by JOSEPH LELYVELD
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington, by Condoleezza Rice, Crown, 766 pp., $35.00
Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, Washington, D.C., May 2004. PHOTO/Chuck Kennedy/MCT via Getty Images
Rice doesn’t enthrall. She can sound for dreary stretches like the musty briefing papers and dated talking points on which she often depends. Her narrative sticks too faithfully to her calendar, so as soon as she gets into a discussion of the Iraq war, she takes off for Moscow or New Delhi or Kuala Lumpur, with the result that its judgments and conclusions are scattered and underplayed, conveniently perhaps for the author but inconveniently for readers. Still, unlike the other testimonies from the last administration, it has a sketchy plot that goes beyond yesterday’s news and hints of character development, her own and the President’s.
It’s her second memoir in two years. (In each case, she thanks an extensive personal staff of assistants, researchers, and fact-checkers.) The first, Extraordinary, Ordinary People, carried her to the inauguration of the second Bush from her childhood in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, where her father, the minister of a Presbyterian church for middle-class blacks, declined to march with the Baptist reverends Fred Shuttleworth and Martin Luther King Jr. because, he said, he didn’t believe in nonviolence as a response to violence and thought it wrong to expose the community’s youth to Bull Connor’s police dogs and fire hoses. He “hated” the idea, the daughter writes. But he was active in a neighborhood patrol set up to repel white intruders. Because of that experience, she calls herself “a fierce defender” of the right to bear arms. “Had my father and his neighbors registered their weapons, Bull Connor surely would have confiscated them or worse,” she says.
The eleven hundred pages in these books could, just possibly, be of more than retrospective or academic interest. Rice, who’s now affiliated with the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, is fifty-seven. Though she plays down the idea that she might be tempted by elective office—and has expressed the heretical view for a latter-day Republican that Roe v. Wade shouldn’t be overturned—a Mitt Romney–Condi Rice ticket next summer is a not unimaginable long shot (assuming the former Massachusetts governor gets that far). She’s likely to be mentioned as a prospective running mate if only because she has what’s next to invisible in the Republican field—”foreign policy credentials,” however hard-earned. Besides, as she says in the new book, “I do know how to talk.” In her own self-portrait, she’s “combative” and “a natural debater.” (If one continues with this premature line of speculation, there’s a further calculation that might tempt campaign strategists: that she could cut a little into Obama’s solid support among African-Americans while giving white independents who backed him in 2008 the comfort of feeling they were not deserting the first black president for racial reasons.)
What she carries is the albatross of Iraq and her shaky, complicit performance in the White House as national security adviser, which is only partially offset by her gradual emergence as a reasonably effective foreign policymaker in her own right as secretary of state. In her first job she had two principal, often conflicting, responsibilities: to support the President’s policies and to make sure the policymaking arms of government gave him clear options based on good intelligence. Asked by Elisabeth Bumiller, the author of a 2007 biography, whether she performed this role well, Rice replied: “I don’t know. I think I did okay.” Everyone else seems to agree that she was too wrapped up in the first part of her role—too close to the President and sensitive to his moods—to manage the second. They were, he was given to saying, “like brother and sister.”
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The secretary, who calls her approach “transformational diplomacy,” is hoping for a breakthrough also with the Israelis and Palestinians. Considering that she served the friendliest administration the Israelis will probably ever see, it’s instructive to compare her complaints about Israeli trickiness and maneuvering to those that have seeped out of the embattled Obama White House. Israel was a close ally and a democracy but its leaders were “sometimes a nightmare to deal with”; they had to be warned not to lobby Congress; in any conversation “there was a ‘but’”; they “always seem to overreach”; getting the Israelis “to actually carry through on promises relating to the Palestinians” was a continuing frustration, particularly promises involving Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
On a presidential visit to Israel in 2008, Bush travels to Bethlehem by car rather than helicopter against the wishes of the Israelis because Rice wants him to see “the ugliness of the occupation, including the checkpoints and the security wall…for himself and [because] it would have been an insult to the Palestinians if he didn’t.” The barriers were taken down, the convoy traveled at speed, but Bush got the point, according to Rice: “‘This is awful,’ he said quietly.”
The New York Review of Books for more