When news broke that ABC would air the first “live interview” with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld since 2006, I determined to tune in. The host was George Stephanopoulos, the setting was Good Morning America (GMA), and the topic was Rumsfeld’s recently released memoir, Known and Unknown.
On paper, everything seemed harmless: the Navy Captain and political figure who embarked on his career in public service while Dwight Eisenhower was president, became a Congressman in his own right, held the post of Secretary of Defense in both the Ford and George W. Bush administrations, and served in various capacities for Nixon and Reagan, was going to sit down and talk about what he’d experienced through decades of service to the nation he loved.
Yet Stephanopoulos had other plans. And during the interview it was clear that the template of the GMA interview was framed so as to push Rumsfeld to admit the myriad of alleged mistakes he’d made in Iraq: Stephanopoulos even wanted him to admit that Iraq had been George W. Bush’s Vietnam. (That these were the goals of Stephanopoulos’ line of questions is clear from Stephanopoulos’ post interview comments, wherein he blogged that Rumsfeld refuses to admit that his “personal mistakes prolonged the war and increased its costs,” among other things.)
Watching the interview, I knew there was really only one mistake Rumsfeld could have made that would have merited such an attack by Stephanopoulos, and that mistake was that he served this country as a conservative Republican instead of a liberal Democrat. Therefore he viewed the military as a tool to bring down tyrants, kill our enemies, and make preemptive strikes against terrorists for our nation’s safety instead of viewing it as a humanitarian arm of an egalitarian federal government.
Proof this lies in the way Stephanopoulos has handled those with whom he agrees ideologically throughout the years. Just consider the way he handled Iowa’s Democrat debates in August 2007. Although he had the opportunity to call soon-to-be candidate Barack Obama on the carpet for opposing the surge that worked so well in Iraq, Stephanopoulos stuck with the template for the debate: which was to discuss each candidate’s plan for getting troops out of Iraq as soon as possible.
Where was the question about the mistake Senator Obama had made in opposing the surge? More pointedly, where was the question that simply forced Obama to admit the surge had worked?
It was during that same election cycle that Stephanopoulos interviewed Senator Hillary Clinton and basically turned his interview over to her as a free campaign spot. He didn’t ask her about how she expected to get around the still vivid memory her trying to shove nationalized health care down the throats of Americans during her husband’s administration. (He didn’t even ask her to elaborate when she tried to overcome charges of inexperience by saying she had been privy to big decisions and was “often provided classified information” while her husband was president.)
These things didn’t merit hard questions from Stephanopoulos because Obama and Hillary were bona fide leftists. Yet Rumsfeld was a splendid target for an interview ambush because his allegiances were with the likes of Reagan, American exceptionalism, and an understanding of how the military should be used.