Known And Unknown_ A Memoir Part 50

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With my senior military a.s.sistant, Vice Adm. Jim Stavridis; special a.s.sistant Larry Di Rita; Gen. George Casey; and Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Bill Luti in Baghdad. My staff and I traveled to Iraq fourteen times over three and a half years.

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With Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno (left) in Kirkuk, Iraq, in December 2003, discussing the hunt for High Value Target Number One: Saddam Hussein.

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With Lt. Gen. David Petraeus (left) in Baghdad. Despite all the challenges we faced in Iraq, we were fortunate in the caliber of officers who led the effort on the ground, notably Gens. Chiarelli, Conway, Dempsey, Mattis, and McChrystal as well as Odierno and Petraeus, who would go on to play pivotal roles in the surge and beyond.

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Travel to remote corners of the globe was sometimes tiring but always enlightening. Onboard a C-17 cargo plane headed into Uzbekistan with (clockwise from bottom left) Torie Clarke, Marc Thiessen, Doug Feith, Vice Adm. Ed Giambastiani, and my administrative a.s.sistant Delonnie Henry.

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Sultan Qaboos of Oman was one of the most impressive observers of the Middle East. I benefited from his council after the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983 and again soon after the 9/11 attacks.

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With Kazakh officials in Astana. What I had not admitted was that the ceremonial robe they had presented me was covering up a large hole in my old pair of suit pants that had virtually disintegrated as I got out of the car to join the meeting.

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This handsome horse was a symbolic gift from the Mongolian Minister of Defense in 2005. I named him "Montana" because the surrounding steppe looked much like the big sky landscape of Joyce's home state. When President Bush visited Mongolia the following year, he jokingly told his hosts that he had come to see how "Rumsfeld's horse" was doing.

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(Center to right) With Gen. d.i.c.k Myers and Deputy a.s.sistant Secretary of Defense Richard Lawless, I showed my favorite satellite photograph to South Korea's Minister of Defense. The image of the Korean peninsula at night illuminates more vividly than any words the power of freedom.

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When my colleague Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Ivanov saw the photograph of a young Rumsfeld with former President Dwight Eisenhower in a Pentagon display, he mused, "That would be like me in a photo with Stalin." I laughed and thought, "Not quite."

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(Top to right) With my senior a.s.sistant Robert Rangel, a.s.sistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman, and Lt. Gen. Gene Renuart at a Pentagon meeting with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo in 2005. In the years after the 2001 EP-3 incident, relations between China and the United States went from strained to somewhat more cordial.

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It was an honor to welcome Lady Margaret Thatcher to the Pentagon in 2006 and to show her one of the ballots from the first free Afghan elections.

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With Joyce at the Air Force Academy's 2006 commencement. Through all the challenges of my second tour as Secretary of Defense, Joyce was at my side. At my farewell ceremony in December 2006, Gen. Pete Pace presented Joyce with the DoD Distinguished Public Servant Award. He said the Reader's Digest Reader's Digest version of the tribute was "We love you, thank you." version of the tribute was "We love you, thank you."

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Joyce skied with the wounded troops in Vail, Colorado, and then enjoyed a barbecue hosted by local firemen. They cheered at what they had never seen before: a seventy-year-old woman sliding down a fire pole.

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With Joyce at our surprise fiftieth wedding anniversary party in 2004.

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Waiting to see the President with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Pete Pace just outside the Oval Office, I paused to s.h.i.+ne his shoes so he would look his best. It was an example of civil-military relations at their finest.

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Thanking World War II veterans at the sixtieth anniversary commemoration of V-J Day in Coronado, California, August 30, 2005. On that day six decades before, I had been selling newspapers where the San Diego ferry docked nearby.

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