Deriding for a fall

Chief of Staff Rumsfeld and his Deputy Dick with the president in 1975. Wikipedia. Love those Republican sideburns, huh?

NBC News:

Deriding President Barack Obama as the weakest president "in my adult lifetime," former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called on the White House on Tuesday to fish or cut bait in Syria.

Rumsfeld said there could be no middle ground in Syria: "You either ought to change the regime, or you ought to do nothing," he said during a question-and-answer session after a lecture at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich. 

"In his adult lifetime" would exclude the not notably weak presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman; he reached 21 in the first year of Eisenhower's [jump]
first term. Maybe he just means since he's been old enough to judge, in the sense that to find out about Roosevelt and Truman he'd have to read a book or something.

His public career began in the Kennedy presidency (when he was a co-sponsor of the Freedom of Information Act!—Curses, FOIA'd again!) and still kind of flutters on, like the famous snowflakes with which, a classic Bad Boss, he choked his staffers in every job he ever held, focusing their attention on him rather than whatever job needed to be done; but it is suspended between the twinned high points of his tenures as the 13th Secretary of Defense under Ford (youngest in history, as you'll recall) and 21st Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush (when he was the oldest).

Would you call Ford a weak or strong president, now? In your national security context? He signed the Helsinki accords, which seems to me an unambiguously good thing, but couldn't move relations with the USSR any further beyond that. He supervised the end of the war in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese troops bulldozing the unhappy ARVN, the Chinese merchants gathering up their gold and fleeing Communism in rickety boats, the panic on the roof of the US embassy in Saigon—not a very powerful picture.

PFC Walter Boyd, USMC, killed through the mismanagement of the Mayagüez incident.  American Cold War Vets.

Ford's most triumphant moment came before Rumsfeld's time in May 1975, when James Schlesinger was still running the Pentagon, and Khmer Rouge naval forces captured a US container ship, the SS Mayagüez. Ford and Schlesinger ordered a commando raid which appears to have been carried out pretty incompetently by the NSC meeting in the White House, where they failed to learn that the ship's crew had already been released and lost 15 killed in the rescue of exactly nobody—plus three Marines somehow abandoned on an island and executed by the Cambodians when they were discovered a week later. Ford's approval ratings went up 11 points though, so I'm sure Rumsfeld liked that.

Also in 1975, the CIA invaded Angola, which had been sort of inadvertently liberated by the Communist government of Portugal, leaving a more or less left-wing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola in charge and in a state of civil war against the more or less right-wing Unita, a puppet of apartheid South Africa, which had sent in troops to support them. The MPLA requested help from Cuba, which the Ford government must have thought was a kind of inverted violation of the Monroe Doctrine, so in turn they sent the Agency to back up the South Africans. What do you want, it was the Cold War.

The great Seymour Hersh discovered what was going on and brought it to public knowledge, and Iowa senator Dick Clark, who had learned about it earlier still, proposed legislation to put a stop to it, which passed and was signed by the president in February 1976. Though the Director of Central Intelligence, one George H.W. Bush, was unable to tell Congress that the law was being obeyed. Our friend and South Africa's, the government of Israel, took over supplying Unita with arms. The MPLA had essentially won the civil war by the end of the year, obviously, though it dragged on in one form or another, often very bloodily, with copious help from the USSR while it lasted and from the USA (one of young entrepreneur Grover Norquist's projects during the Reagan administration was providing Unita with economic advice!), until 2002, when the government forces finally managed to kill the 67-year-old Führer of the rightist army, Jonas Savimbi.

Angola's civil war is still there. Photo 2012 by Bruno Abarca for Demotix.

Ford was an unwilling participant in the most important national security development of his term, the reform of the CIA by Congress, which objected to revelations of the agency's spying on American citizens and assassination attempts on foreign leaders. He signed the legislation, but as we know the Agency did not quite accept democracy in any country, including the United States, and never fully reformed itself, becoming under the vice-presidency and presidency of George H.W. Bush as lawless as ever, though less informed about the world situation (the ones who gave Ayatollah Khomeini a Bible and a chocolate cake in the shape of a key from a kosher bakery in Tel Aviv—at least they did know that Muslims are allowed to eat kosher food—in 1986).

How does Ford's presidency compare, on the strong-weak metric, to Obama's? It's taken Obama a good five years, I think, to start getting real control over the outlaw parts of the administration—over Justice and the Pentagon and the Homeland Security (George W.'s administration had a lot of outlaw parts, like Nixon's and Reagan's)—and I suppose Ford in his two years never did, which may make the comparison unfair.

Since his name was Ruhollah, his age 84, and his birthday months away, Khomeini was merely offended by the friendly gesture. Designer Celebration Cakes.

In the matters of which Rumsfeld might approve, Mayagüez against Abbotabad, Angola versus Libya, Vietnam next to Iraq (amazing that there are so many real parallels!), Obama is clearly overwhelmingly the stronger: the more decisive, effective, and successful. In the matters that might cause him to shake his head, in giving up powers to Congress, Ford was consistently pushed while Obama has consistently maintained his autonomy, choosing what and when to let go, particularly with the massive declassifications of recent months (maybe Edward Snowden pushed him, but Congress certainly didn't) and in this extraordinarily lordly conferring on Congress of its own constitutionally provided war powers.

So there's at least one president of Rumsfeld's adult life who was clearly not as strong as Obama.  Want to start arguing about the Cheney—ah, Bush administration?