The Mystery of Condi RiceWhere did she learn how to play the game?
Posted Monday, Dec. 17, 2007, at 7:37 AM ET
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StumbleUponAnd as I've said, this particular White House fit her particularly well. To the outside world, it might have seemed as though the second Bush administration was a seething mass of conservative and neoconservative ideologists, but Rice appears to have figured out, over time, that this White House was no different from any other: What mattered was access to the president, and this president (as I'm convinced history will show) was always more interested in appearing tough and decisive than in following ideas to their logical conclusion. Though it took her a few years to establish that access—Bush seems to have spent his first four years listening a lot more closely to Dick Cheney—Rice eventually got it.
Most of the reviews of this book will doubtless focus on its second half, which dissects Rice's tenure as national security adviser, and then her first three years as secretary of state. Bumiller has documented—from the point of view of Rice and her team—much of what was known by rumor, or from Bob Woodward's books, about the complete breakdown in relations between the Defense Department and the State Department in the months between Sept. 11 and the invasion of Iraq, as well as the foreign-policy hiccups produced by the vice president's back-channel conniving. As others have pointed out, and no doubt will do again, this was precisely the policy-making environment that produced the disaster of the Iraq war.
Rice's point of view, as transmitted by Bumiller, is clear enough: "Not my fault." While she concedes, directly or indirectly, that Cheney and Rumsfeld got the better of her—in their decisions on handling enemy combatants, for example, which emerged from private meetings with the president—she places the blame for the result squarely on them, without ever quite saying so: Until she had the staff and the prestige of the Department of State behind her, she implies, all she could do was mediate.
Others have argued that it was precisely Rice's failure to control the warring cabinet secretaries that led to the Iraq disaster. Perhaps her experience in the first Bush White House—a more gentlemanly administration, and one in which the president's top foreign-policy adviser actually was the secretary of state, not the vice president—led her astray. Perhaps Cheney and Rumsfeld ignored her, since they thought she was a token. Or perhaps it's better to wait for the rest of their memoirs and decide. There will be plenty of blame to go around, eventually.
The book does have a bland overall flavor—I couldn't quite make out whether Bumiller actually liked Rice. And it doesn't fully answer the No. 1 burning question about Condi's personal life, except to point out that she once almost married a professional football player, though no one seems to know why it fell through. She does seem strangely comfortable weekending with the president and Mrs. Bush, an ideal way to spend time if one were trying to avoid deeper emotional ties—as well as a neat way to cut out the influence of all those men who have wives, families, and other places to go.
But Bumiller may be reflecting the blandness, or rather the remoteness, of Rice herself. At least in my limited experience, Rice almost never says anything off the record that she wouldn't say in a television studio. She isn't chilly—on the contrary, she is unfailingly warm and polite—but she isn't exactly revelatory either. Though she does drop hints. "I never had a conversation with the president about Rumsfeld moving on," she says, for example—though it is also clear that she offered his job to Robert Gates, Rumsfeld's replacement, while Rumsfeld was still in office. That sounds to me like she did have a hand in his moving on but isn't anxious to claim credit for it, at least not at the moment. Which is very Condi: take no prisoners, leave no traces, express surprise that anyone is upset about it—then smile for the camera, and move on.
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Remarks from the Fray:
These occasional paeans to the brilliant and talented Condoleezza Rice never cease to amaze me. Among some in the ranks of political commentary, Rice somehow is perceived as a strong and independent voice in the Bush administration, or even as held back by the manifest limitations of that administration, against her own better judgment. You'd think that after seven years of observing this bunch, people would know better. But apparently not. In this latest version by Applebaum, the line is that Rice lacked a strong position within the administration to be able to persuade the president of her superior judgment on, well you name it: the doomed plans for the Iraq War, the dysfunction between the Defense and State Depts., the horrendous detainee policies, and so on. As Applebaum puts it, "Until she had the staff and the prestige of the Department of State behind her, [Rice] implies, all she could do was mediate." I suppose when you're just a measly National Security Advisor, no one is going to give a hoot what you think.
Of course this whole line of thinking is utter nonsense, and to the extent that Rice fosters it, very underhanded, craven and self-serving revisionism. In reality, Rice's tenure as Secretary of State is right in keeping with Colin Powell's ineffectiveness in that role. Her only role in the administration – her singular talent – has been to sit safely on the sidelines of substantive discussions, then wheedle her way into the president's granite-encased brain, figure out what he wants (i.e., what Cheney, and until last year Rumsfeld, have connived to convince him of), and communicate that back to the president in a way that assures him that "yeah, that's what I want," and then to the outside world with more of an academic and PR gloss than Bush is able to muster. In short, she has no substantive role, never has, in this administration. As another Frayster once succinctly put it, she "flips the pancakes."
Rice strikes me as very similar to Alberto Gonzales in her place in the administration, and in the political landscape. Regardless of whatever talents she may possess, she got where she is by hitching her wagon squarely onto Bush in the only way that is possible, by sucking up to him and ignoring/camouflaging his deficiencies. And when the Bush administration rides off next January, she'll ride off with them (if she doesn't take an earlier train out), most likely never to amount to much of anything in national politics or government again. She'll write a dull and loyal book, again to be chock full of revisionist history no doubt, and take a professorship somewhere.
Unlike Gonzales, though, Rice has done comparatively well in the PR department, at least on her own behalf. Indeed, that has been her only thing that comes close to success. But try as she may to keep her finely manicured hands clean of the mess created by this administration, all the blood and dirt from that mess can't be avoided or powdered over. She has been the chief apologist for a horrendous foreign policy, and I suspect her story in the end is one of talent squandered by weakness of character and seduction of power.
--Steve-R
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Applebaum assures us that "Condi has now dispensed with pretty much everyone who underestimated her to begin with, most notably Donald Rumsfeld, but for all practical purposes Dick Cheney, too."
And yet when it came time to replace Phil Zelikow as her State Dept. advisor, Condi chose the devout neocon Elliot Cohen. And yet when it became necessary to find another job for Wolfowitz after his World Bank debacle, Condi offered him the chairmanship of the International Security Advisory Board, an influential State Dept. advisory panel.
Are these the actions of someone who has aced out Dick Cheney? Unlikely, unless Condi has elected to out-dick Dick and carry the banner of neocon aggression.
Condi remains a token, the calming and ostensibly reasonable face of a radical Bush foreign policy that has scared the crap out of our allies and is increasingly scaring the crap out of the American people. Until Condi can make a State Dept. appointment that isn't straight out of the neocon handbook, one can only conclude that we are still watching an episode of Cheney In Charge.
--Thomas Cassidy
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A politician, not a pragmatist. I suppose I should read this book, because my perception of Condi has been that she as been nothing other than a mouthpiece and enabler for the administration, more specifically, for Bush himself. The State department was excluded in the run-up to Iraq? Ok. But did Condi have an opinion on the war? A differing opinion? She's no Colin Powell.
When the strategy shifted from democratic rollover to realist negotiations, she was right there, never batting an eye to the policy 180. What is the Rice doctrine? What are her policy guidelines? Listen to the boss, play the game.
--jwschmidt
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(12/20)