There’s something uncanny about the way Donald Rumsfeld smiles. Maybe because his smile looks so much like a discontented grimace. In Errol Morris’ documentary “The Unknown Known,” Morris tries to find more under Rumsfeld’s cheeky demeanor than seemingly good will.
The octogenarian Rumsfeld, currently enjoying a second life as a memoirist, makes for the central subject of the film, along with archival footage of his frequent press conferences. Morris formulates his interview with the former secretary of defense around having Rumsfeld read off dozens of his memos.
Under the President George W. Bush administration, Rumsfeld presided over the Department of Defense. Under his direction as secretary, he expanded the department into all manners of warfare ventures that were never adequately explained or justified to the public.
Morris’s documentary concerns itself primarily with showing off Rumsfeld’s confounding semantic acrobatic tricks. “The Unknown Known” leads with Rumsfeld’s most quotable circuitous rhetorical nugget of logic: “Because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that 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.”
While “The Unknown Known” might not be revolutionary in terms of shedding an all important new light on Rumsfeld as a historical figure, Rumsfeld as the central character in Morris’s documentary is infinitely more compelling for portraying Rumsfeld’s effusive attitude.
However, it still remains unknown whether Rumsfeld’s actions will be judged kindly in time, but Morris’s attempt to catch glimpses inside the seemingly impenetrable Rumsfeld yields interesting, if less than fruitful, results.
