Chapter One
Coaching the Candidate
"The presidency is not just the President.
It's a whole team of people who
are going to get things done."
-Condoleezza Rice, 1999
TO everyone in her inner circle, she is known as
Condi, a name that trips off the tongue more easily
than her full given name. Her mother, a pianist and organist,
fashioned Condoleezza (kahn-dah-LEE-za) from
the Italian term con dolcezza, which in a score of music instructs
the performer to play "with sweetness." There is
a tradition of Italian names on both sides of Condi's
family-Theresa, Angelena, Angela, Genoa, Alto-and
the unusual spin that the Rices put on her name was fitting
for the distinctive individual she would become. In
raising Condoleezza, John and Angelena Rice followed
the direction inherent in her name, always heaping kindness
upon her in their zealous efforts to educate, inspire,
and motivate her to excel. Condi's rock-solid foundation
of love and positive influence underlies every step she
has taken, including her entry into an office just down
the hall from the president of the United States.
The president has always called her Condi, while her
staff members call her Dr. Rice. She appears to have escaped
the president's penchant for nicknames, even
though most of his associates as well as press people have
been dubbed with one. Even heads of state are not immune
-as his friendship with Russian President Vladimir
Putin warmed in early 2002, George W. dubbed him
"Pootie-Poot."
Condoleezza's foray into the Bushes' inner circle was
launched at a dinner at Stanford University in 1987, when
a few remarks she made changed the course of her career.
Along with other members of the political science faculty,
she attended an event at which President Gerald R.
Ford's national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, made a
speech. During the dinner afterward, which was attended
by many of the top foreign policy minds in the country,
Scowcroft found the conversation "dreary" until a young
political science professor named Dr. Rice spoke up.
"Here was this slip of a girl," he recalled. "Boy, she held
her own. I said, 'That's someone I've got to get to know.'"
From her comments, Scowcroft realized that she possessed
a profound understanding of Soviet ideology that
matched his own brand of political realism. "She saw
where we could cooperate and where not," he recalled.
Scowcroft was so bowled over by Rice that she immediately
came to mind when he became national security
advisor in the first Bush administration. Immediately
after the election in 1988, Scowcroft began selecting the
staff that would join him in the White House. "One of my
first phone calls was to Condi Rice," he said. Based on
her scholarly expertise of the Soviet Union, he appointed
her director of Soviet affairs at the National Security
Council. Not only did she gain the respect of her colleagues
in this post, she quickly became a personal friend
of both President and Barbara Bush.
Just as his son would do a decade later, the elder
George Bush relied upon Condi to tutor him on Soviet
military and political history. During his term, in which
the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union dismantled, he
forthrightly credited her for keeping him up to speed on
the subject, telling one head of state that she "tells me
everything I know about the Soviet Union." After Bush
I's term was over, Condi returned to her teaching job at
Stanford. She remained friendly with George and Barbara,
and was often invited to their Houston home and
their summerhouse in Kennebunkport, Maine.
She met frequently with the former president as part
of what Barbara called the "book group," at times consisting
of Condi, Scowcroft, and Bush, to help write a book
about major global events that occurred during Bush's administration.
The work was begun during Bush's first
year out of office and included the input of many people.
Condi made lengthy visits to Houston and Kennebunkport
throughout 1997 to help Bush with the book.
The final product, A World Transformed, was published
in 1998 and covers events that occurred from 1989
to 1991, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse
of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, and the
Gulf War. In the introduction, Bush and Scowcroft state,
"Some of the most dramatic and epochal events of the
twentieth century took place during the short period of
1989 to 1991 . did we see what was coming when we
entered office? No, we did not, nor could we have
planned it Yet, in only three years-historically only a
moment-the Cold War was over." Bush credits Condi
for contributing extensively to the book by helping the
authors scope out its content, refreshing their memories
of particular details, and sharing research she had done
for Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, a book she
cowrote with Philip Zelikow in 1995.
During a visit with George and Barbara Bush in
Houston in 1995, George asked Condi to make a call on
his son in Austin before going home. George W. was settling
in as the newly elected governor-his first political
office (in 1978, he had made an unsuccessful bid for a
state congressional seat). Perhaps George Sr. felt that
Condi could be an asset to his son down the road should
his political aspirations grow beyond the state of Texas.
Or maybe he wanted to introduce them because they
share an obsession for sports and carry their steely self-discipline
into their workout routines, a trademark of the
athletic and competitive Bush clan. Such a common
thread would be a strong foundation for friendship and
create a context in which they could discuss politics and
world affairs. Whatever his reasons, George suggested
Condi meet the new governor, and she agreed.
The governor and Condi hit it off immediately, bonding
like any two sports fanatics. George W. was still a
co-owner of the Texas Rangers, and they chatted about
baseball as they looked over George's signed-baseball
collection, lovingly arranged in a set of glass display cases.
Condi wowed George with stories about Willie Mays,
who was a student in one of her mother's classes at Fairfield
Industrial High School in Birmingham-real-life
stories about Mays that probably only a handful of people
have ever heard. For a baseball fan, it just doesn't get any
better than that. "Governor Bush was very impressed,"
Condi recalled.
During that visit, George W. gained not only Condi's
friendship but her respect as well. "He's really smart-and
he's also disciplined, which I admire," she said. "He's
tough, calm and even-keeled . [and] he also has a great
sense of humor." George Sr.'s instincts about Condi and
George W. were on target; the two had a chemistry that
created a bond of friendship, loyalty, and respect. As a result,
Condi would figure large in the next step of his
political career.
During one mini-vacation with the Bush clan at Kennebunkport
in the summer of 1998, George W. and Condi
had a series of intense conversations about pressing
global issues of the day. The governor was considering a
run for the presidency, and he knew that his friend could
give him clear, straightforward summaries of complex issues.
Neither of them were the type to relax and chat
while sipping ice tea on the porch, so they hammered out
their discussions while running side-by-side on the treadmill,
whacking balls on the tennis court, or fishing. Condi
didn't actually fish-she left that to George W. and his father.
She isn't even fond of the water, but in this case she
went along. "I don't get seasick," she said, "but I also
don't like the water very much and I most certainly don't
fish. I let President and Governor Bush fish and I sat and
talked. We talked a lot about the state of the American
armed forces and ballistic missile defense." All the while,
George W. fired questions such as, "What about relations
with Russia, what about relations with China? [And] what
about the state of the military?"
This grueling exchange marked the beginning of
Condi's long-term relationship with George W. as his
closest foreign policy advisor.
In late 1999, when George W.'s campaign began to
take shape, he enlisted Condi as his primary tutor on foreign
policy. She had stepped down from her job as
provost of Stanford University and had been contemplating
a variety of options at the time. She figured she could
keep exploring those options while coaching the candidate
on foreign affairs.
When Condi started out on the campaign, she assumed
it would be part-time and, apart from her tutoring
sessions, limited to a few appearances here and there.
Her friend, Deborah Carson, who had worked on Clinton's
campaign in 1992, soon set her straight. "When we
talked about it, she thought she would just be giving a
few speeches on national security," Deborah said. "Condi
told me, 'I'm not really going to be part of the campaign.'
She thought they'd just fly her out and she'd give a few
speeches on national security! I said, 'Well, wait a
minute, you don't know campaigns. You're going to be at
every chicken dinner-it's not going to happen right
away, but as that thing gets going, they're going to pull
you in. You're not going to be talking about national security,
you're going to talk about whatever they need you to
talk about at the time.' And so as the campaign progressed,
we were talking and she said, 'You know, you
were right.'"
Not only did Condi take charge of George W.'s foreign
policy advisory group and work with him as his main
tutor, she eventually got called out to make other appearances
not related to foreign policy. The campaign needed
her as a woman-to help get the female vote-and as a
black person-to emphasize the candidate's intent to
place minorities in his new administration.
From early on in the campaign, it was obvious that
Condi had the candidate's ear and had the closest affinity
to him. They shared an obsession for fitness and sports,
and it appeared that only she could temper the complexities
of foreign policy with the clarity Bush appreciated.
And perhaps most importantly, they had chemistry. "I
like to be around her," the governor said. "She's fun to be
with. I like lighthearted people, not people who take
themselves so seriously that they are hard to be around.
Besides, she's really smart!" He revealed the depths of
their working relationship when he described Condi as "a
close confidant and a good soul." And from the start, the
admiration was mutual. "I've respected him from the first
time we talked," said Condi, "because he has the kind of
intellect that goes straight to the point. You can get a
bunch of academics in a room and they can talk for three
hours and never actually get to the point."
George W.'s cadre of foreign policy advisors included
eminent veterans of previous administrations (including
his father's) such as Richard Armitage, Robert Zoellick,
Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Blackwill, and Richard Perle. As
coordinator of the group, Condi caught George W.'s bug
for nicknaming and set out to find a label for the group.
She chose the name of her hometown's most famous mascot,
Vulcan, the Roman god who created thunderbolts
and hammered metal into tools for the gods, which
loomed over Birmingham, Alabama, when Condi was a
child. The colossal statue, which stood on the crest of
Red Mountain, had been built by the steel town for an
exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. When Vulcan
returned to his hometown he was placed on top of the
mountain, far enough from view so that his scantily clad
physique wouldn't offend anyone. The Jaycees even
gave him a job, placing a neon torch in his left hand that
normally glowed green but switched to bright red whenever
a fatal traffic accident occurred in the city.
"I grew up right there in Birmingham with Vulcan,"
said Condi. "I remember as a little girl that it was red if
there was an accident or green if everything was clear."
The candidate's foreign policy advisory group was
committed to forging the candidate's grasp of world affairs
and proving to the world that he was presidential material.
Condi, who has a fondness for football metaphors, described
herself as a "quarterback" for the Vulcans. "I don't
try to do it all myself," she said. "Like a quarterback, I can
hand off or throw downfield." She fielded this key position
because George W. valued her ability to decipher
complex policy issues into easy-to-digest, nuts-and-bolts
language. He described her as someone who "can explain
to me foreign policy matters in a way I can understand."
Whether Condi's talent for clarity is natural or has
been gleaned from years of teaching political science to
undergraduates, it is one of her most highly respected
qualities in Washington. "She has an extraordinary ability
to be clear," one European diplomat in Washington
stated in a Vogue profile of Rice. "Her powers of exposition
on a very wide range of complicated topics are
extraordinarily strong." That point was also made by
Philip Zelikow, a former colleague who worked with
Condi in the first Bush administration. "One of the
things that is appealing to Bush is that she can be very
down to earth in cutting right to the heart of matters," he
said. "People in the foreign policy world are generally not
good at that."
In her role as director of Bush's foreign policy advisory
team, Rice took the lead in what has traditionally
been an all-male domain. She was not intimidated; rather,
she approached the job with the confidence of past experience
-having served in the elder Bush's administration
-and with a sense of control gleaned from years of teaching
at Stanford. "She is a novel commodity," observed
Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council member.
"Here is a highly accomplished African-American
woman . being part of what is and always has been [a]
boys' club."
Part of Condi's responsibilities with the Vulcans involved
working with Paul Wolfowitz to set up intensive
half-day training seminars for George W. that covered defense,
weapons proliferation, Europe, and other topics.
The chemistry between Condi and George W. allowed
this process to run smoothly, and she remarked that they
had a similar approach to confronting the material. When
the press questioned the governor about his lack of experience
in foreign affairs, he assured them that he had
strong resources behind him. "I may not be able to tell
you exactly the nuance of the East Timorian situation,
but I'll ask people who've had experience, like Condi
Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, or Dick Cheney. I am smart
enough to know what I don't know, and I have good judgment
about who will either be telling me the truth, or has
got some agenda that is not the right agenda."
Condi strenuously backed the governor during these
press sessions. She explained that any executive, including
a governor, is accustomed to facing issues about
which he or she has minimal previous experience. Gathering
information and making important decisions on
items as they come up is a natural part of the territory,
even for a president in training. Condi's executive experience
came from her role as provost at Stanford, the
number-two post just beneath the president, responsible
for the $1.5 billion budget and administrative decisions.
George's executive experience came from his years in the
oil industry in West Texas, as a managing partner of a
very profitable baseball team, and as governor of Texas.
"As an executive," said Condi, "you're always asked to
make important decisions about which your knowledge
base is relatively slim. Someone might ask me to support
a million-dollar physics telescope. I don't know a lot
about that, but I can ask hard questions and get a sense
about whether it's important, and prioritize it against
other issues."
When the press pointed out the candidate's inability
to name heads of state and his slips in vocabulary, Condi
dismissed the attacks as a "parlor game" played by Washington
pundits. She stressed the experience he had
gained in both business and politics and reminded them
that every president relies upon a team of advisors and
experts. "Governor Bush has not spent the last ten years
of his life at Council on Foreign Relations meetings," she
said. "He's spent the last ten years of his life building a
business and being governor of a state."
(Continues.)
