The Black History of the White House (38 page)

As president, Bush mostly evaded the issue, primarily because he had very little to say beyond conservative clichés and bromides. When asked about his civil rights record two years after being in office, he began with a vague reference to Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and then his voice began to trail off. Perhaps he suddenly realized the foolishness of equating two appointments with a civil rights policy agenda. Perhaps not. Powell and Rice were sometimes sent to speak to black audiences or respond when a racial situation arose, such as when Rice was sent to talk to blacks after the Hurricane Katrina crisis. There were points of
conflicts between the two; for instance, Powell wanted to attend the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, while Rice opposed U.S. participation almost from the beginning of the Bush administration. Powell was also a strong, longtime supporter of affirmative action, while Rice was less so.

The politically moderate Colin Powell was never really welcome in the West Wing, intimidating to Bush and anathema to Cheney, but Condoleezza Rice would rise to become an integral force among the president's innermost circle. While Powell's role diminished daily until he was finally pushed out at the end of the president's first term, Rice's position grew stronger as she was promoted from National Security Advisor to Secretary of State. Certainly, no other African American woman has held such a high staff position, and only one other woman, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, achieved the same power and reach.

Rice's personal closeness to Bush was well known (she once accidentally referred to Bush as “my husband” while speaking at a dinner hosted by
New York Times
bureau chief Philip Taubman
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) and likely protected her from blame for an embarrassing series of intelligence failures on her watch as National Security Advisor—from missing all the signals that Al Qaeda was preparing to attack the United States to leading the false charge that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—that would have led to the firing of most anyone else. She served as Bush's brain on foreign affairs in many instances and personally tutored him during his campaign for president in 2000. Ultimately, her alliance with the administration's neoconservatives during Bush's first term, moderated during the second when their discredited policies had obviously failed and their influence waned, left her a poor legacy overall.

However, on domestic and race issues, Rice did not represent the politics of the far right, where many contemporary black Republicans have chosen to situate themselves. During an interview with the
Washington Times
, she once described slavery and the role it played in the founding of this country as a national “birth defect.”

“Black Americans were a founding population,” she said. “Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together—Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That's not a very pretty reality of our founding.” As a result, Rice told the paper's editors and reporters, “descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that. That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today.”
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Not only has she been soft on affirmative action, but she appears to be agnostic on abortion—calling herself at times “mildly pro-choice”
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—and libertarian on other social issues that are dear to the Republican Party's right wing. Perhaps most galling to the political right, she does not vilify the Civil Rights Movement or bash race-related concerns. This would explain, in part, her relatively low profile in Republican circles after a brief attempt to encourage her to run for president in 2008. Nearly all modern-day black Republicans serve the conservative movement's purposes by their willingness to use their race to attack efforts at antiracism, something Rice has been hesitant to do.

There were few blacks among Bush's higher staff and very, very few African American women. Indeed, a number of high-ranking conservative black women were brought in by Rice, including some of her former students, such as Jendayi Frazer
and former Rice coauthor Kiron K. Skinner. Frazer worked with Rice for the National Security Council and later became ambassador to South Africa. Skinner is a noted and admiring writer about Ronald Reagan and at this writing is a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where Rice once served as provost. In the main, however, Rice spent her days working with older, conservative, old-school white males. By all evidence, Cheney and Rumsfeld demonstrated little tolerance or respect for anyone they did not consider their equal, a category that certainly included Rice. However, her strong relationship with the president shielded her from the worst aggression and allowed her to survive the vicious internal politics of the administration.

It is notable that McCain never seriously considered Rice as a vice presidential running mate, instead choosing the ill-prepared, ignorant, and vapid Alaska governor Sarah Palin. While he selected Palin with the thought that she could help bring the party's far-right base along, he also may have rejected Rice for expressing early on a racial sympathy for Obama's campaign. She has never revealed whom she voted for, but she joined millions of other African Americans who gushed with emotion after his victory.
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In July 2010, in a demonstration that she has not lost touch with black culture as some have argued, Rice performed with “Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin in a fund-raising concert for a program to increase arts awareness among urban children. Rice is an accomplished classical pianist who plays regularly with a chamber music group in Washington and has performed publicly with revered cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Her concert with Aretha Franklin, held at Philadelphia's Mann Music Center, included classical pieces, patriotic songs, and Franklin standards such as “Respect” and “I Say a Little Prayer.” Franklin was a strong
supporter of Obama during the 2008 campaign and almost stole the show at his inauguration when she performed with a much talked-about matching coat and hat. Both Rice and Franklin agreed that educational budget cuts have disproportionately targeted music programs and the arts.
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In the end, Rice held the most powerful political position ever achieved by an African American woman in the United States. She wielded real political authority that went far beyond the symbolism of high office. Ultimately, however, that position did not translate into policy or political benefits for U.S. black communities, other communities of color, working people, or women in any significant manner. Although her tasks did not include domestic issues, she bears a responsibility, along with Powell, for defending and advancing the administration's deleterious policies overall.

Beyond Powell and Rice, there were few other African Americans visible in Bush's inner circle or his staff at the White House. One individual was Claude Allen, who held the highly important position of Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy. The job required coordinating the president's domestic policy agenda.

According to the
Washington Post
, Allen earned $161,000 annually, the highest salary paid in the White House, the same amount that was paid to Karl Rove, Andrew Card, and Stephen Hadley, among others. After graduating from college, he had gone to work for far-right Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC). He later worked as Secretary of Health and Human Resources for Virginia governor James S. Gilmore III (R) in the late 1990s. Before coming to the White House in 2005, he had been deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for the administration. He also became a protégé of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when the latter was a judge
on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Cut from the same radical-right political mold as Clarence Thomas, he was nominated to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Like Thomas, he had no judicial experience or any significant writings. He was rated partially unqualified by the American Bar Association. Bush later withdrew his nomination in the face of fierce opposition from the NAACP, People for the American Way, and a number of feminist groups. In January 2005, Bush brought him to the White House. As domestic policy chief, he helped develop Bush's position on a wide range of labor, health, housing, education, and other issues, always from a hard conservative posture. He pushed for abstinence-based sex education and called for expanding the No Child Left Behind program.

A year after coming to the White House, Allen suddenly and inexplicably resigned. At first, the White House stated that he was leaving to spend more time with his family. In fact, Allen was in legal trouble. Despite his $161,000 salary, he had been caught stealing about $5,000 in what the police called a “refund scheme” at the retail stores Target and Hecht's. Allegedly, Allen would purchase an item, leave the store and put it in his car, return to the store, get the same item off the shelf, and ask for a refund on his credit card.
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Like most contemporary black conservatives, Allen was sharply critical of liberals for what he considered their lack of moral consistency and dismissal of family values.

A crisis provides an opportunity to bring about change, though such opportunities are not always seized. In terms of race politics and black history, Bush's defining moment was his response to the Hurricane Katrina crisis. Despite warnings that the storm would be devastating, almost no one in the administration, including President Bush, acted on the situation
with appropriate urgency. While the administration seemed incapable of getting help to the city, tens of thousands of media and private services descended upon New Orleans to offer aid and make the plight of the people there known to the world. What appeared to be a callous disregard for thousands of people—disproportionately black and poor—clinched African American opinion toward Bush. That, and the consistent rejection of Bush's Iraq War by black Americans, left him with one of the lowest, if not the lowest, ranking of any president by African Americans. In one controversial poll conducted by NBC and the
Wall Street Journal
in 2005, Bush's approval rating among African Americans had dropped to 2 percent. Although there was criticism that the survey only interviewed 89 blacks out of 809 interviewees, most experts still agreed that approval was under 15 percent, a historic low by any measure.
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While African Americans for the most part found it difficult to penetrate the White House as policy shapers, there would be other avenues through which a black presence would be felt. Although many genres of black music had been performed at the White House, significantly, perhaps the single most original and deeply rooted form of black creative expression was absent from the home of the president for more than the first sixty years of its existence: jazz. As music and as political opportunity, jazz in the White House would become another prism through which the nation's racial politics would manifest.

Jazz in the (White) House

Duke Ellington has a White House story. On his seventieth birthday, April 29, 1969, his long career at the top of the jazz world was celebrated by President Richard Nixon with a dinner at the White House. At that event, Ellington was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award given by the United States to a citizen. After more than seven decades of evolution and global impact, jazz and one of its grand masters were finally getting their due. Ellington biographer John Edward Hasse referred to the event as “the capstone of his career.”
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Ellington's relationship to the White House dated back to the Roosevelts. As early as February 16, 1934, Ellington had offered to play for President Franklin Roosevelt's White House in a time when Eleanor Roosevelt was actively expanding the number and range of performances at the residence, including many black artists. However, Ellington and a number of other famous acts, such as the Andrews Sisters and Igor Stravinsky, were turned down, primarily due to scheduling issues.
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Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson had encounters with Ellington as well. On September 29, 1950, he met with Truman at the White House to personally present him with a copy of a musical piece he had written, titled “Harlem,” and a portion of his Toscanini-commissioned manuscript, “Portrait of New York Suite.”
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He admired the fact that Truman—albeit under pressure—had desegregated the military. Ellington planned to premiere his “Harlem” piece in January 1951 for a NAACP fundraiser at New York's Metropolitan Opera House. Later, in November 1950, in a letter to Truman, he noted that the proceeds from the upcoming concert “will be used to help fight for your civil rights program—to stamp out segregation,
discrimination, bigotry and a variety of intolerances in our own American society.”
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Truman's civil rights program was more mirage than reality, so it is not clear if Ellington was being kind or naïve. He was also recognized by Eisenhower, although it is unknown if he held the same opinion of him that Louis Armstrong did. In response to the president's mishandling the school integration crisis at Central High School in Little Rock, Armstrong famously stated, “The way they are treating my people in the South, the Government can go to hell. The president has no guts.”
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In 1960 the State Department sponsored a tour to the Congo in which Armstrong participated. Only months later, the CIA and Belgian intelligence played a covert role in the assassination of the Congo's progressive, anticolonial president Patrice Lumumba on January 17, 1961.
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