That's also how Jamie McIntyre (then of CNN, now of NPR), the reporter who elicited the quote, recalls the reception: 'I remember some people were portraying it as some sort of gaffe-some bit of nonsense he had said that was convoluted and didn’t make any sense.'įew people today remember that Rumsfeld was ostensibly responding to Miklaszewski’s request for evidence. It was a laughingstock-and it fit well with a president widely mocked for his malapropisms and mis-statements. I don't remember how I first heard that quote, but I recall many people viewing it as handwaving nonsense meant to cover over reality. It's only been 12 years since Rumsfeld delivered his comment on February 12, 2002, and there are at least three distinctive phases of how it's been considered. Reading over Morris's first post, it's easy to see how just how important context remains, and just how firmly soundbites' reception is rooted in historical precedent.

No matter where you fall, it's certainly new and different, disjointed from historical experience. For most people, it's the simply the way we live now, decontextualized and fragmented. For Pollyannas, it makes communication easier than ever, flattening the playing field and removing obstructions. For Cassandras, it's a sign of how the culture has degraded into bluntness and black and white, throwing aside nuance. (Rumsfeld's remark, from those innocent pre-Twitter days, clocks in at a behemoth 244 characters.) The truism is likely reductive, but also seductive, in part because anyone can use it to advance their view of contemporary society. I won't try to summarize Morris's posts, because they're absolutely worth reading in full, and also because they're unsummarizable.īut his interviews with reporters who were present at the start got me thinking about that quote, which has become so associated with Rumsfeld that he also borrowed from it for the title of his memoir, Knowns and Unknowns. It's a truism that we live in an age of soundbites, where quick quips-or even better, anything that fits in 140 characters-are the rhetorical weapons of choice. Through the first two posts, he has begun a detailed deconstruction of that quote-the antecedents for it as far back as Keats, how Rumsfeld conducted (and generally seems to have delighted in) press briefings, how he dueled with reporters, and the secretary's relationship with evidence and reality. Morris is exploring that quote in a series of posts on The New York Times website this week. But there are also unknown unknowns-the ones we don’t know we don’t know. We also know there are known unknowns that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. As we know, there are known knowns there are things we know we know.

Known unknowns