Last week, I had a chance to interview Dr. Rice, as everyone calls her. She had returned the night before from Moscow, where she set up a series of meetings between Russians and Americans on missile defense and arms control and had just been discussing the ins and outs of the ABM treaty with a group of reporters. But I wanted to hear her views on race, education and her own upbringing in segregated Birmingham, Ala. Without a hitch, Rice switched gears. As always, she was poised and gracious. Some of that comes naturally from her Southern upbringing. Some of it comes from a stint at the Barbizon modeling school and years of figure-skating lessons. “Figure skating was high-priced child care,” she jokes in her soft-spoken way.
Rice comes from the “Scowcroft School” of national-security advisers: be heard (by the president) and not seen (by the press). Getting even 20 minutes with her took more than a month of lobbying. “If she’s doing her job well, the president is getting the attention,” explains Brent Scowcroft, who held the job under Bush I and has been one of Rice’s mentors. Under his tutelage, Rice learned that her job was mainly to act as a coordinator on foreign policy. In this White House, that’s a bit like herding cats. She presides over an unwieldy group of alpha males including two who often clash: Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Because Rice is not an openly confrontational person, some have dismissed her as out of her league. But the former Stanford provost has in fact become one of Bush’s pinch hitters. Calm and confident, Rice projects a steady image when others are flustered. It was Rice who was the face of the administration on the nightly news from Genoa, Italy, where one protester died in clashes with police during the G8 summit. It was Rice, again, who defended the administration-and critiqued the press coverage of it-at the National Press Club a few weeks ago. She has been stepping out of the Scowcroft model on foreign policy as well. It was Rice-not Powell-who made the first diplomatic trip to Russia last week to make headway on Bush’s beloved missile defense. “It is an unusual thing for a national-security adviser to head a mission,” Scowcroft says.
Rice has an easy style that makes world leaders and average Americans comfortable. But that doesn’t mean she can’t be tough. One friend recalled that at a Washington dinner party several years ago some condescending boor was going on about “the black problem.” What could be done to help African-Americans, he asked Rice. She fixed the dinner guest with a withering look and said: “All they need is a good economy.”
Rice grew up in segregated Birmingham, where one unintended consequence of Jim Crow was a strong, self-sufficient black community. “The thing that was remarkable about Birmingham was even though this could have been a place with really limited horizons, it wasn’t. It was a place where everybody had very high expectations,” Rice says. “My parents had me absolutely convinced that, well, you may not be able to have a hamburger at Woolworth’s but you can be president of the United States.”
Rice shares her views on race openly with Bush, who got only 9 percent of the black vote. “He always knows I’ll tell him when I want to say something. Sure I talk to him about race relations,” she says. “Clearly, in this country race still matters, and so if you are black you have by definition had different experiences. But I don’t feel any special pressure [to weigh in on racial issues].” She is a proponent of “affirmative action without quotas,” for example and fought for the program as provost of Stanford.
Bush can be squishy and evasive on the topic of affirmative action. But Rice did not hedge at all on the topic. “I do believe that higher education is not an award of what you’ve done but an expectation of what you might do. It’s complicated to put together a class. Now I am a committed proponent of using means to diversify in higher education,” she said. “But I am also more than cognizant of the downsides. So I would certainly hope that no one gets locked into the view that this can never change, that it shouldn’t be constantly reviews, that we ought to use race only.”
What drew her to Bush II, she says, were his views on education. The daughter of two educators, Rice grew up with her father’s words echoing in her ears: “If it’s in your head, no one can take it away from you.” That rang especially true during the civil-rights era, when bombs were going off in her very neighborhood. She remembers taking clothes and food over to Arthur Shores, a family friend and Martin Luther King Jr.’s lawyer, after his house was bombed.
Rice calls her parents “educational evangelists.” “They literally used to go door to door and convince people they had to go to college,” she says. Rice is passionate when she speaks about education. “I think education is both the ticket out for so many people and it is armor against almost anything…. I watched education transform my family within a couple of generations. If we lose that as a country, if we lose the ability for people to go on to that transforming experience that is higher education, if we make it such that only if you’re born in certain circumstances do you have access to that, then we have lost the very basis of who we are.” Rice is clearly a woman who knows who she is.
