By: Joe Strupp The Washington Post Magazine plans to run excerpts Sunday from Post Pentagon Correspondent Bradley Graham's new book "By His Own Rules: The Story of Donald Rumsfeld."
Graham interviewed Rumsfeld eight times and talked with his closest colleagues and family, a Post release states.
Excerpts are already online
here. Graham is set to answer questions online at the Post Web site Monday, June 15.
Among the excerpts:
* "Around September 2006, Rumsfeld and his wife, Joyce, had discussed the prospect of his stepping down as Secretary of Defense. 'We said there's no way he would stay if either the House or the Senate went Democratic because he would be the issue,' Joyce recounted months later. The criticism 'would have been relentless until he was gone.'"
* "President Bush wasn't ready to let him go in 2006. Each time, Bush resisted letting Rumsfeld go, even rebuffing several suggestions that he do so by some senior aides and advisers and rejecting the secretary's resignation letters. Bush worried that the disruption caused by replacing a secretary in wartime could be risky."
* "As the chaos and bloodshed in Iraq worsened in the middle of 2006, Bush and his White House team began challenging, in a way they had not before, their basic approach to Iraq. ... It was in this context that the president finally decided to replace Rumsfeld, according to interviews with former officials involved in the process. The decision came before Bush had settled on a plan to send a surge of more U.S. troops into Iraq but after he was resolved that a new approach was required."
At one point, Rumsfeld states in the book: "People said there's no way you can have a major transformation program and simultaneously be involved in a war. I said just the opposite ... that's the time you've got the best opportunity to make the changes. When things are in motion, it's a lot easier to make adjustments."
The book will be on sale June 22.
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