WASHINGTON, 5 April 2004 — History is shaped in the oddest of places. Six years ago in the gym of the Bush family estate in Kennebunkport, Maine, as the president worked out, a similarly obsessive exerciser was running on the treadmill beside him. The conversation they would begin that day in August 1998 would go on to shape the course of international affairs.
That woman was Condoleezza Rice, then provost of Stanford University, an accomplished pianist who spends her little leisure time playing Brahms on the baby grand given to her by her late parents. Between games of tennis, boat trips, and hours spent on the house’s back porch, Bush’s future national security adviser would begin to give form to what would become the Bush foreign policy doctrine, a credo that would owe as much to the elegant and sardonic African-American professor from Alabama as to Bush himself. The first to brief the president each morning — and often the last to speak to him at night — is Condoleezza Rice. She now finds herself beset, charged with failing to grasp the greatest threat facing the US (global terrorism) and to recognize the crucial warning signs that should have alerted the White House to catastrophic suicide hijackings of Sept. 11.
It is a matter, in truth, that is not just for Rice to answer, as the Congress-appointed independent commission investigating the attacks has made clear by calling witnesses from the most senior positions of both the Bush and Clinton administrations.
But it is Rice who has come to be the cypher for all the alleged failings of the Bush White House. And on Thursday, when she gives her evidence before that commission, her performance will be judged not only for its personal impact, but its implications for Bush’s re-election prospects in November.
The allegations against her are serious enough in their own right, if contradictory when taken together. At once she is charged with being unaware of the existence of Al-Qaeda before the attacks, while also standing accused of dissimu lating over the nature of warnings that Al-Qaeda was about to act. But what is significant is the personal animus with which these charges have been delivered, suggestive of a deep resentment among Washington’s professional government cadre over Rice’s proximity and influence over George W. Bush.
It is a relationship that is uniquely close even within Bush’s already tight inner circle. Allocated her own cottage in the grounds of Camp David, the presidential retreat, it is with Rice — who would like to be an National Football League commissioner — with whom the president sits down to watch football. They share the same deep faith — evangelical Protestantism. But there is something more than that. The Bushes have formed an emotional connection with the resolutely single Rice that some suggest is that of a “surrogate daughter”, despite their closeness in age.
But if there is resentment over her access to the president, there is a suggestion too that there are government professionals from State, the Pentagon, FBI and CIA — never sure whether to be intimidated by Condi or to patronize her — who are seeking revenge for the White House’s use of Condoleezza Rice as the point woman in its 2002 campaign to blame everyone but itself, notably the CIA and FBI, for “failing to connect the dots” of the warnings prior to 9/11.
While few would doubt she has been a good friend to Bush, others argue that she has failed to exert the influence of her office to moderate the damaging turf wars of Bush’s Washington, most tellingly between State and Pentagon, and between Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. But beyond the internal wrangling of Washington’s political and civil service elite, there lurks the most disturbing suggestion of all. That there are those who would like to see Rice take the fall because she is a black woman who has soared so high.
A Democrat-turned-hawkish Republican, her early upbringing was in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, a self-contained universe that Rice turned away from to compete in white America on its own terms. It was a direction that in large part was dominated by her parents, the Rev. John Rice and his wife, Angelena, both college educated.
“Birmingham was odd,” she recalled recently. “It was completely segregated. But the black community built its own world. I went to ballet classes and took French lessons and etiquette classes. My father had a picture of me when I was about four sitting on Santa Claus’s lap and I have this really odd look on my face, and I wonder if that’s because I’d never been that close to a white person before.” By 1963, however, Birmingham had become a cauldron of violence as civil rights protesters were targeted by the city’s racist police chief, and Rice’s father and friends armed themselves to prevent violent whites entering black neighborhoods.
It was this that formed the unsettling background to the schooling of Rice, a brilliant student and gifted pianist who graduated from high school at15 and from university at19 fluent in four languages, having abandoned ambitions to become a concert pianist. By 26, Rice would be an assistant professor at Stanford, specializing in the military affairs of the Soviet Union — an academic path that would see her become the university’s first woman provost at 38. And it was while at Stanford that the assertive Rice caught the eye of Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser, who head-hunted her for the national security staff of George Bush Sr.
It is an incident from this time that supplies a clue to one aspect to Rice’s personality: Physically blocking President Yeltsin from seeing Bush Sr. without an appointment. It is an assertive role that Rice has fine-tuned as national security adviser to Bush Jr., telling both officials and visiting premiers (Israel’s Ariel Sharon among them) where to get off.
Among those who got the treatment was Richard Haass, former policy director at the State Department who recalled a meeting with Rice in July 2002 to discuss whether Iraq should be a priority: “Basically she cut me off and said, ‘Save your breath — the president has already decided what he’s going to do on this.”’ And although she insists that the presidential hopeful she agreed to tutor in foreign affairs has brought as much, if not more, to their partnership, the foreign policies of the Bush presidency throughout its international crises have all borne the stamp of the Rice credo.
It is a world view that emerged from her Stanford Cold War studies, which she articulated most clearly in an essay on Foreign Affairs in 2000. Then Rice insisted the guiding principals of America in the world should be the balance of power and national interest, not humanitarian interventions — a somewhat cold-hearted formulation to which Bush added that the use of that power should have a “moral” dimension that would encourage the spread of American-style democracy.
It is a unilateralist formulation that would backfire on the Bush White House when it later needed friends ... through its dismissive treatment of the UN, its rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and tearing up of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. If Rice shared these convictions with many other senior figures in the administration, her critics are now pointing to specific failings of Rice alone. It was Rice, they say, who briefed the president on the discredited claim that British intelligence had uncovered an Iraqi plot to procure terrorism — a claim for which both Bush and Rice had to apologize.
And it was Rice who suggested to the American people in a television interview the image of a mushroom cloud over the US if Saddam was not dealt with.
Now it is Rice who is being accused of having dropped the ball over Al-Qaeda, by among others the former head of counterterrorism on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, who has done little to disguise his distaste for her both in his book — Against All Enemies — and in his own devastating testimony to the 9/11 commission. And if Clarke has put Rice on the spot, the personal nature of charges against her have also won her widespread sympathy with the US public.
Rice’s own anger over the accusations has been apparent both in the photographs of her, face convulsed with anger, and in the uncharacteristic and vigorous self-defense she has delivered of both herself and Bush’s White House on television following the Clarke allegations. Interviews that have revealed Rice at her most assertive.
For a woman sometimes described as the White House’s “sphinx”, it has shown that the controlled and controlling Condi Rice, who has drilled mind and body into a singular discretion, possesses another more emotional side. It is the aspect of her personality which brought her to tears when she heard the US national anthem had been played in Britain to mark common cause with her country’s 9/11 tragedy. It is the same “transformative” passion that Rice describes when she settles to play Brahms.
If her enemies are expecting to neutralize George Bush’s closest confidante, they may be surprised.
