account of him has to deal with the gobbledygook, the lies, the glibness, the cleverness — but also his emptiness.”
If this take on Mr. Rumsfeld is true — if his evasions indicate nothing deeper than “an absence of thought,” as Mr. Morris put it — then one has to wonder whether he’s worth the attention. But is it true? This is a man, after all, who spent decades climbing the rungs of power in Washington, shoving rivals aside with Machiavellian glee. (Look at his mischievous smile in the scene where he mentions his bureaucratic pummeling of George H. W. Bush in the 1970s.) Henry A. Kissinger, who knows whereof he speaks on such matters, once referred to Mr. Rumsfeld as “the most ruthless man I ever met.”
In other words, there may be less to these snowflakes than a close reader like Mr. Morris is inclined to assume. In one scene, when he asks about the fine points of a memo’s wording, Mr. Rumsfeld himself says, “I think you’re probably chasing the wrong rabbit here.”
A key difference between “The Unknown Known” and “The Fog of War” is that McNamara was an emblematic figure of his time, the arc of his career tracing the rise and fall of postwar American power. An original Ford Motor Company “whiz kid,” he soared from youngest professor at Harvard Business School to youngest president of Ford to (at the time) youngest secretary of defense — all the while blithely convinced that the world’s problems could be solved through rational analysis, only to watch his verities, and the nation’s, collapse in the quagmire of Vietnam.
Mr. Rumsfeld’s career has been long and storied, but it has no great theme — or none that he seems willing to share or contemplate.
One of his oldest friends and colleagues has had a life with an arc, and it was captured well in a very different documentary, “The World According to Dick Cheney,” broadcast last year on Showtime. It opened with Mr. Cheney sitting in a chair, answering questions (Favorite food? “Spaghetti.” Favorite virtue? “Integrity.” Biggest flaw? Long pause.) But then, the director, R. J. Cutler, a producer of “The War Room,” about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, widened his lens to take in other characters, commentators, news clips — in short, context.
That film’s style is more conventional than Mr. Morris’s, and its content less original, based mainly on books by Ron Suskind, Barton Gellman and Bob Woodward, who appear as talking heads. But there is a narrative flow and drama. It tells the story of a man who acquired more and more power until his errors and arrogance left him isolated and ignored, even in his last two years as George W. Bush’s vice president (after his friend Mr. Rumsfeld was fired) and still more since. Near the beginning, we see Mr. Cheney fly-fishing on a lake, and it seems like a scene of bucolic retirement. By the end, when we watch it again, it looks more like bitter exile.
With Mr. Rumsfeld, the filmmaker seems to realize he’s coming up short. “Here’s one of the most powerful men in American history,” Mr. Morris said in our phone conversation. His subject poured out a “sea of words — and yet what was going on?”
FRED KAPLAN is a columnist for Slate, the Edward R. Murrow fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of “The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War.”
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