Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (27 page)

Portals of Power: Bush II

“If there is any lesson from history, it is that small powers with everything to lose are often more stubborn than big powers. . . . The lesson, too, is that if it is worth fighting for, you had better be prepared to win.”

—Condoleezza Rice, 2000

THE
morning of September 11, 2001, Condi arrived at her office, as usual, at 6:30. She anticipated another typical, long day, in which she would not go home until 9:00 that night. Her job involved a certain amount of repetitiveness, such as scheduled daily briefings, but working in national security is never routine. About two hours into her day, an unusual message signaled that this day would be no exception.

Her secretary appeared at the door at 8:45 A.M. to say that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. What a strange accident, Condi thought. She called President Bush, who was in Florida speaking about his education agenda, and gave him the news. “What a weird accident,” he said. A short time later, Condi was in a staff meeting when her secretary walked in and handed her a note. A second plane had struck the other tower. In a flash, she realized it was a terrorist attack.

Her second thought was to call a meeting of the top members of the National Security Council. She went downstairs to the Situation Room, the military command center located in the basement of the West Wing, and got on the phone. Besides the president, the principal members of the NSC have historically been the vice president (Dick Cheney), secretary of state (Colin Powell), and secretary of defense (Donald Rumsfeld). Another cabinet member in the council is the secretary of the treasury (Paul O’Neill), and the top military and intelligence advisors are the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Henry Shelton) and CIA director (George Tenet).

The president was not the only one unavailable for an emergency sit-down meeting. Donald Rumsfeld was in his office in the Pentagon, but just after American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the building at 9:43 A.M., he was rushing through the corridors to get to the wreckage and help the injured. He would later move to a basement command center and take part in NSC meetings by phone. General Powell was having breakfast with the new president of Peru in Lima, but by 10:45 A.M., he was on his way back to Washington. Shelton was in a plane over the Atlantic on his way to Europe.

Two minutes after the plane hit the Pentagon, the White House was ordered to evacuate, and Condi was instructed to leave the Sit Room and go to an underground bunker. Cheney was already there, but before Condi left, she called the president once more to urge him not to return to the White House. She told him that his cabinet and staff feared there could be another hit on Washington. The president heeded their advice and was flown to various locations throughout the day. He didn’t return to the White House until 6:30 that evening.

The first thing Condi did when she arrived at the bunker was telephone her aunt and uncle, Connie and Alto Ray, in Birmingham. She asked them to tell everyone she was OK. Her next calls were to heads of state throughout the world, notifying them that the United States government was intact and “up and running.” Throughout the day she set up conference-call NSC meetings with the president. At 3:55 in the afternoon, for example, Dick Cheney and Condi were on the phone from the bunker while the president was hooked in from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

That Friday, still numb like the rest of the country, Condi rode in the presidential motorcade to the National Cathedral to attend the memorial service, a moving ceremony in which speakers from many faiths gave messages of solace and unity. That first week, Condi’s faith kept her going, as it always has. “Since I was a girl I have relied on faith—a belief that I’m never alone, that the bottom will never fall out too far. That has always been a part of me, and I’m drawing on that now,” she said in early 2002.

Less than a year earlier, Condi had gone through another heartbreak with the death of her father. John had suffered a heart attack in the spring of 2000, and his health had never returned. He held on through the Bush campaign and the post-election crisis, and Condi spent as much time as possible by his side. He lived to hear the president-elect appoint his Little Star the next national security advisor. Six days later, on Christmas Eve, 2000, he died. He was seventy-seven years old.

After the attacks of September 11, Condi became much more visible on the national scene. She delivered many of the media updates on the war on terrorism, withdrawing from the style she learned from her NSA mentor, Brent Scowcroft. In his term as NSA for Bush, Sr., Brent never spoke to the press and kept a low profile outside the White House. He exerted most of his energy coordinating foreign policy for the president and did not get involved in public communication. A few months after Condi’s appointment, Brent said, “If she’s doing her job well, the president is getting the attention.” In visibility, however, Condi now more closely resembles former national security advisors like Henry Kissinger (Nixon administration) and Samuel Berger (Clinton administration), who worked more as policy makers than policy coordinators and managers and thus received a higher profile than their predecessors.

In the first several weeks following 9/11, Condi was on the phone every morning at 7:15 with Secretary of State Powell and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. They discussed newly gathered information and ideas, which Condi sifted and later shared with the president. The role of assistant to the president for national security affairs, commonly called the national security advisor (NSA), is to gather foreign policy information and present the various views to the president. The NSA is a managerial role rather than a policy-making position, although past NSAs have assumed powerful decision-making roles. Technically, the NSA is an inside manager who keeps a low-profile outside the White House. But each president has had his own unique relationship with the NSA and has drawn different expectations of the advisor. Unlike most NSAs, Condoleezza Rice has become a media star, especially after the attacks of September 11 when she began holding press conferences about the war on terrorism.

“I try very hard to remember that I have to be very disciplined about making sure I’m giving the president the whole story,” said Condi, “that I’m making sure he knows everything.” She stressed that she makes it very clear to the president when she is talking about her own view and that it is offered only as one part of several other views. “I am responsible for making sure that I’ve checked things out before I tell them to the president—and for not abusing the privilege of sitting down the hallway from him.”

The personal foreign policy views that Condi shares with the president are the product of her conservative, political realism outlook. This includes a call for less American military cooperation in conflicts in other countries. This non-interventionist approach is a classic tenet of “power politics” and views the military as a tool to be used with great discrimination. This view was voiced loudly and clearly in one of Condi’s speeches in the final weeks of the campaign. In October 2000, she stated that if elected, Bush would withdraw U.S. troops from the Balkans and leave the Europeans in charge of the peacekeeping forces. She explained that the U.S. presence there detracted from its readiness in other areas of the world like Asia and the Persian Gulf. Her speech created an uproar in Europe. Later, George W. would admit that “we had gotten off on the wrong foot in Europe.”

During the campaign Condi had also outlined her foreign policy approach—which she had shared with George W.—in a lengthy essay in
Foreign Affairs
. Included were clear statements about military restraint. “Using the American armed forces as the world’s ‘911’ will degrade capabilities, bog soldiers down in peacekeeping roles, and fuel concern among other great powers that the United States has decided to enforce notions of ‘limited sovereignty’ worldwide in the name of humanitarianism. . . . The president must remember that the military is a special instrument. It is lethal, and it is meant to be. It is not a civilian police force. It is not a political referee. And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society. Military force is best used to support clear political goals.”

This view would be made clear in the first months of the Bush administration, most notably in its hands-off approach to the Middle East.

Condi is calm and steady under pressure, a major factor in her selection as a White House spokesperson after 9/11. She never appears flustered, can think on her feet, and explains complex subjects clearly and simply. These are characteristics that have made her stand out among many of her colleagues and that prompted George W. to ask her to coach him on foreign policy during the campaign. Her Stanford friend Coit Blacker calls her “lightning brained,” and her director at the Hoover Institution, John Raisian, said she has a “rare ability” at extemporaneous speaking. “When you see her giving talks,” he said, “she does so most of the time with virtually no notes. She maps out in her head what she wants to say and is so articulate that she doesn’t have to write it out first.” While Condi would probably argue that this ability is not rare among professors who spend most of their time talking and fielding questions in front of a classroom, she appears to have developed this skill to a high degree.

Speaking on the Sunday morning Washington talk shows and fielding questions about foreign policy are perhaps the simplest jobs in Condi’s schedule. At this time in history, her job requires analyzing the National Security Council’s varying views on the war on terrorism, war in the Middle East, potential war in India, relations with North Korea and China, and other monumental concerns. “On a scale of one to ten in degree of difficulty, this is a fifteen,” said Samuel Berger two months after the terrorist attacks. “I have enormous respect for her and for what she’s doing right now.”

The National Security Council was created during the Truman administration, when the complex policy decisions of postwar America called for better communication between the president’s diplomatic and military staffs. Truman faced a host of thorny policy issues at the beginning of his administration. He learned about the United States’ newly created atomic bomb soon after taking office and faced the agonizing decision of whether to use it on the Japanese. The Soviet Union had installed military regimes in several Eastern European countries, and in Western Europe nations were suffering financial collapse and starvation in the wake of the war. These and other conditions in the fast-changing world drove Truman to write the National Security Act of 1947, which included a new advisory board of “chiefs of staff and service commanders” called the National Security Council.

Truman was explicit about the council’s role as advisory only, stating that he would have “complete freedom to accept, reject and amend the Council’s advice and to consult with other members of his official family.” The president would have the last word as well as the authority to “determine such policy and enforce it.”

The first NSC policy papers provided the president with facts and opinion consolidated into one document, streamlining Truman’s policy-making process. One of the first NSC papers, for example, helped define the content and logistics of the Marshall Plan, the gigantic financial aid package that America sent to Western Europe. Overseeing the policy paper assignments and other activities of the Council was the manager, then called the executive secretary. Truman’s executive secretary of the NSC was Rear Admiral Sidney William Souers, a close associate who had helped him reorganize the intelligence agencies after the war. Souers had a background in both the military and business, and he served for a time as the first CIA director. Like many national security advisors to come, Souers was a trusted confidant of the president. “A poker-playing crony of the president’s, Admiral Souers was on easy terms with Harry Truman,” wrote John Prados in his history of the NSC.

What was George W. looking for in a national security advisor when he began selecting his senior staff? The essential qualities of this position were spelled out clearly by the first man to hold the job. When Souers told Truman he was leaving the White House to return to the business sector, Truman asked him to describe the traits he should seek in his replacement. In his book, Prados includes excerpts from the memo that Souers gave to Truman in reply and explains that these criteria still hold true today:

• He should be a non-political confidant of the president.

• He must be objective and willing to subordinate his personal views on policy to his task of coordinating the views of all responsible officials.

• He must be willing to forego publicity and personal aggrandizement.

Prados writes that in the decades since the NSC’s creation, its staff has acquired “power rivaling that of Cabinet officers, diplomats, and generals.” As manager of that powerful staff, and as one of the closest presidential advisors, the national security advisor has become a central figure in the White House.

The nation’s twentieth national security advisor, Condi is the first woman to hold the post. She is the second black person, following General Colin Powell who was appointed national security advisor in the Reagan administration.

Condi’s appointment made her the most prominent woman in foreign policy, the new poster-child for the slow but steadily increasing ranks of women in the field. Madeleine Albright’s appointment as secretary of state in President Clinton’s second term threw open the gates for more women in foreign policy. Throughout her career, Madeleine has been committed to the advancement of women in the field, and she considered her Cabinet appointment a victory for all women.

During George W.’s presidential campaign, one of Condi’s Stanford colleagues made a remark about her shakeup of the status quo. “Foreign policy is dominated by bald, graying white men,” said Michael McFaul, “and they’re not used to someone like Condi Rice.” According to a recent study by the Women’s Foreign Policy Group, men still dominate in terms of numbers, but increasing numbers of women are making their mark in the field. “The foreign policy establishment, comprised primarily by males, is in the midst of a transformation,” states the WFPG study. “In record numbers, women in the U.S. are entering the field of international affairs, assuming leadership roles and breaking with centuries of tradition. . . . Their faces are seen and their voices are heard in the corridors and staterooms of power as never before.”