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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
Twice as Good:
Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to
Power
by Marcus Mabry
Modern Times/Rodale
Books - May 2007
Storms
It
is one thing to have a limited political
goal and to fight decisively for it; it is
quite another to apply military force
incrementally, hoping to find a political
solution somewhere along the way. A
president entering these situations must
ask whether decisive force is possible and
is likely to be effective and must know
how and when to get out.
Condoleezza
Rice
Foreign Affairs
January/February
2000
Condoleezza Rice had been working flat
out since becoming secretary of state in
January, delaying her vacation until the
last days of August. The president had
been on his vacation for weeks. In fact,
Bush was on the way to setting a
presidential record, surpassing Ronald
Reagan for time spent away from
Washington. When her holiday finally came,
Rice embraced it with the same intensity
she brought to her job. Escaping from work
was one of the ways she maintained balance
-- like her daily workouts, her sessions
with her chamber music group, and her
Sunday calls to friends and family.
She left Washington for her vacation in
New York on Wednesday, August 31. That
afternoon she hit some balls with Monica
Seles, and that night she took in the
sold-out Monty Python musical,
Spamalot, on Broadway. On Thursday
morning she indulged her shoe obsession,
shopping at Ferragamo on Fifth Avenue.
While Rice was out, her communications
chief, Jim Wilkinson, back in his room at
the Palace Hotel at Fifth and Madison,
came across an item on the Drudge
Report:
- Eyewitness: Sec of State Condi Rice
laughs it up at 'Spamalot' while Gulf
Coast lays [sic] in
tatters. Theatergoers in New York
City's Great White Way were shocked to
see the President's former National
Security Adviser at the Monty Python
farce last night -- as the rest of the
cabinet responds to Hurricane Katrina .
. .
Wilkinson's heart sank. The
thirtysomething aide was so attentive to
Rice's image that before she gave speeches
in drab hotel conference rooms abroad, he
fussed with the backdrop and podium to
make sure the pictures would show what the
city she was in. And it was Wilkinson who
stage-managed her airport arrivals to make
them look presidential. It was no secret
that he hoped Rice would run for president
some day. And now this. Hurricane Katrina
had made landfall early Monday morning.
Initially, weather forecasters thought New
Orleans had dodged a bullet; when the
storm hit sixty-five miles southeast of
the city, it had been downgraded to a
Category Three hurricane from a
potentially cataclysmic Category Five. But
by 8 a.m. on Monday, one of the city's
central canals had been breached. The
nearby Lower Ninth Ward, largely black and
poor, was under six to eight feet of
water, and soon eighty percent of New
Orleans was flooded. Mayor Ray Nagin
reported "significant" loss of life;
bodies could be seen floating in the
floodwater. Looting erupted.
Fifteen to twenty thousand residents
took shelter in the Superdome, which was a
designated "refuge of last resort."
Another nearly twenty thousand crowded
into the Convention Center, even though it
wasn't a designated shelter and had no
food or water. On Tuesday morning,
Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco ordered
the evacuation of the city, but no
transportation was available to move
anyone. By Wednesday, when Rice left for
her vacation, the media was reporting that
thousands were dead in New Orleans, and
television screens filled with the images
of the survivors. They were almost all
African American, their eyes desperate,
many carrying babies and what possessions
they could grab as the waters rose.
Reporters who had covered the Third World
compared the scenes to refugee crises they
had seen.
By Thursday, the situation had gotten
even worse. Every hour, the cable news
channels showed a dead woman in a
wheelchair outside the Convention Center,
covered with a sheet, under the now clear
skies of New Orleans. Despite what
Drudge reported, no one seemed to
be responding to Katrina.
Wilkinson -- a native of East Texas,
whose family had supported civil rights
before it was fashionable for whites to do
so -- was concerned enough about the
images of African Americans stranded,
begging for water from camera crews, that
he conferred with Rice's other top
advisers about whether Condi needed to
return to Washington. "That woman needs a
vacation," said one of Rice's advisers who
was also a friend. In fact, all of Rice's
staff agreed: She had set travel records
jetting around the globe, and she deserved
her downtime. And besides, she was
secretary of state, not the
interior.
But within hours, they regretted the
decision. The New York Post's
gossip column ran a piece reporting that
Rice was working on her backhand with
Monica Seles. Then the gossip and news Web
site Gawker posted a story
headlined "Breaking: Condi Rice Spends
Salary on Shoes."
- . . . So the Gulf Coast has gone
all Mad Max, women are being raped in
the Superdome, and Rice is enjoying a
brief vacation in New York. We wish we
were surprised.
-
- What does surprise us: Just moments
ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue,
Condoleeza [sic] Rice was seen
spending several thousands of dollars
on some nice, new shoes (we've
confirmed this, so her new heels will
surely get coverage from the
[Washington Post's]
Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable
to fathom the absurdity of Rice's
timing, went up to the Secretary and
reportedly shouted, "How dare you shop
for shoes while thousands are dying and
homeless!" Never one to have her
fashion choices questioned, Rice had
security PHYSICALLY REMOVE the
woman.
-
- Angry Lady, whoever you are, we
love you. You are a true American, and
we'll go shoe shopping with you
anytime.
On Friday, the New York Daily
News would report that Spamalot
audience members had booed Rice when the
lights came up. Then, the paper would ask,
"Did New Yorkers chase Condoleezza Rice
back to Washington yesterday?"
Rice says that no one chased her
anywhere: "On Thursday morning I got up, I
had breakfast, and I went down to
Ferragamo. I came back. Things had gotten
pretty bad, and plus I learned that the
State Department had a problem; our New
Orleans Passport Center was down. And . .
. the pictures were really ugly. I called
the president and I said, 'I think I
should come back.'"
Rice insists the alleged encounter with
the angry woman at Ferragamo never
happened. "Absolutely not . . . this stuff
just gets out there."
And in a country outraged by the
tragedy unfolding in New Orleans, the tale
of the angry shopper did get out there.
And -- like CNN anchor Anderson Cooper's
verbal lashing of Senator Mary Landrieu
for politicians' diddling while rats ate
dead bodies in the streets -- shot around
the Internet. Later director Spike Lee
would try to find the irate Ferragamo
shopper, unsuccessfully. But in Lee's
searing 2006 documentary, When the
Levees Broke, African American social
commentator Michael Eric Dyson took Rice
to task: "While people were drowning in
New Orleans, she was going up and down
Madison Avenue buying Ferragamo shoes.
Then she went to see Spamalot!"
Dyson muddled Ferragamo's address and
the chronology of Rice's holiday, but he
captured the sense of anger, even
betrayal, that many African Americans felt
toward the administration in general and
Condoleezza in particular in the days
after Katrina.
The criticism took Rice by surprise.
"These are not my accounts," she protested
to Chip Blacker, referring to domestic
issues.
"I was watching on the news what was
going on with Katrina. I wasn't getting
the reports of what the hurricane was
going to do or anything like that," says
Rice. "And so I responded like the
secretary of state, which is [to]
worry about the foreign contributions,
worry about the [New Orleans]
passport center. But it was less than
twenty-four hours before I realized it was
time to get back.
"Look, I'd be the first to say I
learned something from that. I thought of
myself as secretary of state; my
responsibility is foreign policy. I didn't
think about my role as a visible African
American national figure. I just didn't
think about it."
That Rice hadn't realized that she had
a role to play as a black leader was a
result of how she saw the world. John and
Angelena's efforts to invest their
daughter with a limitless sense of
possibility, to make her unconquerable,
had made her both less confined by race
and less conscious of it.
By the time Rice returned to Washington
on Thursday afternoon, President Bush was
facing a public furor of his own, centered
around the photo the White House had
released of Bush peering out the window of
Air Force One, surveying Katrina's damage
on his way back to Washington from
Crawford. Presumably, the White House
intended to show a concerned commander in
chief; instead Bush had looked detached
and powerless.
Watching the disaster coverage in her
seventh-floor office at the State
Department, Rice decided she had to go
home to Alabama to show that the
administration cared. An aide phoned the
White House to clear the trip, but the
White House resisted; the president should
travel to the gulf first, and he was
planning to go early next week. But Rice's
office was adamant: The secretary needed
to be down South "with her people." They
reminded the White House that they had
their own planes. The White House called
back three hours later; Rice had been
cleared to go. The president would go
earlier.
Copyright
© 2007 Marcus Mabry and reprinted
with permission.
A
veteran foreign correspondent and editor,
Marcus Mabry is chief of correspondents
for Newsweek, overseeing the
magazine's domestic and international
bureaus. The winner of numerous journalism
awards, Mabry is also a former Edward R.
Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations and author of the memoir
White Bucks and Black-Eyed Peas: Coming
of Age Black in White America. He
graduated from Stanford University and
studied at the Institut d'Études
Politiques-Paris. His work has appeared in
Foreign Affairs and the New
Republic, among other publications,
and he is a frequent commentator on CNN,
MSNBC, and the BBC's French-language
service. He is chairman of the Albert G.
Oliver Program in New York, which sends
bright minority students to private
schools, and a governor of the Overseas
Press Club. He lives in New York with his
partner.
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