Donald Rumsfeld

Biography

Donald Rumsfeld was born in Chicago in 1932 and grew up in Winnetka, Illinois. He graduated from Princeton in 1954, served as a naval aviator, and after work as a congressional aide and at an investment bank was elected to the US House of Representatives from Illinois in 1962, serving four terms.

He left Congress in 1969 to join the Nixon administration as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, then counselor to the president and head of the Cost of Living Council, and in 1973 became ambassador to NATO. Gerald Ford brought him back as White House chief of staff in 1974 and in 1975 made him, at 43, the youngest secretary of defense.

From 1977 he ran the drug maker G. D. Searle, later headed General Instrument and chaired Gilead Sciences, while taking part-time public roles: as Ronald Reagan's Middle East envoy he met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in December 1983, and in 1998 he chaired a commission on the ballistic missile threat to the United States.

George W. Bush made him secretary of defense again in 2001, so that he was both the youngest and the oldest holder of the office. After the September 11 attacks he directed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq with deliberately small forces. The failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the insurgency and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal eroded his standing, and he resigned after the 2006 midterm elections. He later published a memoir and died in Taos, New Mexico, in 2021.