Known and Unknown (Rumsfeld)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 9, 1932
• Where—Evanston, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton University
• Currently—lives in St. Michaels, Maryland

Donald Henry Rumsfeld is an American politician and businessman who served as the 13th Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977, under President Gerald Ford, and as the 21st Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006, under President George W. Bush. Combined, he is the second longest-serving defense secretary after Robert McNamara.

Rumsfeld was White House Chief of Staff during part of the Ford Administration and also served in various positions in the Nixon Administration. He was elected to four terms in the United States House of Representatives, and served as the United States Permanent Representative to NATO.

He was president of G. D. Searle & Company from 1977–1985, CEO of General Instrument from 1990–1993, and chairman of Gilead Sciences from 1997-2001.

Youth
Donald Rumsfeld was born in Evanston, Illinois, to George Donald Rumsfeld and Jeannette (née Huster). His great-grandfather, Johann Heinrich Rumsfeld, emigrated from Weyhe near Bremen in Northern Germany in 1876. Growing up in Winnetka, Illinois, Rumsfeld became an Eagle Scout in 1949 and is the recipient of both the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award from the Boy Scouts of America and its Silver Buffalo Award in 2006. He was a camp counselor at the Northeast Illinois Council's Camp Ma-Ka-Ja-Wan in the late 1940s and a ranger at Philmont Scout Ranch in 1949. Rumsfeld later bought a vacation house 30 miles (48 km) west of Philmont at Taos, New Mexico.

Education
Rumsfeld went to Baker Demonstration School, a private middle school, and later graduated[6] from New Trier High School. He attended Princeton University on academic and NROTC partial scholarships (A.B., 1954). In extracurricular activities he was an accomplished amateur wrestler and a member of the Lightweight Football team playing defensive back, and at Princeton he became captain of both the varsity wrestling team and the lightweight football team. While at Princeton he roomed with another future Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci.

His Princeton University senior thesis was titled "The Steel Seizure Case of 1952 and Its Effects on Presidential Powers." That precedent was later used against him in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

In 1956 he attended Georgetown University Law Center but did not graduate.

Domestic life
Rumsfeld married Joyce H. Pierson on December 27, 1954. They have three children and six grandchildren. Rumsfeld lives in St. Michaels, Maryland, in a former plantation house, Mount Misery, the site of Frederick Douglass's resistance to the unsuccessful breaking by Edward Covey. (From Wikipedia—where a longer and more indepth biography can be found.)