HELLO, MY NAME IS INIGO BUSH...:

A Father's Nemesis Who Became a Son's Trusted Aide: President Bush's relationship with Donald Rumsfeld seems complicated now, but it is nothing compared to the relationship that Mr. Rumsfeld had with Mr. Bush's father. (ELISABETH BUMILLER, 5/10/04, NY Times)

As veterans of the Ford White House remember, Mr. Rumsfeld was an intense rival of George Bush's, and by all accounts the men had a terrible relationship in the 1970's and 1980's. Bush partisans still say that Mr. Rumsfeld masterminded what became known as the Halloween Massacre, the 1975 Ford cabinet shake-up in which Mr. Rumsfeld jumped from his position as White House chief of staff to become secretary of defense, thereby enhancing his prospects, never realized, of being President Gerald R. Ford's running mate in 1976.

In that same shuffle, Mr. Bush, who had been the chief United States envoy to China, was sidelined as director of central intelligence — a job that took Mr. Bush out of the running for vice president, since at the time C.I.A. directors were thought to have no future in politics.

The defense secretary and the C.I.A. chief soon clashed over the agency's estimates of Soviet military spending. In 1988, when Mr. Bush was the vice president running for president, Mr. Rumsfeld briefly joined the race.

"There's a certain amount of disrespect when Rumsfeld decides to run for president in '88 with a sitting vice president," said James Mann, the author of "Rise of the Vulcans," a history of the current president's war cabinet.

Today the relationship between Mr. Rumsfeld and Bush père is said to be thawed, or at least that is what the elder Mr. Bush indicated Friday from his office in Houston, where he was watching, on and off, Mr. Rumsfeld's Congressional testimony about the scandal.

"He asked me to tell you that he would characterize his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld as a very pleasant one, and he thinks Donald Rumsfeld would say the same," said Jean Becker, Mr. Bush's chief of staff.

Which brings us to Mr. Rumsfeld's selection as defense secretary for a second time, by the current President Bush. Mr. Bush, who had rejected Daniel R. Coats, the former Republican senator from Indiana, turned to Mr. Rumsfeld as a bureaucratic strongman (and Vice President Dick Cheney's old friend) who could go one on one against the star of the new cabinet, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

Republicans who know both Bushes say that the father's history with Mr. Rumsfeld was either irrelevant to the son or, more interestingly, another way to show that he was his own man. Just as he would march into Baghdad and topple Saddam Hussein — the road his father never took — the current President Bush would manage Mr. Rumsfeld.

That's a sizable "either."

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 10, 2004 7:30 AM