Showing values of America
“The secretary of state is America’s face to the world,” President Bush declared with his National Security Advisor’s smiling face at his side. It is, of course, the face of a black woman, a first for the nation’s chief diplomat. And that fact is likely to affect how Condoleeza Rice sees the world and how the world sees America. Assuming the Senate confirms her, she will follow the first black man and the first white woman into the job first held by Thomas Jefferson.
Do other nations pay heed when they see these women and minorities representing us? “I do think it makes a difference, and I think it’s a very helpful one,” argues Jim Steinberg, who was Deputy National Security Advisor in the Clinton administration. “It’s a positive for the country,” chimes in Jessica Matthews, a foreign policy adviser during the Carter years. Or, as Rice herself told a friend, “When the president walks into a room full of world leaders and Colin’s on one side and I’m on the other, they take notice.”
But it’s not just image that’s affected. The personal stories each of these highest-ranking cabinet officers brings to the job also make a difference. When Madeleine Albright was ending her tenure as the first female secretary of state, Cokie asked her about a critic’s remark that she was driven by her own biography. Albright’s answer: “Everybody’s driven by their own biography.”
Hers includes her family’s plight as refugees from Czechoslovakia, fleeing first the Germans and then the Soviets, and her own life as a woman who was forced to break rungs in order to climb the ladder. Both experiences had an impact on her conduct of foreign policy.
Albright also undoubtedly took satisfaction, as the first woman to hold the job of secretary of state, in declaring, “We have made women’s issues not something peripheral but central.”
If, as Madeleine Albright asserts, everyone is driven by their biography, Condoleeza Rice’s story is worth knowing. A beloved only child of teachers in Birmingham, Ala., the newly designated secretary of state was 8 years old when a schoolmate was killed in a 1963 church bombing. That would certainly make you believe in good guys and bad guys. A family move to Colorado led her to the University of Denver, where a course from Josef Korbel opened her eyes to the influential field of international relations. Korbel and his family became important figures in Rice’s life, and the professor’s daughter is none other than Madeleine Albright.
A foreign policy assignment in the first Bush White House brought “Condi” to Washington, where Alma Powell (Colin Powell’s wife), whose uncle was the principal of the Birmingham school where Rice’s father taught, took the young woman under her wing. Rice moved on to become the youngest provost at Stanford before signing on to candidate George W. Bush’s foreign-policy team.
It’s a team that’s shown its strains since Sept. 11 and the invasion of Iraq. Condi Rice has been linked more with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney than with her old mentor Powell, and some Bush critics fear that she’s being dispatched to Foggy Bottom to get the State Department in line behind the president’s policy. So she brings with her the clout — and the burden — of a close friendship with both the president and the first lady. But she also arrives as a powerful symbol of the opportunities that this country is all about.
Steve and Cokie Roberts can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected].