Known and Unknown: A Memoir "learned nothing and forgotten nothing". Known and Unknown: A Memoir Known and Unknown: A Memoir is an autobiographical book by Donald Rumsfeld, an American politician and businessman who served as Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 and again from 2001 to 2006 (among many other positions). He published it through Penguin Group USA in February 2011. It covers a variety of his experiences such as working as a Republican in the U.S. House in the late-1960s, serving in the Ford Administration during the Watergate and Vietnam crises, and serving during the George W. Bush Administration through the Abu Ghraib
Known and Unknown: A Memoir the aspect of both knowledge and non-knowledge as being equally constitutive for political decisionmaking. They assume that the cognitive frame for political practice is determined by the relationship between "what we know, what we do not know, what we cannot know and" (according to the authors, being left out by Rumsfeld) "what we do not like to know". The cover depicts Rumsfeld during a get-away trip to Taos, which journalist Ben Smith has suggested conveys the notion of being "detached from the Beltway". Rumsfeld begins the book by recounting his famous 1983 meeting with Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. He recalls