When Rumsfeld began thinking about his book, "Known and Unknown," he imagined a more typical Washington release: a quick, impressionistic story based on whatever he recalled. Instead, he and a team of six aides worked four years on what became a 700-page narrative, with an additional 100-plus pages of end notes. Dozens of books were consulted and thousands of documents reviewed, from White House memos to letters Rumsfeld's parents wrote to each other during World War II. Rumsfeld's sister Joan and former Secretary of State George Shultz were among the friends, family members and colleagues who came to Washington for conversations.
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Rumsfeld is seated in a conference room at his office suite, where the walls document a long, high-level life of politics and history: a photograph of then-Congressman Rumsfeld with President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s; a signed copy of President Gerald Ford's swearing-in statement in 1974; a piece of shrapnel from the hijacked plane that struck the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. At 78, Rumsfeld had enough energy to narrate the audio edition of the book himself — eight days of recording, eight hours a day. He looks grayer, but otherwise little changed from his time as defense secretary under President George W. Bush, with his rimless glasses and quick, confident grin.
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For much of his career in public office, Rumsfeld has been compiling information. As a Republican congressman from Illinois, he kept records on every vote he made and the reason for each decision. He held on to notes from presidential briefings and recorded thoughts and ideas into a Dictaphone. Rumsfeld has set up a website, http://www.rumsfeld.com (which goes live on publication day, Feb. 8), that allows visitors to link to the documents he used as source material. During his interview, Rumsfeld showed samples, including eight pages of notes from a briefing Johnson gave in 1966 on the Vietnam War and White House papers from July 1975 — when he was chief of staff under President Ford — with passages initialed by Rumsfeld's then-assistant, Dick Cheney.
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Donald Rumsfeld reflects on writing of memoir (AP)
