Flavia Krause
By Flavia Krause-Jackson and Indira AR Lakshmanan
When Susan Rice (pictured) was seven, her schoolmates’ parents pegged her to become the first African-American president of the United States.
She went on to punch the tickets of a striver — as valedictorian, student-council president and varsity tennis player at Washington’s elite National Cathedral School, Phi Beta Kappa at Stanford, then as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.
Her professional rise has followed a similar trajectory. President Obama made her US Ambassador to the United Nations, and today, Rice, 48, is a front-runner to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State or serve as national security adviser.
That ascent may be derailed by critics who say she gave misleading information about the September 11 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and failed to assuage their concerns in later face-to-face meetings. And, with a style that can occasionally be confrontational and off-putting, Rice sometimes wins at a cost, fellow diplomats at the UN say.
“Abrasive, blunt, aggressive. If she were a man, these same qualities would be seen as positive or they wouldn’t need to be discussed; they would be taken as a given,” said Andrea Worden, Rice’s best friend since age four. “How else would someone get to be in that high-level government position if you weren’t tough, aggressive, didn’t have ambition? You can’t be effective if you’re demure.”
Still, even in her earliest foray into government as student-council president, Rice “led by example, didn’t grab power and didn’t try to get ahead at the expense of others,” Worden said.
Objections among Senate Republicans to making her secretary of state have spread from the trio of Arizona’s John McCain, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte to more moderate senators such as Maine’s Susan Collins and Tennessee’s Bob Corker. That may force Obama to spend more political capital on a confirmation fight at a time when his first priority is seeking a tax and budget deal with Congress.
If the president instead picks her to become his new national security adviser, Rice’s relationship with and proximity to Obama, coupled with White House control of major defence and foreign policy decisions, would position her to dominate Senator John Kerry, Democrat-Massachussetts, who’s 20 years her senior, or any other secretary of state, said two administration officials who’ve been part of the second-term personnel planning.
In that role, Rice might follow in the footsteps of predecessors such as Henry Kissinger under former President Richard Nixon and Zbigniew Brzezinski who served Jimmy Carter, the two officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of any presidential announcement.
Rice was an early Obama supporter. They met in 2004 when she was an adviser on Kerry’s campaign and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington public policy group. She helped mould Obama’s foreign policy during his first presidential bid.
The largely partisan attacks on Rice present what friends and administration colleagues say is a caricature of her as a blind Obama loyalist. In reality, they say, she advocates her positions even if she disagrees with her bosses, displaying the intellect and integrity she’s shown since childhood.
Obama said on Tuesday on Bloomberg Television that Rice has done a “great job” at the UN.
“When she has a strong view, it doesn’t matter if every single person in the room has a different opinion,” including the president, said Tony Blinken, national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. Rice speaks her mind “forcefully and, more often than not, persuasively,” said Blinken, who’s known Rice for more than 20 years.
“If she thinks something can be changed, she tries to change it, even when other people say ‘that’s in the too-hard category,’ “ said Richard Clarke, former national counterterrorism chief and Rice’s colleague on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton.
Rice’s sharp tongue has been evident for years. In 2008, she mocked then-Republican presidential nominee McCain for “strolling around the market in a flak jacket” in Baghdad, saying he “demonstrated a surprising lack of understanding of critical issues on Iraq.”
Four years later, McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, kicked off Republican opposition to her potential nomination as secretary of state, calling her account of the Benghazi attack “not very bright.”
On Sunday interview shows on September 16, she described the assault as a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim video that was “hijacked” by extremists, based on unclassified talking points supplied by the US intelligence community.
The controversy over what happened in Benghazi would follow Rice to the State Department or the White House, where she also would inherit a lot of unfinished business. Near the top of Obama’s second-term agenda will be preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and managing the US response to the political changes in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring.
Rice’s greatest strength may be her long-term vision, said one administration official who works with her frequently. While she doesn’t publicly challenge the popular notion of American exceptionalism, colleagues say she understands that the US needs to adapt to technological, economic, demographic and environmental changes sweeping the globe.
Rice has embraced the Twitter social-media service, and has 229,000 followers, more than twice as many as any other Cabinet member.
In February, after Russia and China delivered the first of three vetoes to block intervention in Syria, Rice went further than the White House’s criticism, saying in a Twitter message that she was “disgusted.”
At Stanford, Clayborne Carson was one of Rice’s advisers on her thesis on the divestment campaign in white minority-ruled South Africa.
Rice focused on what would work most effectively to change apartheid policy, such as urging Stanford donors to insist that their contributions not be invested in companies active there, Carson said.
“You knew she was going to make her mark,” said Carson, director of Stanford’s Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute.
As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Rice wrote her doctoral dissertation on the end of white minority rule in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, ferreting out primary sources and original documents, according to two Rhodes Scholars who studied with her.
Rice worked for McKinsey & Co. in Toronto as a management consultant from 1990 to 1993. The next year, not yet 30, she joined President Clinton’s National Security Council staff. In 1997, she became the youngest assistant secretary of state for African affairs.
Rice was on the National Security Council staff when US failed to prevent the 1994 Rwandan genocide that killed 800,000. Alison des Forges, an authority on Rwanda who died in a 2009 plane crash, criticized her in a 2003 interview on Frontline.
“It was a meeting where I recall more the role played by Susan Rice than anyone else,” des Forges said. “My sense was of a person determined to be absolutely crisp and firm and hard-nosed about the situation, as if, as a young woman in the company of middle-aged males, she had something to prove; and what she was going to prove was that she could deal with this in as hard-nosed a manner as anyone else.”
Albright, UN ambassador at the time, and Clarke, who was Rice’s boss and then her colleague on the NSC, said blaming her for Rwanda is unjust.
“All of us, starting with President Clinton and on down, including myself, have said that it weighs very heavy on our soul,” Albright said.
Rice has expressed regret and said that history influenced her advocacy for intervention in Libya. Visiting Rwanda with her family, she said, “Many of us heard strong echoes of 1994 when Moammar Gadhafi promised that he would root out the people of Benghazi.”
As she finished delivering a speech on the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, she cried.
WP-Bloomberg
By Flavia Krause-Jackson and Indira AR Lakshmanan
When Susan Rice (pictured) was seven, her schoolmates’ parents pegged her to become the first African-American president of the United States.
She went on to punch the tickets of a striver — as valedictorian, student-council president and varsity tennis player at Washington’s elite National Cathedral School, Phi Beta Kappa at Stanford, then as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.
Her professional rise has followed a similar trajectory. President Obama made her US Ambassador to the United Nations, and today, Rice, 48, is a front-runner to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State or serve as national security adviser.
That ascent may be derailed by critics who say she gave misleading information about the September 11 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and failed to assuage their concerns in later face-to-face meetings. And, with a style that can occasionally be confrontational and off-putting, Rice sometimes wins at a cost, fellow diplomats at the UN say.
“Abrasive, blunt, aggressive. If she were a man, these same qualities would be seen as positive or they wouldn’t need to be discussed; they would be taken as a given,” said Andrea Worden, Rice’s best friend since age four. “How else would someone get to be in that high-level government position if you weren’t tough, aggressive, didn’t have ambition? You can’t be effective if you’re demure.”
Still, even in her earliest foray into government as student-council president, Rice “led by example, didn’t grab power and didn’t try to get ahead at the expense of others,” Worden said.
Objections among Senate Republicans to making her secretary of state have spread from the trio of Arizona’s John McCain, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte to more moderate senators such as Maine’s Susan Collins and Tennessee’s Bob Corker. That may force Obama to spend more political capital on a confirmation fight at a time when his first priority is seeking a tax and budget deal with Congress.
If the president instead picks her to become his new national security adviser, Rice’s relationship with and proximity to Obama, coupled with White House control of major defence and foreign policy decisions, would position her to dominate Senator John Kerry, Democrat-Massachussetts, who’s 20 years her senior, or any other secretary of state, said two administration officials who’ve been part of the second-term personnel planning.
In that role, Rice might follow in the footsteps of predecessors such as Henry Kissinger under former President Richard Nixon and Zbigniew Brzezinski who served Jimmy Carter, the two officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of any presidential announcement.
Rice was an early Obama supporter. They met in 2004 when she was an adviser on Kerry’s campaign and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington public policy group. She helped mould Obama’s foreign policy during his first presidential bid.
The largely partisan attacks on Rice present what friends and administration colleagues say is a caricature of her as a blind Obama loyalist. In reality, they say, she advocates her positions even if she disagrees with her bosses, displaying the intellect and integrity she’s shown since childhood.
Obama said on Tuesday on Bloomberg Television that Rice has done a “great job” at the UN.
“When she has a strong view, it doesn’t matter if every single person in the room has a different opinion,” including the president, said Tony Blinken, national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. Rice speaks her mind “forcefully and, more often than not, persuasively,” said Blinken, who’s known Rice for more than 20 years.
“If she thinks something can be changed, she tries to change it, even when other people say ‘that’s in the too-hard category,’ “ said Richard Clarke, former national counterterrorism chief and Rice’s colleague on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton.
Rice’s sharp tongue has been evident for years. In 2008, she mocked then-Republican presidential nominee McCain for “strolling around the market in a flak jacket” in Baghdad, saying he “demonstrated a surprising lack of understanding of critical issues on Iraq.”
Four years later, McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, kicked off Republican opposition to her potential nomination as secretary of state, calling her account of the Benghazi attack “not very bright.”
On Sunday interview shows on September 16, she described the assault as a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim video that was “hijacked” by extremists, based on unclassified talking points supplied by the US intelligence community.
The controversy over what happened in Benghazi would follow Rice to the State Department or the White House, where she also would inherit a lot of unfinished business. Near the top of Obama’s second-term agenda will be preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and managing the US response to the political changes in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring.
Rice’s greatest strength may be her long-term vision, said one administration official who works with her frequently. While she doesn’t publicly challenge the popular notion of American exceptionalism, colleagues say she understands that the US needs to adapt to technological, economic, demographic and environmental changes sweeping the globe.
Rice has embraced the Twitter social-media service, and has 229,000 followers, more than twice as many as any other Cabinet member.
In February, after Russia and China delivered the first of three vetoes to block intervention in Syria, Rice went further than the White House’s criticism, saying in a Twitter message that she was “disgusted.”
At Stanford, Clayborne Carson was one of Rice’s advisers on her thesis on the divestment campaign in white minority-ruled South Africa.
Rice focused on what would work most effectively to change apartheid policy, such as urging Stanford donors to insist that their contributions not be invested in companies active there, Carson said.
“You knew she was going to make her mark,” said Carson, director of Stanford’s Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute.
As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Rice wrote her doctoral dissertation on the end of white minority rule in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, ferreting out primary sources and original documents, according to two Rhodes Scholars who studied with her.
Rice worked for McKinsey & Co. in Toronto as a management consultant from 1990 to 1993. The next year, not yet 30, she joined President Clinton’s National Security Council staff. In 1997, she became the youngest assistant secretary of state for African affairs.
Rice was on the National Security Council staff when US failed to prevent the 1994 Rwandan genocide that killed 800,000. Alison des Forges, an authority on Rwanda who died in a 2009 plane crash, criticized her in a 2003 interview on Frontline.
“It was a meeting where I recall more the role played by Susan Rice than anyone else,” des Forges said. “My sense was of a person determined to be absolutely crisp and firm and hard-nosed about the situation, as if, as a young woman in the company of middle-aged males, she had something to prove; and what she was going to prove was that she could deal with this in as hard-nosed a manner as anyone else.”
Albright, UN ambassador at the time, and Clarke, who was Rice’s boss and then her colleague on the NSC, said blaming her for Rwanda is unjust.
“All of us, starting with President Clinton and on down, including myself, have said that it weighs very heavy on our soul,” Albright said.
Rice has expressed regret and said that history influenced her advocacy for intervention in Libya. Visiting Rwanda with her family, she said, “Many of us heard strong echoes of 1994 when Moammar Gadhafi promised that he would root out the people of Benghazi.”
As she finished delivering a speech on the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, she cried.
WP-Bloomberg
