Condi

by Antonia Felix

  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 har
dens 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.

  TEN

  At War and Under Fire

  “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 ha
ve 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.