The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy - Hardcover

Kessler, Glenn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 031236380X ISBN 13: 9780312363802

Verlag: St. Martin's Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

An intimate assessment of the secretary of state evaluates her skills as a policy-maker, politician, and manager, revealing her decisive role in one of the nation's most tumultuous foreign-policy periods while drawing on first-person interviews to discuss such topics as her relationship with Bush and her talent for repairing foreign relationships.

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GLENN KESSLER is a diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post and has been recipient of numerous awards, including two shared Pulitzer Prizes. Kessler, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, has reported from dozens of countries and also has covered the White House and Congress. He is a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and lives in McLean, Virginia.

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The Confidante

Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush LegacyBy Kessler, Glenn

St. Martin's Press

Copyright ©2007 Kessler, Glenn
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312363802

Chapter 1

At the Conservatoire Hector Berlioz in Paris, an eager group of sixteen French youngsters were learning to read music when they received a special visitor: a secretary of state on a mission to reshape American diplomacy—and her own image.

Rice was accompanied by more than two dozen aides, reporters, and other officials, including the mayor of Paris. They squeezed into the small classroom, but that did not seem to faze the businesslike teacher, who continued to lead the children through their paces. Rice, tapping her toes to keep time, soon joined in a French music comprehension refrain with the children, singing softly, “Fa-do-sol-si-re-la-sol.”

“I remember this,” she said, telling the children through an interpreter that she learned to read music from her grandmother when she was three, even before she learned to read. “It takes a lot of work to learn to read music,” she said. “You have to practice and practice and practice.” She didn’t mention that after years of study, in college she had abruptly abandoned her ambition to become a concert pianist, shifting to Soviet studies instead, when she realized she would never be in the top ranks.

As reporters watched the initially stilted conversation, one of her aides, Jim Wilkinson—who, more than anyone, was the impresario of the event—circulated among them, quietly making sure they understood how “cute” the staged event looked.

Rice was nearing the end of her first overseas trip, which began just days after she had been confirmed by the Senate. Almost every moment had been meticulously planned for weeks by Rice and her top aides, starting from the day President Bush announced that she would be his nominee for secretary of state in his second term. The State Department traditionally prides itself on being worried about the policy, not the politics, but Rice and her team had brought a White House sensitivity to images and message discipline. The overriding goal of the trip was to signal to Europeans that the Bush administration was serious about repairing relations ruptured by the Iraq War. But there was also a deeper, more personal mission at stake: eliminating the stereotype of Rice as a cold and bloodless White House staffer and catapulting her into a world figure with possible political aspirations.

No detail was too small, especially for Wilkinson, a hyperactive former Capitol Hill staffer whom Rice had brought to the National Security Council for his savvy at shaping media images. He had commissioned studies from the State Department historian’s office. He wanted to know what makes the difference between a good secretary of state and a bad one. Proximity to the president, the historian responded. That conclusion made Wilkinson feel better about Rice’s chances.

Wilkinson also wrote down a list of negative questions about Rice, a clear-eyed exercise designed to think seriously about the concerns of the media and the State Department. Once he had that list down, he could then look for ways to answer them—or at least neutralize them. Among the questions were these:

• Hadn’t she been a bad national security advisor?

• Didn’t she have disdain for the Foreign Service?

• Isn’t she part of the neoconservative cabal that doesn’t care about diplomacy?

• Isn’t she cold and unfriendly?

To counter the notion that Rice was cold, Wilkinson decreed that almost no pictures should be allowed of Rice alone after she moved to the State Department; instead she should always be photographed with other people in an effort to warm her up. On her first day on the job, for instance, he arranged for a crowd of people to stand around her when she addressed State Department workers from a staircase in the building’s main entrance. In another subtle switch, he decided that massive podiums were to be avoided for speeches because she has such a slim frame and stands just five feet, six inches tall.

To show Rice cared about diplomacy, he wanted Americans to see that their secretary of state was at work overseas. He arranged a series of cultural expeditions, such as the trip to the Paris conservatory, each scrupulously chosen to suggest Rice’s appreciation for the local culture. Of course, he loved the photographs that then would be printed in the newspapers back home. He would stuff the drawers of his small office, just outside Rice’s suite, with positive press clippings of Rice, especially photographs that captured exactly the image he had wanted to convey.

In Washington, Wilkinson decided to move Rice’s news conferences with foreign officials upstairs to the ornate rooms of the seventh and eighth floors of the State Department. Rice would be photographed sitting in front of a fireplace or walking fifty feet to a microphone, evoking the spirit of presidential sessions in the White House. Powell, by contrast, had always escorted visitors to the front door of the State Department and then would speak to reporters in front of the glass doors as other people walked in and out of the building. During the transition, Wilkinson had watched a Powell news conference and to his horror saw a man speaking loudly on his cell phone in the background during the entire news conference. The whole thing seemed undignified and unprofessional. The “walk-outs,” as the Powell sessions were called, were banned; the Rice news conferences were henceforth known as “walk-ups.”

To make sure the Paris visit came off without a hitch, Wilkinson even borrowed Nina Bishop from the White House advance team. The most iconic image of the Bush presidency came amid the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. Surrounded by firemen, Bush appeared to spontaneously grab a bullhorn to help extort the firemen and the entire nation to stand firm. It was Bishop who had arranged that trip—and had even handed Bush that bullhorn.

“I Do the Hiring Here”

When Bush won reelection in 2004, Rice was ready to go back to California. She hadn’t expected to be national security advisor in the first place. She told friends she hadn’t even wanted that job because her father had been terribly ill during Bush’s first campaign. Though she had been Bush’s foreign policy advisor in the 2000 campaign, she wanted to return to California to be with her dad. But Bush persisted, and Rice finally said yes. Randy Bean had begun to explore installing a webcam system and other ways for Rice to keep in touch with her father when he died just four days after she was named national security advisor. “That was his gift to her,” Bean said. “He freed her to go to Washington, unburdened.”

Now, with the first term nearly finished, Rice really was desperate to return to Stanford. But Bush had other plans. Two days after the November 3 election, on a Thursday, she flew up to Camp David with the president, the first lady, and the chief of staff, Andrew Card. The president met with her privately on Friday morning, November 6, and got quickly to the point: Powell was out, and he wanted Rice to be secretary of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St. Martin's Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 031236380X
• ISBN 13: 9780312363802
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar