It would be hard to find another American—George H. W. Bush, perhaps—with Rumsfeld’s aggregate government experience. He worked for Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George W. Bush. He met every president since John F. Kennedy. Over some 50 years, Rumsfeld had been a Navy jet pilot, a four-term U.S. congressman, the head of numerous offices in the Nixon administration, and chief of staff of the Ford White House. He became both the youngest and the oldest man ever to serve as secretary of defense, first under Ford and then under George W. Bush. He was often a critical special diplomatic envoy. As a Nixon administration overseer of federal programs, he prevented 1970s America from getting even more unwieldy; as secretary of defense, he kept the country from signing a disadvantageous strategic-arms treaty with Leonid Brezhnev and insisted on merit-based procurement that led to the Abrams tank. And yet by 2006, all that had been reduced to cheap “Rummy” slurs from New York Times columnists.
via city-journal.org