Tough Love

by Susan Rice

  The proximate evidence for me was that my hometown was engulfed in flames, looting, and chaos. The four days of riots in Washington and in cities across the nation following Dr. King’s murder brought armed troops onto the streets. Smoke blanketed the skies downtown, as the 14th Street corridor and much around it was incinerated. The violence was far removed from our neighborhood, yet my parents made me watch it on television and visit its aftermath when calm returned.

  Mom and Dad also rolled my eighteen-month-old brother in his stroller and held my hand as we walked through the muddy, mass camp that was Resurrection City, a tent town on the National Mall established to memorialize the late Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign. It was a weeks-long protest in horrible conditions that dramatized the racial and economic discontent that pervaded our city and larger society.

  The old genteel, safely segregated Washington was gone. A new, brutal, bitterly divided carcass of a city replaced it. The shards of burned-out Washington haunted my childhood, as it took well over a decade—what seemed to me like forever—to repair the worst ravages of the riots and for the city’s open wounds to seal into rough keloids.

  Walter Cronkite narrated this crisis and every other major event throughout my childhood, memorably concluding each evening’s broadcast with his signature closer: “And, that’s the way it is.” In the bygone era of just three national television networks, our news was delivered unvarnished and un-spun, although with little diversity of sources and presenters. Back then, Americans were blessed with a common fact base, rather than self-selected stories that reinforce our personal preconceptions. This enabled serious and productive debate.

  Avid consumers of both broadcast and print news, my parents made sure our dinner table conversations resembled a debate hall. The greatest sin we could commit as children was to cause a delay that made my father miss the lead story on the nightly news. In this time before digital recording devices, when that occurred, we had hell to pay.

  Nothing was more arresting for me as a child than the first images of man walking on the moon. On July 20, 1969, my parents called us into their bedroom to watch on their black and white television as Apollo 11 landed and out walked American astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. Piloting the command module was Michael Collins, the father of Michael Jr., one of my contemporaries in school.

  Then there was Vietnam—the open sore that bled nightly on our television screens. I was not spared its most dramatic images. As a child, I witnessed film of napalm attacks, air raids, close combat, Cronkite’s nightly body count, the full brutality of war. I also saw the violent protests it inspired back home, on campuses, in my city, and around the world.

  President Johnson declined to run for reelection. The Kennedys were gone. Hubert Humphrey was our candidate, and I sported “HHH” political buttons at three years old. The Democratic convention in Chicago devolved into riotous chaos. Nixon won handily, and the war intensified.

  In later years, our dinner table remained a stage for a lively discussion club shaped by reports on the nightly news. Johnny and I learned to be assertive and, when necessary, loud—in order to get a word in edgewise. Alliances shifted among the four of us, depending on the issue; but, again, reinforced by lessons from our visits to Maine, we grew up being comfortable with verbal jousting, expressing our views with confidence, and engaging in worthy battle.

  We lived history as a family, like the later events of August 8, 1974, when I came running into the kitchen breathlessly to report to my parents that there was breaking news on television: Nixon had resigned! They were shocked and thrilled. A robust family conversation ensued.

  Watergate was not just a national phenomenon; it was a personal trauma, hitting us like a tidal wave. As the revelations unfolded and the prosecutions persisted, two of our schoolmates’ parents, G. Gordon Liddy and Jeb Magruder, were sent to jail.

  All the violence, the fractious debates, and the Washington political dramas gripped me as a child. I could never wish, nor would I be able, to ignore my city, my nation, or the world. My parents refused to give us that luxury—to allow us to think that public issues were somehow remote from us. They steeped us in the tumult, forced us to confront our relative privilege, and taught us explicitly that we had both agency and responsibility—the ability to effect change and the expectation that we must.

  Beauvoir in those days was barely 10 percent black, if that. Of those, about half came from far across Rock Creek Park, the verdant barrier that separated much of Washington’s white minority from the black neighborhoods that most D.C. residents inhabited. Fittingly, after we moved to Shepherd Park, we grew up right in the middle, safely enmeshed in our mixed Jewish and black neighborhood—where we moved not long before I started at Beauvoir. The first (and only) house my parents owned together was on tree-lined Myrtle Street in upper Northwest. With her exquisite taste, Mom turned that dark, imposing, large stone edifice into a warm and elegant home with beautiful art, quality furniture, and a lovely garden, which she personally tended.

  As children, we roamed freely throughout our neighborhood, riding bikes, playing basketball and football, hopping between families who felt no need to check on their kids’ whereabouts. Our neighbors were professionals—doctors, judges, businessmen, and academics—plus colorful figures like the musician Van McCoy, who wrote and recorded “Do the Hustle,” and Ron Brown, who years later became my senior colleague when he served as commerce secretary in the Clinton administration.

  Our closest neighbor friends were the Cornwells, who had three daughters and three sons, all older than us except their youngest, Michael, who remains close to Johnny. Their mother, Shirley Cornwell, stayed tight over the years with my mom; and Dr. Edward Cornwell, a stout, proud, and loud surgeon, was a good friend of my father’s.

  My dad, Dr. Cornwell, and the other men-folk would sit around on weekends smoking cigars, drinking, and laughing raucously to Richard Pryor’s profanity behind closed doors. As kids, we would sneak up and listen for hours to hilariously inappropriate albums, most memorably Bicentennial Nigger, marveling at how Pryor made foul-mouthed cussing and dangerous drug use seem almost unremarkable. I can still impersonate Pryor delivering many of his lines, like: “You know, I first met GOD in 1929. I never will forget this. You see, I was walking DOWN the street.… I was not running. I was WALKING down the street eating a tuna fish san-wich!”

  Our other neighborhood buddies came from families with whom we carpooled to Beauvoir. They, like us, lived where our school’s buses would not travel. For my working mother, the carpool was a constant and significant source of stress, as she relied on other families to share the burden of taking us to and from school. Carpool challenges were the main reason Mom chose to join the Board of Trustees of Beauvoir School (on which I served many years later). She arrived on a mission to make the school buses accessible to kids beyond the traditional white neighborhoods from which Beauvoir drew most of its students. As a champion of equality, Mom was deeply frustrated that she had to do carpool duty while wealthier, white moms who mostly didn’t work, simply waited for their kids to be picked up and deposited at their doorstep.

  I remember vividly the lengths to which Mom went to make her case. One day, at around age six, I walked in to find Mom creating what appeared to be a major art project. Puzzled, I asked, “Mom, what are you doing? That looks really complicated.” Carefully affixing pins and string to a massive mounted street map of Washington, she patiently explained, “I’m making this poster to show the Beauvoir board how they could easily reroute the school buses so that kids who live east of the park can also ride to school. See, each of these different-colored strings shows a possible new bus route, and the pins indicate where Beauvoir families live.” Never knowing my mom to be particularly arts-and-crafty, I was amazed by the rigor and detail of her project. When Mom set out to marshal data to argue her case, she was deadly serious.

  Ultimately, she failed in her bus crusade, but Mom became deeply invested in our sch
ool and made good friends on the board, like chairwoman (later Secretary of State) Madeleine Albright and Douglas Bennet, who subsequently served as USAID administrator, NPR president, and eventually turned out to be another close colleague of mine in the Clinton administration. My dad regularly played doubles on Sundays with Madeleine’s then-husband Joe Albright. After tennis, the Albright and Rice families would often gather at Hamburger Hamlet for foot-long hot dogs, thick shakes, and steak fries. It was in that era that Madeleine dubbed me “little Susie Rice,” a diminutive I have always disliked but which she occasionally employed with humor when we worked together, just to remind me of how long she had known me.

  An inveterate tomboy from the start, I spent my discretionary time getting dirty, playing sports, cheering the Washington Redskins against Johnny’s Dallas Cowboys, trading coveted Sunoco football stamps, and avoiding all prissy, girly activities. My close friendships were with both boys and girls. But one thing was clear: you would not find me with dolls, princesses, fairies, or anything pink. To my mother’s everlasting dismay, I also acquired a fully formed vocabulary of curse words, which for lack of a better explanation I blame on hanging out with the boys.

  By graduation from third grade at Beauvoir, my intellectual and physical confidence was well-established. I had a strong sense of who I was, combined with a readiness to assert myself, even in elementary school. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Kvell, a hard-ass from Estonia, pointedly advised me to “Stay strong,” but, “try to be more gentle and less impatient with the other kids.” Her admonition resonated with me, because she aptly identified a challenge that I have faced ever since—whether in dealing with school friends or work colleagues.

  For as long as I can remember, my mother has been a key role model for me. In these years, she was promoted to head the College Board’s Washington office, and we would often visit her after school, playing on the electric typewriters and distracting her staff. Even as a young child, I appreciated how unusual it was to have a professional working mother, as almost all of my friends had stay-at-home moms. It seemed cool that my mother wore stylish Ultrasuede dresses to work and traveled frequently to New York. Plus, despite the demands of her job, Mom remained deeply involved in our daily lives—often cooking family dinners and driving us regularly to and from school. As we grew older, she continued to check on our homework, oversee our social plans, and cheer at our sports events.

  Madeleine Albright and my mom, along with their fellow Beauvoir board member and friend Alice Rivlin (who became the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office and later of the White House Office of Management and Budget as well as vice chair of the Federal Reserve), were among the few highly accomplished professional women I knew while growing up. Their dual success as mothers and top leaders in their fields made a powerful impression on me, demonstrating that career and family need not be a binary choice for women. Still, much as I admired Mom’s career and understood that it entailed tradeoffs, I confess to having occasional moments of regret that Mom had no time for, nor little interest in, greeting us after school with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies or delicious fudge pie, like my friend Hutchey’s mom, Muffett Brock, used to do.

  To help at home, my parents employed a housekeeper who cleaned, watched us kids, helped cook, and served us weekday dinners. Mrs. Elizabeth Jennings—Mrs. J, as we called her—was a major figure in my upbringing. She was a strong, sturdy woman from Northeast Washington, with a dignity and self-assurance that exceeded her role in the household. To my mother’s annoyance, Mrs. Jennings kept the television on constantly as she cleaned, and I became fluent in the plotlines of All My Children and General Hospital. Without any hesitation, she called my mother “Lois,” and Lois called her “Jenny” or “Beth.”

  Mrs. Jennings took absolutely no crap from my mother, who could dish it liberally. A typical argument might begin with my mom complaining in the morning that Mrs. Jennings was behind on the ironing and laundry. Mrs. J would retort: “Loyce, don’t start with me this morning. I am ver-rry ti-ired.” Undeterred, my mom might reply, “Beth, I don’t care how tired you are. I’m not paying you to rest!’ It was then game on, before their banter—at once annoyed and affectionate—petered out.

  Over these same years, Dad played a traditional paternal role, bearing little, if any, share of the household responsibilities. He enjoyed spending time with me and Johnny, contributing mainly by teaching us chess, poker, and tennis and playing each game with us frequently. These were “Dad things,” and we cherished them for their intimacy and rigor.

  With time, however, Dad grew increasingly frustrated with Mom’s long work hours and travel, insisting that she was neglecting the family. Although he professed support for working women, citing his beloved mother, when it came to his own family he was ambivalent at best and, more often, resentful. This tension was among the factors that sorely strained my parents’ marriage.

  Around age seven, my parents’ relationship began to deteriorate rapidly. Up until that point, I mostly ignored, even sublimated, the undercurrent of unhappiness in my household, holding fast to the good times when my parents got along—and bracing myself for the uncertainty of what might come. For fleeting moments, I could breathe and dare to hope they could resolve their differences—like the time when my parents announced they were traveling together to Rio de Janeiro with other members of the TWA Board of Directors. Their wish, and mine, was that this trip would light a spark that could salvage their tattered marriage. It was a fun visit, by both accounts, but failed to reverse their mutually destructive dynamic.

  Arguably, my parents were never well-suited. My dad was not only brilliant and charming, but quick-tempered, impatient, and at least somewhat chauvinistic. My mom was beautiful, ambitious, and smart, but also high-strung, domineering, overtly powerful but latently insecure. Ultimately, they agreed on little, except politics, some friends, and their love for their children.

  Despite that essential plot of common ground, for the next decade of my formative years, I grew up in the middle of something akin to a civil war battlefield.

  3 Growing Up Too Soon

  “I’m all-in,” I answered without hesitation at the end of a phone call with Senator Obama in January 2007, a month before he officially announced his candidacy on that freezing cold day in Springfield, Illinois.

  The previous fall, senior staff in Obama’s Senate office—who were quietly preparing for his presidential run—had been in touch to gauge my interest in joining their effort.

  Barack Obama was the only potential 2008 candidate I found compelling, so when he personally asked me to partner with Tony Lake and recruit and lead his team of outside foreign policy advisors, I pledged my full support.

  Keenly aware of the professional cost of burning bridges with the Clintons, proud to have served in the Clinton NSC and State Department, and knowing that Hillary was the Democratic Party’s likely nominee, I was nonetheless confident that supporting Obama was the right choice for me. While we came from very different backgrounds, Obama and I were close in age, and had classmates and friends in common. Above all, we had shared ambitions for our country. Never before had I felt more affinity for a political candidate.

  Win or lose, Obama’s candidacy for me portended the fulfillment of my generation’s dreams of service and the unrealized potential of this country that I love. If America could elect a black man with intelligence, dignity, and principles who didn’t use race as an excuse or a crutch, as my parents taught me, then this was my fight.

  I knew the Clintons wouldn’t understand; and they didn’t. For almost fourteen years, I had known, liked, and respected President Clinton and was grateful to serve our country under his leadership. I also admired Hillary, whom at the time I knew less well, but appreciated her kindness to me and her candor—including a memorable conversation on a long flight back from Africa when she shared some of her personal views about marriage at a difficult time for her. Though I questioned whether the country was r
eady for another Clinton so soon, I believed Hillary would make a good president. But Obama represented so much more than a strong candidate. He embodied my dreams for our country.

  I don’t think the Clintons saw Obama coming. They assumed that Hillary would be the nominee and failed to imagine, until much later, that Obama posed a credible threat. They were slow in building their stable of foreign policy advisors—assuming, I suspect, that everyone who had served in the Clinton administration, which amounted to the bulk of the policy expertise in the party, would undoubtedly support Hillary—whether out of obligation, ambition, affection, or fear.

  In late January, before Obama formally announced his candidacy, former national security advisor Sandy Berger called me at home. Sandy had become my good friend and mentor over eight years of close collaboration. He was deeply committed to the Clintons, going back decades. Sandy surprised me by asking, “Would you like to lead Senator Clinton’s campaign foreign policy team?”

  I replied, “Sandy, I’m truly honored. I wasn’t expecting this.” After taking a deep breath, I continued, “Please thank Senator Clinton for me. I have enormous respect for her, but I have already committed to help Obama in a similar way.”

  The silence on the other end of the line seemed interminable. Having gathered himself, Sandy said calmly, “Are you sure? You know he can’t win, don’t you?”

  I explained how I felt about Obama’s candidacy, concluding, “This is not a choice against the Clintons, to whom I’ll always be grateful. It’s a decision in favor of Obama. And, yes, I’m sure.”

  Stunned, Sandy said without rancor, “You realize, don’t you, that you are making a foolish, potentially career-ending move?”

  The conversation ended civilly, and my relationship with Sandy never suffered. He remained a committed friend. Not everyone on the Clinton team felt the same way, even though in the grand scheme of the Clinton-Obama battle for talent, I was not a very senior defection.