New York Times

 OPENERS: SUITS: YOU'D BE FIRED!

   
By MARK A. STEIN       
   

Ten current or retired corporate executives -- none of them Donald J. Trump -- have publicly told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld: ''You're fired!'' Or, at least, he would be fired if he worked for any one of them.

The executives listed their bill of particulars against Mr. Rumsfeld -- himself a former C.E.O., of the drug maker G. D. Searle & Company -- in a full-page ad published in The New York Times and paid for by Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, a liberal advocacy group.

The ad read like a nightmarish version of an employee's annual review, contending ''financial mismanagement,'' ''mammoth waste,'' ''incompetent forecasting,'' ''plummeting morale'' and ''intolerance of dissent,'' all related to Mr. Rumsfeld's management of the war in Iraq.

The senior executives behind the ad were Bruce J. Klatsky, the chairman of Phillips-Van Heusen; Frank S. Greenberg, the chairman of Burlington Industries; Theodore E. Williams , the retired chief executive of Bell Industries; Bruce R. Katz, the founder of the Rockport Shoe Company; R. Warren Langley, the retired president of the Pacific Stock Exchange; Patrick J. McGrath, the retired chief executive of the advertising agency Jordan McGrath Case & Partners; Alan E. Kligerman, the C.E.O. of AkPharma Inc.; Roger Mumford, the retired president of Matzel & Mumford, a homebuilder now owned by the K. Hovnanian Company; M. Blair Hull, the retired C.E.O. of Hull Trading, now a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs; and Steven T. Kirsch, the C.E.O. of Propel Software and the founder of InfoSeek, the Internet portal he sold to the Walt Disney Company in 1999.