Point man

Donald Henry Rumsfeld, at the halfway point of President Bush's first term, is already the most controversial secretary of Defense since Robert Strange McNamara took over the Pentagon in 1961 and tried to change its course in radical ways.

Like McNamara, Rumsfeld, 70, fervently believes he has a mandate from the president to change strategy, tactics and hardware, whether the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Congress like it or not. And like McNamara, Rumsfeld came to office from corporate America and was determined to impose its practices on the world's largest enterprise, the Department of Defense.

Both secretaries ran into heavy seas early on in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill as they ordered course changes. Rumsfeld commissioned a whole series of against-the-wind studies on defense issues in his first months, turned to a couple of outsiders-a retired admiral and a former Army secretary-for advice, and kept the Joint Chiefs at a distance. And he offended a lot of people in the process. "I applaud what he is trying to do, but absolutely abhor the way he is trying to do it," said one high-ranking flag officer of Rumsfeld's exclusionary management style. The officer added that some members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that Rumsfeld's dismissiveness of the senior brass stems from his conviction that generals and admirals ran around their civilian bosses during the Clinton years. Rumsfeld, as a result, supposedly felt that he had to reassert civilian control over them.

Again, as with McNamara, military leaders resented being elbowed aside by Rumsfeld's civilian whiz kids. Their nemesis in McNamara's time was Alain C. Enthoven, Mr. Systems Analysis. Now it is the bristly-many say arrogant-Stephen Cambone, who, as Rumsfeld's director of program analysis and evaluation, fills Enthoven's old post.

The way Rumsfeld wrote off Congress in his first two years-when he refused, in the view of many lawmakers, to tell them what he was thinking and doing before he did it-brought roars of protest from senators and representatives. Predictions abounded through most of 2001 that Rumsfeld would resign or be fired because he had so antagonized Congress.

But Bush stood behind his man at the Pentagon. And then came Sept. 11-a cataclysmic event, which needed a reassurer and explainer. Rumsfeld became that person, Bush's man out on the point in the war against terrorism.

Before Sept. 11, who would have guessed that the traditionally close-to-the-vest Rumsfeld would become the administration's TV star? But there he was, explaining better than anyone else how and why the administration was fighting terrorism all over the world. Bush, upon learning how popular Rumsfeld had become with female viewers in TV land, even called his Defense secretary "Rumstud."

In managing the war against terrorism, Rumsfeld has earned his stripes. The war in Afghanistan-although far from perfect because senior leaders of Al Qaeda remain at large-was, on the whole, an excellent and often creative performance in which the military broke out of old modes of thinking, often at Rumsfeld's urging. American forces waged a short and successful campaign, overthrowing a government in two months with just handfuls of U.S. troops on the ground. Those U.S. Special Forces troops, who galloped around Afghanistan on horseback with laptop computers calling in bomber strikes on the Taliban, have become a poster image for the administration.

And Rumsfeld, with others' help, has brought about the biggest changes in two generations in U.S. strategic policy: dumping the Antiballistic Missile Treaty; winning unprecedented money for missile defense; and helping to make thinkable what long has been unthinkable-talk of new kinds of nuclear weapons and of perhaps using them pre-emptively. The wisdom of those policies is debatable, but Rumsfeld's role in bringing them about is real.