Condoleezza Rice Looks Back

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

By SUSAN CHIRA - New York Times - Published: December 9, 2011

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.

NO HIGHER HONOR - A Memoir of My Years in Washington -

 By Condoleezza Rice - Illustrated. 766 pp. Crown Publishers. $35.

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.
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