Donald Rumsfeld, the two-time protection secretary greatest identified for serving in that place on the peak of the Iraq Warfare, has died. He was 88.
The Chicago native handed away at his dwelling in Taos, New Mexico, surrounded by household, in response to a press release posted on his official Twitter account Wednesday.
“Historical past might bear in mind him for his extraordinary accomplishments over six many years of public service,” the assertion learn, “however for individuals who knew him greatest and whose lives had been ceaselessly modified because of this, we are going to bear in mind his unwavering love for his spouse, Joyce, his household and associates, and the integrity he dropped at a life devoted to nation.”
Rumsfeld labored beneath three Republican presidents – Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George W. Bush – over a profession in public life that lasted greater than 40 years. After serving just a little greater than six years as an Illinois congressman, Rumsfeld joined the Nixon administration in March 1969 and held a sequence of government positions, together with Director of the Workplace of Financial Alternative, counselor to the president, and ambassador to NATO.
Following Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, Ford tapped Rumsfeld to be White Home Chief of Employees. Rumseld spent 14 months in that place earlier than changing into Protection Secretary for the primary time in November 1975.
After Ford’s defeat by Jimmy Carter within the 1976 presidential election, Rumsfeld launched a profitable company profession, solely to be recalled to function Protection Secretary once more by Bush in 2001.
Rumsfeld arrived on the Pentagon with a plan to “rework” the armed forces, however his tenure was outlined by the US response to the 9/11 terror assaults. He oversaw the early successes of the US invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Nonetheless, Rumsfeld misplaced political help amid a sequence of setbacks in Iraq, together with a bloody insurgency and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. He introduced his resignation as protection secretary in November 2006 and left workplace the next month.
