"He rarely lost a match." Happy Birthday Rummy

It's the birthday of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, born in Chicago, Illinois (1932). He studied political science at Princeton University, where he was the captain of the wrestling team and rarely lost a match. He went on to run for Congress as a representative for Illinois, and won his first election when he was only thirty.

He served in the Nixon administration and then in the Ford Administration, and at 43 he became the youngest Secretary of Defense in the nation's history. But when Ford lost the election in 1976, Rumsfeld left politics became the CEO of the pharmaceutical company that manufactured the artificial sweetener NutraSweet. In 1980 Fortune magazine named Rumsfeld one of the "10 Toughest Bosses in America."

He was in and out of politics throughout the 1980s and '90s, until President Bush appointed him Secretary of Defense in 2001. Since then, in his many press conferences, he's become known for his creative use of language. Last year, the humorist Hart Seely went through transcripts of Rumsfeld's many public statements and turned them into poems, collected in Pieces of Intelligence, The Existential Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld (2003).