First of all, her name. It is emphatically not one of those pseudo-African monikers, such as Tawana, that some black American parents inflict on their children. It comes from the musical direction con dolcezza, or “with sweetness”. Rice’s mother, who schooled her at the keyboard, had considered calling her Andantino, but that of course means “slowly”, and the alternative, Allegra, means “fast”, which for a preacher’s daughter would never do. The name had to be musical, but Angelena Rice was afraid that people would mispronounce the Italian for the dulcet, so, to cut a long story (and word) short, the second female US secretary of state is known round the world as “Condi”.

The detail is of importance because Americans want to be proud of their representative in international diplomacy: a woman who can play piano to concert standard and read Tolstoy in the original. A woman who speaks with forceful, measured articulation, dresses with natural style and grace, and has had the responsibility of running a great university. A woman, moreover, whose father was not allowed to register as a Democrat in the old South, and who bitterly remembers the day when one of her schoolfriends was among the dead when the Ku Klux Klan entirely lost its tiny, shrivelled mind and dynamited the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. If the tired expression “American Dream” retains any of its meaning (and I maintain that it does) then it must mean that such a woman can rise above all considerations of gender and pigmentation to become a keystone figure in both terms of a two-term administration and a thinkable candidate for the most powerful office in the world.

The problem for some is that this two-term administration is a Republican one for which only a microscopic number of black Americans actually voted, and which in foreign policy has not covered itself with distinction. The related problem is that Rice is of the bootstrap school that credits her ascent to strong family and religious values and the virtues of hard work, and barely at all to the influence of the social “programs” that replaced the old Dixiecrats with the rhetoric of “The Great Society”. In one of the two great speeches that she has delivered, Condi Rice told the Republican convention that it was the Democrats who condescended to black Americans by indulging their self-pity and helping to deny them the thrift and enterprise that were really required for success. That blew the roof off, which tells you how long ago it was.

Since then, what? It was arguably a mistake to be shopping for high-value shoes, and attending a Broadway show when the waters closed over the hapless underclass in New Orleans. Louisiana may not be exactly a foreign-policy question, but you know how upset people can get.

Then again, most people do not regard the American expedition to Mesopotamia as among the more stellar episodes of the more recent past, and it was Rice who put her special signature on the enterprise by saying that Saddam Hussein’s putative “smoking gun” should not be given time to become “a mushroom cloud”.

If you read the interview in which she actually said that (and Marcus Mabry gives the whole context in the stronger of these two books), you will see that she was making quite a deft reply to quite a stupid question. But politics is unforgiving, and “context” is for spin doctors, and the question is – does Condoleezza Rice have any core of principle?

During her formative period as an academic expert in Russian and Soviet studies, nobody remembers her as having anything but rather conventional views on the USA-USSR rivalry. She was not among those who saw the importance of Gorbachev’s reformism. Her patrons from the 1989-93 Bush administration (where she served for a time as director of Soviet and East European affairs) tended to be the so-called “realists”, such as General Brent Scowcroft, who didn’t see anything really changing in Moscow. This is of some interest, because those same “realists” were the ones who wanted to end the 1991 Gulf war without going to the trouble and expense of deposing Saddam. Yet under the successor Bush regime, which embarked on an ambitious programme of “regime change” in the Middle East, Rice suddenly became an enthusiast for the new radicalism. That’s when she made her second great speech, at the American University in Cairo in June 2005, in which she echoed the condemnation of the compromises that had prolonged segregation and discrimination in America itself, and roundly said: “For 60 years, my country . . . pursued stability at the expense of democracy.”

What both Mabry and Glenn Kessler want us to ask is this: did she say these things because she meant them, or did she say them in order to please her (apparently rather adoring) boss? In other words, has her career-path been one of accommodation, even in the old South, or one of independent courage? It might seem lazy to say that there is evidence for both propositions, but the two authors seem to suggest that such a conclusion might be true. “I have been black all my life,” she suddenly and uncharacteristically snapped at those who complained that she didn’t do enough about “affirmative action” when she ran Stanford University. Yet for the rest of the time, she displays something like disdain for those who emphasise historic grievances. And today, with the Bush administration retreating at great speed from its rash pledges of Middle Eastern democracy, it can hardly be said that the State Department is urging a different course. The current round of banal brokering between Israel and Palestine, for example, is what one might have expected from a Clinton or a Gore, or an Albright or a Vance.

In America, Mabry’s biography is titled Twice as Good – a reference to the old adage that a member of a minority must be twice as good in order to be reckoned at half the worth. Half a century after the desegregation of Little Rock high school, Condi Rice is the most presentable face of a president who may think she is twice as brilliant and courageous as she really is.

No kidding

For better and for worse, Condi’s fate and reputation are forever tied to those of her boss, George W Bush. She sees him, says Mabry, about seven or eight times a day at the White House and frequently joins his family for Sunday lunch. The 2004 Georgetown dinner party at which she referred to the president as “my husb . ..” has passed into legend and although Condi herself swears “I don’t remember any such slip of the tongue,” fellow guests do. Certainly the admiration is mutual: to him, she is “an honest, fabulous person”. And what’s he to her? As one of her closest friends admits, ruefully: “She just cannot say no to that man.”

Read on

websites:
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/celebrity/article699653.ece
2006 profile of Condoleezza Rice by Peter Stothard

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Naked Ambition by Marcus Mabry
Gibson Square £20 pp362

THE CONFIDANTE: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy by Glenn Kessler
St Martin’s Press £17.99 pp304

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