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<DIV class=title>Midge Decter has just penned a celebration of Rumsfeld's
manliness. "Rumstud" was the title of a National Review interview with Decter.
Below is an amusing New Yorker Talk of the Town about the book. Jeet</DIV>
<DIV class=title> </DIV>
<DIV class=title><A
href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?031103ta_talk_macfarquhar">http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?031103ta_talk_macfarquhar</A></DIV>
<DIV class=title> </DIV>
<DIV class=title> </DIV>
<DIV class=title>MIDGE’S MASH NOTE</DIV>
<DIV class=author>by Larissa MacFarquhar</DIV>
<DIV class=issuepublish>Issue of 2003-11-03<BR>Posted 2003-10-27</DIV>
<DIV class=printablecontent>
<P class=descender>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.”</P>
<P>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 <SPAN class=italic>People</SPAN>,
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.”</P>
<P>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.”</P>
<P>In her book, Decter concludes that Rumsfeld’s secret is “<SPAN
class=italic>manliness</SPAN>” (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, <SPAN
class=italic>Rumsfeld</SPAN>,” a friend coos, “I just <SPAN
class=italic>love</SPAN> 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.</P>
<P>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. </P>
<P>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.”</P><BR><BR></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>