Donald Rumsfeld personified idea of never quitting

In the mid-2000s, I spent two years as senior military assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, acting essentially as his military gatekeeper and translating his orders to the U.S. military via the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Before joining his team, I had been a Navy one-star admiral and commander of Enterprise Carrier Strike Group, in charge of 10,000 sailors and a dozen ships in combat in the Arabian Gulf.

I mention that because my duties suddenly shifted from a pinnacle of command at sea to overseeing administrative misery: making sure the PowerPoint briefs the secretary saw had page numbers in the right place (lower right corner), that our protocol team put up the right flags when foreign leaders came to the Pentagon (we blew that more than once, to the secretary's extreme annoyance), and that the schedule ran on time (it never quite did).

But I had one other duty that defined the tour, and epitomized my two years around Don Rumsfeld: the game of squash. For those unfamiliar, squash consists of hitting a very small, dense black ball in an indoor court about the size of a racquetball venue, or roughly 20 feet by 30 feet.

The front wall has a tin strip at the bottom, and if you hit it you lose the point. If you hit your opponent — and it hurts like hell — you win the point.

Rumsfeld, who died on Wednesday, became devoted to the game in his middle years, and was intensely competitive. He would often leave blood on the walls from bouncing off them hard.

Almost every afternoon, after the end of the workday, either I or my civilian equivalent, Larry Di Rita, would walk down to the squash courts in the Pentagon and do battle with the secretary. While both Larry and I had been varsity squash players at Annapolis on nationally ranked teams, and were more than two decades younger than the secretary, Rumsfeld would generally give as good as he got on those hardwood floors.

So what did I learn on those afternoons about Don Rumsfeld?

I never met a more intense competitor. He also personified the idea of never quitting. Like Winston Churchill, someone he admired, he was a proponent of the dictum: “Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in.”

Godspeed and open water, Mr. Secretary. I hope there is a squash court in heaven for you.

James Stavridis

Bloomberg Opinion