The Condi Rice Version of History

[Stone_Spirits]

The Condi Rice Version of History

By Laura Flanders, AlterNet
April 7, 2004

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the chapter "Sweetness and Light: Condoleezza Rice" from Laura Flanders' new book Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species (Verso Books). For more information about the book, visit www.lauraflanders.com.


Condoleezza Rice became George W. Bush's national security adviser, having directed an oil company, managed a multi-million-dollar university and served as a Soviet expert in Washington during the collapse of the Soviet Union.


She was assuming a post in her second Bush administration, the top national security position in the cabinet; but when The New York Times ran a story on the 46-year-old professor, it didn't discuss her views on national security until the twenty-seventh paragraph. The subject cropped up near the end of the Times's long feature, which was dominated by talk of her dress-size, her hair, her hemline, and her place of birth.


Los Angeles attorney, Connie Rice, a second cousin of Rice's, says such coverage is simply sexist: "You don't hear the press asking where Dick Cheney likes to shop."


No Times story so far dwelt on the VP's youth as a white man in pre-civil rights Nebraska, but the Times dedicated fully half of their feature on Rice to her childhood. In that, the paper was hardly alone. Read a dozen features on Condoleezza Rice, and you're likely to read twelve almost identical stories about her family and her childhood and almost nothing about just what's she done since she rose from there to here.

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