TEN
“I know that, had we thought that there
was an attack coming in Washington or
New York, we would have moved
heaven and earth to try and stop it. And
I know that there was no single thing
that might have prevented that attack.”
—Condoleezza Rice, testifying before the 9/11 Commission on April 8, 2004
BY the summer of 2004, Condoleezza Rice’s role as President Bush’s closest advisor in the White House had elevated her to center stage in both U.S. politics and foreign policy. Forbes magazine affirmed this standing in August by naming her number one in its list of “The World’s Most Powerful Women.” The magazine announced that “advising the leader of the world’s largest superpower—and having the ear of leaders around the globe—makes Rice, 49, the most powerful woman in the world.”
Although Condi had become well known as one of the most visible national security advisors in history, the primary factor behind her increased global familiarity from 2002 onward has been the war in Iraq. As the Bush administration laid out its plans to continue the war against terrorism by using military force against Iraq, Condi continued to be the White House’s lead spokesperson by taking the president’s message to the media in news conferences as well as on the political talk show circuit.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and other members of the administration had begun to make their case against Iraq in the spring of 2002. At a press conference on March 17, for example, Cheney voiced concerns over Iraq’s weapon stockpiles and potential nuclear capabilities:
The President’s made it clear that we are concerned about nations such as Iraq developing weapons of mass destruction. . . . We know they have biological and chemical weapons. . . . And we also have reason to believe they’re pursing the acquisition of nuclear weapons. That’s a concern to the United States. We think it’s of concern to people all over the region. And we think it’s important that we find a way to deal with that emerging threat.
The following August, Condi spelled out the president’s perspective on Saddam Hussein in a widely quoted BBC interview. Speaking to BBC Radio 4, she stated that the Iraqi leader “is an evil man who, left to his own devices, will wreak havoc again on his own population, his neighbors and, if he gets weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them, on all of us.” Her argument stressed that there was a “very powerful moral case” for removing Hussein from power, based on lessons from history. The United States was justified in considering a preemptive strike, she explained, in that:
History is littered with cases of inaction that led to very grave consequences for the world. We just have to look back and ask how many dictators who end up being a tremendous global threat, and killing thousands, and indeed millions of people, should we have stopped in their tracks.
In the interview, part of the BBC’s September 11 anniversary radio series entitled “With Us or Against Us,” Condi reiterated the administration’s message that Hussein had “developed biological weapons [and] lied to the UN repeatedly about the stockpiles.”
Among the critics of the administration’s preemptive strategy was Condi’s mentor Brent Scowcroft, who had served as George H. W. Bush’s national security advisor and brought Condi into that administration as an expert in Soviet and Eastern European affairs. In an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal on the same day of Condi’s BBC interview, Scowcroft warned that military action in Iraq would divert the United States from its war on terrorism, isolate us from the global community that did not support such a strike, and destabilize the Middle East. “There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the September 11 attacks,” Scowcroft wrote. By focusing on Iraq, he stated, the president undermined the country’s “pre-eminent security priority” of the war on terrorism and unraveled the global support that had developed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. “An attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counter-terrorist campaign we have undertaken,” he stated.
Scowcroft believed that launching a war in Iraq would not only divert the country from the war on terrorism but, if undertaken without America’s traditional allies, be far too costly:
There is a virtual consensus in the world against an attack on Iraq at this time. So long as that sentiment persists, it would require the U.S. to pursue a virtual go-it-alone strategy against Iraq, making any military operations correspondingly more difficult and expensive. The most serious cost, however, would be to the war on terrorism. Ignoring that clear sentiment would result in a serious degradation in international cooperation with us against terrorism. And make no mistake, we simply cannot win that war without enthusiastic international cooperation, especially on intelligence.
In addition, Scowcroft predicted dire consequences in the region if the United States struck Iraq. The Middle East, which considers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the most crucial issue, would interpret such an attack as a turning away from that conflict. This would ignite, according to Scowcroft, “an explosion of outrage against us.” Rather than contributing to solutions in that decades-long struggle, “we would be seen as ignoring a key interest of the Muslim world in order to satisfy what is seen to be a narrow American interest,” he said.
Unlike Scowcroft, Condi’s statements echoed the administration’s more hawkish policy toward war and its willingness to go it alone. When France, Germany, and Russia announced that they would not join the coalition in the spring of 2003, her reaction was sharp and strident. She referred to their policy as “non-nein-nyet,” and stated that the U.S. strategy should be to “punish France, ignore Germany, and forgive Russia.” This hard-line position contrasted with the more moderate, Scowcroft-like foreign policy perspective Condi had spelled out in her Foreign Affairs article in January 2000. According to her close associates, the 9/11 attacks transformed her world view and set her upon a more conservative path. After the attacks, her foreign policy perspective more closely reflected that of the president and neoconservative members of his administration. “They believe that September 11 was a wake-up call,” said Condi’s friend Coit Blacker, “and that certain things had to be done— painful, violent, but they had to be done—and let the chips fall where they may. They’ve shaken up the chessboard, and now no one doubts the ability of the United States to run risks that were unimaginable before September 11.”
Condi admitted that her more conservative foreign policy views were not “the orientation out of which I came,” but evolved out of the president’s focus on universal values and freedom. “This president has a very strong anchor and compass about the direction of foreign policy, about not just what’s right and what’s wrong, but what might work and what might not work,” she said. “I found myself seeing the value of that.”
One strong characteristic of Condi and George W. Bush’s connection to each other is their deep religious faith, and the values that Bush expressed in speeches during the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks revealed the religious undertones of his foreign policy. The moral compass that Condi noted was clear in Bush’s comments about America’s duty to spread its ideals throughout the world. On September 11, 2002, he stated that the “attack on our nation was also an attack on the ideals that make us a nation. . . . Our deepest national conviction is that every life is precious because every life is the gift of a Creator who intended us to live in liberty and equality. More than anything else this separates us from the enemy we fight.” The enemy, he added, is “any terrorist or tyrant [who means] to threaten civilization with weapons of mass murder.”
Continuing his description of the nation’s “sacred promise,” Bush stated that “our cause is even larger than our country. Ours is the cause of human dignity, freedom guided by conscience and guarded by peace. This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind. . . . That hope still lights our way, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it.”
In a radio address a few days later, the president reiterated his argument that Hussein posed a threat to the world that must be addressed by U.S. and global intervention:
Congress must make it unmistakably clear, when it comes to confronting the growing danger posed by Iraq’s efforts to develop or acquire weapons of mass destruction, that the status quo is totally unacceptable. The issue is straightforward—we must choose between a world of fear or a world of progress. We must stand up for our security and for the demands of human dignity. By heritage and choice the United States will make that stand. The world community must do so as well.
A few weeks after the president made these remarks, Condi presented a speech at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York that outlined Bush’s national security strategy. While she had acknowledged the role of values in making foreign policy decisions in her 2000 Foreign Affairs article, here she emphasized the need to integrate idealistic concerns with issues of power. “In real life, power and values are married completely,” she said. “Great powers matter a great deal—they have the ability to influence the lives of millions and change history. . . . And the values of great powers matter as well.” Like the president, Condi now focused on a more idealistic view of foreign policy as an instrument of defining the nation’s values: “Foreign policy is ultimately about security—about defending our people, our society, and our values, such as freedom, tolerance, openness, and diversity.” And also like the president, she described foreign policy in terms of a new, grandiose struggle that divided the world: “Since September 11th all the world’s great powers see themselves as falling on the same side of a profound divide between the forces of chaos and order.”
The U.S. House and Senate passed a measure that allowed the president to use military force against Iraq in October 2002, and the next month the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 1441 that called for new weapons inspections in Iraq. In January 2003, Condi published an editorial in The New York Times entitled “Why We Know Iraq Is Lying,” in which she summarized Hussein’s non-compliance with the new inspections. Inspectors had not been given the full access demanded by Resolution 1441, she stated, and Iraq’s “recent promises to do better can only be seen as an attempt to stall for time.” She concluded that Iraq treated the inspections as a game, and warned that the country “should know that time is running out.”
In the Times editorial, Condi also discussed an issue that would become a hot-button crisis in the administration. Writing about the 12,200-page declaration that Iraq had submitted to the United Nations about its weapons program, Condi stated that the document “fails to account for or explain Iraq’s efforts to get uranium from abroad.” The question of Iraq’s purchase of uranium from Niger had been investigated by the CIA and the State Department, both of which concluded that the attempts to buy this material could not be confirmed. The evidence was so scant that the CIA urged Great Britain to drop references to this alleged event in a dossier it published in the fall of 2002. In spite of the CIA and State Department’s reports, President Bush announced in his January 2003 State of the Union address that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld repeated the statement at a press briefing at the Pentagon the following day. Secretary of State Colin Powell, however, omitted the uranium story from his presentation to the United Nations in February 2003, explaining later that he did not think the evidence was substantial enough to announce. When the British report was found to be a forgery, Condi was forced to admit on ABC News This Week on June 8, 2003, that “clearly, that particular report, we learned subsequently, subsequently, was not credible.”
On February 24, the Bush administration and two allies, Great Britain and Spain, attempted to make this urgency official by proposing a U.N. resolution that stated that “Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity afforded to it in resolution 1441.” In response, France, Germany, and Russia drafted their own resolution calling for more inspection time. “The military option should only be a last resort,” stated the draft, which argued that the conditions for using force against Iraq “are not fulfilled.”
The day that both of these draft resolutions were submitted, Condi reiterated the president’s call for swift action in dealing with Hussein. In a news conference at the White House, she outlined the Iraqi threat and reminded the press corps of the president’s timetable. “We all continue to live under the threat of continued programs of weapons of mass destruction linked to someone who’s got links to terrorism,” she said. “It’s time to deal with this problem. And so it should be very clear by now that when the President said, weeks, not months, he really did mean, weeks, not months.” Condi also reminded the press that the president was willing to act alone: “The President has made very clear that the Security Council needs to act and that, if the Security Council is unable to act, then we will have to act with a coalition of the willing.”
The proposed U.N. resolution from the United States, Great Britain, and Spain found only one supporter at the Security Council, Bulgaria, and the sponsors did not call for a vote. On March 20, 2003, the administration followed through on its plan to act alone and launched its attack on Iraq with Operation Iraqi Freedom. On April 9, U.S. forces took control of Baghdad, and millions of television viewers watched the symbolic toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein.
The following month, President Bush announced from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln off the coast of San Diego, California, that major combat operations in Iraq were over, and that the U.S. and its allies had prevailed. Awaiting the president’s S-3 Viking jet on deck were Condi, Chief of Staff Andy Card, and White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, all of whom had flown in earlier on a less glamorous C-2 Greyhound delivery plane. Passengers on the Greyhound are seated backward in a dark interior, and jolted unexpectedly by air currents and during landing. Condi, sporting goggles and ear protectors, looked unfazed when she stepped out of the plane. She explained that it was her second trip in a Greyhound and that “the weather was better this time.” The image of the president on the deck of the carrier, with a “Mission Accomplished” sign in the background, became fodder for Bush’s critics in coming weeks and months as the war in Iraq continued to escalate.
Another carefully orchestrated presidential appearance in 2003 reestablished the fact that Condi is the president’s closest advisor and confidante. When President Bush began planning his top-secret, morale-boosting Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad in October, Condi was one of only a handful of staff who knew about the plan, and the only staffer selected to join him. Secrecy, the number-one priority among the many challenges of safely flying the president into a war zone, went into every detail of the plan. First Lady Laura Bush was aware that the trip was a possibility, but was not told it would actually happen until a few hours before Air Force One flew. Bush’s daughters learned about the trip that day, too, but Bush’s parents were not informed until the president landed in Baghdad. The word from the White House was that the Bush family would spend Thanksgiving at the ranch in Crawford.
At about 8 P.M. Wednesday night, November 26, the president and Condi slipped away from the Crawford ranch in an unmarked car, both dressed casually with baseball caps pulled over their eyes. “We looked like a normal couple,” Bush told reporters later. The trip on Air Force One was unusually quiet, as they were accompanied by only a small press pool and the usual security. The plane flew in radio silence with its call sign disguised from all air-traffic controllers, and all cell phones and other electronic devices were packed away in manila envelopes during the flight. Baghdad International Airport, which had been the site of a missile attack on a cargo jet just five days earlier, was blacked out when the plane approached, and Air Force One, also totally dark, was virtually invisible upon landing.
The president stunned the six hundred troops who were having Thanksgiving dinner in the mess tent at the airport, and was met with “Hoo-ah” shouts and wild, stamping applause. After a two-and-a-half-hour visit, the president, Condi, and their small pool of journalists boarded Air Force One for the flight home.
When critics charged that Bush made the dangerous trip for political gain, Condi defended the president’s motivations. “Let the chips fall where they may,” she said. “But for the American people, I don’t care what your party, they know that the president of the United States, as commander in chief, going to see these troops is an important step.”
Bush’s decision to bring Condi along on this dangerous, top-secret trip revealed the enormously close working relationship they share. Bush’s father developed a deep admiration for and trust in his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, but George W. appears to put even more confidence in his NSA. Spending so much time with the president in the White House, at Camp David and at the Crawford ranch, Condi was prompted to make a slip during a dinner party in the spring of 2004. At one point she said, “As I was telling my husb—As I was telling President Bush . . .”
Eager to uncover the facts about what the administration knew about potential terrorist attacks prior to 9/11, families of the victims pressed for an official investigation. The ten-member September 11 Commission was created by Congress in November 2002, and charged with the job of “providing the nation the most comprehensive examination of the vulnerabilities that made the attacks possible.” The independent, bi-partisan commission was “intended to be unflinching in assigning blame for specific government failures.”
Condi testified before the members in private sessions after the hearings were underway. In the spring of 2004, however, public opinion demanded that she testify in public, which set off a cascade of events that once again put the spotlight on her role as national security advisor. The panel unanimously called for her public appearance, but Condi refused on the grounds that the constitutional powers of the executive branch legally forbade her from doing so. “Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify,” she stated on CBS’ 60 Minutes. “I would really like to do that,” she added, “but there is an important principle here—it is a longstanding principle—that sitting national security advisors do not testify before the Congress.”
The issue of Condi’s public testimony were spurred by the testimony of Richard A. Clarke, a former counter-terrorism official in the Bush and Clinton administrations. Clarke had recently published an exposé of the Bush administration’s actions and inactions regarding al Qaeda leading up to the attacks. In Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, Clarke charged that the administration ignored critical intelligence about the terrorist threat and ultimately inflamed the al Qaeda cause by attacking Iraq. Clarke wrote:
George W. Bush . . . failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat for al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks; and . . . launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide.
Following his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Clarke called for the declassification of government documents from before the attacks as well as other materials. These documents should include, he stressed, Condi’s private testimony before the 9/11 Commission and correspondence that Clarke had had with her and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, while he was serving in the administration.
Pressure mounted for Condi to appear before the commission in public, and on March 30, 2004, White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales sent a letter to the commission agreeing to her appearance, pending two conditions. Gonzales required that Condi’s testimony would not set a precedent for future commission requests for testimony by a national security advisor or any other White House official, and that the commission agree in writing that it will not request additional public testimony from any White House official, including Rice. To some observers, Condi’s actions during the controversy forced the administration’s hand to allow her to testify. “Rice herself weakened the administration’s argument against public testimony by granting numerous interviews and stating her own desire to testify,” noted one editorial. Regardless of Condi’s repeated statements on television and in the press that she had nothing to hide, the administration’s claim of executive privilege did not sit well with the public. Bush allowed her to testify before the political damage could go any further.
On April 8, Condi was sworn in before the 9/11 Commission, standing behind the center of a large table that faced the panel. At the beginning of her opening statement, she admitted that the United States had been slow to react to a long-developing terrorist threat before the 9/11 attacks. “The terrorists were at war with us but we were not yet at war with them,” she said. She overviewed several events in history in which the United States was slow to act to looming danger, such as “the growing threat from Imperial Japan until it became all too evident at Pearl Harbor.” She defended the administration’s strategy on terrorism, citing the president’s briefing schedule and her own meetings with intelligence officials, and outlined various initiatives such as bolstering the Treasury Department’s power to track and seize terrorist assets.
The highlight of the testimony surrounded the content of an intelligence memo given to the president on August 6, 2001, which contained information about Osama bin Laden’s plans to attack on U.S. soil. Condi stressed that the memo did not contain new warnings about an impending attack, but was based on “historical information based on old reporting.” She summarized the memo as follows:
The briefing team reviewed past intelligence reporting, mostly dating from the 1990s, regarding possible Al Qaeda plans to attack inside the United States. It referred to uncorroborated reporting that—from 1998—that a terrorist might attempt to hijack a U.S. aircraft in an attempt to blackmail the government into releasing U.S. held terrorists who had participated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This briefing item was not prompted by any specific threat information. And it did not raise the possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as missiles.
During the question-and-answer period, Condi stressed that the administration did not anticipate any strikes within the country, but was focused on terrorist activities in other parts of the world. Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste brought the subject back to the memo, however, to point out that its very title pointed to a domestic attack. The sharp exchange began as follows:
BEN-VENISTE: Isn’t it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the Aug. 6 P.D.B. warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that P.D.B.
RICE: I believe the title was “Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States.” Now, the P.D.B.—
BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.
RICE: No, Mr. Ben-Veniste—
BEN-VENISTE: I will get into the—
RICE: I would like to finish my point here.
BEN-VENISTE: I didn’t know there was a point.
RICE: Given that—you asked me whether or not it warned of attacks.
BEN-VENISTE: I asked you what the title was.
RICE: You said did it not warn of attacks. It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.
Throughout her testimony, including the heated exchange above, Condi remained calm and steady, just as she had in every other public appearance when discussing the president’s controversial policy on Iraq. Viewers did not witness any attitude or behavior that contrasted with Condi’s previous appearances on television talk shows. And as one reporter observed, war continued to rage in Iraq during her testimony, a reality that concerned Americans as much, if not more, than the dramatic televised hearings. “Although Rice’s testimony produced no bombshells, there were plenty exploding in Iraq even as she spoke,” wrote Tony Karon in Time magazine. “The uprising among both Sunni and Shiite Iraqis that has shaken Coalition forces there and thrown U.S. transition plans into crisis may be a more immediate concern on the minds of the American electorate than the increasingly partisan post-mortem over 9/11.”
In June 2004, the 9/11 Commission released a statement that refuted the administration’s argument that the terrorist threat—which president Bush had acknowledged as specifically a threat from al-Qaeda—lay in Iraq. “We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda co-operated on attacks against the United States,” stated the report. Critics of the president’s decision to go to war in Iraq found new fuel for their case in this dramatic statement. The commission’s declaration supported the view of those like Scowcroft who did not believe that the war on terrorism should be fought in Iraq, but by that time the war had gone on for fifteen months. As of this writing in January 2005, American casualties in Iraq numbered 1,340, with total coalition deaths numbering 1,491.
During the presidential campaign of 2004, Condi accompanied Bush to several cities, such as a September 2 trip to Columbus in the battleground state of Ohio. In the following weeks leading up to the November 2 election, she made speeches in key states including Oregon, Washington, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida. “The frequency and location of her speeches differ sharply from those before this election year,” reported the Washington Post, “and appear to break with the long-standing precedent that the national security advisor try to avoid overt involvement in the presidential campaign.” A New York Times editorial complained that Condi appeared so often “on the campaign trail that she sometimes seemed more like a press secretary than a national security advisor.” Condi refuted these charges, however, stating on the National Public Radio, for example, that she had not stepped across the line in her job. “Of course not,” she told Tavis Smiley. “I’m the national security advisor. I take it as part of my role to talk to the American people. We’re at war. This is a time for those of us who have responsible positions to get out of Washington.”
Although Condi stepped up her speech schedule during the campaign, she did not participate in political events as she had done during the 2000 campaign when she served as Bush’s foreign affairs tutor. In contrast to her 2000 appearances in the “W Is for Women” campaign and as a keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention, she was absent from the 2004 convention in New York City. “By tradition and custom,” explained Sean McCormick, a National Security Council spokesman, “the national security advisor does not actively participate in campaign or political events.”
Two weeks after Bush won the November 2004 election, he expressed his trust in his national security advisor’s competence and admiration of her qualifications by nominating Condi as his next Secretary of State. She would succeed Colin Powell, who had announced his retirement from the cabinet post.
At the White House announcement on November 16, two days after Condi’s fiftieth birthday, she was nearly moved to tears by the president’s proud, heartfelt description of her career and personal background. “During the last four years I’ve relied on her counsel, benefited from her great experience, and appreciated her sound and steady judgment,” Bush said. “And now I’m honored that she has agreed to serve in my Cabinet. The Secretary of State is America’s face to the world. And in Dr. Rice, the world will see the strength, the grace, and the decency of our country.” Referring to Condi’s childhood in Birmingham during the violent era of the Civil Rights struggle, Bush added, “Above all, Dr. Rice has a deep, abiding belief in the value and power of liberty, because she has seen freedom denied and freedom reborn.”
In her remarks, Condi said that it was “humbling” to consider succeeding Colin Powell, and that she would greatly miss working with everyone in the White House. Those comments followed her words of praise for the president:
Thank you, Mr. President. It has been an honor and a privilege to work for you these past four years, in times of crisis, decision and opportunity for our nation. Under your leadership, America is fighting and winning the war on terror. You have marshaled great coalitions that have liberated millions from tyranny, coalitions that are now helping the Iraqi and Afghan people build democracies in the heart of the Muslim world. And you have worked to widen the circle of prosperity and progress in every corner of the world.
Bush also announced that day that Condi’s deputy, Stephen Hadley, would be promoted to national security advisor. Condi’s nomination was part of a flurry of changes in Bush’s cabinet following the election, including resignations from Commerce Secretary Don Evans, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.
Prior to Condi’s nomination, there has been one woman (Madeleine Albright) and one black (Colin Powell) Secretary of State in American history. Several European countries weighed in on the prospects of future relations with the United States under Condi’s watch at the State Department. An editorial in Germany’s weekly magazine Die Zeit remarked that relations with the United States would probably get better because they couldn’t get worse than they were in the two previous years. Eberhard Sandschneider, director of the German council on Foreign Relations, noted that Condi’s background as an academic rather than as a professional politician were positives, and that her close relationship with the president would be an important change. “With Powell you never knew whether his policies would have influence with the president,” Sandschneider said, “but if Ms. Rice says ‘x,’ you know that the president will also say ‘x.’”
Writing in The New York Times, Richard Bernstein explained that Europe held two general views about Condi’s potential influence there. “One is that she will strengthen further the hard-line views” of the neoconservatives in the administration, and the other that “her sophisticated understanding of international affairs, particularly of Russia and Germany, will prove to be both . . . sympathetic to, or at least, cognizant of, European views.”
On November 19, three days after her nomination as the next secretary of state, Condi was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., for minor surgery to treat non-cancerous, uterine fibroid tumors. She chose a low-invasive procedure, uterine fibroid embolisation, which is performed in about one-and-a-half hours under local anesthesia and involves an overnight stay. In this procedure, the surgeon injects tiny particles into the uterine artery, which block the blood supply to the tumors. Traditionally, most women who undergo treatment for this condition undergo a hysterectomy, a much more complex surgery that requires general anesthesia and a long recovery period. “Having someone like her choose [embolisation] means more women will hear about this option,” said a Boston surgeon.
Embolisation has been available for about ten years, but only 13,000 to 14,000 American women choose this alternative each year, as opposed to approximately 200,000 women who choose to have a hysterectomy. “Dr. Jacob Cynamon, director of interventional radiology at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, said many patients say their gynecologists did not present the option of the less invasive procedure,” reported New York Newsday . According to Cynamon, hysterectomies have long been the “bread and butter” of gynecologists.
Condi was released the day after the procedure and returned to work the following Monday. Her high profile brought this medical topic to the front pages of newspapers around the world, revealing the powerful effect that a world figure can have on a single issue.
Condi will have many options when she finishes her service in the White House. Some speculate that she’s got all the attributes of a successful presidential candidate. “The first viable female candidate for president, whatever her party, must demonstrate deep military knowledge to win the confidence of the electorate,” said social scientist Camille Paglia. She described a frequently repeated chorus that broke out whenever a group of women caught a glimpse of Condi on TV—“That woman should be president!”
In California, polls conducted in the summer of 2002 indicated she was a top pick as the Republican candidate for governor. Some of her closest colleagues see her in international banking or consulting, fields she toyed with when she left Stanford in 1999. There’s always the NFL, which she would love to run one day. Her former job as provost of Stanford gives her perfect entrée to the presidency of a major university. And the door to Stanford’s political science department, where she has tenure, is always open. Most of those options could also include a return to corporate boards, all of which she left when she was appointed national security advisor.
Condi will cross that bridge when she comes to it. “I am not a very good long-term planner,” she said. “I tend to take things on one at a time and worry about getting that job done and doing a good job at that.” Whatever she decides, she will undoubtedly delve into it with the same enthusiasm and drive with which she has approached everything else. “I’d like to think of myself as passionate about life,” she said. “I’m certainly passionate about music and I’m passionate about my work, passionate about family and about my faith.”
Her relatives and friends in Birmingham, including everyone at the church Granddaddy Rice founded nearly sixty years ago, are behind her every step of the way. “We look at her as one of our own who has gone on to high service because of her ability,” said Reverend Jones. “We pray for her every day.”
Condi’s appointment as NSA was a monumental stride for both women and blacks, coming nine years after Carol Moseley-Braun became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. With the scarcity of blacks in upper levels of foreign policy (Colin Powell was the first black NSA, appointed by President Reagan), her rise to this position was as important as Marian Anderson becoming the first black to become a regular member of an American opera company and Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball. The NAACP recognized her achievement in 2002 by giving her that year’s President’s Award. This honor recognizes those who, through leadership or by example, have promoted the cause of minorities. According to then-NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, Condi has been breaking new ground her entire life. “There were no role models for her to follow,” he said, “because there was no one like Condoleezza Rice.”
Condi’s career has come a long way from her first assistant professorship, in which she gave students insights into the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In the first Bush administration she stood at the front lines of policy-making, helping the president and the National Security Council staff outline new policies toward the newly mapped regions of Europe. In the first term of George W. Bush’s administration, she was at the forefront of policy-making once again, providing the president with the Security Council’s views—and her own, if asked—on the war on terrorism and other international crises. Rather than researching political history, she was creating it.
Her job as NSA was gratifying on many levels, allowing her to utilize her expertise in her chosen field in the most exciting capacity possible. As a member of the president’s staff she performed a public service, something that her parents practiced in many ways and ingrained in her as a virtue. And she traveled throughout the world, often finding common threads that bind people to each other. During a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, for example, she was moved by a photograph of a well-dressed, impeccably groomed couple who contrasted with the bleak surroundings of their Warsaw ghetto. She heard others comment that it seemed odd for the couple to pay so much attention to their appearance when their lives were at stake. “I had a different reaction,” said Condi. “I said immediately, ‘I understand that photograph. These people are saying, I’m still in control, I still have my dignity.’ They are saying, ‘You can take everything from us, including life itself. But you cannot take away our pride.’” In that couple, Condi saw the pride and dignity with which her mother always dressed in Birmingham, crisp and tailored and beautiful.
Her journeys throughout the world have given her greater appreciation for her own country, in spite of its faults and snail-paced social progress. “As I travel with [President Bush] around the world and as we meet with leaders from around the world,” she told an audience in 2002, “I see America through other people’s eyes. I see a country that still struggles with the true meaning of multiethnic democracy, that still struggles with how to accommodate, and indeed, how to celebrate diversity. But it’s a country that is admired because . . . it does struggle to become better. It is not perfect but it is a long, long way from where we were.”
She may be far from Titusville on the southwest side of Birmingham, but Condi is not a long way from who she was as an individual when she was growing up there. She is still working hard (and probably not playing enough), still taking her piano seriously (even though summer music workshops in Montana are canceled or cut short by White House obligations), still utterly self-confident and optimistic that things are always moving forward and getting better (she did get a job inside the White House that was closed to her when she was ten), and still strong in her faith. She did not have the same challenges as less-privileged black children of Birmingham, but she had her share of the struggle. The darkness of that time has been a springboard in her life, propelling her to the farthest reaches of her talents and intellect. Like her father before her, she understands that without a struggle there would be no incentive to grow. And like three generations of Rices and Rays before her, she finds glory in that revelation:
We do not choose our circumstances or trials, but we do choose how we respond to them. Too often when all is well, we slip into the false joy and satisfaction of the material and a complacent pride and faith in ourselves. Yet it is through struggle that we find redemption and self-knowledge. This is what the slaves of Exodus learned. And it is what slaves in America meant when they sang: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen—Glory Hallelujah!”
When Condi’s parents instilled in her the belief that she could one day be president of the United States, they prepared her to become a person who could make a mark on the world. Did John Rice ever imagine that his “little star” would one day be dubbed “the most powerful woman in the world,” or did Angelena Rice foresee that her musical prodigy would play at the Kennedy Center, introduced by the First Lady of the United States? They may not have imagined these specific events, but John and Angelena Rice did not put limits on their own dreams, nor on those of their daughter.
In fifty years, Condi has become a Renaissance woman in the truest sense of the word, accomplished in more than one field as artist and academic, writer and university provost, foreign policy czarina and presidential advisor. There is undoubtedly much more to come from her, and the world is watching.