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Lifting the Shadow

Can Condoleezza Rice Emancipate Herself from Bush?

By Marc Hujer

Part 2: She Can Talk about Football -- and Knows Her Way around Nuclear Bombs and Missiles

Two thousand eight was supposed to be the year of women in US politics, one in which the hope of a female superstar taking the reins in Washington was suddenly within reach. In January, it looked as though Hillary Clinton would be the one to fill those shoes. Eighteen-million Democrats voted for her in the primaries, but then she eventually lost to rival Barack Obama. But the desire for a woman in a leading position remained, prompting McCain to choose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate in late August. The hope was that Palin would capture the enthusiasm of female voters and transfer it to McCain. But her provinciality ultimately caused her to stumble.

Condoleezza Rice is 53, which makes her seven years younger than Hillary Clinton and 10 years older than Sarah Palin. Palin may be sexy, but she lacks intellect, and Clinton may be clever, but she is not necessarily sexy. Rice, though, is clever -- and she can be sexy if she wants to be.

She was never an academic genius. Her 1981 dissertation about Czechoslovakia was neither brilliant nor original. Nevertheless, throughout her life she has been adept at creating an outstanding first impression.

She says that she is not interested in returning to politics. Next year she plans to go back to Stanford University, where she was provost until 1999. She wants to incorporate her Washington experiences into her teaching at the university.

Rice's lukewarm denials have only reinforced the rumors of her political ambitions. Some believe that she could run for governor of California in two years, when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's second term ends. She could also run against Democratic California Senator Barbara Boxer in 2012. Finally, she could run for president in 2012, as former Clinton advisor Dick Morris predicted she would do in 2008.

Is Rice the Republicans' answer to Barack Obama?

She has never treated her skin color as part of her identity, and unlike Obama, she never sought out the black experience. While Obama played basketball with other young black men as a teenager, she was the only black girl to go ice-skating with her white friends. But Rice says that no one can tell her what it means to be black. "I've been black all my life," she says.

She grew up in the midst of the racial unrest of the 1960s. She was born in the Deep South, in Birmingham, Alabama, where the Ku Klux Klan committed a devastating bombing of a church in 1963. She was eight years old at the time, and her friend Denise McNair was killed in the blast. She still remembers the girl's pastel-colored coffin, which seemed strangely small.

But she does not remember having felt angry at the time. Her parents taught her that anger is a weakness.

She has experienced racism firsthand, in department stores and restaurants. As a child, she was once scolded by a white saleswoman for touching a hat. On another occasion, she ordered a hamburger in a restaurant and was brought a bun with onions, but no meat. Nevertheless, she remains convinced that a person can overcome any obstacle. She believes in the ability of every human being to change his environment. She has never complained about injustice in America. "I think that black Americans of my grandparents' ilk had liberated themselves," she says.

Her parents, who were strong advocates of education, tried to give their child as many opportunities as possible. Her father showered her with books and signed her up for every possible book club. "So I never developed the high art of recreational reading," she says.

She learned to play the violin and chimes, learned to speak French and Spanish, and took ballet lessons. Play purely for the sake of play was foreign to her. Her parents told her that she had to be twice as good as other children. She skipped the first and seventh grades. When she was 15, her parents took out a loan to buy her a Steinway grand piano for $13,000. And when she was a student at the University of Denver and a professor implied that blacks were intellectually inferior, she said: "I'm better in your culture than you are."

She never felt like an outsider, and she never felt African-American. When Hurricane Katrina hit the coast of Louisiana in August 2005, she was in New York, where she worked on her backhand with tennis star Monica Seles, met her former boyfriend, former football star Gene Washington, went shopping for shoes at Ferragamo on Fifth Avenue and went to see the musical "Spamelot." It was not until the next day that she realized what a terrible impression she had made. While black Americans were dying and losing their houses in New Orleans, she went shopping -- she, of all people, a black cabinet secretary.

Rice did not feel responsible for blacks.

Bush first met her in 1995, when he had just been elected governor of Texas. They talked about sports and family, and within a month they were fishing, exercising, rowing and sailing together. Her first impression of Bush was that he was "curious and probing." He needed her to make up for his ignorance of foreign policy.

They were not exactly compatible, he a man's man with a swagger and a Texas drawl, and she a well-educated woman who had always been drawn to the fine arts. She loves classical music and he likes country music, she loves good books and he likes to fish. She is a polyglot and, though he sometimes delivers speeches in Spanish, he mostly speaks American. And yet Rice came to admire this man, for his deep faith in God, his strong discipline, his love of sports and, to some degree, even for his unpolished ways.

Athletes had always fascinated her. Every man with whom she is believed to have had a relationship has been a football player. At Notre Dame she met Wayne Bullock, the fullback on the school's football team. And in Denver she met Rick Upchurch, a player with the Denver Broncos, who she almost married. After that, she dated Gene Washington, a player on the Stanford team who would later join the San Francisco 49ers. Her friends say: "Condi likes tough guys."

It is an evening in August 2008. She has an appointment with her fitness trainer, a man known as Tommy the Tank. She trains with him at 6 p.m., twice a week. He comes to her home in the Watergate complex, where she has bought two condominiums, one as her living quarters and one as her gym.

It is still light outside, but she has drawn the curtains. There is relatively little equipment in the room: a treadmill, an elliptical trainer, weights and mats. The walls are bare. "We call this place the house of pain," she says.

She got up at a quarter to five, as she does every morning, and spent an hour working out in her gym and watching the news of the day -- stories about North Korea, Russia and Iran -- on television. She was in her office at 7 a.m., where she met with members of Congress, telephoned with Hillary Clinton, then had lunch at the White House, administered the oath of office to the new American ambassador to Honduras and, finally, in an event in the ballroom at the State Department, reflected on the 10th anniversary of the bombing attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It was a day without interruption, and now Tommy the Tank is standing in front of her, saying: "Earn it, Doc!"

She works her biceps, her back and her abdominal muscles. She lies down on a mat and pushes herself to complete the last of the repetitions, with Tommy the Tank kneeling over her, saying things like "yes, ma'am" and "alright, Doc!" At the end, he counts backwards, as if she needed outside help to motivate herself. Almost out of breath, she orders him to stop counting. "I can count for myself," she barks.

"I structured my life from very early on," she says. "When we moved to Denver and I was a competitive figure skater and serious about piano and serious about school, and there was only so much time in the day, and so you had to organize the day. You couldn't just let things happen. So getting up at 4:45 in the morning was second nature to me because that's what I did to skate. So I think early on I developed this sense of order in my life. I'm not sure I would call it discipline really so much as orderliness. " It is this toughness that has helped Rice succeed in male-dominated worlds. Toughness and knowledge. She surprises men, because she can talk about football -- and knows her way around nuclear bombs and missiles.

She has repeatedly sought out powerful mentors. Josef Korbel, the father of Madeleine Albright and one of the best-known experts on Eastern Europe in his day, sparked her interest in the region. Brent Scowcroft, former President George H.W. Bush's national security advisor, taught her the ropes in Washington, and former Secretary of State George Shultz introduced her to the younger Bush. All of these men treated her as they would a daughter with great promise. She rose through the ranks, all the while becoming more experienced, self-confident and well known.

But she was also quick to emancipate herself from her mentors and change sides. Before the Iraq war began, Scowcroft, writing in the Wall Street Journal, begged his protégé: "Don't attack Saddam," but by then Rice was no longer interested in what her former mentor had to say. Outraged, she called him and, in the end, Scowcroft apologized.

If Rice hopes to have a political future, she must also emancipate herself from Bush. Indeed, it is no accident that she has been subtly distancing herself from Bush recently. When asked about the achievements and mistakes of the last eight years, about how fallible she was and whether she believed that she was acting on behalf of God, she already sounds clearly different from Bush: "I'm a prayerful person. I believe in divine guidance. I am not one who would ever say God put me here to do this. I think it's presumptuous to make certain statements about what God intended for you."

Rice was Bush's alter ego in foreign policy for eight years. During that time, she uttered statements that ended up having devastating consequences.

She called the Kyoto climate protocol "dead on arrival." She criticized the security architecture of NATO. When it came to dealing with the opponents of the Iraq war, she is quoted as having said to her boss: "Punish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia." There were those who called her one of the weakest foreign policy leaders in history.

Today she sits in her office on the eighth floor of the State Department in Washington, where she runs one of the world's largest government agencies, with its 57,000 employees, 8,000 of them in Washington alone, and 264 diplomatic missions. But today hardly any progress is being made on the foreign policy front, and negotiations everywhere are stalled. In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a declared Bush foe, remains as stubborn as ever. In the Middle East, peace still seems a long way off, even if the bloodiest unrest in Iraq appears to be over. Bush wanted to create democratic nations in the Middle East, and yet it has been precisely their democratic elections that have put the enemies of democracy in power there: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. And this is Rice's new Middle East? Has she failed? Hasn't the Iraq war proved to be a serious mistake?

"I believe that Iraq will turn out to have been a strategically wise decision. I won't say that everything that we did was perfect, but I do think it will turn out to have been a strategic, wise decision to get rid of Saddam Hussein ... which will, I believe, change the face of the Middle East." She truly believes that we are at a turning point in history, a time not unlike the era of German reunification, when she was part of George Bush Sr.'s negotiating team, and when communism collapsed and a new, American age began.

She admits to making mistakes, but she hopes that history will vindicate her.

She came to "recognize that when you're at the beginning of a big historical transformation, the goal has to be to lay the foundation, including in terms of values and insisting on a kind of set of irrefutable principles. We harvested German reunification, but it was the decisions that we made in 1946, 1947 and 1948 that set the ground on which Germany would ultimately reunify. ... But quite frankly, it's a different game to do the diplomacy at the end of an historical transformation than at the beginning. People tend to forget that underneath the tectonic plates have shifted very dramatically in our favor."

In the summer, she traveled to China to visit the earthquake zone in Chengdu. It was yet another of those trips on which Rice embarks to gain friends for America. After touring the wreckage and the rubble, and what was left of the Tengda health club, she went to the Qinjianrenjia camp, where 8,000 people were living in temporary housing and the United States had donated money to provide the earthquake victims with clean water. She listened to their stories of destroyed apartments, poverty, sickness and need, and even of the goldfish some had saved. She fed the fish, buying a bottle of water from a vendor who was there for no other reason but Rice's photo op -- an effective number in an effective show.

Appearances like these explain why she is not held responsible for Bush's disastrous administration. She was in China, after all, to help, to feel empathy and to praise the resilience of the people there and promise American solidarity.

A boy, perhaps 12 years old, approached her in Chengdu. He said that he had been waiting for her, but that all he wanted was her autograph -- not money or clean water. "Ms. Rice," he said, "you are a superstar."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan