Whatever their limitations, books about prominent sitting officials are irresistible, partly driven by an insatiable public appetite for gossip about pubic figures and an interest in understanding and judging them.
More important, these first drafts of history are indispensable assets for future historians. They capture not only policymakers’ fresh recollections but also the tone and mood of the day, which are all too often lost by the time historians, usually decades later, write about them.
Elisabeth Bumiller’s biography of Condoleezza Rice is an excellent case in point. A correspondent for The New York Times who covered the White House from 2001 to 2006, Bumiller relied on 10 interviews with Rice and 150 with other people to write a compelling portrait of the country’s first black female secretary of state.
What distinguishes Bumiller’s book from other initial studies of the Bush administration and its principal actors is its absence of finger-pointing or polemics. Bumiller’s biography is scrupulously fair and most notable for its above- the-battle tone.
“It was obvious from Rice’s many metamorphoses that her real ideology was not idealism or realism or defending the citadels of freedom, although she displayed elements of all of them,” Bumiller writes. “Her real ideology was succeeding.” Bumiller refuses to offer any decisive judgments on Rice’s performance. She admires her extraordinary rise from a childhood in segregated 1950s Alabama to the highest office ever held by an African-American woman. But Bumiller understands that Rice’s place in history will rest more on her record in the Bush administration.
And “with 18 months left in office,” Bumiller wrote as she finished her book, “it was still too early to come to definite conclusions.” Yet if Bumiller is self-consciously cautious about pronouncing on Rice’s record, the book provides ample information for readers to draw their own conclusions.
The 6 1/2-year history of the Bush-Rice collaboration recounted by Bumiller and the six months since is certainly enough for commentators to render more than tentative conclusions.
Bumiller says that if President Bush and Rice can produce a settlement in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians and an end to North Korea’s nuclear program, it would give them claims on success that would significantly improve their historical reputations.
But implicit in this assessment is the view that foreign- policy failures have troubled the Bush presidency. And even if Rice and the president manage to achieve the sort of Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement that has eluded all previous administrations over the past 60 years and tame the North Korean communist regime, it is doubtful that these would be enough to counter what most people see as the administration’s failures in Iraq.
Rice’s record here as both national security adviser and secretary of state will surely undermine her historical standing.
“She knows very well that if she doesn’t do anything” about the Middle East, “she will be Iraq,” a European diplomat who was a friend of Rice’s told Bumiller.
Although the greatest blame for the failures in Iraq will be shouldered by President Bush; Vice President Dick Cheney; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; CIA chief George Tenet; neocons Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith; and L. Paul Bremer, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Bumiller’s reconstruction of the prelude to war describes Rice’s contributions to the decision.
By the start of the invasion in March 2003, the Rice of early 2000, who had published an article in Foreign Affairs decrying the Clinton administration’s “moral impulse to spread American democracy,” had morphed into a forceful public advocate of bringing down Saddam Hussein, whom she pictured as intent on acquiring nuclear weapons that could lead to “a mushroom cloud” over the United States.
“Some of Rice’s friends,” Bumiller writes, “were stunned that she actually seemed to believe Bush’s argument in the final days of the war buildup that a liberated Iraq could spread freedom across the Middle East.” Rice also believed that “the postwar phase would be like the successful occupation of Germany after World War II, and that it would be possible to plant democracy in a shattered Iraq.” Either Rice knew less than she should have about pre- and post-1945 German history, or she was carried away by false optimism.
Ultimately Bumiller’s book will be seen not just as a discussion of Rice’s role in shaping one administration’s missteps in foreign affairs but also as a lesson anout the gap between ambitious presidential appointees and their unwillingness to speak truth to power.
nonfiction
Condoleezza Rice, An American Life: A Biography, by Elisabeth Bumiller, $27.95
american democracy,amp,historian,new york times,plo
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