NINE
“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.”
The summary of this study states that the post-Cold War era offers more opportunities for women in diplomacy and defense in areas such as human rights, law, humanitarian relief, trade, the environment, and the media. The study also reiterates the importance of Madeleine Albright in this trend. “The appointment of Madeleine Albright to serve as sixty-fourth Secretary of State dramatically symbolized the changes underway in the profession. . . . As recently as 1970, women constituted only 4.8 percent of U.S. Foreign Service officers. . . . By 1997, women comprised 18 percent of the career senior foreign service, 24 percent of career senior executive service, 22 percent of ambassadors . . . 40 percent of under secretaries . . . 28 percent of assistant secretaries . . . and 31 percent of deputy assistant secretaries.
With input from nearly 600 women, the WFPG study reveals the characteristics that these women claim have helped them succeed in the field. The findings could be a summary of Condoleezza Rice’s own experience:
High self-esteem and confidence went hand-in-hand with a third characteristic the women mentioned as important to their professional success: consistently exceeding performance expectations (95 percent). There was a definite sense that women must work harder than male colleagues to earn the same levels of respect, trust and salary. Eighty percent of women agreed that gaining international experience was important to advancing one’s career. Seventy-four percent of women agreed that “developing a style with which male colleagues are comfortable” was important.
Although Condi and Madeleine Albright have had very different careers in international relations, their lives do share a few common themes; for one, they both admired and emulated their fathers. Madeleine ascended in the field of international relations in the hopes of mirroring the career of her father, Josef Korbel. “I tried to pattern myself after him,” she said. “A good deal of what I did, I did because I wanted to be like my father.” Condi followed in her father’s footsteps as well. Like him, her career in academia spanned both teaching and administration. She also relives John Rice’s commitment to underprivileged youth, as in her cofounding of the Center for a New Generation in California. Also like her father, she places her faith at the center of her life.
Additional similarities in Condi and Madeleine’s youth were their parents’ protectiveness and zealous commitment to their education. Madeleine described her parents as overly protective, and her father went to great lengths to oversee her education. “He corrected her essays . . . fretted about whether she would get into the best schools, plotted her future,” wrote Dobbs. Condi’s parents went to great extremes to shield her from the horrors of segregation and devoted themselves to her education, providing nearly as much instruction at home as she ever got in a classroom.
Another comparison can be drawn in terms of Condi and Madeleine’s “outsider” status in their early years. Madeleine came to the United States at age eleven, a Czech who spoke English with a British accent and “spent a lot of time worrying, trying to make sure that I would fit in.” Condi’s situation was more dramatic, of course—a black child growing up in the most segregated city in the nation—but her upbringing was carefully guided to ensure that she would not only fit in, but succeed exceptionally in the culture at large.
As scholars, Condi and Madeleine both concentrated on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and although they are both major figures in foreign affairs, they resemble each other least in the political arena. Madeleine, who knew of Condi for many years as her father’s protégée at the University of Denver, discovered this in 1988 when she called Condi to ask if she would like to help her with Democrat Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign. After an awkward silence on the phone, Condi said, “Madeleine, I don’t know how to tell you this. I’m a Republican.”
Condi states that in spite of their differences, she and Madeleine share important common ground. “I know and like Madeleine very much,” she said. “You can have the same intellectual father and different outcomes. . . . On issues of how you use power we probably don’t agree . . . but there are some powerful core values that we share.”
Other women stars of foreign policy include Jeane Kirkpatrick, America’s first woman ambassador to the United Nations, appointed by President Reagan. A political scientist with a career in both academia and government service, Kirkpatrick worked in the defense department for many years and, like Condi, served as a foreign policy advisor to a presidential candidate (Reagan). Another prominent women in the field is Swanee Hunt, who served as ambassador to Austria during four years of the Clinton administration. She is widely praised for the peacekeeping work she did in Bosnia during the war, and she currently teaches at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
When Condi moved to Washington to start her term as NSA, she bought an apartment at the Watergate, the luxury residence on the Potomac that is home to Supreme Court justices and other Washington luminaries. The grand piano that her parents bought her when she was thirteen came along, as well as her treadmill and piles of Ferragamo shoes. She doesn’t have as much time to practice as she did at Stanford, but on occasion she works up a few pieces for informal gatherings. In April 2002, she was surprised to get a call to do a “command performance” at a ceremony that would present a number of performers with the National Medal of the Arts.
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, one of the award recipients, requested that Condi accompany him on a piece at the ceremony. One of the world’s most famous classical musicians, Yo-Yo Ma enjoys collaborating with serious amateurs, partly to expose them to the large audiences he feels they deserve. He had heard that the national security advisor was a pianist, and he asked her if she had time to work something up for the ceremony at Constitution Hall on April 24. She was able to squeeze him in—the afternoon of the performance. He chose a piece by Brahms—Condi’s favorite composer—the Adagio movement from his Violin Sonata No. 3 in D Minor (arranged for cello).
When President Bush presented Yo-Yo with his medal that night, he described him as a “world-renowned cellist who represents the very best in classical music.” He hinted at his advisor’s upcoming appearance when he said, “Later on this great American figure will be performing with another world-renowned figure.” When the time came, First Lady Laura Bush introduced the pair. She revealed her West Texas roots when she told the audience that Condoleezza Rice would be performing on the “pi-AN-ah,” and one critic was notably touched by the First Lady’s “down-home and unabashed” appreciation of the artists. Laura loves classical music and Condi appreciates having another classical music fan in the White House.
The lush, solemn duet went beautifully and they were given a rousing standing ovation. “It’s my great pleasure to say that she’s very good,” reported Greg Sandow in The Wall Street Journal a few days later. “Ms. Rice . . . was all music.” He continued:
Her touch was authoritative, her rhythm firm, her phrasing thoughtful. Or at least this was true in places where she just accompanied Mr. Ma. When she had to step out a little more, she didn’t find the focus a professional would have, and seemed reticent, or even shy. But my heart went out to her. Afterward, I thought, she looked as if this had been a peak moment in her life, and who could blame her? She seemed thrilled, and had every right to be. She did herself, the arts and her country proud.
Yo-Yo Ma understands how gratifying it is for serious amateur musicians to show their stuff to their colleagues and peers and prove to them that their music is more than a hobby. Condi did this during an interview with a visiting journalist one day at Stanford, popping a cassette into the player when they hopped into her Mercedes. The speakers blasted out her recording of the lightning-quick scherzo movement of the Brahms Piano Quintet she had prepared so diligently with the Muir Quartet. “I thought you’d like to hear me play,” she told Ann Reilly Dowd of George magazine.
Before September 11, the National Security Council met twice a month. After the attacks, it began to meet three times per week. The hunt for Osama bin Laden, bombing strikes in Afghanistan, anthrax assaults, airport security concerns, and threats of more terrorist attacks put the Council in high gear. Before the attacks, Condi said her job was “to help make sure the government is speaking with one voice.” She reiterated that after September 11, stating, “I probe to see if there is a consensus. I don’t see any reason to continually take split decisions to the president if that’s not necessary,” adding that it was sometimes necessary to present a range of split opinions. But the goals of the administration came into sharper focus, to a degree, after the attacks. Condi said that the administration’s aim was “to leave the world not just safer . . . but better.”
The president’s primary advisors on foreign policy are Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. As referee between these three—as well as between other members of National Security Council—Condi is sandwiched between the widely differing views of a team of powerful Washington veterans. On one side, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, are hard-line, conservative hawks who promote military strength and intervention. Cheney and Rumsfeld have been linked since the Ford administration, in which Rumsfeld was secretary of defense and Cheney, his protégée, served as White House chief of staff. Rumsfeld has been described as “a bureaucratic infighter without equal,” and is famous for foiling Kissinger’s SALT II plans during the Ford years. In his memoirs, Kissinger describes him as “a special Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability and substance fuse seamlessly.”
On the other side stands General Powell, a centrist who advises against military intervention and, like Condi, does not believe the nation’s role is that of global policeman. During the first Bush administration, Cheney, then secretary of defense, was at constant odds with Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Now the jockeying has picked up where it left off a decade ago,” wrote Lawrence Kaplan in the New Republic after George W.’s election. The president anticipated these clashes of philosophy when he made his Cabinet appointments. Colliding egos and ideologies go with the territory and they’re worth it, as the end result is a broad perspective from which he can make his own decisions. “There’s going to be disagreements,” the newly elected president said. “I hope there is disagreement.”
Although Condi’s views coincide more closely to Powell’s than to Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s, this did not guarantee an instant cozy alliance. “According to several Bush advisers,” wrote Kaplan, “Powell has demanded, and been assured, that Rice’s duties won’t impede his ability to guide U.S. foreign policy. Rather, members of the Bush team predict, Rice will manage the day-to-day interagency paper flow and keep the trains running on time.” Former Secretary of State George Shultz, one of the conservatives who has promoted Condi’s career and worked with her at the Hoover Institution, sees Rice and Powell as two strong-willed people who work well together. “They have a very nice, easy, friendly style [together] and a lot of mutual respect,” he said. “But they are both strong people. Neither one is a pushover.”
Eighteen months into her term, Condi has managed more than “keeping the trains running on time.” She has run a tight ship, keeping the egos at bay as the administration works through one crisis to the next. That’s her job. And whatever she lacks in experience, compared to Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell, she makes up for with her own power-alliance—her bond with the president. “She not only spends the most time with the President, but in the pantheon of foreign policy advisors, his comfort level is highest with her,” said a Business Week source.
In the aftermath of the Chinese fighter jet/U.S. spy plane collision in early April 2001—the administration’s first crisis—Condi took on the customary NSA role of coordinating information for the president. The State Department was primarily responsible for negotiating with the Chinese and getting the crew home. During this period she fulfilled other, more policy-oriented duties, however, such as meeting with Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh. And four months later, it was clear that she would be a foreign policy operator as well as manager with her trip to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Condi’s trip preceded President Bush’s European visit, paving the way for his talks with Putin about missile defense. One of the president’s top priorities is a missile defense shield in the tradition of the Star Wars program, a plan that Russia vehemently opposes. Bush chose Condi to make the trip because of her expertise in arms as well as in Russia. She was the first senior foreign policy person in the administration to visit Moscow, a significant event in the history of national security advisors. “Her mission to Moscow was unprecedented,” said Brookings Institution fellow Ivo Daalder, author of several books about foreign policy. Not since Kissinger had a national security advisor made a “routine diplomatic mission to Moscow,” he said.
Condi knew that much of her message would not be popular with Russian officials, especially the plan to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which Bush and Rice consider an outdated relic of the Cold War. “We’ve always said that we believe that the ABM Treaty is not only a problem for the limitations it places on testing and evaluation, but it’s the wrong treaty for the wrong era,” Condi said in a press briefing before leaving for Moscow. “And it inculcates and hardens a hostile relationship that no longer exists. But we’ll talk to the Russians as to form. I think that’s part of the consultation that needs to go on.”
The primary purpose of the trip was to clarify which topics Bush and Putin would discuss and set up a rough timetable. Condi’s talks with Putin, Defense Minister Sergie Ivanov, and other officials helped set the tone for the arms talks to come, including the president’s meetings with Putin at the G-8 Summit in Italy that summer. At that meeting, the two presidents agreed to talk in the future about reducing their stockpiles.
The Russian press relished Condi’s appearance in Moscow, praising her “beautiful Russian” and gushing over her fondness for St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), where she spent a few weeks as a graduate student. Her meetings were covered extensively on television news and in the newspapers. When she returned to Washington, she remarked that Putin’s style was refreshingly different than that of his predecessors. “I’ve been in lots of meetings with Russian leaders and they tend to turn into an exchange of monologues,” she said. “[Putin] is much more conversational. He has a good sense of humor and loves to tell little jokes and stories.”
Working on the U.S.-Russian dialogue on missile defense is one of Condi’s primary assignments. In a summit held at Bush’s Texas ranch, both Bush and Putin agreed to major cuts in their nuclear arsenals, but they did not come to an agreement about revoking the ABM Treaty. They were upbeat throughout the three-day summit and expressed a warm regard for each other, but the treaty remained a thorny issue.
After September 11, the vital alliance between the two countries in fighting terrorism had an effect on the ongoing arms talks. The Bush administration went ahead with its plan to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, but this did not have a harmful effect on the historic arms reduction treaty Bush and Putin signed in the spring of 2002. Bush traveled to Moscow and St. Petersburg for a summit with Putin in May, and the talks resulted in an agreement to “remove from deployment” two-thirds of each nation’s long-range nuclear missiles over a period of ten years. The United States officially withdrew from the ABM Treaty in June 2002. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz discussed the relevance of that step in The Wall Street Journal:
As a result of hard work and determination on both sides, relations with Russia—and between Russia and our NATO allies—are entering a new and promising era. Future U.S.-Russian summits will not be dominated by the question: What treaty are you planning to sign to regulate the nuclear balance of terror? Instead, we will focus on cooperating to meet the security challenges facing both our nations, the war on terrorism, and what we can do to enrich the lives of our peoples through closer economic, cultural, and political ties.
With her contributions to Bush’s missile defense agenda and her diligence in coordinating the massive amount of information coming into the National Security Council about the war on terrorism, Condi has struck a balance as an NSA who is both a highly visible policy operator and a manager. There are moments when familiar voices remind her of the effect that the constant threat of terrorism is having on everyone, such as the day she got a call from a friend in Birmingham. “Tell Aunt Condi what you’ve been saying,” she heard Deborah Carson say to someone near the phone. Deborah’s three-year-old son then got on the line and said, “Bin Laden is a bad man. You and the president are going to put Bin Laden in jail.” Condi laughed and said, “Joe, I’m going to tell President Bush first thing in the morning that you said that he was going to put Bin Laden in jail.”
As the search for Bin Laden continued, a congressional investigation began in Washington to try to uncover where the intelligence processing went wrong. When reports emerged in May 2002 that the Bush administration knew about a possible al Qaeda hijacking plot before it occurred in September 2001, Condi addressed the press to clarify what the government knew. “In the period starting in December 2000, the intelligence community started reporting increase in traffic concerning terrorist activities,” she said on May 16, 2002. “There was specific threat reporting about al Qaeda attacks against U.S. targets or interests that might be in the works.” She added that the possibility of hijackings were also included in the reports. “At the end of July,” she said, “the FAA issued another [communication] which said, ‘There’s no specific target, no credible info of attack to U.S. civil aviation interests, but terror groups are known to be planning and training for hijackings, and we ask you therefore to use caution.’” She stressed that the consensus of the intelligence community was that an attack might occur against an American interest in a foreign country such as an embassy, but that they did not anticipate an incident on U.S. soil. “I want to reiterate,” she said, “that during this time the overwhelming bulk of the evidence was that this was an attack that was likely to take place overseas.” She also stated that no one expected American airliners to be used as suicide bombs. “I don’t think that anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon,” she said.
In addition to the ongoing investigation into the administration’s analysis of terrorist activities and the day-to-day events in the war on terrorism, the National Security Council held discussions on crises such as potential war between India and Pakistan, suicide attacks and escalating tensions in the Middle East, and a possible U.S. attack on Iraq during the first half of 2002. Trained as a Sovietologist, Condi had to broaden her knowledge of these regions to coordinate the Council’s recommendations on these and other global issues and bring various foreign policy opinions to the president.
After 9/11, the president’s weekend getaways at Camp David became primarily working trips. Condi has spent more weekends at Camp David than any other Bush advisor. She has also been a frequent guest at the Bush ranch in Crawford, the “Western White House,” for official business as well as socializing. Sometimes the informality of the ranch lends itself to fresh ideas, such as the day Condi sat around the kitchen table with Laura Bush and the president’s advisor Karen Hughes discussing the war in Afghanistan. There they came up with the idea of dropping food bundles to help alleviate the severe food shortages in the country. Their brainstorm turned into reality when the first bright yellow packages containing peanut butter, lentils, protein bars, and other items were dropped by American cargo jets in early October 2001.
In a speech given in early 2002, Condi summarized her feelings about the unifying effect of the 9/11 attacks, and her words reveal that her trademark optimism extends to her outlook on the nation’s future. They also confirm her parents’ influence throughout her life, an influence that strove to empower her to be a positive, driving force in the world:
We are committed to a world of greater trade, of greater democracy and greater human rights for all the world’s people wherever they live. September 11th makes this commitment more important, not less. Because . . . America stands for something real. It stands for rights that are inalienable and truths that are self-evident. It stands for compassion and hope. September 11th reintroduced America to a part of itself that some had forgotten or that some thought we no longer had. And we will carry this better part of ourselves out into the wider world.
The attacks of September 11th swept the nation into a new era, took America into a controversial war, and brought laser-like scrutiny to the Bush administration’s pre-9/11 terrorism policies. In addition to explaining the president’s policies as each event unfolded, Condi went before a historic investigatory commission to explain her own actions in the administration. The controversy surrounding the buildup to her public hearing was a story in itself, and ushered in perhaps the most turbulent phase of her career.