The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  Gates: Fair enough. Does being a leader necessarily mean that you’ll be isolated from those you lead?

  Rice: You have to have just a little distance from those that you lead. I don’t think that a leader can just be one of the gang. Sometimes you have to make really hard calls that you would not want to make with your friends. Sometimes leaders can bring everybody together around an idea and there’s consensus and we can all be very happy, but sometimes a leader has to say ‘All right, we’ve had enough discussion, this is what we’re going to do.’ And a little distance helps you when you have to do the second.

  Gates: I feel the same way about not allowing my students to call me by my first name, which is very unpopular now. Many of my colleagues will insist, but you create this false sense of equality, of intimacy, and then you could flunk them. I think it’s unfair. It confuses people.

  Rice: I think it is confusing. My students call me Professor. My graduate students call me Professor, and the day that they graduate, they call me Condi.

  Gates: But can a leader be loved and respected?

  Rice: I think a leader can be respected. I don’t know if loved is the right term. You can be admired. And I hope that as a leader, I have been admired. I do think you can be admired as someone who cares a lot about the people who work for them. And maybe that is the closest thing to being loved. You ought to care about what is happening to people, for example, if somebody’s family situation is difficult. You ought to care if somebody is having difficult health issues. You ought to care if somebody is not feeling fulfilled in what they’re doing. Caring about the people who work with you and for you is a very important part of leadership. And when you think about it, you would like to be cared about. You don’t want people to just be cold and uncaring about what’s going on in your life.

  Gates: It must be very, very painful being in the White House watching the polls and seeing the President or the administration taking flack. How do you bolster a leader, at the worst time, whose feelings are hurt?

  Rice: Well, it helps to have a sense of humor. And all of the leaders with whom I have worked—the two presidents with whom I’ve worked and even the president of Stanford—had great senses of humor about the views of the outside world about them. I was fortunate to work with people who have a firm grounding, a kind of center to themselves, so that they are not thrown off course by every headline; it makes it a lot easier to get through tough times. It is also particularly important to remember, in national and international leadership, that history has a long arc, not a short one. What people think about you today may not be what they think about you tomorrow or, most importantly, what history will think about you. I often think about Harry Truman who was perhaps, in my opinion (and I know many people will be surprised), the greatest president of the twentieth century in the United States.

  Gates: Greater than Franklin Roosevelt?

  Rice: Even so. Franklin Roosevelt was great for what he took the country through, of course. But from my perspective as somebody who cares about America’s role in the world, it was Harry Truman that figured it out. And he did it by taking really tough decisions. When he recognized Israel in 1948, George Marshall, who was his secretary of state, told him (maybe it’s apocryphal, but I think it’s probably true), ‘I will continue to be your secretary of state, but I’ll never vote for you again.’

  Gates: Really?

  Rice: Marshall was furious. He thought that it was going to throw the world into turmoil, and in fact, war broke out in the Middle East the next day. Harry Truman’s decision in 1948 to recognize Israel turns out to have been one of the most important decisions of the twentieth century. But he took it because he felt it was right. He was the one, of course, who believed the integration of the armed forces could take place and it was not going to diminish morale as everybody said it was going to do. This was a man who really took tough decisions and when he said ‘The buck stops here,’ he meant it. When you aren’t so focused on today’s headlines, you are a better leader.

  Gates: And the chaos following Truman’s decision on Israel ended up securing the Nobel Prize for Ralph Bunche.

  Rice: That’s right.

  Gates: Ralph Bunche brings me back to an earlier generation of Black leaders. Are we doing all we can to groom leaders within the African American community for the next generation?

  Rice: Well, I do think we are seeing the emergence of African American leaders in a broad range of contexts. Clearly, we have a lot of African Americans now in corporate leadership—leading corporations that we would never have dreamed of when you and I were growing up. That there would be a Black man heading American Express; could you have imagined that? So in the corporate world, I think we’re doing much, much better. What is concerning to me, and I have sat on corporate boards, is when I look at the next couple of levels, I don’t see as many Blacks moving into that pool, where the next set of CEOs are going to come from.

  We need to be very concerned about that and, by the way, it is true in academia as well, and in government. We should not only focus on ‘Well, somebody got to the top.’ But there are pools from which people are chosen to get to the top. We should look at whether we are filling those pools with young Black Americans, and giving them the experiences. The military is terrific at seeing a bright young captain and saying ‘That person looks like he’s got the potential to be a colonel,’ or ‘she has the potential to be a general, but needs to have these career experiences in order to do that.’ The corporate world is somewhat better at it, too. We are terrible at it in the government. I was stunned when I was secretary of state, to walk into room after room after room. I could go a whole day as secretary of state and never see anybody who looked like me. In the foreign service, it’s still not diverse enough. But also, people are not moved in a way that means they’re going to become assistant secretary, which is the position of responsibility from which you’re going to get the major ambassadors appointed and so on.

  Gates: But you were talking earlier about your father’s youth group, which is leadership training. You went to Black schools, in which they spotted you. You would be nurtured. Is that happening within the race today?

  Rice: I don’t see it. Sometimes we old folks sound, you know, the way old folks start to sound. ‘Well, back in the day . . .’ And back in the day, of course, we had this peculiar characteristic of being segregated and had, in a certain sense, second class citizenship. On the other hand, our parents had the ability to control the messages that their kids received, the ability in a Black school to demand excellence (as my school always said, ‘You have to be twice as good’) and to have it and have no racial overtones. What I worry somewhat about is that in integrated environments, you can get a couple of responses that are not very good for Black kids. One is to assume that they are somehow less capable and therefore to start to engage in noblesse oblige: ‘Let’s give them a little bit of a break.’ Deadly. Secondly, to empower victimhood. I think one of the worst things you can let anybody tell you is that you’re a victim of something. Because the minute you are a victim of something, you have completely lost control. And in a more integrated environment, sometimes in trying to recognize the challenges that are associated with being Black in America, it eases over into victimhood and that is a problem.

  Gates: And that lets us make excuses for bad behavior.

  Rice: That’s right.

  Gates: Or lacks in performance. I agree with you, and I don’t think that it’s just us being romantic or sentimental about the past. They demanded performance.

  Rice: They sure did. They were caring, and I can remember my mother staying after school to help her science students who weren’t doing very well, so they didn’t just leave you hanging out there if you didn’t perform. But you were expected to perform.

  Gates: So should we have segregated schools again?

  Rice: Well, of course we aren’t going to go and shouldn’t go back to segregated schools. But somehow, I do think within these gr
eat White institutions or great integrated institutions, it puts a special responsibility on, for instance, Black faculty, to remind Black students that there are no easy ways here. And when I was at Stanford, I started a program called Partners in Academic Excellence. This started when I conducted my first Phi Beta Kappa ceremony as provost. In the three hundred or so Phi Beta Kappas, I think there were two Black kids. I thought, ‘Something is really wrong with this picture.’ And I started to wonder if maybe something was wrong with the messages about excellence and so forth. We started Partners in Academic Excellence, where we paired Black freshmen with Black graduate students and a Black faculty member once a week. The Black graduate students would read the papers of the Black freshman for their Humanities requirement, and they would say ‘That’s not an A paper that you just wrote.’ So something was going on there, and we started to think about where else might this be the case, perhaps for other minority students, for athletes. There were lower expectations of athletes than there should have been in a place like Stanford. Or women and math.

  So I’m a big proponent of really challenging kids. And it’s not just minority kids. It’s about seeping into our academic environments, our educational environments more broadly, with a kind of self-esteem movement. I was helping my cousin’s daughter a few years back when she was about ten years old. She was doing math homework and she had 5 × 9 = 40. And I said, ‘That’s wrong.’ And she said, ‘There are no wrong answers.’ [laughter] And I said, ‘Oh yes there are, and that’s one of them!’ So recommitting to excellence and high standards is important because, going back to our theme of leadership, leaders have to have the highest standards for themselves and for the people that they lead. And people appreciate it when you have high standards.

  Gates: When you walked into a room with the most powerful leaders in the world, when the door opened, did they see a Black person coming through first or a woman coming through first?

  Rice: Well, in most places, they first saw the secretary of state of the United States. [laughter] I have often said I really do think role definition might be stronger for women than it is for minorities. I think we are starting to get past role definition for Blacks. I could see it. I’m not a humanist and I’m certainly not a student of popular culture, but I remember thinking a few years back as I was watching a commercial, that it was no longer limiting the Black role. Your insurance agent just might happen to be Black, or your doctor might just happen to be Black. And something was happening where we were starting to divorce role and race. Now it’s not complete, but with Colin Powell, people started to consider him as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who just happens to be Black.

  Gates: They started to, yes, but initially it was a shock. I had people in Latin America tell me about the first time they saw Colin Powell representing the U.S. military on television. They were in a bar, and the whole place stopped.

  Rice: But now we take it for granted. Black secretaries of state, oh, well.

  Gates: Dime a dozen.

  Rice: And then, finally, the Black president of the United States. Now I don’t believe we’re a race-blind society; when somebody walks in your room, you still see a Black person. But maybe you are less likely, increasingly, to think this way, which is where I think we want to be. For women, particularly in positions of authority and particularly in positions having to do with national security and the like, it is also, finally, starting to break down.

  Gates: But why? You would think, I mean there are so many more White women, powerful women, why would it be the way that race boundaries would break down before gender?

  Rice: I think we have weird notions about gender. I go to these conferences from time to time and somebody will quite nicely and quite well-meaningly say, ‘Well, women lead differently. They’re consensus builders.’ I say, ‘Yeah, like Maggie Thatcher, right?’ [laughter]

  Gates: Or Golda Meir.

  Rice: The fact is, when you think about it, it’s a pretty ridiculous notion. But there is this concept with gender that somehow, women have the feminine and therefore softer side when they lead, and men are just going to go out there. And you say any good leader, male or female, has to have a range of assets, capabilities, and styles. Some days, it’s ‘Let’s all come together and reason about this and we’ll come to a joint conclusion.’ And some days, it’s ‘I’ve had enough of this, we’re just going to do it.’

  Gates: Did you ever feel condescended to, even for a second?

  Rice: When I was younger, I sometimes felt awfully young in the room. And in some places in the world—Russia, for instance—it’s a very patriarchal society. I can remember giving my first big lecture in Russia, in the Soviet Union. It was at the home of the American ambassador and he had invited all these Soviet leaders and generals. And I gave the address in Russian. At the end of it, there was a dinner and I was seated next to a Soviet general and he essentially said, ‘Why is a nice girl like you so interested in bombs and bullets?’ [laughter] I said something about actually being rather fond of military power or something to back him off. But a story appeared the next day in the newspaper saying that I should have been thinking about my suitors, but instead I was thinking about bombs and bullets. But not in many, many years has that been a problem.

  Gates: Turning to your book, as a public person, former secretary of state, you could have written an enormous memoir focused mostly on diplomacy, foreign policy, interactions with the world. You could have dropped names, made a million dollars, sold a zillion copies. So why make your first book after leaving office a very personal memoir—what I call your Black book—in which you reflect on family and your life growing up in the Jim Crow South, the dawn of the Civil Rights era?

  Rice: With every implausible event and circumstance in which I found myself, whether it was negotiating with Palestinians and Israelis or getting off a plane that says the United States of America, toward the end of my time in government I just got more and more interested in and compelled by the question that so many people ask me: ‘How in the world . . .

  Gates: Did a girl like you . . .’

  Rice: Right, exactly. [laughter] And I would look sometimes at a particular picture that you saw, Skip, when you came to my house.

  Gates: I love that picture.

  Rice: This little five-year-old girl with bows and rolled up bangs. How did she become secretary of state? And I was very attracted to trying to tell the story. I always tell people that in order to know how that happened, you had to know John and Angelina Rice. And I wanted to tell their story, both because it explained my story and because it explains a story, I think, of people that are sometimes a little bit forgotten. There was a striving middle class in the segregated South that was somehow in these bizarre circumstances of Jim Crow, yet still getting educated and educating their children and becoming professionals and doing all of the things that then really set us up to be ready when the Civil Rights Act passed. And I wanted to do it not from the perspective of the great leaders of the movement or certainly not as an historian or as a sociologist. My great friend Clay Carson, an historian at Stanford, gave me very good advice. I talked to him before I wrote the book. And I said, ‘You know, Clay, I’m not really an historian of this era.’ And he said, ‘That’s not what you’re going to do here. This is how you remember it as a little girl.’ And it freed me then to take the perspective of telling the story of these forgotten people as a little girl. I think theirs is a generation to which we owe a lot.

  Gates: And if we don’t remember them, they will be forgotten.

  Rice: They’ll be forgotten because of the way that historians, for a lot of very good reasons, often focus on the leaders and the rulers of a particular period. And you know very little about the normal people, the average people, the ordinary people. And yet, these ordinary people—and my parents were ordinary people—were living in extraordinary circumstances and were getting extraordinary results.

  Gates: That is why I like doing people’s family tree
s. Because I am discovering and reuniting you with lost ancestors. And they are all extraordinary. Just finding them makes it extraordinary. But you’ve written a beautiful book.

  Rice: Thank you.

  After a lengthy exchange on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they return to the subject of leadership and Black America.

  Gates: . . . I want to return to where we started the interview: leadership and Black America. Was President George W. Bush misunderstood by Black America? And if so, who bears the greatest responsibility for this misunderstanding? Black leadership or the Bush administration?

  Rice: President Bush was fundamentally misunderstood by Black America. And I’ll come to the question of responsibility. On the one hand, he’s a Republican and I have said very often that part of the problem is the Republican party has a lot to live down for what happened in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed and when some tried to take advantage of that to build a southern strategy to build a base for the party among disaffected segregationists.

  Gates: Which they did quite effectively.

  Rice: But at a great cost to our soul in the Republican party, which should have been, as most Republican Senators were, most Republican Congressmen were, four-square behind the Civil Rights Act. A young Congressman from Illinois, Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, supported the Civil Rights Act. So there’s that history. And a pity that the party of Lincoln would do that. Secondly, for a long time I think that the party didn’t speak in a language about issues that are American issues but perhaps have a more fundamental effect on the Black community; for instance, the nature of the public school education system. President Bush tried to speak to those issues. One of my first conversations with him was not about foreign policy. In 1998 we were at Kennebunkport together thinking about what he might do if he ran for president. And he talked about the soft bigotry of low expectations and how people didn’t expect enough of Black kids. He talked about the minority achievement gap and how could it be that we had so many Black and Hispanic kids who couldn’t read at third grade level six or seven years into their education? He had a desire to do something about that. And even though he didn’t want to use quotas in the University of Texas system, he had gone to a top ten percent strategy so that if you were in the top ten percent, which brought many, many more Blacks into the number, you got into the UT system. So he was attuned to these issues from the very beginning. Yes, he cared about minorities and their forward progress.