Donald Rumsfeld, who has died aged 88, began his political career under Eisenhower, became a prote ge of Richard Nixon in the 1960s and ended it as defence secretary under George W Bush, when he was a pivotal figure in the controversial case for linking the 9/11 attack to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and in persuading the president to go to war in Iraq.

Rumsfeld served four presidents, as chief of staff, adviser, and ambassador to Nato, becoming defence secretary for the first time under Gerald Ford in the 1970s, when he was the youngest man ever to hold the post. 

Crusty, clever, funny and arrogant, Rumsfeld was regarded by Henry Kissinger as one of the most ruthless men in American politics; Nixon described him approvingly as “a ruthless little bastard”.

As a member of Bush’s cabinet, he met with animosity from the military, from Congress and from defence companies for his abrasive and dogmatic style. There were predictions he would be manoeuvred out of office. But then came September 11, 2001. Rumsfeld had been working in his office when he felt the thud of the airliner hitting the Pentagon. Ignoring advice to flee, he went towards the fire to help rescue the injured.

In the run-up to hostilities in Afghanistan he refused to be tempted into jingoism and warned of a long complicated struggle. His grave, candid, unflappable style was right for the moment.  

But as later became apparent, Rumsfeld always had a personal agenda. In the five hours after the attack, Rumsfeld wrote to his aides: “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit SH at same time. Not only UBL.” UBL was a reference to “Usama” bin Laden. SH was Saddam Hussein, a tyrant, yes, but a secularist with no links to bin Laden. So even as his fellow Americans were struggling to understand what was happening to them, Rumsfeld was coolly looking for a way to use his country’s catastrophe as an pretext to accomplish a long-held neo-conservative geopolitical aim.

The decision, in 2003, to invade Iraq, was sold on the premise that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat. Rumsfeld was in the forefront of making the case, claiming to know precisely where the weapons of mass destruction were — a blatant lie. Not only did the premise prove false, but the invasion became a long and bloody insurgency which cost more than 4,000 American lives along with the lives of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.. The reasons why Iraq became such a bloodbath owed a considerable amount to Rumsfeld’s arrogance and refusal to listen to advice.

In 2008 he was accused by a US Senate committee of being directly responsible for the abusive interrogations of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.

After an investigation it was concluded that his approval of aggressive interrogation methods in December 2002 had been a direct cause of abuses that culminated in the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2003, where Iraqi detainees were found to have been forced into naked pyramids, sexually humiliated and threatened by dogs. 

He was eventually brought down by  US military generals. Bush replaced Rumsfeld with Robert Gates in 2006 saying the country needed a “fresh perspective” on Iraq.

Donald Henry Rumsfeld was born in Evanston, near Chicago, Illinois, on July 9, 1932, the son of an estate agent.  He won a scholarship to Princeton where he read political science. After graduating he entered the US Navy serving as a jet pilot and flight instructor before being discharged in 1957 in the rank of Lieutenant.

 He was elected to the US House of Representatives from Illinois in 1962 and was re-elected in 1964, 1966, and 1968.

His answer to a journalist’s question in 2002 about links between Saddam and terrorists seeking weapons of mass destruction became famous: “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one.” 

He won many accolades, including, in 1977, the American nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in private led a blameless family life, collecting bronzes of his hero, Theodore Roosevelt, and branding cattle at his New Mexico ranch.

He married Joyce Pierson in 1954. They had two daughters and a son. 

© Telegraph Media Group Ltd 2021

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]