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Summary
Summary
From one of the world's most admired women, this is former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's compelling story of eight years serving at the highest levels of government. In her position as America's chief diplomat, Rice traveled almost continuously around the globe, seeking common ground among sometimes bitter enemies, forging agreement on divisive issues, and compiling a remarkable record of achievement.
A native of Birmingham, Alabama who overcame the racism of the Civil Rights era to become a brilliant academic and expert on foreign affairs, Rice distinguished herself as an advisor to George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign. Once Bush was elected, she served as his chief adviser on national-security issues - a job whose duties included harmonizing the relationship between the Secretaries of State and Defense. It was a role that deepened her bond with the President and ultimately made her one of his closest confidantes.
With the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Rice found herself at the center of the Administration's intense efforts to keep America safe. Here, Rice describes the events of that harrowing day - and the tumultuous days after. No day was ever the same. Additionally, Rice also reveals new details of the debates that led to the war in Afghanistan and then Iraq.
The eyes of the nation were once again focused on Rice in 2004 when she appeared before the 9-11 Commission to answer tough questions regarding the country's preparedness for - and immediate response to - the 9-11 attacks. Her responses, it was generally conceded, would shape the nation's perception of the Administration's competence during the crisis. Rice conveys just how pressure-filled that appearance was and her surprised gratitude when, in succeeding days, she was broadly saluted for her grace and forthrightness.
From that point forward, Rice was aggressively sought after by the media and regarded by some as the Administration's most effective champion.
In 2005 Rice was entrusted with even more responsibility when she was charged with helping to shape and carry forward the President's foreign policy as Secretary of State. As such, she proved herself a deft crafter of tactics and negotiation aimed to contain or reduce the threat posed by America's enemies. Here, she reveals the behind-the-scenes maneuvers that kept the world's relationships with Iran, North Korea and Libya from collapsing into chaos. She also talks about her role as a crisis manager, showing that at any hour -- and at a moment's notice -- she was willing to bring all parties to the bargaining table anywhere in the world.
No Higher Honor takes the reader into secret negotiating rooms where the fates of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Lebanon often hung in the balance, and it draws back the curtain on how frighteningly close all-out war loomed in clashes involving Pakistan-India and Russia-Georgia, and in East Africa.
Surprisingly candid in her appraisals of various Administration colleagues and the hundreds of foreign leaders with whom she dealt, Rice also offers here keen insight into how history actually proceeds. In No Higher Honor , she delivers a master class in statecraft -- but always in a way that reveals her essential warmth and humility, and her deep reverence for the ideals on which America was founded.
Author Notes
Condoleezza Rice was the National Security Advisor and the 66th U.S. Secretary of State in the administration of George W. Bush. She served as provost of Stanford University for 6 years and was the Soviet and East European Affairs advisor to President of the United States George H. W. Bush.
Rice earned her bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Denver; her master's from the University of Notre Dame; and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver.
Rice's books include, Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984), The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (1995) with Philip Zelikow, Condoleezza Rice: A Memoir of My Extraordinary, Ordinary Family and Me (2010), Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family (2010), No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (2011), and Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (2017).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Booklist Review
Rice opens her book looking in the mirror and asking herself, in reference to 9/11, How could this have happened? Did we miss something? And, for many, the answer will be, why, yes, you most certainly did. Let's start with that presidential daily briefing that bore the heading, Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S. Rice proves, a few paragraphs later, that she's aware what's on readers' minds, and she goes on to explain what the Bush administration thinking had been on terrorism before the attack and why that nonspecific pdb didn't lead them anywhere. In the end, she thinks she did all she could to protect the nation and, at the same time, feels she should have done better. Throughout this hefty book, Rice seems to be aiming to be an honest broker. She discusses the administration's goals, its setbacks, and how circumstances (and sometimes bad judgments) altered events. Diplomat though she is, she allows her feelings about Don Rumsfeld, and especially his undersecretary, Douglas Feith, to show through, and she not-so-subtly places the blame for what went wrong in Iraq on the Department of Defense. But there is a lot more in here than just Iraq. Lots more. In her jobs as national security advisor and, later, secretary of state, she might, on any day, be working on the tragedy in Darfur, Latin American immigration, ruffled feathers in Europe, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and, well, anything else in the world. Those who have followed Rice's pronouncements will find more new here on personalities rather than policy. The latter sometimes seems rather robotic. But Rice is aiming for context more than new revelations, and that she provides.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THEY were an unlikely pair: the cerebral A-student from a striving black family and the son of privilege who as a candidate for president couldn't name Pakistan's military ruler. But together they forged a vision of a muscular United States striking out on its own. With "No Higher Honor," Condoleezza Rice has written an exhaustive brief to acquit herself before the bar of history, which she hopes will be more forgiving than the caustic judgments of the present. Her power stemmed from the bond that runs through her book: the close, even adulatory relationship with George W. Bush, which prompted jealousy and derision from Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Rice is terse about what drew her to Bush: "I liked him. He was funny and irreverent but serious about policy." The attraction was his moral certainty. Intellectuals and the Foggy Bottom striped-pants crowd may have mocked his impatience with nuance, but she saw that as standing for principle. "It was what I loved about George W. Bush as president," she writes. "What was right mattered." Yet this very clarity and impatience set the stage for the administration's most reviled decisions, the ones she has written this book to defend. To plot a new course for a Bush presidency even before the election, she had assembled a group that called itself the Vulcans. They were drawn largely from colleagues in the previous Bush administration, and had witnessed the end of the cold war. But this lens - Eurocentric, informed by her specialty in Russia and fed by the triumphalism of a sole American superpower - arguably blinded her to problems the second President Bush would have to confront, like the very different dynamics of the Arab world and the cost of imperial overstretch. The starting point for the new administration was unilateralism, and evidence for its new course came early in the first term, when the White House rejected the Kyoto environmental protocol in a way Rice acknowledges was too highhanded and combative. "Mr. President," she said, "this is going to color your foreign policy from the outset, and that's a problem." And in the urgency that followed the attacks of 9/11, the conviction that the United States could not wait for slowmotion coalition-building hardened into pre-emptive action. The book's few vivid scenes are largely of those early, fearful days: Rice looking at herself in the mirror and asking what she had missed before 9/11, or waiting to see if top officials had been exposed to deadly botulism. "I was shaken to my core," she writes. The one and only time she raised her voice to Bush, she reports, is when she told him it wasn't safe to return to Washington. This atmosphere, hard to summon now, framed the decisions on detention, "enhanced interrogation" and the invasion of Iraq. Still, her defense of detention and interrogation is unconvincing; she does not grapple with the violations of civil liberties or the blow to American values, clinging instead to legal technicalities and the argument that the measures saved lives. Of the military tribunals, she maintains that she and other top national security officials weren't shown the order the president signed authorizing them. "In that case I told the president that the White House counsel and the vice president's office had not served him well." In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled the tribunals unconstitutional. Above all, Rice wrestles with Iraq. Stung by the charges that the administration lied about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, she says, "It is hard for many people now, knowing what subsequently occurred, to appreciate how compelling the overall intelligence case against Saddam appeared to be." She also strives to recreate the fear among Bush officials that they were underestimating a serious threat to American security. Yet her sound bite from a Sunday talk show - "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" - now reverberates as one of the most hyperbolic claims of the Bush years. Rice's most puzzling argument is that the administration was mistaken in releasing individual intelligence nuggets to the public, so that the case for war seemed to hang on specific assertions that were later proven wrong: the "16 words" in the State of the Union charging that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger is one example. But if those assertions about the threat from Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were empty, what was the rationale for the war? Many of the worst mistakes of the war, Rice insists, were made by the Pentagon: too few troops to enforce order; disbanding the Iraqi Army; surreal official briefings, at increasing odds with the reality that foreign correspondents on the ground were seeing. (I talked daily with journalists who were risking their lives to get the story.) Indeed, she says, by 2006 she refused to cite the blizzard of deceptive military statistics claiming success. "I don't believe them myself," she told her chief of staff. Finally, her growing anguish over the course of the war culminated in a tense confrontation with Bush when she bluntly told him, "It's failing." His response was to ask her what policy she thought would work. "That was my moment of deepest despair about Iraq," she writes. "I wasn't sure that there was an answer to the president's question." IN their own books, Rumsfeld and Cheney lambaste Rice. It's her turn now. She is more polite than they were, insisting throughout that their sharpening differences were about policy, not personality. But she skewers Rumsfeld as an arrogant man unsettled by the ascent and access to power of a woman who was once his junior. And she captures the swagger of Cheney by describing how he excluded her and Colin Powell from his 2003 celebration of the liberation of Iraq. Yet her own blind spots are also apparent. She admits, for example, that she didn't expect Iraqis to view Americans as occupiers, ignoring the history of Iraqi resistance to the British in the 1920s and the Arab sensitivity to any tinge of colonialism. Her Eurocentrism was an obvious handicap. And in a 766-page book that seems to include virtually every trip she ever made, she gives short shrift to the rapid deterioration in Afghanistan. She notes that President Hamid Karzai was often unrealistic and paranoid, but mentions none of the corruption and dysfunction that alienated Afghans and strengthened the Taliban. Similarly, she glances over the double-dealing that permitted Pakistan to receive billions in American aid while members of its security services were backing anti-American militants. There were successes: a passionate commitment to Africa that produced programs to fight AIDS; development grants and pressure to reduce killings in Darfur; the disarming of Qaddafi (which she rightly points out deprived him of weapons of mass destruction he might have unleashed in the Arab Spring); a nuclear pact with India. Rice also seems eager to claim credit for sowing the seeds of the Arab Spring by, among other things, helping to establish "a fragile democratic pathway for Iraq" and encouraging democracy in Lebanon. "No Higher Honor" really shows us two Condoleezza Rices: one, the impatient unilateralist who was national security adviser, the other the born-again diplomat who, as secretary of state, worked to repair some of the damage that had been done to American credibility by its unilateralism. "People were tired of us," she told the president a few months before they left office. A humbling thought as history renders judgment. Susan Chira, the assistant managing editor for news at The Times, was foreign editor from 2004 through most of 2011.
Choice Review
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice writes a compelling narrative of her time in Washington, focusing on her service in the administration of George W. Bush. As a political scientist, Rice presents a treatment of her story and events that is more relevant than the more typical memoirs of public servants. As a memoir, her version of events must be viewed with a skeptical eye, not that her views are inaccurate, but they are tinted by her perspective and perhaps a bit of a need to place her role in a better light than others in the administration or historians might. That being said, throughout Rice's chronological treatment of her service she interweaves events with explanations of theories of international relations and, perhaps less purposefully, depicts the internal politics of the executive branch. The book would be of interest to international relations or executive branch politics students and would be useful for those courses. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections. J. Twombly Elmira College
Library Journal Review
Condoleezza Rice discusses her service as national security adviser and then secretary of state, with special emphasis on 9/11 and the subsequent decision to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Before the Crack in Time In August 1998, President George H. W. Bush called and invited me to spend time with him and Mrs. Barbara Bush in Maine. I had become close to President Bush in the years after I'd served as his Soviet specialist in the National Security Council, and they had hosted me a few times before at their wonderful family home in Kennebunkport. The weathered, shingle-style house, decorated in calming pastel chintz, has an elegant yet understated decor and a spectacular view of the ocean. I'm not all that fond of being in the water. But I love to look at it, and there isn't a prettier place to view the Atlantic than Walker's Point. I promptly accepted the invitation. Driving along the rocky New England coast to the entrance of the property, I was struck by two flags flying over the compound: the Texas state flag for the governor and the Stars and Stripes for the former President. (The Florida state flag would later join them when Jeb Bush was elected governor.) It was a subtle reminder that this was no ordinary family and it would be no ordinary weekend. The elder Bush didn't hide his desire to get me together with his son George just so we could get to know each other better and talk a little about foreign policy. Before a casual lobster dinner that night, I joined Governor Bush on the back porch, where he told me that he was confident of reelection in November and that if he won impressively (which he fully expected), he'd likely run for the presidency. A run for the White House by the Texas governor struck me as having long odds for success. President Clinton's years had been morally tarnished but peaceful and relatively prosperous. The governor was untested and would likely face a real pro in Vice President Al Gore. I was too polite to say those things that night, but I sure thought them. Throughout the weekend, while fishing (he fished, I sat in the boat and watched) or exercising side by side in the small family gym on the compound, we talked about Russia, China, and Latin America. He wanted to start thinking about what to do in foreign policy if he got elected. I soon realized that he knew our southern neighbors, particularly Mexico, far better than I did. I made a mental note to read a few articles about Mexico when I got back to my home in California. But we also talked about other things. He was interested in my upbringing in segregated Birmingham. I was attracted to his passion for improving education for disadvantaged youth. We compared notes on the problems of college admission and affirmative action. I was more traditional in my support of race-based admission; he'd tried to increase diversity at the University of Texas by other means. He proudly said that he would likely receive half of the Hispanic vote and more than a quarter of the African American vote. I liked him. He was funny and irreverent but serious about policy. We e_mailed back and forth several times during the fall, mostly friendly chitchat about whatever was in the news-the growing conflict in the Balkans or the Clinton administration's efforts to expand NATO. Then, a couple of days after the November election and the landslide victory Governor Bush had hoped for, I received a note from him. He wanted to follow international events more closely. Early in March 1999, Karl Rove, the governor's political advisor, called to ask if I'd come down to Austin and speak with the governor about the upcoming campaign. "Will you book a hotel room for me?" I asked. "You won't need a hotel," he replied. "The governor wants you to stay at the residence." It was a signal that he expected me to support his campaign, which was quickly becoming a serious endeavor. A few weeks later, when my picture appeared on the front page of the New York Times as a member of the "exploratory committee" dedicated to electing George W. Bush President of the United States, I was momentarily stunned by the sudden exposure but committed to the cause. My father was the first person I called after the governor asked me to join his campaign. John Wesley Rice, Jr., loved politics. He watched news shows, particularly C-SPAN, for hours at a time, and had been a loyal Republican ever since a clerk affiliated with the Grand Old Party had helped him register to vote in segregated Alabama. My father could barely contain his excitement. The campaign itself proved professionally fulfilling, but early on I realized that it would require my full-time focus. For six years I had been the provost-the chief operating officer-of Stanford University. I was ready to step down independent of the chance to join the Bush campaign. Foreign policy would be the governor's Achilles' heel against more seasoned candidates in the primaries and eventually in the general election. I knew that George W. Bush would look to me to help answer the inevitable questions about his readiness to assume the mantle of commander in chief. Throughout 1999 I worked to assemble a small group of foreign policy specialists to develop policy for the governor. My first call was to Paul Wolfowitz, who had been ambassador to Indonesia under President Ronald Reagan and under secretary for policy in the Pentagon during George H. W. Bush's administration. Paul was a cerebral, almost otherworldly intellectual. He'd done his undergraduate work at Cornell and gone on to complete a PhD in the intense academic environment of the University of Chicago. Though Paul had already had a distinguished public policy career, he was really most comfortable debating ideas. We'd been friends since the 1980s, and when I asked him to join me as cochair of the foreign policy group, he readily did so. Richard Armitage and Stephen Hadley had also been in the first Bush administration. Rich was a muscular, stout former naval officer who had served in Vietnam and specialized in Asian affairs. Many people believed that the Rambo character had been based on Rich. Yet, there was another side to him: he and his wife had adopted numerous special- needs kids. He was Colin Powell's best friend, a fact that would later lead to considerable conflict within the administration. Steve was a quiet, Yale-trained lawyer from Cleveland, Ohio, who at the time wore horn-rimmed glasses. He was smart and methodical, and when there was real work to be produced for the campaign (rather than just things to be said and debated), we all looked to Steve to write the first draft of the paper. He did so selflessly and effectively. Robert Zoellick, Robert Blackwill, and I had worked closely together during the extraordinary days of 1989-1991 at the end of the Cold War. They were among the best policy engineers I had ever known, capable of conceiving of a solution and then actually implementing it. Zoellick had been Secretary of State James Baker's closest aide at the State Department and the architect of many important initiatives concerning Central America and Europe. He had led the three-member U.S. delegation to the talks on German unification on which I had been the White House representative. Bob Blackwill had been my boss for a while at the NSC the first time around as special assistant for European and Soviet affairs. He'd held numerous high-level positions. He was from Kansas, with very traditional values and a wicked sense of humor. But he could be abrasive and impatient, and he made enemies. Some thought that Bob would be high maintenance, but he would be valuable to the governor, and we were good enough friends to speak honestly about any problems that might arise. I asked Richard Perle to join the group to represent the right wing of the Republican foreign policy establishment. Perle had been the bane of the party's foreign policy traditionalists such as Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger. He had a well-deserved reputation for ruthlessness too. But Governor Bush needed all elements of the party united behind him, and the group that I assembled was broadly representative enough to demonstrate his commitment to a foreign policy big tent. Dov Zakheim, who did most of the work supporting our Pentagon reform plans, rounded out the group. And we were able, too, to draw on the regional expertise of others such as Jendayi Frazer, who developed our Africa policy. In general, we got along well. My job was to organize the group and to deal with the personalities and egos-to keep everyone on board so that we could concentrate on the governor's campaign, not ourselves. If there was any resentment of my role (I had been the most junior of those who had served together in George H. W. Bush's administration), I couldn't tell. In any case, they all knew that I was the one who was closest to the governor. I was the point of access. We worked smoothly and with little drama, just getting the job done in standing Sunday- night phone calls to coordinate requests, policy positions, and responses for Governor Bush. Just for fun we decided to adopt a nickname and called ourselves the Vulcans, after the Roman God and symbol of my home city of Birmingham, Alabama. The name meant nothing more than that, but many a conspiracy theorist tried to divine some deeper significance. The work in the campaign was proceeding well. I made frequent visits to Austin to brief the candidate, developed policy papers on a half- dozen major initiatives, and helped write a couple of major speeches. I also began doing press appearances on behalf of candidate Bush. The question was always the same: "What makes you think that the one-term governor of Texas is ready to be President of the United States?" My first televised interview was on Chris Matthews's Hardball in June. Chris was a relentlessly challenging interviewer who rarely gave a guest time to really answer a question. Asked at one point whether George W. Bush's being in the Oval Office would be "on-the-job training," I pointed out that my candidate was already dealing with considerable complexity as governor of Texas. Texas is a big, complicated state, and the person running it has to be able to ask the right questions, digest information, stick to principles, and make decisions. The Texas governor has to be tough. Chris, sensing that I was contrasting George W. Bush's readiness with that of Bill Clinton when he had first run for President, said, "Right. You sound like the wife of the governor in Primary Colors where she said, 'And he's governor of a real state, not Arkansas.'_" I don't know where it came from, but I shot back, "I come from Alabama, so I'm not going to talk about what real states are." Chris broke up laughing, and I thought that I'd passed my first media test on the campaign trail. Anyone who is interested in politics should work on the ground floor of a campaign at least once. Early on we got stuck in traffic jams and carried our own bags. The crowds were enthusiastic but, in some places, quite small. The music track that introduced the governor at campaign rallies included Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I'm Yours)." I never understood why that song was chosen, but to this day I can't listen to it without vivid memories of stadiums, auditoriums, and cowboy bars full of early believers in George W. Bush. I loved the pace and the sense of being a part of an adventure. Life had settled into a nice post-provost pattern, and I was quite content. When I arranged to have George W. Bush meet my father during a trip to Palo Alto in July of 1999, Daddy was hooked. He peppered me every night with questions about campaign strategy that I couldn't answer: "How in the world did we screw up in New Hampshire? George Bush isn't getting through to people that he is going to be a different kind of Republican. That's what people need to know!" He admired Governor Bush and was very proud of my association with the campaign. In February 2000 I was back home, helping to rally the troops for the California primary in the wake of the disasters in New Hampshire and Michigan. I was getting ready to do an interview with a reporter named Ann Dowd for a profile of me. Ann had gone to interview my father that morning and was in the house when suddenly my father suffered cardiac arrest. She called 911 and then my longtime assistant, Marilyn Stanley. I was in a meeting, but Marilyn burst in and said that something had happened to my father and he was not breathing. I asked my assistant Ruth Elliot to come with me, rushed out, and sped to the house. It looked like a scene from ER. Daddy was on the floor, and they were shocking his heart. I heard the medic say, "I have a weak pulse." We all rushed to the hospital and waited. It hadn't been a heart attack, but his heart had stopped long enough to cause what his physician called an "anoxic brain event." Essentially, he'd been deprived of oxygen to his brain and was now in a coma. No one could say what the prognosis was. Daddy continued in a coma for about a week and then began to stir. But he'd sustained significant brain damage. He never fully recovered, but he fought to live. Several times he was near death and refused to go. As I watched this giant of a man who'd loved me more than anyone in the world approach the end, it was hard to find much good in life. It seemed so unfair that I could no longer share stories of the campaign with my father. Here I was at the height of my professional career, and my father couldn't enjoy it with me. Not surprisingly, my absences from home became a source of guilt, and the campaign, which had been such a wonderful magical mystery tour, became something of a slog. I kept going and told myself that Daddy undoubtedly approved of my decision to keep my commitment to the campaign. Slowly the governor was climbing in the polls, and he clearly had a real chance to be President. But we had not erased the questions about his foreign policy competence. In fact, early in the campaign, one particular misstep created a deep hole, and it took a while to climb out of it. I arrived at the Austin airport one November evening in 1999, and my cell phone was going crazy. It was Joel Shin, an incredibly dedicated young man who actually slept in the campaign office. (Joshua Bolten, the policy director for the campaign and later deputy chief of staff, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and chief of staff, finally made him get an apartment.) Joel asked if I'd seen the governor's interview with Andy Hiller. I said that I'd been on the plane and hadn't. He read the transcript. My heart sank. "Can you name the president of Taiwan?" Answer: "Lee." "Can you name the general who is in charge of Pakistan?" Answer: "General." "And the prime minister of India?" No answer. "Well, that reads pretty badly," I commented. "It's worse," Joel said. "It's on videotape and being played over and over." Excerpted from No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington by Condoleezza Rice All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
