Is Condi The Problem?

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In 2001, there was no doubting the source of Rice's power. During the election campaign, she had forged a deep personal bond with Bush, building on relationships with his family that she had established during his father's presidency. Rice used the confidence that Bush had in her to consolidate her position in Washington. The big personalities of the Administration's foreign policy team had not yet shown their muscle. Though it was well understood that Cheney would be a key figure in the new Administration, Bush did not know him as well as he knew Rice. There was speculation at the end of 2000 that Cheney would chair the Principals Committee meetings--a key policymaking forum on foreign and security policy. Rice was given the assignment, although Cheney managed to place some associates of his, like Robert Joseph, an expert on nonproliferation, in important positions within the NSC. Rumsfeld, no friend of Bush's father, spent much of the first half of 2001 fighting (and seemingly losing) a battle with the uniformed military to rethink their priorities. So Rice was central to Bush's team. Granted, she had only had a scant two years' experience in government, but from the time of her childhood in Birmingham, Ala., nobody ever doubted that Rice was a quick study. At the time of the transition, said a senior member of the Clinton team, "she came in and listened attentively to what the experts told her. She was very, very cordial."

But for all her cordiality, Rice was a critic of the Clinton Administration's policies and habits. She had said as much, in the kind of language that one of Oscar Wilde's more waspish characters might have used. In a famous 2000 article in Foreign Affairs, she insisted that the "Clinton Administration has assiduously avoided implementing an agenda" that "separates the important from the trivial." In an interview with the New York Times just before the election, she dismissed Clinton's affection for peacekeeping by stating that "we don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten." The Bush team, says Scowcroft, had a sense that "if the Clinton Administration did it, it was suspect," though Scowcroft says that in Washington attitudes like that are "standard procedure."

Rice, however, brought more than a distaste for the Clinton way to her new job. There was also her expertise and her President's initial agenda. Arguably, neither has turned out to be ideally suited to the world with which she and Bush have had to cope. Rice had been a distinguished scholar of the Soviet Union, which by 2001 did not exist. During the presidential campaign, she freely admitted to the New York Times that "I've been pressed to understand parts of the world that have not really been part of my scope. I'm really a Europeanist." Even Clinton officials not unsympathetic to Rice and her colleagues saw trouble brewing at the time of the transition. "The biggest thing they have to work on is adjusting their perception of the world to realities," said the official who had praised Rice's cordiality. "They've been on the outside for quite some time. They're going to discover it's not the world they thought it was."