Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (3 page)

Part of Condi’s responsibilities with the Vulcans involved working with Paul Wolfowitz to set up intensive half-day training seminars for George W. that covered defense, weapons proliferation, Europe, and other topics. The chemistry between Condi and George W. allowed this process to run smoothly, and she remarked that they had a similar approach to confronting the material. When the press questioned the governor about his lack of experience in foreign affairs, he assured them that he had strong resources behind him. “I may not be able to tell you exactly the nuance of the East Timorian situation, but I’ll ask people who’ve had experience, like Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, or Dick Cheney. I am smart enough to know what I don’t know, and I have good judgment about who will either be telling me the truth, or has got some agenda that is not the right agenda.”

Condi strenuously backed the governor during these press sessions. She explained that any executive, including a governor, is accustomed to facing issues about which he or she has minimal previous experience. Gathering information and making important decisions on items as they come up is a natural part of the territory, even for a president in training. Condi’s executive experience came from her role as provost at Stanford, the number-two post just beneath the president, responsible for the $1.5 billion budget and administrative decisions. George’s executive experience came from his years in the oil industry in West Texas, as a managing partner of a very profitable baseball team, and as governor of Texas. “As an executive,” said Condi, “you’re always asked to make important decisions about which your knowledge base is relatively slim. Someone might ask me to support a million-dollar physics telescope. I don’t know a lot about that, but I can ask hard questions and get a sense about whether it’s important, and prioritize it against other issues.”

When the press pointed out the candidate’s inability to name heads of state and his slips in vocabulary, Condi dismissed the attacks as a “parlor game” played by Washington pundits. She stressed the experience he had gained in both business and politics and reminded them that every president relies upon a team of advisors and experts. “Governor Bush has not spent the last ten years of his life at Council on Foreign Relations meetings,” she said. “He’s spent the last ten years of his life building a business and being governor of a state.”

She also had to discuss her own limitations and admitted that the candidate was not the only one with much to learn. Condi’s career as a Soviet scholar gave her vast insight into that part of the world but little background in the political histories of other regions. She did not have a strong grasp of America’s policies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, or other non-European nations, and had to undergo her own crash course in those areas. “I’ve been pressed to understand parts of the world that have not been part of my scope,” she said. “I’m really a Europeanist.”

Because George W. did not like to read prepared manuals about policy or national security, Condoleezza had to devise a more interpersonal approach to his tutoring sessions. She set up question-and-answer roundtables for him and the advisors. Another of her primary tasks was drafting a clear-cut nuclear weapons policy for the candidate. The Vulcans worked for a year on this issue at specially arranged policy retreats, and their efforts culminated in Bush’s nuclear policy speech delivered on May 23, 2000.

The speech was Condoleezza’s baby. In addition to reviewing it with the Vulcans, she sought feedback from her former White House boss Brent Scowcroft, former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George P. Shultz, General Colin Powell, and others. Once she felt the content was as precise as possible, she spent hour after hour going over every line with Bush. A crucial part of her job was to ensure that he understood every facet of the policy and the background of every issue contained in the speech. Condoleezza and Paul Wolfowitz created a companion document containing questions and answers about topics in the speech for Bush’s study. But George W. didn’t like to work in isolation, reading and integrating facts on his own, so they scheduled verbal question-and-answer sessions.

The heart of the nuclear policy speech recommended reducing America’s nuclear arsenal; removing more weapons from high-alert, “hair-trigger” status; and immediately building a missile defense system. “America must build effective missile defenses,” Bush stated, “based on the best available options, at the earliest possible date. Our missile defense must be designed to protect all fifty states—and our friends and allies and deployed forces overseas—from missile attacks by rogue nations, or accidental launches.” The Vulcans’ policy stressed the need to erase the Cold War mind-set and face facts about new types of threats. “The Cold War era is history,” Bush continued in the speech. “Our nation must recognize new threats, not fixate on old ones. On the issue of nuclear weapons, the United States has an opportunity to lead to a safer world—both to defend against nuclear threats and reduce nuclear tensions.”

As the campaign progressed, George W. and Condi’s smooth-running, efficient working style solidified their friendship and further enhanced their respect for each other. As a result, George W. felt confident about bringing Condi into other areas of the campaign. Just as her friend Deborah predicted, she was called upon to make appearances that she had not anticipated. Most of these involved the “W is for Women” program. A major goal of the Bush campaign was to lure women voters from the Democratic party, and the “W is for Women” tour featured George W.’s mother, Barbara; his wife, Laura; and Richard Cheney’s wife, Lynne. Condi joined the troupe in mid-October 2000 as the trip wound through Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

“W is for Women” was one part of a calculated move to undo what previous Republican campaigns and National Conventions had done—create a gender gap between the parties. Barbara Bush and her group sought to portray George W. as the face of a new and improved Republican party committed to education and women’s health—a far cry from the angry, warrior-like tone of the pro-gun, anti-abortion, macho-white-male party of past GOP conventions. Things would be different, Barbara Bush stressed, because George W. is comfortable with tough and capable women. “He’s always been surrounded by strong, smart women,” Barbara said at a stop in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. “Sometimes by choice, sometimes by birth.”

The “W is for Women” theme was also in full force at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, where keynote speakers included Laura Bush, Elizabeth Dole, Lynne Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice. In her speech, laced with personal anecdotes, Condi talked about her family’s proud legacy of college education, her father’s decision to join the Republican Party, and the integrity of the candidate she had come to know well. “George W. Bush, the George W. Bush that I know,” she said, “is a man of uncommonly good judgment. He is focused and consistent. He believes that we Americans are at our best when we exercise power without fanfare and arrogance. He speaks plainly and with a positive spirit.”

Throughout the campaign, political commentators discussed where Condoleezza Rice would be placed in the new Bush administration. The two positions mentioned most often were national security advisor and secretary of state. When asked about this herself, Condi always deflected the debate and said that her dream job was to be commissioner of the National Football League. She wasn’t joking. “Anybody who really knows me knows that that’s absolutely true,” she told one interviewer, “and that if the NFL job comes up, the governor is on his own.” With a football coach for a father, she had learned more about football by age ten than most fans discover in a lifetime. She loves to talk about football and to describe where it fits in the bigger picture as a vital part of the culture. “I actually think football, with all due respect to baseball, is a kind of national pastime that brings people together across social lines, across racial lines. And I think it’s an important American institution.” On another level, she is fascinated with the comparisons between military and football history. “Military history has swung back and forth between advantage to the offense and advantage to the defense,” she explained. “Football has that kind of pattern, too.”

Like other women in Bush’s inner political circle, including his long-time advisor Karen Hughes, Condi is a strong personality who is fully capable of holding her own in a male-dominated field. Although Colin Powell has remarked that she was “raised first and foremost to be a lady,” Condi cannot be stereotyped as a Southern belle who depends upon her Southern charm to smooth over difficult situations. In an article written in the last weeks of the campaign,
The New York Times
’ Elaine Sciolino wrote that members of the foreign-policy team did not dare speak a word to reporters without getting Condi’s permission first. “‘You make me sound like a tyrant!’ she exclaimed, then added with a smile, ‘We are disciplined, we are disciplined.’”

Her former boss Brent Scowcroft has remarked that while Condi is on the whole a pleasant person, she also has a tough side. “She’s got this quiet demeanor,” he said, but anyone who “thought they could push her around learned you could only try that once. She’s tough as nails.” In the same article, former CIA Chief Robert Gates recalled a dramatic moment during Condi’s first post at the White House as a director of the national security staff. An official from the treasury department attempted to undermine her authority, and “with a smile on her face she sliced and diced him,” said Gates. “He was a walking dead man after that.”

Paul Brest, a friend of Condi’s who was dean of Stanford Law School when she was provost of the university, describes her as “both very upbeat and very down to business. You have a sense that she’s having fun with what she does as long as other people are behaving themselves. The only time I have ever seen her be curt, because she’s an extremely gracious person, is when somebody was rude or clearly out of line. When somebody’s out of line with Condi, she lets them know very quickly.”

Being a woman in the high echelons of foreign policy is unique in itself, but being single added an even rarer dimension to Condi’s role as George W.’s top foreign policy tutor during his presidential campaign. During her two-year stint in the first Bush administration, she elicited hordes of marriage proposals, and rumor had it in the White House that she had talked about returning to Stanford because she wanted to settle down and get married. Now, like then, her high profile job brings her plenty of attention from the opposite sex, but as of yet she has not found her soul mate.

There’s still a possibility that the right proposal will come along one day, of course. She was engaged once (as we will see in Chapter Five) and has dated several famous men, including NFL football players. Her football boyfriends brought her into another uniquely American inner circle—NFL wives (and girlfriends)—a group that socializes and sits together at the games. But other than her one close call with marriage, she has not made long-term plans with any of her boyfriends. “I am a very deeply religious person,” she said in October 2001, “and I have assumed that if I’m meant to get married that God is going to find somebody that I can live with.” (Condi’s single status allows her to devote all of her energy to her job, something that undoubtedly crossed the president’s mind in mid-2002 when Karen Hughes resigned and returned with her family to Dallas. Without a husband or children vying for her energies and attention, Condi is perhaps more apt to stay with the job.)

Shortly after the thirty-three-day post-election debacle of 2000, Bush began announcing his choices for senior staff positions. On December 18, he held a press conference to name three positions: White House counsel (Al Gonzales), counselor to the president (Karen Hughes), and national security advisor—Condoleezza Rice. “Dr. Rice is not only a brilliant person,” he told the press, “she is an experienced person. She is a good manager. I trust her judgment. America will find that she is a wise person, and I’m so honored [she is] joining the administration.” George W. asked Condi to make a few remarks, which included the following:

This is an extraordinary time for America because our values are being affirmed, and it’s important to always remember what those values are at home. And I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. I did not go to integrated schools until I was in tenth grade and we moved to Denver, Colorado. And there’s very often a lot said about whether we’ve made any progress as one America. I think that you will see in the presidency of George W. Bush recognition of how important it is that we continue the last 30-plus years of progress toward one America; that he will have an administration that is inclusive, an administration that is bipartisan, and perhaps most importantly, an administration that affirms that united we stand and divided we fall, and I’m very proud to have a chance to be a part of it.

On Bush’s first official day of business in the White House, January 22, 2001, he led a swearing-in ceremony for senior members of his staff in the East Room of the White House. With Bush’s Senior Advisor Karl Rove (whom George W. calls “Boy Genius”) at her right, Condi raised her right hand and said:

I, Condoleezza Rice, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

One journal expressed the behind-the-scenes work of the national security advisor as part of the system that molds the president as much as it allows him to shape policy. “Advisors such as Rice and Kissinger must not only be prominent personalities,” stated an editorial in
New Presence
, “but also have the ability to integrate diverse outlooks and approaches and—when the situation calls for it—to step back and allow the fruits of their labor to become the property of those whom they serve. Simply put, the American president is a collective and collectively created person.”