by Susan Rice
Thanks to Howard, I was able to correct course before it was too late. Under his tutelage, I became a better leader and manager, as he kindly acknowledged. I also gained a deep appreciation and respect for the extraordinary talent and experience embodied in the career foreign service and civil service and have since done my utmost to help develop and promote the most promising officers. As assistant secretary and thereafter, I championed increased funding, enhanced security, and due appreciation for the service and sacrifice of the State Department’s and USAID’s career employees who often risk their lives in the line of duty but get a fraction of the public appreciation that our service members rightly receive.
Howard Wolpe, who became a dear friend and comrade in arms, will forever have my gratitude. In later years, when I needed to coach junior colleagues to be more effective policymakers, I often cited the value to me of Howard’s intervention, which truly saved me from myself.
As special envoy, Howard Wolpe played a key role in resolving “Africa’s First World War,” the bloody battle for control of Congo that drew in numerous neighboring countries. During that same crazy summer of 1998, Congo’s eastern neighbors, Rwanda and Uganda, invaded Congo to try to topple the young government of former rebel leader Laurent Kabila. One year earlier, these two governments had helped overthrow the decades-old, corrupt, repressive regime of Mobutu Sese Seko. But after Kabila reneged on his pledge to close the refugee camps housing Rwandan Hutu rebels, including many who had committed genocide, Rwanda airlifted rebel forces clear across the vast Congo to threaten its capital, Kinshasa. Angola, Zimbabwe, Chad, and Namibia rallied to save Kabila’s government, embroiling seven foreign armies in a complex regional conflict. The fighting took on an ethnic cast, where the Congolese army targeted minority Tutsis, and Rwandan-backed Congolese rebels conducted brutal reprisal killings against Rwanda’s Hutu adversaries.
Our fears of renewed genocide in this volatile region resurfaced, along with recognition that intensifying conflict in Congo, the continent’s third largest country that borders nine other nations, would subsume much of Africa in costly warfare. Howard’s job, in coordination with our ambassadors in the region, was to apply the full weight of America’s diplomatic muscle, alongside African, European, and U.N. partners, to try to prevent mass atrocities and broker a peaceful resolution.
As with Tony Lake’s work on Ethiopia-Eritrea, I backed Howard’s efforts with my own diplomatic weight and relationships in the region. Together, we formulated our goals, strategy, and negotiating tactics; and, occasionally, we traveled together to the region. In late October 1998, when the multinational war was raging, we made a strong push for foreign forces to halt the fighting and withdraw from Congo, while pressing Kabila’s government to enter serious negotiations with Congolese rebels. Along with my special assistant John Underriner, I embarked with Howard and Gayle Smith on a regional tour of the key countries involved in Congo, plus Mandela’s South Africa, which was an important mediator.
Such trips were intense and exhausting, as we hopped between distant capitals on small private planes. Commercial airline connections in Africa were scarce, unreliable, and often dangerous. As an assistant secretary, rather than a cabinet official, I did not rate a dedicated military plane, so we often leased four- or six-seat propeller planes (jets were a rare luxury), which were vulnerable to weather and mechanical challenges.
On this trip, we flew in a small plane on what became a particularly memorable leg from Pretoria, South Africa, to Luanda, Angola, a 1,500-mile journey that required a refueling stop in rural Namibia. It was approximately a four-hour flight, so we left South Africa early in the morning to arrive in Angola by midday and go straight into meetings with senior officials. Along the way, as we plotted our message to the Angolans, the four of us sat close—almost toe to toe. Gayle and I faced forward, with John and Howard facing us, flying backward on our tiny plane. It made for convenient conversation, but soon was too intimate.
About an hour into the flight, I started feeling clammy and weak. As my perspiration increased, my stomach turned over, signaling it was quite discontent. I announced to my colleagues, “I’m not feeling well,” and reached for the air sickness bag, which thankfully was handy. With muffled apologies, I opened the bag and threw up voluminously. Suddenly, to my horror, I felt my lap growing warm and wet. The bag had a hole in the bottom, and I was covered in puke. My lightweight, rayon blue dress with white polka dots, once ready for my meeting with the president of Angola, was ruined, and I would have no time to change before my meeting.
In a flash, I caught Howard and John sitting there slack-jawed in shock, but canny enough to gingerly pull back their feet to try to save their shoes from the vomit pooling beneath us on the floor. As soon as I finished being sick and realized the gravity of the situation, there was only one thing I could do: laugh hysterically. Kindly, as friends, they all joined me in howling at the insanity of the moment. But we still had the problem of the dress, and the leader of our delegation being a smelly, unpresentable mess.
We landed on a dirt patch in nowhere Namibia to refuel as planned. There was a single gas pump, a water hole with hose, and some rudimentary bathrooms. The men gave us some privacy, as Gayle turned the hose on me and my dress, spraying me down until I was thoroughly drenched in the desert. She and I then went into the bathroom to strip down and ensure we had washed away all signs of vomit. Confident we had succeeded, all that remained was for me to air-dry over the ensuing couple of hours.
As I have said countless times over the years: “Thank God for Gayle!” Starting when she was my colleague working for USAID in East Africa in the mid-1990s, Gayle quickly became and remains one of my very best friends. Tall and imposing, with a shock of short, spiky white hair, Gayle resembles a white Grace Jones. She is smart, irreverent, fearless, and fun-loving. We have found great strength and solace in each other for some twenty-five years. As partners in leading Africa policy during the latter years of the Clinton administration, we shared a rare bond of trust and common judgment that enabled us to be exceptionally efficient. Often, counterparts at State and the NSC suffer from rivalry, mutual suspicion, or even hot friction. In our case, we could divide and conquer, maximizing our ability to drive policy outcomes without ever doubting or questioning the other’s motives or efficacy.
Our Congo-focused tour of the region was more memorable for the side-dramas than the policy outcomes. Despite our efforts, the Kabila government refused to negotiate with its rivals. Kabila’s external backers extended their commitment to prop him up, and Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda remained unyielding in their determination to rid Congo, by whatever means necessary, of those who had committed the 1994 genocide and still threatened Rwanda.
The war continued unabated until the summer of 1999, when Howard in partnership with Southern African leaders and other mediators negotiated the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement, signed by all the countries involved in the Congo War. Unfortunately, disputes among the rebel groups delayed their signatures, and fighting persisted for a few months after the cease-fire was declared. Even after the fighting quelled, the issues of who would monitor and enforce the agreement and how to catalyze a political reconciliation within Congo remained unresolved.
Sensing another opportunity to best his bureaucratic rivals and perhaps to use Congo to cement his years-long bid for a Nobel Peace Prize, U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke entered the scene to prove that he could seal implementation of the deal that Howard had helped broker but not yet secured.
Over the preceding years, Holbrooke’s career had spanned diplomacy, journalism, investment banking, and various nonprofit causes, but his unabashed goal was to become secretary of state, and he committed his full energies to that objective. Beginning as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Carter administration, he later served as U.S. ambassador to Germany and assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs in Clinton’s first term, when he played a leading role in brok
ering the Dayton Peace Accords, ending the Bosnian war. In 1998, Clinton nominated Holbrooke to be U.S. ambassador to the U.N., which Holbrooke likely anticipated would bring him within striking distance of becoming secretary of state, perhaps in a first Al Gore term.
Dick combined, in rare measure, impressive diplomatic skills with hubris, persistence, and an unmatched devotion to self-promotion. I’d never met him in person until one day—while he waited many frustrating months to achieve confirmation as U.N. ambassador—he showed up at my State Department office. I was on Capitol Hill in meetings when my assistant Annette Bushelle called my cell. She reported that Ambassador Holbrooke was in my office demanding to see me.
“Please tell him I am not there, and we can make an appointment to meet at a mutually convenient time,” I said.
Seemingly anguished, Annette persisted, “He wants you to come back now to meet with him. He’s not leaving.”
“Tell him I am on the Hill meeting with members of Congress and will not return until my meetings are done.” Annette agreed but predicted, “I think he will be here when you get back.”
He was. Holbrooke camped out in my office for well over an hour. When I arrived, I sat down in my chair next to his encampment on my couch and asked what was so urgent?
“I wanted to meet you,” he began. “You know, I dislike you already because you broke my record as the youngest regional assistant secretary.”
I knew Dick had a well-established reputation, but I was truly surprised to see it demonstrated so amply in our first encounter. We went on to discuss various policy issues, with Holbrooke insisting that we would be working closely together, given that African affairs typically dominate the U.N. Security Council agenda. On this, he was correct, and the next two years proceeded on the course he set in our initial encounter.
Holbrooke, I discovered from our first meeting, was not only a seasoned diplomat but a classic bully: he dominated and abused those he could, but he respected, if demeaned, those he could not. To deal with him, I needed to heed my dad’s advice: push back hard and “don’t take crap off him.”
Once Holbrooke was confirmed in August 1999 as the ambassador to the U.N., some fourteen months after his nomination, it was game on.
One of his first gambits was to embark on a tour of the Central and Southern African region, reprising over a year later the trip Howard, Gayle, and I had taken with the same aim of settling the conflict in Congo. Howard Wolpe accompanied Holbrooke on his whole journey, along with a dozen Holbrooke staffers and Holbrooke’s wife, Kati Marton, while my schedule only allowed me to join for a few stops. Across broad swaths of Africa, Holbrooke bullied and charmed, blustered and berated heads of state, trying to compel them to yield by the sheer force of his personality. It was an impressive, if unsuccessful, display of effort and ego.
Undeterred by failure, Holbrooke tried again when he presided over the Security Council as president. Declaring January 2000 “the month of Africa” at the U.N., Holbrooke invited all the African heads of state involved in the Congo conflict to New York for a summit meeting chaired by Secretary of State Albright.
As the leaders began to arrive at the U.N. in advance of the summit, Holbrooke summoned me, our staffs, and my ambassadors accredited to the countries concerned to a Sunday meeting in his office. The discussion grew heated, as he towered over a cramped conference room table and argued that the mandate of the U.N. peacekeeping force in eastern Congo must not include disarmament of the Hutu militia and former Rwandan army elements who had committed genocide and continued to destabilize Congo’s eastern neighbors. Howard and most of the ambassadors patiently tried to persuade Holbrooke that if the U.N. didn’t take on this task (difficult as it was) no one would, and the region would remain a tinderbox. With each salvo, Holbrooke grew more convinced of the righteousness of his position.
When I weighed in forcefully in opposition to his position, Holbrooke, dripping with sarcasm and condescension, responded slowly, “Ah, I remember when I too was a young assistant secretary…” Whatever else he said thereafter, I didn’t hear.
His aim was to emasculate me (or the female equivalent) in front of the older ambassadors who reported to me. It was a pivotal moment: if I let him get away with denigrating me in front of six of my ambassadors, I would be weakened thereafter as leader of the Africa Bureau and the decider on U.S. Africa policy. If I said anything further, the conversation would have devolved into an ugly shouting match. With no better idea on how to respond, I looked him square in the face, as he continued to speak, and raised my right hand prominently, prolonging the display of my middle finger. He kept talking. It was clear he saw my gesture, but he never acknowledged it.
While Wolpe and Prendergast were plainly amused, my ambassadors were uniformly shocked—some bemused and impressed, others horrified. As the discussion continued, I worried about two things. First, that our distinguished six-time ambassador now serving in Congo, William Swing, might have a heart attack. He was an older man, a genteel southerner with a divinity degree, who agreed with Holbrooke’s position and surely never expected to see a senior official, an assistant secretary no less, address a superior as I just did. Second, I wanted to tell my bosses in Washington what happened before Holbrooke did.
For Swing, I simply prayed. For my bosses, I excused myself some minutes later and walked out into the hallway to reach Secretary Albright and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. When I was connected to the secretary, I started, “I am calling to report that I just gave the finger to a member of President Clinton’s cabinet.” She laughed and asked for elaboration. I explained the back-and-forth, and she simply said, “Good for you!” Berger was equally amused and supportive. While I felt fully justified in my indignation with Holbrooke at the time and still do, if I had it to do over, with the benefit of age and experience, I might have found another way to convey the same message—with words and without profanity.
The Congo Security Council Summit was attention-grabbing and brought the region’s leaders back together for the first time since Lusaka, when a cease-fire agreement had been brokered but not sufficiently respected; yet it yielded little tangible progress. Indeed, it nearly came off the rails before it started when Holbrooke offended the elderly, prickly Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, the senior African leader in attendance, who threatened to boycott and thus torpedo the meeting. Holbrooke pleaded with Secretary Albright to visit Mugabe on an emergency basis at his hotel in New York and try to soothe him. She obliged, reluctantly saving Holbrooke’s signature summit.
In the months to follow, Holbrooke gradually lost interest in Congo, concluding both that there was little prospect for a high-profile diplomatic victory and the publicity value of the enterprise had been exhausted. Holbrooke moved on to other targets, including Ethiopia-Eritrea, and far more successfully the battle against HIV/AIDS, which he helpfully catalyzed by elevating it to the U.N. Security Council agenda. In a signal achievement, he negotiated the reduction of U.S. dues paid to the U.N. and, in turn, secured funds from Congress to pay off long-standing U.S. arrears to the U.N.
Holbrooke’s retreat from the Central African field left it largely open again to Howard Wolpe. Through persistence, skill, and deft diplomacy, Howard played a critical role in implementing the Lusaka Agreement and fostering peace and reconciliation in neighboring Burundi.
Holbrooke’s disdain for me endured until his untimely death in 2010 while serving in the State Department as special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Over the years, Holbrooke had mastered the Washington influence game, cultivating influential members of the press by providing generous access and copious leaks and building an army of dedicated acolytes by nurturing talented young experts. As needed, he enlisted his faithful foot soldiers and journalist friends to aid his own ascent and trip up any perceived adversaries, myself included.
It took me years to understand why Holbrooke had seen me as a threat or some kind of competitor, starting even as far back as the late
1990s in the Clinton days. He was almost twenty-five years my senior and three levels above me in government. Yet, perhaps mindful that he himself had risen swiftly from an assistant secretary to the cabinet, Holbrooke and his posse deemed it necessary to work hard during the Bush years to undermine my prospects for higher office by disparaging me to my boss at Brookings and stoking negative press stories about my work on Africa. If it hadn’t been for Barack Obama, whose rise Dick failed to foresee, Holbrooke might have succeeded. Instead, eight years after my most heated encounter with Holbrooke, Obama elevated me to U.N. ambassador.
During the two and a half years that we wrestled with resolving the Ethiopia-Eritrea war and Congo’s conflagration, the U.S. faced numerous other serious challenges in Africa, which converged in the summer of 1998 shortly after President Clinton’s historic trip to the continent. Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha died suddenly in June, enabling the start of a transition to democratic rule. Fierce clashes erupted in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, between government forces and rival militia, which enveloped the American embassy and forced the emergency drawdown of U.S. embassy staff in September 1998. In Angola, the tenuous 1994 peace agreement between the government and UNITA rebels disintegrated, plunging the northern part of that strategic, oil-rich country back into conflict. Simultaneously, war and famine in southern Sudan intensified.
As laser-focused as my colleagues and I were on resolving these and other conflicts raging across the continent—from Burundi to Sierra Leone—we still devoted significant energy to advancing the lasting, beneficial aspects of President Clinton’s Africa agenda. The president’s Partnership for Economic Growth and Opportunity, which I helped envision and later implement, aimed to spur economic reform and regional integration throughout Africa by combining a near 50 percent increase in development assistance with unprecedented debt relief and concerted steps to increase U.S. trade and investment in Africa. Most agencies were eager to rally to President Clinton’s call to do more with Africa. Some, however, were less enthused, notably senior leaders at the Treasury Department, who were skeptical of granting many poor African nations debt relief.