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Review: The Unknown Known

★★★★★
Five Stars

As interview subjects go, Donald Rumsfeld is a pretty big fish. Holder of the dubious honour of having been both the youngest and oldest Defence Secretary in US history, he has presided over many of the decisions that have shaped our political landscape, perhaps most significantly the Iraq war.

The director, Errol Morris, is also a pretty big deal. His documentary ‘The Thin Blue Line’ is often called the greatest documentary of all time. About two suspects in a murder case, it famously ends with a shot of a Dictaphone playing what amounts to a confession, which Morris had managed to coax out of the guilty party 10 years after the other suspect was sentenced to life imprisonment. It is the only film in history to have altered the course of justice, resulting in the innocent man being freed.

Many came to “The Unknown Known” expecting Morris to pull off a similar feat with Rumsfeld and coax out an Iraq-based confession. But this in not the case. In an ironic twist, we hear that while he was serving in the Nixon administration, Rumsfeld was considered a persona non grata and so sent to work on foreign shores, a move that saved Rumsfeld’s career from the fallout of the Watergate scandal. Unlike Nixon in the famous post-Watergate Frost/Nixon interview, never once does Rumsfeld break down in tears or confess to any possible wrongdoing. In fact, he seems to actively enjoy justifying himself, and not once does his grinning visage betray even the slightest hint of remorse. He tells Morris “I’ll chalk that one up” with palpable glee on its face, after spieling his way out of Morris’ accusation of “all those torture memos”.

Yet, rather than be the film’s shortcoming, Morris turns Rumsfeld’s unfazed performance to his advantage. As Rumsfeld spins his self-justificatory rhetoric, Morris often intercuts imagery or footage that undermines it. At one point, Rumsfeld denies that the US public were ever led to believe Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were connected, just before cutting to footage from a 2003 press conference where Rumsfeld responds to Saddam Hussein’s claim that Iraq had no WMD’s or links with Al Qaeda with the laconic, “and Abraham Lincoln was short.”

More subtly, Morris gets Rumsfeld to read out some of the hundreds of memos, nicknamed “snowflakes”, he recorded during his lengthy career. These snowflakes are then realised in the repeated image of a snow globe containing a miniature Washington monument. Throughout, the monument remains obscured by the snowflakes, only clearing when we reach his final memo that simply states, “the blizzard is over”. This powerful image of language being used to obscure rather than clarify, to bring us further away not closer to the truth, highlights exactly what Rumsfeld and his rhetoric are trying to accomplish.

The extraordinary thing about the film is that it takes this analysis to another level, by suggesting that Rumsfeld himself is caught in this blizzard. The title “The Unknown Known” is the fourth variation on the series of “known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns” Rumsfeld described in a 2002 press conference about the lack of evidence of WMDs in Iraq.

In their original incarnation, the first three were intended to provide rhetorical support for a potential invasion. At the start of the film, Rumsfeld reads out a memo from 2004 that gives his definition of the “unknown known” as, “things that you think you know, that it turns out you did not”. This pretty clearly refers to the faulty evidence they had for the invasion, and seems like a strategy for avoiding blame. But at the end of the film, Rumsfeld admits he got his definition of “unknown known” wrong. Really, it should have been, “things that you may know, that you don’t think you know”. Another way to put this would be, ‘things you knew deep down, but had refused to consciously acknowledge’. The redefinition makes you think once again about the lack of remorse Rumsfeld displays throughout the film, whilst also reinforcing the idea that he really believes the rhetoric he’s spinning.

You come away with the conclusion that this is a man caught up in his own sophistry; in a blizzard so thick, that he will never have to properly consider the consequences of his actions or feel the guilt that would come from an honest introspection. In its own warped way, this is his genius; and in revealing this to the public, Morris has produced an astounding piece of work. 

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