Donald Rumsfeld, R.I.H.

One of American democracy’s greatest enemies, Donald Rumsfeld, has shuffled off this mortal coil at age 88. He died peacefully in his home in Taos, New Mexico — which was once a sanctuary for bohemian artists and Native tribespeople. Now what the hell is it? Speaking of hell, Rumsfeld should roast in it. Along with his evil twin, Dick Cheney, he mired the U.S. in a Middle East nightmare that continues to claim lives and rock the region. In my book The Devil’s Chessboard, I called Rumsfeld “George W. Bush’s smugly confident conqueror of desert sands.” But he and Cheney had an even more devious plan to sabotage American democracy — a “change of government” plot, exploiting the 9/11 shock and awe impact on U.S. society, to replace our Constitutional freedoms with authoritarian rule. Rumsfeld and Cheney partly succeeded — and much of their secretive, anti-democratic infrastructure is still in place, two decades after 9/11.

I referenced The Devil’s Chessboard — my dark biography of Cold War spymaster Allen Dulles — because Rumsfeld was a young acolyte of America’s most evil conspirator in the 20th century. As a fresh-faced Illinois congressman, Rumsfeld helped rehabilitate Dulles — who had been forced out of the CIA in disgrace by President Kennedy after the spy agency’s Bay of Pigs debacle. As I write in my book, in March 1963, Rep. Rumsfeld invited Dulles to address a congressional group he led — on Cuba, of all topics.

Dulles was Rumsfeld’s kind of guy — conniving, power-hungry, contemptuous of democratic institutions and customs. Like other Dulles proteges — including Reagan spymaster William Casey — Rumsfeld kept the “Old Man’s” spirit alive long after his death in 1969.

Somewhere in the swamps of Washington — or Florida — there is an evil successor to Donald Rumsfeld, who will keep his dark force alive in American politics.