Is Condi The Problem?

Monday, Apr. 05, 2004 By MICHAEL ELLIOTT AND MASSIMO CALABRESI

Article Tools

Sometimes, you just have to leave your mentor behind. In an interview with TIME in August 2001, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said her "model" for the job was Brent Scowcroft, the only person to serve in the post under two Presidents, and the man who, in 1989, had brought Rice from Stanford University to work with him in the White House of George H.W. Bush. Scowcroft was self-effacement personified. For most of his time in office, he would not have been recognized by tourists squeezing their faces between the bars of the north fence of the White House. Indeed, at a conference Rice attended in January 2001, Scowcroft argued that a National Security Adviser should be seen occasionally and heard less.

Rice could not have been listening. On the morning of March 22, hours after Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief in the Administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, had made his explosive charges on the war on terrorism, Rice performed a rarely seen grand slam, appearing on the breakfast shows of ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN. Interviews with Tom Brokaw of NBC News and Sean Hannity of Fox News followed; so did sit-downs with network and print correspondents as well as an op-ed piece in the Washington Post. For a woman who was once said to have been unfairly criticized--actually, by none other than Clarke--because "she doesn't run around telling everyone in the media what she thinks," Rice was doing more running and telling than anyone else since P. Diddy bragged about completing the New York City marathon.

Just about the only place that Rice did not appear was before the commission looking into the attacks of Sept. 11 during two days of gripping public testimony last week. Citing Executive privilege as a member of the President's staff, Rice said she could not appear under oath in a public session but would be happy to talk to the commission privately, as she already has done for four hours. Perhaps inevitably, given the manifold outlets for her ire, not everything Rice said was internally consistent. At one time she claimed that most of Clarke's ideas for combatting al-Qaeda had been tried and rejected under Clinton, while at another she insisted that the Bush team had acted on them. And Rice sometimes contradicted--or was contradicted by--Administration colleagues who were doing their own briefings for the media and appearing before the commission. Rice, for example, disagreed with Vice President Dick Cheney's claim that Clarke was "out of the loop" on decisions on counterterrorism.