Interesting article, John!
********************************************************
Is Condi The Problem?
By MICHAEL ELLIOTT and MASSIMO CALABRESI
Posted Sunday, March 28, 2004
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.
Her showdown with Clarke got bitterly personal. On ABC News, Clarke lumped Rice together with Cheney as "mean and nasty people." But Rice gave as good as she got. Clarke's claim that he once divined from her body language that she had never heard of al-Qaeda, she told the network correspondents, was "arrogant in the extreme. I find it peculiar that Dick Clarke was sitting there reading my body language. I didn't know he was good at that too." But all the sarcasm and backbiting in Washington could not obscure a central truth: by casting doubt on the performance of the Bush team in the months before Sept. 11, Clarke had taken aim at the competence of Rice, who was not only his boss but is also the person charged with making sure that the President's foreign policy priorities are straight and that the best intelligence is landing on his desk. For the first time in more than three years, during which she has usually been the subject of coverage so flattering that it would make Donald Trump blush, the first woman ever to be National Security Adviser was on the spot.
time.com |
