Secretary of State Condoleezza RiceGlobal figurehead ... Rice travelled from one battle zone to another. Photo: AP
Little happened in George Bush's White House without the approval of his right-hand lady.
There's nothing like a titillating look behind the scenes at the White House to get the juices flowing. Condoleezza Rice's memoir gives that, albeit in an exhaustive (and exhausting) way. By the epilogue, this reader emerged, wrung out from eight years of back-biting and manoeuvring, nevertheless more au fait with American politics than before.
So, does Rice get her own back on Dick Cheney's assessment that she is naive, was no good at her job as Secretary of State and a few other criticisms mentioned in his memoir In My Time, published weeks before hers? Yes, she does. She dismisses him as a man ''very much of one ultra-hawkish mind''. She is stunned when he goes behind her back and negotiates a deal with Israel to support the extension of the war. ''Do that and you are dead in the Middle East,'' she tells Bush, who backs her. She and Cheney row over revealing CIA secret rendition sites and the capture of terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (''one of the most contentious between the Vice President and me''). She wins that, too. The news goes public. And if this is beginning to sound somewhat self-serving, so be it. There's none of the self-vindication of Cheney's book.
She also takes a stab at the Secretary of Defence, Don Rumsfeld, once her friend and then a turncoat-nasty in her job as National Security Advisor, their frequent dust-ups noted with relish by the media. In the Rose Garden one day she asked Don: ''What's wrong between us?'' He replied: ''I don't know, you're obviously bright and committed but it just doesn't work.'' Bright? Condescension she didn't need from someone who could not have one-on-one discussions with the confidant of the most powerful man in the White House.