Rice plays key role, but with few lines
WASHINGTON -- Consider "Condi." National security adviser Condoleezza Rice is the Bush administration's star witness, sent forth to slay the Sunday-morning dragons with her combination of academic high-mindedness and the bulletproof poise of a talk-show host.
Yet she is also an officer of the executive branch, not bound to Congress, and thus President Bush has asked her not to testify in public before the 9/11 commission set up by Congress.
Her two roles this week -- as the administration's chosen defender, but a policy maker with an oddly muted voice -- pretty much sum up the duality that has marked her three years as national security adviser: She's a star, but few can say precisely what she has done or where she stands on crucial issues.
James Fallows, who spent months interviewing administration officials to study the extent of prewar planning for The Atlantic Monthly, found that Rice -- like her boss -- was missing from the discussion: "I never once heard someone say, `We took this step because the president indicated . . .' or `The president really wanted. . . .' Instead I heard, `Rumsfeld wanted,' `Powell thought,' `The vice president pushed,' `Bremer asked,' and so on. . . . The other conspicuously absent figure was Condoleezza Rice, even after she was put in charge of coordinating administration policy on Iraq, last October."
But Rice is hardly a missing figure in the White House. She's at the president's side constantly, and ubiquitous enough on TV that more Americans can recognize her than any of her predecessors going back to the days when Henry Kissinger whispered detente in Richard Nixon's ear.
This is partly due to the fact that she doesn't look like her predecessors. As a black woman in a pivotal job, she carries exceptional markers. From talk shows to water-cooler discussions, she gets cited for her race, gender, and ideological affiliation. She also bears a few extra burdens familiar to women in power: She's known as "Condi," while few would have thought to call Brent Scowcroft, her predecessor in the first Bush administration, "Brent."
Born into a family of teachers in Birmingham, Ala., in 1954, she took up ambitious pursuits -- classical piano, competitive figure skating, Soviet studies -- and stood out both for her excellence and, in some cases, for being the only black person in the room. Now, as national security adviser, she is inevitably cast as a role model.
Among Republicans, her race and gender sometimes are chits to be played on cable TV debates. (Democrats have, of course, played the same chits in the past.) Just as some conservatives cried racism when Democrats blocked Hispanic prosecutor Miguel Estrada's judicial nomination, pro-GOP commentators Ann Coulter and Robert Novak have insinuated that whistle-blowing national security aide Richard A. Clarke may have been jealous that a black woman got ahead of him. Clarke, for his part, proclaimed himself fully satisfied with his career progress in the Bush administration.
And now, with Clarke charging that Bush and his team discounted the threat of terrorism in the early months of the administration, Rice is taking to the airwaves to defend the administration. But even some Republicans in Congress have puzzled over how Rice can be willing to appear on television interview shows and agree to answer copious questions from the 9/11 commission behind closed doors, yet not be willing to face the grilling in public.
The official reason, and it's consistent with other administration actions, is that Bush is trying to insulate core advisers from congressional grilling. Nixon's taping system may be gone, but these days presidential aides are hauled into Congress and asked to recall the um and uh of every conversation in the Oval Office.
Still, the reasonableness of Bush's argument doesn't mean the public isn't being cheated of some important information. There is a lot that "Condi" can testify about that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell cannot.
Rumsfeld, for one, has been so willing to field questions, and so off-the-cuff in his answers, that it puts quotation marks around everything he says. It's semi-clear from the context that he's just riffing on his own opinions and not relating those of Bush.
Powell speaks in far more measured tones, but he's done such a good job telegraphing when the White House has failed to take his advice that he's really tending to his own reputation, not Bush's.
Rice is different. Her power comes from her proximity to the president. What she knows, he knows -- or at least it's reasonable to expect she would have told him anything important.
So the answer to the mystery of Condi Rice may be: She's the administration's best defense, but the president's worst vulnerability.
