In part because of the debate on Iraq, we have overlooked his acclaimed television career, his inspiration by Lou Thesz, his work in the indies, and the incredible numbers he drew in his feud with Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld's career has produced things more luminous than a cluster of rhinestones (set by a Bedazzler) spelling the words "Disco Stu." Yet even now, it potentially lies in ruin, for Rumsfeld humbly does not advertise his accomplishments.

As a patriot and wrestling fan, I can no longer sit idly by and witness this man's sad relegation to history's midcard. It is time once again to elevate a decades-long champion. It is time to reflect on the electrifying life of Donald Rumsfeld.
 

Youth
Donald Rumsfeld was born in 1932 in the suburbs of Chicago. His father was a moderately wealthy real estate executive who lived his life by only two precepts: "Location, Location, Location," and, "A Magyar is a Hungarian and not a washing machine." The elder Rumsfeld instilled in his son a deep commitment to physical health, education, and being paralytically afraid of anyone with a mustache — like G. Gordon Liddy. On his first day of high school, Rumsfeld's father gave him a good-luck charm of a hollow glass cube filled with bees. That cube sits today in his office in the Pentagon. Though the bees are long dead, it makes a rattling sound when you shake it.
  

Despite John Erlichman's devastating Indian burns and the dreaded MacGruder/Mitchell/Agnew "Dutch Oven," what Rumsfeld feared most about Nixon strategy meetings was Liddy's mustache.

leading to countless matches and triumphs down the road.

But while he dominated on the mat of wrestling, Rumsfeld went winless on the mat of friendshipmaking. It's said that even after graduating high school, he'd still never spoken to a girl, until a chance encounter during an abortive Bull Moose Party revival put Rumsfeld in touch with a traveling TV agent. The agent liked Rumsfeld's firm athletic body and sweet shyness, and before long the future defense secretary was on his way to Hollywood to appear as a contestant on the short-lived dating game show "Pinned" by Swell America!

Like many game shows of the day, the ending was fixed, and Rumsfeld won a date with "Miss Corn Subsidy of Southern Wyoming." They were to return to the show the next week and report, but it never came to pass as Rumsfeld got nervous during the date and resorted to demonstrating wrestling moves on Miss Corn Subsidy. Regrettably, the cross-face chicken wing cut off the air supply to Miss Corn Subsidy's brain for too long, and she suffered permanent neural damage. It's said that a fresh batch of petunias has arrived at her bedside in Laramie every week for the last half century.

In 1950, Rumsfeld's excellent SAT score, good grades and devastating promo to the Princeton Review (entitled, "America's Ruthless Aggression: a Backlash on Judgment Day") landed him a full scholarship to Princeton University. There he blossomed as a scholar, a wrestler and a man. His senior thesis, "Retarding Racism: Choking Social Inequality into Submission" won him special marks with his baccalaureate committee.
 

Even years later in the Department of Defense, Rumsfeld would still occasionally elatedly pick up the phone, only to be silenced by a wave of crippling shyness.

Unfortunately, in a final exhibition match at Princeton, Rumsfeld Pillmanized the ankle of an opponent whom he suspected to be a communist sympathizer. Though he did invent the practice of putting someone's ankle in a folding chair and then stomping on the chair, it didn't catch on with the audience (until the move was performed on Brian Pillman in 1996) for two reasons:

1. The term "Rumsfelding" and the verb "Rumsfelded" sounded obscene.
2. The violence of the move proved too much for mid-1950s sensibilities.

Rumsfeld was considered too objectionable a worker, and as a result, he was "de-pushed" after graduation and sent to USN (the United States Navy) for more development. One would think the close comradeship of the military could perhaps break through Rumsfeld's shell of isolation, but it's said that besides required acknowledgments of his superiors, Rumsfeld's only utterance was, "Boats are for lazy fish, SIR!"
 

Early Roles, Early Matches
Rumsfeld served three years in the Navy's Power Plant and again became a champion. At this point, scouts deemed him mature enough to step up to the big time, and he debuted in the U.S. Government (often called "The Company") in 1957 as a valet to an Ohio congressman. His exposure to the business in the shadow of a bigger star gave him the experience needed to strike out on his own as a member of congress in 1962. He was then 30 years old, and the subsequent seven years of work in the political midcard honed the skills he would need to become a superstar.

While working in the Congress Faction in 1965, Rumsfeld played to the audience by starring in the TV series I Spy. Though his workrate in Congress was creditable, he had never connected with the audience until the series debuted. Together with co-star Bill Cosby, Rumsfeld created a dynamic and clever family-friendly persona that aided him in his climb to the main event. During this time, he also befriended Peter Graves, star of Mission: Impossible, because of their similar backgrounds as celebrities and communicators.
 

Rumsfeld and his partner protect the United States from savage attacks by Sky Commies.

In 1969, he abandoned his TV titles and joined the Nixon Faction as Director of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity. He then became an assistant to the President, a member of the Cabinet (1969-1970), Director of the Economic Stabilization Program, then a member of the Cabinet again (1971-1972), and finally went on "the juice" to bulk up and get that main-event physique (1971).

During this time, he captured the Rust Belt through tireless devotion to rehabilitating America's flagging industrial centers. Unfortunately, his attempts to win the Bible Belt repeatedly met with failure, due to his socially progressive Republicanism. His final act as Director of the Economic Stabilization Program was to win a four-way elimination match against Poverty, Illness and Lack of Education, but that match had no binding stipulations. (The latter three wrestlers have gone on to breakout success since 2001.)

After this, he was primed to become the next "People's Champion." But the Watergate Angle overshadowed Rumsfeld's victories, and the absence of strong opponents left him with lackluster feuds and poor audience response. Despite a good showing for the TV title in a Columbo free-per-view ("The Most Crucial Game," 1972), Rumsfeld was buried as the U.S. Ambassador to NATO from 1973-1974.
 
 

As would be the case many years later in Afghanistan, here Rumsfeld fails to get away with the perfect murder.

Weeks later, in a quiet backstage moment, Rumsfeld nearly stumbled in on Cheney, when Cheney thought that he was alone. Rumsfeld watched through an opened door as Cheney dislocated his lower jaw and swallowed a small bunny rabbit and a kitten whole. Then his entire body cringed and writhed as he molted. Upon recovery, he swept his discarded skin into an empty locker. Rumsfeld coughed politely and saw the look of astonishment on Cheney's face. From then on, he knew that a promise of secrecy alone would make Cheney a permanently loyal partner.

Knowing Cheney's secret had other payoffs as well. Because he felt that Cheney could never turn his back on him, his innate shyness lifted. Although quite comfortable with large audiences and playing politics, this was the first time in his life when he could be honest about himself one-on-one. In a sense, he was able to ease himself into the practice of openness and intimacy, because he could be assured that Cheney's dependence on him was even greater than his own natural bashfulness. Until 2003, he was right.
 
   

Vice President Dick Cheney in a rare, unguarded moment.

Luckily, Rumsfeld's name netted him a successful stint in the independent circuit, and he was able to capitalize on the audience interest in the limousine "death" angle. In 1977, he made a shocking run-in to the ring of G.D. Searle and Company, a pharmaceutical giant. After knocking out the current CEO with a steel chair, he declared himself the new CEO and proceeded to tear through Searle's ranks. Rumsfeld annihilated low profits through a series of Loser Leaves Town matches that reduced the number of workers in the company by roughly 60%. His talent garnered several awards from the dirtsheets: Outstanding Chief Executive Officer in the Pharmaceutical Industry from the Wall Street Transcript (1980) and Financial World (1981). He even made Dave Meltzer's list of Top Five Workers (1982), ranking #3 behind only Ric Flair and a ten-year-old Bob Sapp.

The 1980 awards brought national attention and reminded the gifted grappler that, in order to rejoin one of the major groups, he would need to generate more buzz for his name. He did this in two ways:

1. He astounded the technical community by returning full-time to Searle in 1983, where — to the amazement of the staff chemists — he developed a prototype of what would later be called Viagra that instantly killed anyone who got an erection and also pronounced the word supposedly as "supposobly."
2. From 1980-1982, he appeared on the cult TV show The Greatest American Hero: a story of an FBI agent (portrayed by Rumsfeld) who helped a schoolteacher understand and use a super-hero costume that was infused with super powers by space aliens. What viewers didn't know was that the treatment for the series was written by Rumsfeld himself… and that the show flagrantly violated National Security protocols by being based on true accounts of actions undertaken by Rumsfeld while he was secretly working for the FBI from 1978-1979.

Again, Rumsfeld left a show at the height of its popularity. In this case, he did so willingly, for three reasons:

• He objected to the show's reliance on the super-suit to solve crimes, defeat terrorists and thwart assassins who took aim at "the President." He alone knew that the suit was often the distraction that clouded enemies' minds before he himself cut them apart with his lethal Katana blades.

• He repeatedly fought with producers who re-used a plot device where "The Greatest American Hero" (played by William Katt) broke Rumsfeld's (a.k.a., "Special Agent Bill Maxwell's") right hand with his super strength. Rumsfeld countered by saying that his right hand was a pure adamantium prosthesis, grafted to his wrist by the CIA after he lost the hand in a 1975 duel with notorious African Dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Producers ignorantly dismissed his tale as "fantasy."

• He claimed that the producers' insistence on Katt's keeping his blonde hair in a perm was part of a long-term plan to have "The Greatest American Hero" and Rumsfeld/Maxwell become crusading homosexual lovers.
 
   

With the Greatest American Hero (center) surprisingly captured by the arms smugglers, Rumsfeld (offscreen) gritted his teeth and drew his katana blade. Three leaden thuds signaled the smugglers' decapitated heads hitting the deck. Five seconds later, it was all over.

 
(a) not do a run-in during the Iraq/Iran Last Man Standing match;
(b) provide the Iraq Faction with several military shopping carts full of fire extinguishers, stop signs, lead pipes, garbage cans, can lids, sledgehammers, steel chairs and bowling balls;
(c) cut promos praising Iraq and Saddam Hussein for fighting against a heel opponent;
(d) beat up Arn Anderson and pin the blame on Hussein in order to goad Ric Flair into demanding a first blood match.

Flair lost, but "put over" Hussein in the process. In response, Dave Meltzer praised eleven-year-old Bob Sapp.

Unfortunately for Rumsfeld, Hussein considered their oral contract void when 1989-1993 Company Chairman and CEO George H. W. Bush attacked Hussein following the latter's post-match beat-down of the Kuwait Faction in 1991. Hussein knew that his showdown with Rumsfeld would draw huge numbers, and felt that Bush's attack was ruining a guaranteed money-making program by running a similar version of it too soon. Luckily for Rumsfeld and Hussein, Rumsfeld's one-time valet and tag partner, Dick Cheney, was then in a General Manager position as Secretary of Defense. Cheney persuaded Bush the First to leave Hussein's faction intact and withdraw. The storyline was still safe.
  

An unsubtle suggestion of where The Greatest American Hero was heading creatively.

1988 — Provided vocals for the video game Altered Beast, specifically the lines: "Wise from your gwave!" and "WELCOME TO YOUR DOOM!!!"

1989-1991 — Served as a member of the Commission on U.S./Japan relations, thus creating good relationships with the leaders of New Japan and All Japan, and their technical geniuses.

1993 — Appeared in the role of the Chairman and CEO of the United States in the movie The Pelican Brief.

1990-1993 — Presciently served as Chairman and CEO of General Instrument Corporation, which developed broadband and HDTV technologies, thus placating pimple-faced loser internet teenage fans even before they were teenaged.

1998 — Spent a well-publicized year in rehab where it was revealed that he had used his contacts in the intelligence community to get the CIA to exhume the skeleton of Adolf Hitler from where the OSS had buried him in 1945. Rumsfeld then "ground his bones to powder small" and snorted grams of them every day for over 14 months. During his rampaging highs on "Fuhrer Dust," he charged about his home and offices, belligerently grabbing nearby innocents and screaming, "I GROW MORE POWERFUL BY SNORTING MY ENEMIES. I WILL TAKE YOU UP MY NOSE."

1999 - Lifted the briefcase during the King of the Ring match for control of the WWF.

2000 — Knocked up Miss Hancock.

While these incidents captivated the audience, they essentially marked time, delaying the real storyline payoff.
 
  

Half-crazed on "Fuhrer Dust," Rumsfeld cases Arlington National Cemetery in preparation for stealing the skeletons of his enemies.

That grumbling did not attach to Rumsfeld. He was an established star coming back to what he knew would be a white-hot angle. Fan reaction to him was moderate at first; no one knew how he could break out of his familiar mold. But the September 11 attack on him while he was in a Pentagon backstage office changed all that, resulting in a tremendous outpouring of support for the embattled babyface.

The attack had been carried out by a midcard flunkie named Osama — and his group, The Ministry — and Rumsfeld led a blistering response that included attacking Osama in the White Castle of Fear in the Afghan mountains. Since he was totally unfazed by the fact that Osama's midget Cheatum had tried to blow up the U.S.S. Cole, this was no headache. When Rumsfeld's interrogations of Osama's Ministry members, combined with Cheney's efforts to distort promos and evidence, revealed that the real threat had come from Saddam Hussein, their long-awaited showdown — twenty years in the making — became inevitable.

Ruthlessly using his finisher The Shokinaw (a Japanese variation of the stunner) on all opposition, Rumsfeld burned through the March to Baghdad elimination Battle Royal, eventually reaching the Husseinia main event in the Iraqi capital. Saddam was as wily as ever, though, and the match didn't end with a clean finish, as the dictator temporarily knocked out Rumsfeld with a devastating chairshot.

Meanwhile, Rumsfeld's Big Boss Man, Paul Wolfowitz — a once gifted technical grappler who had slowly gone insane because of his ability to hear cheese scream — baited Hussein with barbs about his unwillingness to meet in the ring, while Rumsfeld assured the fans that it was only a matter of time before he got his rematch. After Wolfowitz threatened to repeatedly back his car over small terriers and hunks of Blue Stilton, Hussein fled from hiding, fearing being buried by irrelevant subplots. At the sixth pay-per-view following their Baghdad match, Rumsfeld finally got a clean shot, and prevailed.

Immediately upon returning to the United States, he stood atop a corner of the Pentagon, repeatedly smashing bottles of Veuve Clicquot above his face and swallowing the champagne and shards of glass whole. He then Shokinawed Colin Powell twice and repeated the Veuve Clicquot bash. Fan adulation was overwhelming. Rumsfeld was assured a spot in the Hall of Fame as one of the all-time best face grapplers.
 

The Great Unraveling
Unbeknownst to many fans, however, resentment and bitterness was simmering amongst the other workers and indeed some fans. With his focus kept so tightly on a two-decade-long feud, Rumsfeld ignored threats that imperiled The Company and feuds the audience wanted to see. The sad truth is that today his legacy as one of the great babyfaces is in jeopardy. The factors undermining his work and reputation are many.

The Halliburton Stable: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (left) and Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith (right), hand an exhausted Cheney a scepter and throw a cloak on him to usher him offstage during a long jam in his hit "Sex Machine." Moments later, Cheney throws off the cloak and asks, "Can I take it to the bridge?"

• Rumsfeld lost his wildly popular parlor-trick ability to tell if a marmoset is being deceitful.

• He has alienated many fans by using his power as General Manager to suspend hundreds of heel workers in Guantanamo Bay indefinitely. At the same time, remnants of Saddam and Osama's heel stables pick apart face workers in Iraqi handicap matches that were set up by Rumsfeld's short-term booking. The short-term approach is angering fans and even some face workers.

• When he got "the book," he pushed Missile Defense (who worked in the 1980s as SDI and Star Wars) against the fans' will and despite the fact that it was a terrible worker who never "got over" the first time. He jammed it down their throats. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy even no-sold the drama of the moment when the appropriations bill passed in the Senate by saying, "I respect you, booker man," before contemptuously pressing the "yea" button on the voting machine.

• The locker-room incident at Abu Ghraib severely damaged Rumsfeld's leadership with workers and fans.

But perhaps the greatest threat may come from a possible heel turn by his longtime valet and tag partner Dick Cheney. Cheney's support of no-bid contract signings by his Halliburton Stable — combined with Halliburton swindling The Company to the tune of over $186 million of overbilling for meals it never gave to workers — may be enough to topple the Bush2 Fac-Gime, taking Rumsfeld out of the main event, perhaps forever. Also, Cheney dressed up like Rumsfeld and had sex with Eleanor Roosevelt's corpse on eleven separate occasions.

What will Rumsfeld do? Will he and Cheney ever bury the hatchet in a social program and reunite? Will he retire? Will he forge a new stable? Only time will tell.
 

The Future
History and fans will remember Donald Rumsfeld as a gifted grappler who proved his mettle in high school, college, the Navy and on the national stage. His bouts with Poverty, Lack of Education, Osama, all comers in the March to Baghdad Battle Royal and even Saddam Hussein himself are legendary. Moreover, the baby boomer generation and Generation X (or, "GX") will fondly remember his antics with Bill Cosby on I Spy as well as his attempt to make someone else The Greatest American Hero, despite the fact that he was "afraid of looking like a homo."
 

Better yet, will the fighter who once crusaded liberally for the disadvantaged and discarded refuse to be discarded himself — instead letting out a fearsome battle cry against the venal

Happier Days: Rumsfeld and Cosby's two-pronged Bullet Tennis and Spinning Aero-Blade attack was well nigh unstoppable. If joined by the Greatest American Hero, could their three-man group be enough to stop Cheney and Halliburton?

God bless us all, and God bless Donald Rumsfeld. Let us hope that, from this day forth, his legacy never again threatens to fade away ethereally, leaving him one more of history's forgotten.

E-MAIL JEB LUND
BROWSE JEB'S ARCHIVE

Jeb Tennyson Lund is a pointy-headed liberal intellectual who regularly reads too many current affairs journals — because he's such an academic snob and jerk — and who genuinely and generally tries to excise all political commentary from his columns. He regrets that, for the purposes of humor/facilitating some jokes, he had to venture into hot-button territory irrelevant for normal wrestling purposes. This column was inspired by an Atlantic Monthly profile on the youth and early career of Donald Rumsfeld, who was indeed a high school and Navy amateur wrestling champion. To read an excerpt from that excellent profile, go here.

Sources
For basic Rumsfeld Biography:
http://www.defenselink.mil/bios/rumsfeld.html 
http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/rumsfeld-bio.html 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld 
http://www.geocities.com/rummyfan/bio.html 

For the biography of actor Robert Culp:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0191685/ 
http://entertainment.msn.com/celebs/celeb.aspx?c=295147&mp=b 

Recommendations
Jeb would like to recommend the following books to interested readers:

The Great Unraveling, by Princeton economist Paul Krugman who, when he is not stirring the pot in his columns, is just sitting around at this point and rightly waiting for his Nobel Prize in Economics.
Bushworld, by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
Bushwhacked, by syndicated columnist Molly Ivins and Texas journalist Lou Dubose.

Acknowledgments
Jeb blatantly ripped off the "Shokinaw/Shock and Awe" gag from semi-retired OnlineOnslaught columnist Kyle Maxwell. He also had immense help from fellow columnist and college buddy Rocky Swift when it came to the shyness, Farm Subsidy, Fish/Boat and safety scissors gags. Additional thanks go to OnlineOnslaught's esteemed webmaster Rick Scaia — who had to put up with the annoying extra formatting of this column.

Lastly
Quite possibly the crappiest flash movie you may ever watch.