Newsweek on a new book about Rice:
Excerpt: The Price of Condi's Loyalty to Bush
In his forthcoming biography of Condoleezza Rice, NEWSWEEK's Marcus Mabry explains the roots—and the consequences—of her loyalty to the president.
Newsweek
(snip)
During the 2000 campaign, she had planned to advise Bush informally; instead, Rice ended up leading his foreign policy team. "In a political sense, I think he kind of courted her," said Carson. "He really went after her. He's very charming." And Rice was drawn to Bush. "First of all, I thought he was wonderful to be around," she recalled, sitting on the couch in her State Department office. "He was warm and funny and easy to be around. I thought he had just an incredibly inquisitive mind ... You could barely finish an explanation before he was digging into it."
(snip)
Bush — the grandson of a U.S. senator, scion of a Connecticut Yankee family and a product of Andover, Yale, and Harvard Business School—was a gadabout until his fortieth birthday, when he decided it was time to stop drinking. Bush hadn't known who he was until he was 45, according to Rice's mentor, Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Bush Sr. By the time Rice met Bush, he had become a Christian teetotaler and a devoted family man. The two shared a strong religious faith, a belief in American power, similar senses of humor, and a conviction that sports was a metaphor for life. He admired her brains. She valued his instincts. Politically, she liked his "compassionate conservatism"—the philosophy that those who wanted to lift themselves from poverty and ignorance should be given the opportunity. That had been a leitmotif for generations of minister-teachers in the Rice family. Most important, they saw themselves as outsiders: Rice as a function of her race and gender, Bush because he had never fit in as a Texas boy with the Northeastern elitists he came to see as snobs.
(snip)
The mind meld grew stronger in Washington, especially after 9/11. But as much as it reassured Bush to have the woman he called his "sister" by his side, their closeness also became one of the administration's liabilities in the run-up to the war in Iraq. To Scowcroft, for whom Rice had worked in the Bush Sr. White House directing Soviet policy at the end of the cold war, the major task of the national security adviser was to be the skeptic-in-chief: "My approach to almost every question is to view it with informed skepticism ... If it doesn't work, what happens?" (Scowcroft said that in 1987.) But Rice tended to enable the president's missteps rather than check them. The basis of the relationship had been formed in the campaign: she molded his instincts, she didn't challenge them. So as the administration marched toward war in Iraq, she didn't push back. She didn't question troop levels or the Defense Department's rosy post-Saddam scenarios. She didn't demand the administration devise a single, unified plan for after Saddam's statue fell.
(snip)
As secretary of State, Rice has persuaded Bush to shift his stance on some key issues: offering direct U.S.-Iran talks for the first time since the 1979 hostage crisis if Tehran would end its nuclear enrichment program (Iran demurred) and making a deal with North Korea to halt its nuclear buildup (it hasn't stopped yet). But the reason Rice stayed on for the second term, she told me, visibly humbled, perhaps schooled by the mistakes of the previous six years, was "I thought there was more we could do. Over the first three years we'd basically broken down a lot of the old system. And," she sighed, "and I've been very cognizant of the need to put it back together in a different configuration, one that lays a foundation. And so I thought, 'Well, I'll try to do that.' "
(snip)
From "Twice As Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path To Power"; By Marcus Mabry, to be published by Rodale Inc. © 2007 by Marcus Mabry.
URL:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368744/site/newsweek/
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