“The Unknown Known”: Donald Rumsfeld throws his hands in the air like he just doesn’t care
The Unknown Known feels like a movie that was frustrating to make, and not just because we can repeatedly hear director Errol Morris’s exasperated exclamations from behind the camera.
It’s the respected documentarian’s second long-form engagement with a former defense secretary who helped lead America into a highly dubious war—the first being 2003’s lauded The Fog of War, a feature-length conversation with Robert McNamara (1916-2009), who served under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
McNamara was a more satisfying subject insofar as his comments were candid and probing, illuminating the logic and circumstances that drew the U.S. into the tragic quagmire of the Vietnam War. Rumsfeld is much more slippery, the film’s title referring to the angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin rationale the Secretary offered for invading Iraq in 2003.
Rumsfeld tells Morris that he doesn’t know why, in retirement, the famously hawkish official chose to subject himself to an extended interview by a famously liberal filmmaker. Morris, though, hints at an answer both in his film and in a series of op-eds, based on the film, published in the New York Times: Rumsfeld loves engaging with the press.
It’s not just a historical accident that Rumsfeld is responsible for more iconic sound bites than possibly any other cabinet official in history; he manifestly thrives on the thrust-and-parry of the press conference. When faced with pointed questions, Rumsfeld tends to back out as though didactically providing context, but his folksy aphorisms tend to back so cosmically far out that he’s hardly talking about anything at all.
The film’s title is inspired by one of the most famous Rumsfeld-isms: “There are known knowns; there are things that we know that 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.” The only missing element there is the unknown known; logically, that would be something we don’t know that we know, but which Rumsfeld now muses might refer to something we think we know but don’t actually know.
Such as, say, Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction? No, Rumsfeld won’t go there. He gives Morris the same runaround he gave the White House press corps a decade ago: we just didn’t know. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” is another quasi-philosophical Rumsfeldism that the ex-official continues to lean on: we didn’t know for certain that Iraq did not have WMD, so obviously we had an imperative to remove any possibility of a doubt, if necessary by force.
The most damning aspect of Morris’s film is the counterposing of Rumsfeld’s recent interviews with footage of the then-Secretary’s wartime press conferences. Rumsfeld would apparently like to have us believe that the Bush Administration was consistently upfront about such details as the lack of association between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, but Morris quickly turns back the clock to demonstrate how Rumsfeld led the press corps on a series of lighting-quick hops from “we don’t know whether Saddam has WMD” to “we can’t see the WMD, but we know Saddam wants them” to “we know Saddam has WMD, we just can’t see them.”
Midway through The Unknown Known, Morris takes a historical detour to walk us through Rumsfeld’s long career in public service; his stints under Presidents Ford (1975-1977) and George W. Bush (2001-2006) give him the status of having been both the youngest and oldest person ever to serve as Secretary of Defense. Morris implies that Rumsfeld is a canny operator, suggesting that his success in public service has been more a matter of political savvy than military expertise; Rumsfeld, though, holds that his career has followed the dictates of logic and circumstances.
When Morris points out that Shakespeare saw all of human behavior as being motivated by emotions like lust, pride, and jealousy, then asks whether Shakespeare was wrong, Rumsfeld blithely replies that Shakespeare may have been right about people in the 15th century—but obviously, he posits, circumstances have changed.
In a film that’s largely about Rumsfeld’s role in the Iraq War, the most telling among the 81-year-old ex-official’s comments refer to earlier conflicts with Vietnam and with Russia.
Asked by Morris if there are any lessons we can take from the failure of the Vietnam War, Rumsfeld replies, “Well, one would hope that most things that happen in life prove to be lessons. Some things work out, some things don’t. That didn’t. If that’s a lesson, yes, it’s a lesson.”
Some things work out, some things don’t. If it’s impossible to know ahead of time what will work out and what won’t—due to the unknown unknowns, the unknown knowns, and all that—then how is one to decide what course of action to take when lives are on the line?
It’s with respect to this question that Morris unveils another telling Rumsfeld comment, from a 1989 televised panel discussion. Arguing that credit for the end of the Cold War properly belongs neither to Gorbachev nor to Reagan but to America’s decades-long buildup of military might.
“We need to understand how we got to where we are,” says Rumsfeld, chopping his hand up and down to emphasize his point, “because going forward, we’re going to have to make a judgment as to what role our country ought to play, and a passive role would be terribly dangerous. Who do we want to provide leadership in the world? Somebody else?”