Dignity at all costs

If George W. Bush goes down in history as the most disastrous US president since Herbert Hoover, it will be because of his foreign policy mistakes. Yet the person who tutored candidate Bush on foreign policy, co-ordinated it in his first term and was its public face in his second term is probably the most respected member of the Bush administration both at home and abroad. This is the paradox that Marcus Mabry sets out to explain in Condoleezza Rice: Naked Ambition.

Throughout the Bush administration, Rice has been the most effective emissary for the President’s foreign policy because she doesn’t fit the stereotype. Rather than being a shoot-first-ask-questions-later wannabe cowboy, she is an accomplished black female academic whose best friend is gay and best girlfriend is to the ‘left of Lenin’.

When discussing Rice, there is no getting away from race — her story is too tied up with America’s founding sin and its attempts to overcome it for there to be any other way. A girl who grew up unable even to eat lunch at the same table as a white person has risen to become the most powerful woman in the world; she is a testament both to the pace of change and how long in coming it was.

Mabry is uniquely well qualified to tell this story. As an African–American he is able to win the confidence of Rice’s friends and family in a way that a white writer could not; when Rice’s stepmother met Mabry she ‘declared with obvious delight’ that ‘they didn’t tell me that a brother would be interviewing me!’, while as a foreign affairs journalist for Newsweek and now the New York Times Mabry understands the world that Rice now moves in, and how she is seen in it, better than most.