<i>60 Minutes II</i>: Secretary Of War

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has five grandchildren, and more than enough money to do whatever he wants for the rest of his life. At 69, he is old enough to be Osama bin Laden's father. David Martin reports on the man in charge of the war.

Rumsfeld is, in effect, the Secretary of War: He is in charge of planning and executing the battle against terrorism, the man in charge of getting bin Laden – dead or alive. And Rumsfeld makes no bones about which way he wants it. Does he care whether Osama bin Laden is captured, dead or alive?

"I don't know if it's politically correct to say you'd prefer the former, but I guess I’d prefer the former, myself. But I don't think we have much choice in it, anyway," he says.

He says he'd just as well prefer bin Laden dead: "Oh my goodness gracious, yes, after what he’s done. You bet your life."

It is undoubtedly the biggest manhunt in history in a country that is geographically and culturally as far away from the United States as you can get. Flying from Uzbekistan into Pakistan on a C-17, Rumsfeld got a brief look at Afghanistan. He saw a lunar landscape with an endless number of potential hiding places for bin Laden.

"He could end up hiding in a tunnel or a cave for another year and a half, two years, for all I know," says Rumsfeld. "We're working the caves and the tunnels. We may hit one that he’s in, we may not hit one that he’s in, but we don’t have any control over that."

The Soviet Union spent the better part of a decade trying to dig the Afghan resistance out of those caves and tunnels. It's going to take more than laser-guided bombs for the U.S. to succeed where the Soviet Union failed.

Is the U.S. searching any of the caves? "We've got rewards out, and have encouraged a number of teams of Afghan people to earn some quick money and go in and find these folks. Big reward," says Rumsfeld.

The reward is now $25 million.

Then there is Mullah Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban and chief protector of bin Laden. A Predator reconnaissance drone armed with anti-tank missiles, operated by the CIA and capable of taking high-resolution video, has been tracking Omar since the first night of the war.

The Predator has spotted Omar's personal SUV – even taken a picture of the license plate. So far Omar himself has escaped, but a lot of other senior leaders of both the Taliban and bin Laden’s al-Qaida network have not.

"It's quite a few that have been killed and or injured," says Rumsfeld. "There's one right now that is trying to get out of the country because his legs were badly damaged in an attack, a senior official. But we, we have had good, good luck in, in finding these folks, and putting weapons on them."

The badly damaged legs belong to a senior official in a humanitarian organization the U.S. believes is a front company funneling money, weapons and fighters to bin Laden. And last November that CIA Predator spotted som of the leaders of al-Qaida gathering for a meeting in a building south of Kabul. Navy jets attacked it and then, when survivors started crawling out of the ruble, the Predator fired its missiles. The CIA now believes about 50 senior members of al-Qaida were killed, including Mohammed Atef, bin Laden’s top military commander and architect of the Sept. 11 attacks.

But still Rumsfeld says he is not fully certain. "Do I have DNA on Atef? No."

"You make do the best you can in life, and what we'll do is, we'll keep pursuing these folks, and finding ‘em and trying to stop them from committing terrorist acts that kill thousands of people, and we’ll chase them and, and root ‘em out, wherever they are."

One way of rooting them out is with 5,000-pound bunker buster bombs. Another is by putting American commandos on the ground to set up ambushes.

"They have, in some cases, parachuted in, in some cases helicoptered in," says Rumsfeld. "They make judgments as to the flow of traffic on major highways. They have interdicted roads in ways that brought them in contact with people that we didn't want going certain places." He suggests that the U.S. forces may be fighting battles with enemy forces.

Running a war is a demanding job, which starts at the crack of dawn and runs well into the night. Can a 69-year-old man stand the pace of workdays that often last more than 14 hours, even after he returns home? Rumsfeld has no doubts that he can: “I enjoy work. I don't feel put upon at all."

Just before he met Martin, he was lifting weights: "Modestly doing it. Some dumbbells while I had to stand and listen to somebody talk."

Back in November, Rumsfeld left Washington on a Friday, held meetings in Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and India, much of the time flying cargo class on an Air Force transport. Late Monday night, he flew back to Washington. Tuesday night, he was the featured speaker at a black-tie gathering of national security hawks.

The military commander of the war is General Tommy Franks, who Rumsfeld meets or talks with on the phone at least twice a day. Sometimes they face the press together, but Rumsfeld himself has become the voice of the war. From the beginning, Rumsfeld used his press conferences to warn that a few pinpoint strikes by precision-guided weapons wouldn’t win this war.

He often takes a long pause before answering reporters’ questions. “I’m old fashioned. I like to engage my brain before my mouth,” he jokingly told reporters at one press conference.

Some say that he has put the thrill back in the press conference because nobody knows what he will say in response. "I just say the truth. I say what I think," he says.

Rumsfeld's briefings have earned him the ultimate cultural cachet – the opening skit on Saturday Night Live. But Rumsfeld doesn't seem to care about pop culture. His staff says that before this year the last movie he saw was "One Flw Over the Cuckoo’s Nest," which came out in 1975.

Rumsfeld says he is sure he has seen a movie since then: "I'm sure I have. My wife likes to go, and every once in a while I go with her, but if I go, I always take a book in case I don’t like it. Then I can go out and read the book."

Actually Rumsfeld is part of American culture. President Eisenhower campaigned for Rumsfeld when he first ran for Congress, in 1962. He eventually joined the Nixon administration and later became chief of staff for President Ford, a job he passed on to his protégé Dick Cheney.

In 1975, Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense the first time. He was the youngest Secretary of Defense ever. If he stays in office for one more year this time around, he will become the oldest ever.

He may be the only member of the war cabinet old enough to remember Pearl Harbor. "It was a jarring thing because I can remember seeing my parents and the radio was on. We didn't have television back in those days, of course, and the radio was on constantly and it, it, it was just such a shock to think that our country had been attacked."

Which was a greater shock, Dec. 7, 1941, or Sept. 11, 2001? Says Rumsfeld: "I think they'll both be memorable."

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