If not for a misplaced phone number, his contentious relationships, and his stunted height, Donald Rumsfeld might have had power to start a lot more damage than his little skirmish in Iraq.

The former defense secretary—in all his irritability and incompetence—is the subject of Andrew Cockburn's scathing new biography, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy. Among the revelations:

• Rumsfeld has a contentious relationship with his former protégé, Dick Cheney. During Rumsfeld's aborted run for president in 1988, he called up Cheney to get his endorsement. Cheney balked, saying that he was behind George Bush Sr., and Rumsfeld snapped, "Everything you are, I've made you. You owe everything to me." Cheney's reply: "I've had to make my own way since '77—I would do anything for you, but not this." They didn't speak for several years and Rumsfield even skipped the ceremony for Cheney's appointment as Bush's defense secretary. Then, asked about Cheney's potential as Bush's running mate in 2000, Rumsfield said, "He wears easily on you."

• Rumsfeld's aborted presidential campaign in 1988 was doomed due to his height. "It's a fact that tall candidates tend to do better than the mini-sized ones, Illinois power broker Ed Derwinski tells Cockburn. "Rummy is relatively short, so he looked small on stages alongside all those guys like Bush and Kemp and Dole. Rummy was the runt."

• Rumsfeld came this close to being named Ronald Reagan's vice president in 1980. When Reagan aide Richard Allen revealed that he handed George Bush Sr.'s phone number to Reagan, persuading him to call and offer Bush the vice presidency, Rumsfeld angrily phoned Allen and asked, "Why didn't you pick me?" Allen's response: "Because I didn't have your number."

• On Rummy's first day in office in as defense secretary to President Ford in 1975: "One of the secretaries had to go down to the Pentagon flower shop and purchase an expensive bouquet of flowers, which were then arranged in a vase just inside the door. According to one of those present, Rumsfeld walked in, saw the flowers, plucked them out of the vase using both hands, and without breaking stride, thrust them into the trash."

• Rummy on fatties: "Irked by one executive's weight, which he deemed to be excessive, Rumsfeld withheld the man's annual bonus until he shed some pounds."

• On a five-day river rafting party through the Grand Canyon: "In between countermanding the directions of the professional river guide, which he did on a continual basis, Rumsfeld would lecture us interminably ..." The lectures ended "only when Rumsfeld put his back out hurling buckets of water in an interraft water fight. He finished the trip strapped to a chair on the chase boat that also carried the sealed box containing the rafters' 'human waste.'"

• During cold war games, Rumsfeld "always tried to unleash the maximum amount of nuclear firepower possible" at the entire Communist bloc, Russians and Chinese together.