Success Quote by Donald Rumsfeld

A reprimand disguised as humility, Rumsfeld's line tries to moralize the one commodity Washington trades in endlessly: blame. On its face, it's a plea for restraint and empathy. The kicker is the second sentence, which turns empathy into a veto: you cannot judge because you were not there. It sounds generous, but it functions like a procedural motion to table the argument.

That is the specific intent: dampen the public sport of retroactive accountability, especially when administrations change hands and the scoreboard gets rewritten. Coming from Rumsfeld, a defining figure of the post-9/11 national security state, the subtext reads less like kindness and more like institutional self-defense. "You didn't walk in their shoes" is a tidy way to launder policy choices into "complex circumstances", to move hard decisions out of the realm of ethics and into the foggy terrain of situational necessity. It implicitly asks the listener to privilege insider knowledge over outside judgment.

The context matters because Rumsfeld lived through the most aggressive phase of modern executive power: wars sold with certainty, managed with improvisation, justified with classified rationales. In that world, accountability is always one election away, and the easiest way to keep it at bay is to frame criticism as ignorance of burdens only decision-makers can understand.

It's also a message to his own camp: don't scorch the earth when you leave, because you'll want the same courtesy when it's your turn to re-enter the arena. The line flatters the governing class as uniquely encumbered, then demands the public treat that encumbrance as exoneration.