Culture March 8, 2011

The most surprising thing about Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, Known and Unknown, is that a lot of it is boring. How could that be? Donald Rumsfeld was not boring; his life was not boring; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were and are not boring. What other contemporary public figure attained brief sex-symbol status at the age of sixty-nine, drew mad vitriol from hippies and hawks alike, and had lawsuits filed against them on everything from habeas corpus to torture to sexual harassment in the military, even as poets, novelists, and comics riffed passionately on their words and lives? Yet Rumsfeld