Susan Faludi

America will need more “heroes,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Armed Forces one day after 9/11, and however reliable his intelligence on matters of actual defense, on this point he proved prescient. The press, for its part, heeded Rumsfeld’s pronouncement by nominating him to the role, in the process dressing him up in some curious costumes. National Review’s December 31, 2001, cover story featured a drawing of Rumsfeld in Betty Grable pose, beside the headline “The Stud: Don Rumsfeld, America’s New Pin­Up.” “Reports have it that people gather round to watch Rumsfeld press conferences the way they do Oprah,” the story claimed. “Women confide that they have . . . well, un­defense-policy­like thoughts about the secretary of defense.” Fox called Rumsfeld a “babe magnet,” and People named him one of the “sexiest men alive.” Conservative doyenne Midge Decter penned a book­length valentine, Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait, which included beefcake shots of the young “Rumstud” as a bicep­bulging wrestler and a socialite’s breathy confession that she kept his photo tacked to her dressing­room wall. “He works standing up at a tall writing table,” Decter wrote, “as if energy, or perhaps determination, might begin to leak away from too much sitting down.” His secret, she said, was “manliness.”

However odd the idolatry, Rumsfeld wasn’t alone in receiving the award for best actor in an unconvincing role. His boss also got the treatment. Passing tactfully over the president’s initial missing­in­action per­for­mance after 9/11, Newsweek assured readers that George Bush was exercising heroic control: “Behind the scenes, aides say, Bush never exhibited anything but serenity, focus and determination,” and he was presiding over war­room sessions with “a commander’s grip.” In the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes declared Bush “a man with a mission,” driven by “a calling like that of a fireman who feels called to his work to save people.” Barnes’s evidence: “He could have taken a less dangerous, better paying job, but he didn’t.” David Brooks marveled at Bush’s “strenuous tone” and likened his speaking style to Teddy Roosevelt’s.