http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?031103ta_talk_macfarquhar
MIDGE'S MASH NOTE by Larissa MacFarquhar Issue of 2003-11-03 Posted 2003-10-27 The air in Midge Decter's apartment last week was not particularly humid. Decter herself, sitting on her living-room sofa in a blue wool turtleneck, black pants, and tennis shoes, appeared cool and dry. She sat with her legs crossed and her right hand wedged between her thighs. Every now and again, she removed the hand and fiddled with the neck of her sweater. There was no sign, in other words, that she had only recently emerged from the composition of a sweaty new book about the secretary of defense, "Rumsfeld." She spoke of her subject admiringly, but without obvious emotion. "The key to him is that he is a wrestler," she said. "A wrestler is a lone figure. He battles one on one, and he either wins or loses. There is only one man on the mat at the end of a wrestling match. It is no accident, as the communists used to say, that he wrestled."
In the past, Decter (who is usually characterized, along with her husband, Norman Podhoretz, as a neocon but who might more accurately be called simply a con) has written often and gloomily about changes in sexual mores: liberated women, promiscuous women, and gay men all seemed to her to portend a rise in childish hedonism and a decline in moral fibre. But recently she began to sense a different, better sort of sexual change in the air: she noticed that Donald Rumsfeld had become a sex symbol. She observed that he was called a "virtual rock star" on CNN, a "babe magnet" on Fox, and "Rumstud" by the president. He appeared in the December 2, 2002, issue of People, having been selected as one of the world's sexiest men. "In Washington, to be anywhere he is has become chic," a friend of Rumsfeld's told Decter. "People actually follow him around."
Her curiosity aroused, Decter, who is seventy-six, began to watch the Secretary more closely, and at some point last spring she noticed that he had begun to look more pallid and wrinkly than usual. Thinking that this might be the toll taken by the strain of war, she asked his wife about it and discovered that his poor color and skin tone were due to recent weight loss. Rumsfeld had been on a diet. "Put himself on a diet at such a time?" Decter marvelled when she heard this. Clearly, she realized, "anyone who thought, or even merely hoped, to see Donald Rumsfeld vanquished . . . was well advised to think again." She felt the same way last week when her subject was criticized for being contemptuous of Congress and for obscuring failures in Iraq. Strong, ruthless men are always resented, she knew. "The story is suspect," she said. "The whole thing sounds like a tempest in a teapot."
In her book, Decter concludes that Rumsfeld's secret is "manliness" (italics hers), a quality that in her estimation has something to do with being a grandfather and something to do with prairies. But, unfortunately for the reputation of her subject, the tone of the book is anything but manly. She blows him warm kisses ("He works standing up at a tall writing table, as if energy, or perhaps determination, might begin to leak away from too much sitting down"), and warmer ones ("this was the stuff-no other word would do-of glamour"), and even warmer ones ("Oh, Rumsfeld," a friend coos, "I just love the man!"), until poor Rumsfeld begins to melt. There comes a point in praising when effusion overcooks and becomes effluvium, a moment when the weight and rising heat of admiring descriptions (for there is a physics of adjectives) combust into tar. Everyone knows how to damn with faint praise, but damning with extravagant praise is a more esoteric enterprise, the more so because it is frequently unintentional.
It's probably just as well, then, that Decter cannot now think of another political figure who exemplifies manliness of the Rumsfeldian variety. The manliness of Arnold Schwarzenegger, for instance, is a different thing altogether. "Schwarzenegger's election has to do with California," she said, "whose geography I love but whose society I do not pretend to understand." Asked her opinion of Al Gore's attempt to enmasculate himself for the last election with the help of Naomi Wolf, Decter rolled her eyes. "I thought he was being extremely silly," she said. "That is certainly not the way to be manly. Probably manliness cannot reside in someone who thinks about being manly." She had not heard the adage that the tallest man always wins the race for president, and she doubts that it is true.
Rumsfeld, then, is the only politician in whose masculinity she takes an interest. But did she herself feel the tug, the sexual pull that Rumsfeld exerted on so many of the women with whom she spoke, including her own (non-Republican) niece? "No," she said. For Decter, Rumsfeld will only ever be a hero: "someone," as she put it in her book, "whose future was still very much before him."
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