By JACOB HEILBRUNN
CONDOLEEZZA RICE An American Life: A Biography.
By Elisabeth Bumiller
Illustrated. 400 pp. Random House. $27.95.
Condoleezza Rice is a survivor. Of the foreign policy members of the original Bush cabinet, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld are gone. Vice President Dick Cheney is on the defensive. It’s Rice, shunted to the sidelines during President Bush’s first term, who is now in the ascendant. The signs of her new influence as secretary of state are everywhere.
Rice’s former deputy Stephen Hadley succeeded her as national security adviser. She helped ensure that her old boss Robert Gates would become defense secretary. The United States is actively pushing for a Middle East peace settlement, negotiating with North Korea and reaching out to Western Europe. And the most that hard-liners like the former United Nations ambassador John Bolton can do is complain that Rice lacks the gumption to stand up for America’s true interests and that Bush “does not supervise her enough.”
The volte-face Rice has presided over is also a very personal one. During Bush’s first term, few officials publicly championed the Iraq war more fervently than did Rice, who dressed down skeptics as though they were errant schoolchildren in need of a starchy governess. She turned on old mentors like the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, who in August 2002 had the temerity to cast doubt on the wisdom of attacking Baghdad. So is she simply an opportunist who subordinates herself to her superiors? Or does Rice actually stand for something beyond smoothing her own political ascent?
In “Condoleezza Rice: An American Life,” Elisabeth Bumiller offers a fine opportunity to assess her. Bumiller is well prepared for the task: a Washington reporter for The New York Times, she covered the White House from Sept. 10, 2001, to 2006. She brings a keen eye to Rice, probing not only her tenure as a policy maker and her close ties to George W. Bush, but also her personal and professional past. Bumiller has conducted many interviews, including 10 with Rice herself. Several books about Rice have already appeared, but this one is probably the most measured, insightful and comprehensive.
As Bumiller astutely notes, both Bush and Rice are the products of American elites: Bush is the descendant of Northeastern WASPs, and Rice comes from the Southern black patriciate. While both are outwardly supremely self-confident, they share lingering resentments about being underestimated and taken for granted. But there is one important difference: while Bush spent many years indulging himself before he found his vocation, Rice had a steely drive for success from the beginning, imparted by her parents, John and Angelena Rice, during her childhood in Birmingham, Ala., in the early 1960s. The pressure was intense; according to Bumiller, “John and Angelena poured their hearts into the project of their lives: the teaching, molding and polishing of Condoleezza.”
Whether it was at piano, ballet, etiquette or French, Rice was expected to excel. Her parents piled so many books by her bedside table, Bumiller writes, that “she stopped reading for pleasure, and does not to this day.” The family’s self-help philosophy extended to the civil rights movement: Rice still resents the notion that Northerners traveled to the South and “saved” the helpless locals. Though her parents tried to shield their daughter, as far as possible, from racial tensions, she could hardly avoid having had an acute sense of who really wielded power in the South, given the turmoil in what was known as “Bombingham.”
Until she went to the University of Denver, however, Rice had only a passing interest in politics. That changed in 1973 when she took an introductory course in international politics taught by Josef Korbel, a Czech refugee and the father of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Rice was spellbound by Korbel’s depiction of the scheming and betrayals that made Stalin dictator. She became a staunch realist, shunning sentiment in foreign policy, and grew fascinated by the Communist Party’s ruthless exercise of power, immune to the normal restraints that operate in a democratic society.
Rice, you might say, pursued a very realistic policy to advance her own career. At the heart of her seamless rise has been her ability to attach herself to mentors, whom she has discarded once they outlived their usefulness. It was Scowcroft who provided her entree into the traditionally clubby oak-and-port world of the Council on Foreign Relations. He had been impressed by Rice’s tenacity at a Stanford University dinner with arms control specialists in 1985, and three years later offered her a job in George H. W. Bush’s administration, as a Soviet analyst for the National Security Council. There she would watch the country she had become an expert on disappear. In 1993, Stanford’s new president, Gerhard Casper, tapped her to become provost; Rice slashed the budget and challenged proponents of affirmative action (from which she herself had benefited), earning the enmity of many students and much of the faculty for her blunt style. Rice’s credo, as she told one protégée, was that “people may oppose you, but when they realize you can hurt them, they’ll join your side.”
Rice’s biggest coup, of course, was befriending George W. Bush. She wooed him. According to Bumiller, “Bush did not know many black people well, and it made him feel good about himself that he got along so easily with Rice.” Rice, in turn, “could see that he needed her far more than his father had, and that made her feel important and vital.” One big plus in her favor was that she was an exercise maniac; her friendship with Bush was forged on the elliptical trainer.
Despite their close relationship, Bush had only a hazy notion of what role a national security adviser should play. Bumiller chides Rice for catering to him: “As had been the case with the other important men in her life — Casper, Korbel, Scowcroft, her father — Rice would do what the president wanted.” There can be little doubt that Rice was badly out of her depth. Bumiller reports that Vice President Cheney, in the first days of the administration, tried to usurp her authority to run National Security Council meetings in Bush’s absence. Rice was stunned. “Mr. President,” she said, “this is what national security advisers do.” She won this battle, but lost the war. Cheney and Rumsfeld simply performed an end run, meeting with Bush in the Oval Office to oversee foreign policy and turning Rice’s position into a ceremonial one in which she obediently parroted the administration line on spreading freedom and democracy around the globe.
With another year to go before Bush leaves office, Bumiller’s final remarks are necessarily inconclusive, but she observes: “It was obvious from Rice’s many metamorphoses that her real ideology was not idealism or realism or defending the citadels of freedom, although she displayed elements of all of them. Her real ideology was succeeding.” Rice’s shortcoming has been, more often than not, to define success in narrowly personal terms, which is why she prostrated herself before Bush. Still, her flurry of diplomatic moves indicates that she’s aware she must tote up some actual accomplishments or risk complete irrelevance. For Rice, survival is no longer enough.
Jacob Heilbrunn, a regular contributor to the Book Review, is the author of “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.”
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