The Secret Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld

Pieces of Intelligence : The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld

From Amazon’s Description: “Until now, the poetry of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been hidden, ’embedded’ within comments made at press briefings and in interviews. His preferred medium is the spoken word, and his audience has been limited to hard-bitten reporters and hard-core watchers of C-SPAN.”

The Unknown

As we know,

There are known knowns,

There are things we know we know.

We also know

There are known unknowns.

That is to say

We know there are some things

We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,

The ones we don’t know we don’t know.

– Feb 2, 2002, Dept. of Defense news briefing

and another

I was briefed on that story before I came down.

I have not gone over it.

It’s interesting.

Let me try to put it in context,

And then I’ll see if I can answer it.

I have no idea what it’s about

Yes, these really are quotes from our defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Also interesting: important information about the discovery of weapons of mass destruction.