The Unknown Known

USA, 2013, Colour, 96 min

A mesmerizing portrait of Donald Rumsfeld, one of the key architects of the Iraq War. Rumsfeld takes the stage as the writer/performer of his own life, reading selections from his “snowflakes,” the tens of thousands of memos he composed as a congressman and as an advisor to four different presidents, twice as Secretary of Defense. As a writer, Rumsfeld is resolute, philosophical, and fond of maxims and rules; as a performer, he is no less restrained than he was during his bravura Iraq War press conferences and just as provocative. His world view is forceful and self assured: “True peace can only come from military strength.” Although Rumsfeld has held lofty positions of American political power for half a century, most people know little about him. When Rumsfeld wrote, as part of his most famous meditation, that an “unknown known” refers to “things you think you know that it turns out you do not,” he could have been speaking about himself. The Unknown Known is not intended as yet another postmortem on the Iraq War, but rather an illumination of a mystery, an unknown known. And by the time we reach the film’s surprising conclusion, it is evident that Rumsfeld is in some ways as unknown to himself as he is to us.