November 15, 2002
RUMMIE RULES (from Peter Regas)
FORTUNE Global Forum: Remarks by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Washington, DC, November 11, 2002 (Defense Link)Q: ...In order to defend prosperity in some parts of the world is there not a need to attack poverty in addition to all the other steps that you've taken?Rumsfeld: Certainly there's a need to do that and I guess the question is how does one do that?
I was involved in the so-called war on poverty here in the United States and I've traveled the globe and seen just terrible poverty. I had a friend once and he was asked to chair a commission, an international committee, and the title of it was What Causes Poverty. He declined. He said I will do it but on one condition. The condition is that we change the title and I'll chair a committee on What Causes Prosperity. The reason he said that was, the title What Causes Poverty leaves the impression that the natural state of the world is for people to be prosperous and that for whatever reason there are prosperous people running around making people poor when you say what causes poverty. He looked at the world the other way. He said the natural state of people is to be relatively poor and that there are certain ways and things that can be done that can cause prosperity. They can create an environment that's hospitable to people gaining education and people gaining investments and people finding ways to contribute in a constructive way.
There are big portions of our globe that are so far behind the rest of the world that it is a dangerous thing. It is an unfortunate thing for those people. It's a heartbreaking thing.
The task for the developed world is to see that we do not just salve our consciences by finding ways like Lady Bountiful, we can give some country this or some country that which then is gone and disappears. But to the contrary, that we find ways to encourage countries to take the kinds of steps that create an environment that's hospitable to enterprise and to education so that the nation itself can do those things that will begin to ameliorate the kinds of terrible poverty that we see around the globe.
Certainly the United States has a responsibility as do the people from every nation in this room have the responsibility to contribute to that.
He may just be the most invaluable civil servant of recent decades. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 15, 2002 1:29 PM
Imagine how much more valuable he might be if (in the warped view of the NY Times) Colin Powell hadn't been present to "hold him in check." :) Yeah, I'm being more than a little facetious, but we're allowed that aren't we?
Posted by: Kevin Whited at November 15, 2002 4:06 PMWhen Powell is our dove, you know the world has shifted Right.
Posted by: oj at November 15, 2002 7:57 PMSome old men, like Mondale, are just a bag of bones not worth more than the effort it takes to slip the straw into their apple sauce.
Rumsfeld's 3rd act is better than his second. Most people do not know his first act was as a war hero aviator.
He said some mighty repulsive things about citizen rights and the FBI in the old days, but he's enjoying a golden sunset, ain't he?
I was talking it over with my editor a few weeks ago. He agreed (he seldom agrees with me), but while I attributed it mostly to the wisdom of experience, my editor thinks it is perhaps mostly the end of ambition.
Either way, we're lucky to have him. I cannot think of any other politician that I detested 30 years ago that I now admire. I detest Hubert Humphrey more now than then, the longer I think about the cowardly sack of lard.
To the accolades below, I might add that Donald Rumsfeld is one of the very few public figures I've ever seen or heard about that is 1.) Profoundly conservative to the core
, and 2.) Able to express his conservatism in short statements that are often pithy and reminiscent of the downhome wisdom of Yogi Berra. Like Berra, he says in 7 or 8 words what others take paragraphs to articulate.
Even when he is wordier, he gets his point across with relative ease. When a millennium project asked celebrities to write their thoughts or advice for future generations on a postcard, Rumsfeld wrote something like: "War will always be with us, and the need for a strong national defense is paramount. I increasingly fear that future generations will continue to learn this lesson the hard way."
My pathetic effort to mentally retrieve this quote in full does not do justice to what he originally said, but it was basically the conservative philosophy on war in a nutshell.
When he was recently giving a speech to celebrate his friend Milton Friedman's 90th birthday, Rumsfeld quoted Friedman to the effect that government should do 3 things: print money, keep the peace, and provide for the national defense. He turned to Friedman and exclaimed: "Whew! I'm sure glad defense made the cut, Milton."
Bee-yuuu-ti-ful.