The Unknown Known

The Unknown Known (also known as The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld) is a 2013 American documentary film about the political career of former U.S. Secretary of Defense and congressman Donald Rumsfeld, directed by Academy Award winning documentarian and filmmaker Errol Morris. It is a summary of 33 hours of interviews that Morris conducted with Rumsfeld over eleven separate sessions during visits to Newton, Massachusetts. The film was released on April 4, 2014, by Radius-TWC, and is dedicated to the memory of Roger Ebert. Synopsis The major portion of the film is spent addressing excerpts from the countless memos, nicknamed "Yellow Perils" by his first Pentagon staff and "Snowflakes" by his second, that Rumsfeld wrote during his time as a congressman and advisor to four different presidents, twice as United States Secretary of Defense. It also focuses on a response Rumsfeld gave to a question at a U.S. Department of Defense news briefing on February 12, 2002, about the lack of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. The content of the memos are varied, covering everything from the aftermath of Watergate, to the torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, to the definition of the word "terrorism". Morris returns to the motif of snowflakes swirling within a globe throughout the documentary as he discusses the memos with Rumsfeld, the contents of which the Defense Secretary allowed him limited access to while preparing the film, and several of which Rumsfeld reads aloud on camera. At the beginning of the film, Rumsfeld argues that a major purpose of the Department of Defense is to evaluate "unknown knowns", or "the things you think you know, that it turns out you did not", to anticipate hostile actions before they take place. Illustrating his point, Rumsfeld suggests that the failure of the United States to anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor was a failure of imagination. As the interviews proceed, several times Morris attempts to point out things that Rumsfeld says which he thinks contradict either fact or Rumsfeld's own past statements, but, as noted in several reviews of the film, Rumsfeld does not always directly acknowledge what Morris is referring to or engage in deeper discourse, and at times he deflects the points raised.