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.
Despite being such a trailblazer, Rice has always had a slightly ambiguous relationship with the wider African–American community. This dates back to her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama. Her family were part of a black class that preserved their dignity in the face of segregation through their own achievements and felt uneasy about Martin Luther King and his followers marching straight into the batons of the forces of segregation. The attitude of her family was summed up by the story about the time when the young Condoleezza was in a store and the white assistant tried to scold her for trying on various hats, only to be put firmly in her place by Rice’s mother, who told her, ‘I buy more in this store than you are paid, and you will not talk to my daughter that way … [To Condoleezza] You touch every hat in the place.’ As Rice herself says, her family had ‘liberated themselves’ before the civil rights movement came to town. This belief in an individual’s ability to empower himself is key to Rice’s personal philosophy and explains why she didn’t initially grasp that she shouldn’t be shopping while hurricane Katrina was battering New Orleans. For her, ‘the locomotive of human progress is individual will’, not collective action.
Rice’s upbringing would have been remarkable even without the historical events that were going on around her. Her parents poured everything into her development. They bought her a $13,000 piano when they were making only $16,500 a year. On top of this, they were paying for private school and skating and tennis lessons. Rice was not, though, spoiled in the traditional sense. Mabry sums it up neatly when he calls it ‘an affection of expectation’.
Mabry ties Rice’s childhood to her time in the Bush administration by explaining how her ability to shut out criticism from the wider world and her instinctive loyalty to her family, be it political or blood, were instilled in Rice by her parents so that she could maintain her dignity in segregated Birmingham. Certainly, Rice has needed these skills recently. She must carry some of the blame for the missteps of the past few years, but not as much as others. She was a disaster as national security adviser but in many ways that was not her fault. Rice was put in an impossible position by the arrogance and obstructionism of the Rumsfeld–Cheney axis. Perhaps the greatest criticism of her is that she was too proud to demand that the President brought these aging egos to heel. In her new role she has played a poor hand well, and her paeans to freedom, coming as they did from a ‘place of humility rather than arrogance’, were effective until they were drowned out by events.
Secretary of State is probably as high as Rice will climb. She is too inextricably linked with the Bushes — a family whom, she tells Mabry, she would trust with her life and for whom she would do anything — for her to run for elected office, be it as governor of California or on a presidential ticket, dreams that those close to Rice once harboured for her. But her story is still a remarkable one and Mabry tells it well.
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