See Also: Media react to Donald Rumsfeld's memoir
criticises the tone the former defence secretary uses in his work.
Not only does Mr Rumsfeld frequently assume a smug, know-it-all tone - he says he warned President George W Bush to "tone down any triumphalist rhetoric" in his end-of-major combat-operations speech, made on May 1, 2003, in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner - but he also displays a tendency, familiar to viewers of his news conferences, to make bold assertions with no pretense of substantiation.
Gary Anderson a retired Marine Corps colonel, who served under the US defence secretary, :
The first roughly 300 pages of "Known and Unknown" cover Donald Rumsfeld's story up to his second term as secretary of defence, and general readers without a dog in the fight will find this part to be the book's most enjoyable and entertaining.
Col Anderson says the book contains "some very interesting anecdotes about famous and infamous individuals", adding that "Mr Rumsfeld's personal remembrance of Kennedy is particularly touching".
explains that although Mr Rumsfeld appears confident in his tone, the book leaves out events that plagued his career.
For the most part, Rumsfeld remains defiantly self-righteous about his tenure as Bush's Defense Secretary - defending his often-criticized decisions and blaming almost everyone else for mistakes that were made - in the 800-page book. Notably missing from the book is any mention of Pat Tillman, the football star turned soldier whose death by friendly fire was covered up by the Pentagon.
says the cover of Mr Rumseld's book portrays the former defence secretary in an unusually casual manner.
Rumsfeld may be trying to present a friendlier image here - the book jacket features a photograph of him wearing a fleece vest and jeans - but this is the same guy once known as "Rumstud" who enthusiastically sold the Bush administration's wrong-headed story about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and set the tone that led to detainee abuses.
reports that Mr Rumsfeld staunchly defends the decisions he made on the Iraq war.
This is the essential Rumsfeld: fighting to the dead end in the face of overwhelming fact.There had been some question about whether Rumsfeld would use his memoir to apologize for what went wrong in Iraq, as Robert McNamara's memoir did for Vietnam. But after four years of reflection, Rumsfeld remains dismissive of those less brilliant than he is - which is pretty much everybody.
says critics who dismiss Mr Rumsfeld's memoir as a "score-settling account" are missing its value as a historical record.
At the heart of Mr Rumsfeld's book is an important critique of the Bush administration that has been largely missing from the debate over Iraq. The dominant narrative to date has been that a cowboy president and his posse of neocons went to war without adequate preparation and ran roughshod over doubts by more sober bureaucratic and strategic minds.What Mr Rumsfeld offers is a far more believable account of events, one that holds individuals responsible for failures of execution.
suggests that the former defence secretary should take more responsibility for the decisions he made while working under the Bush administration.
Rumsfeld shifts responsibility for the failures in Iraq on to President George Bush and Paul Bremer III, the diplomat who ran the Iraq for the first year, as well as on to former secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. There's plenty of reason to blame them for their failures, no doubt about it. But in reality, if there is one person who was in charge of the war, it was Donald Rumsfeld - and it is he who needs to apologise for the crimes of that war.
In an , Howard Kurtz simply sums up the book as an attempt at boosting Mr Rumsfeld's reputation.
It contains few surprises and, after so many years of divisive debate, is unlikely to change many minds. What is known is that he has in these 50 chapters marshaled his best defense; only history's final verdict remains unknown.
