Lisa DePaulo has an interview with Donald Rumsfeld in GQ magazine. The article has a decidedly smarmy tone, and I think that there’s nothing in it that will change anyone’s previously fixed view of Rumsfeld. I did find the following passage to be one of the more interesting ones:

At one point I ask him what the hardest time in his life was. “The hardest time, without question, was being chief of staff to President Ford,” he says. “Because [Ford] stepped into a flying airplane, with no crew! And to come in and be his chief of staff was just a terribly difficult assignment.” It was brutal being in charge, he says, “in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, when the reservoir of trust in this country had been drained,” where “you’d go out and give a press conference in the White House, and if I said, ‘That’s the ceiling,’ they would wonder why; they’d say, ‘Why is he saying that’s the ceiling?’ I mean, there was no trust in anyone for any reason. The environment was just polluted. It was just rotten in our country.”

Harder than the past six years, though?

“Oh yeah. You know, people think now, Gee, isn’t everything horrible and isn’t it terrible? ” But look at the other times in history, in his own lifetime, he says. “I mean, Lyndon Johnson couldn’t leave the White House during the Vietnam War, they were throwing blood on the Pentagon… They were digging graves in my front lawn the last time I was secretary of defense! So you know, everything’s new and everything changes, and nothing changes.”

There are a lot of people who think that you guys are cold and callous, I say, that you don’t hear criticism, that it doesn’t seem to affect you when you see the death toll every day coming out of Iraq.

“Oh.” It’s more of a moan than an “oh.”

Why is that?

“Probably ignorance.”

But it has to affect you.

“Oh.” The moan again. “Off the record … ” And he tells a story that, frankly, should be on the record. It’s personal and pretty heart-wrenching, the kind of thing that people who despise Donald Rumsfeld might be surprised to hear.

Why do you want this off the record?

“I just do. I don’t like to talk about myself.”

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