But last week Condi Rice was showing her clout. She went to Moscow to begin the difficult process of selling the Russians on a deal: in exchange for Moscow’s acquiescence to President Bush’s plan for missile defense, both sides would agree to radically cut their oversize nuclear arsenals. Rice is careful to say the initiative is the president’s, but the strategy behind it, say top administration officials, is largely her creation. The goal and timetable are ambitious. According to a White House aide, Bush wants an agreement ready by the time he invites Russian President Vladimir Putin to his Texas ranch in November. If successful, the pact with the Russians–not a negotiated treaty, which could take years, but rather a kind of gentlemen’s handshake–will give Bush a victory in an arena where the president has seemed less than sure-footed. And it will establish Rice, the first black female to be national-security adviser, as the dominant player on his foreign-policy team.
Rice likes to be in control. She says her Russian is rusty, but at the talks with Kremlin officials last week, she corrected her English-to-Russian translator when he left out chunks of what she was saying. While Rice does not pretend to be an expert on the Middle East or Asia, Russia, her academic specialty, is another matter. In conversations with Bush dating back to his days as a presidential candidate, Rice has long talked–in rather “mystical” terms, say her critics–about a new “grand bargain” for the old cold-war rivals.
She has had to overcome skepticism from Bush’s other top foreign-policy advisers. The “unilateralists,” principally Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his brainy deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, have asserted that the United States, as the world’s “hyperpower,” should look after its own interests and not worry so much about Russia, which they regard as a corrupt has-been. The “internationalists,” on the other hand, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, have been reluctant to antagonize American allies by abruptly breaking the 1972 antiballistic-missile treaty. Rice’s approach could be a clever middle way. If her plan works to buy off Russia, it will quiet Europeans who are sharply critical of the Bush administration’s “go it alone” tendencies and who are fearful of a new arms race. At the same time, Rice’s “framework” idea has appeased the Pentagon hard-liners by making clear that the United States intends to go forward with tests on missile defense as early as this winter, even if that means breaking the ABM treaty.
Rice’s gambit is risky. With his ferret eyes and KGB resume, Putin is not the most reassuring partner. He may just be trying to get the United States to help pay for Russia’s massive international debt, without any real intention of going along with missile defense. Rice is not unwary: she has followed behind her effervescent boss, warning the Russians that the president’s friendly gestures are not a license to oppress Chechen rebels or help rogue states build weapons of mass destruction.
Rice is not just Bush’s adviser, teacher and fellow sports fan, but his close friend. As chair of the regular “principals” meeting of the president’s top advisers on foreign policy, she rarely says much while Rumsfeld and Powell hold forth, not always in agreement. But when the meeting is over, Rice is the one who gets up and goes to a smaller meeting–in the Oval Office with the president.
She is not easily rolled. Though demure and sunny, she learned how to be steely at a very young age. Shopping with her mother in segregated Birmingham, she was told to change in a storeroom by the white saleswoman. Her mother insisted: either my daughter tries it on in the dressing room, or we don’t buy the dress. Rice remembered the “stricken look” on the saleswoman’s face–as she stood guard while Condi changed in the dressing room.
Rice’s background is vital to her influence with Bush. At weekends at Camp David and on walks at the ranch, the two have talked often about education and race. A friend credits Rice with coining one of Bush’s favorite expressions, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” In an interview with NEWSWEEK last week, Rice demurred: “I don’t think I’ve ever said it myself, but it’s a phrase that absolutely resonates with me.” Rice was pushed by her parents to work twice as hard in order to overcome being treated as half a citizen. “It wasn’t as if someone said, ‘You have to be twice as good’ and ‘isn’t that a pity’ or ‘isn’t that wrong.’ It was just, ‘You have to be twice as good’.” Both parents were teachers; they made her read so many books she says she still can’t read for pleasure. She took figure-skating lessons, flute lessons and piano lessons, and skipped enough grades to enter college at 15. As provost at Stanford, it pained her, she told NEWSWEEK, to see “professors pull punches with black students about low-quality work, even though these were kids who had gone to Exeter.”
The tight black middle-class world of Rice’s upbringing was, in its own way, elitist. Rice could not eat at a whites-only lunch counter downtown when she was little, but she was a debutante who wore white gloves to a cotillion. “It was a very controlled environment with little kids’ clubs and ballet lessons and youth group and church every Sunday,” Rice says. “The sense of discipline comes from that.” Yet when she was about 9 years old, the civil-rights movement arrived in Birmingham, which became known as “Bombingham” after white racists started blowing up the homes of blacks. Rice was a friend of one of the four little girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing of September 1963.
Now Rice is trying to bring order to a far larger and just as unruly world. Carefully coifed, elegantly dressed, trim and athletic, she presides in a corner power office in the White House, the sort of place generally associated with white males in suits. As she talks about the world and her–or rather the president’s–plans for it, she looks perfectly secure.
