Stuck in reverse gear
Published 01 November 2007
The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy
Glenn Kessler St Martin's Press, 288pp, £17.99
In March 2005, Condoleezza Rice's star needed burnishing. She had been secretary of state for less than two months, but she desperately needed to ditch the popular impression that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had steamrolled her - on Iraq, secret CIA prisons, Guanta namo - for the past four years. She was being called the weakest national security adviser, her job in George W Bush's first term, in US history. So, during an interview with the Washington Times, a newspaper supportive of the administration, one of her PR-savvy aides slipped a note to the editorial page editor. Ask her if she wants to run for president, it suggested. Rice playfully dodged the question, but the gambit had its intended effect. "Hillary v Condi" headlines followed, and a new conventional wisdom took hold: Rice was a strong leader who could go toe to toe with anyone. And now it was her turn to shine.
How distant that presidential speculation seems today. Rice's first few years at the state department, skilfully and diplomatically depicted in Glenn Kessler's The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy, have been marred by struggle and setback, from nuclear headaches in North Korea and Iran to the increasingly distant prospects of a functioning Palestinian state. In many cases, the messes of Bush's first term, in particular the shaping of the war on terror and the White House's tunnel vision on Iraq, have come to haunt Rice in her new role. It is in many ways ironic that the mistakes resulting from her inexperience when she served as national security adviser, when she rubber-stamped disastrous policies, would later complicate her attempts at diplomacy so completely.
Kessler, diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post, travelled frequently with Rice, and his account is full of insider gossip and fly-on-the-wall observations. What emerges is a portrait of an intelligent and confident woman, proficient at negotiation, who seems to lack any strategic vision about how to accomplish the ambitious democracy agenda that her boss desires as his legacy. The result has been a pattern of persistent diplomatic backtracking from the positions she took during her heady first few months as secretary.
In February 2005, just weeks after beginning her present tenure, Rice cancelled a trip to Cairo to express displeasure at the jailing of the Egyptian dissident Ayman Nour. That summer, she delivered a stirring pro-democracy speech at the American University in Cairo in which she insisted that US policy towards the Middle East was shifting course: our autocratic allies must adopt political reforms or else. But, two years later, the United States has largely abandoned its grand plans. The Bush administration watched silently this spring as President Hosni Mubarak rammed through constitutional changes that cripple Egypt's opposition and erode the rule of law. Today Ayman Nour, who is serving a five-year prison sentence, is lucky to get a mention in speeches.
Kessler conveniently arranges his book around ten critical diplomatic issues - from the US-India nuclear deal and the North Korean nuclear debacle to the Israel-Hezbollah war and increasing violence in Darfur - and pulls back the curtain on secret meetings and relationships both testy and reliable. (Rice famously does not get along with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov; her rapport with Jack Straw was decidedly warmer.)
The format allows us to see Rice learning - and stumbling - on the job. But, because the book's scope is limited to the past few years, it also fails to answer satisfactorily what is perhaps the most vexing mystery about Rice: her intellectual transformation from hard-core realist to ambitious idealist while at the White House. Some credit the 11 September 2001 attacks; others say it's her deep-seated Christianity. Still others believe she has adopted Bush's world-view in order to cement her relationship with him, particularly now that she is no longer by his side every day but down the street in Foggy Bottom, in charge of her own sprawling bureaucracy.
With few diplomatic successes on her watch so far, and the perhaps indelible stain of Iraq, Rice's star has undoubtedly waned. Co-operating with a number of biographers, Kessler included, is Rice's strategy of attempting to inject as much of her own side of the story into the historical record as possible. (Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power by Marcus Mabry, formerly of Newsweek and now with the New York Times, was published this spring; another biography, by Elisabeth Bumiller, also of the New York Times, is due out at the end of the year.)
While Kessler has been called Rice's favourite reporter (though he's had a chillier reception at press conferences since the book's publication), he is not afraid to call her statements naive and her actions ultimately detrimental to US strategic goals. He subtly ridicules her pleasure at seeing female Saudi reporters - clearly planted for effect - at a news conference in Riyadh. But he also lays bare the many roadblocks Rice often faces. On the same trip to Riyadh, the then Saudi crown prince, now king, Abdullah, gave the secretary of state a personal gift: an abaya, the head-to-toe covering worn by all Saudi women when in public. It was a subtle jab: that same day, she had made a speech calling for greater freedoms for women in the region.
Ultimately, such details make Kessler's portrait of Rice humanising. It also reflects the fact that, for all the disappointments thus far, Rice's legacy - and she would be the first to say so - is far from written in stone.
Carolyn O'Hara is assistant editor of Foreign Policy magazineThe Siege of Mecca: the Forgotten Uprising, Yaroslav Trofimov, Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 301pp, £22
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