The Black History of the White House by Clarence Lusane

Author:Clarence Lusane
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780872865327
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

Condoleezza Rice, March 1, 2005

As president, Bush mostly evaded the issue, primarily because he had very little to say beyond conservative clichés and bromides. When asked about his civil rights record two years after being in office, he began with a vague reference to Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and then his voice began to trail off. Perhaps he suddenly realized the foolishness of equating two appointments with a civil rights policy agenda. Perhaps not. Powell and Rice were sometimes sent to speak to black audiences or respond when a racial situation arose, such as when Rice was sent to talk to blacks after the Hurricane Katrina crisis. There were points of conflicts between the two; for instance, Powell wanted to attend the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, while Rice opposed U.S. participation almost from the beginning of the Bush administration. Powell was also a strong, longtime supporter of affirmative action, while Rice was less so.

The politically moderate Colin Powell was never really welcome in the West Wing, intimidating to Bush and anathema to Cheney, but Condoleezza Rice would rise to become an integral force among the president’s innermost circle. While Powell’s role diminished daily until he was finally pushed out at the end of the president’s first term, Rice’s position grew stronger as she was promoted from National Security Advisor to Secretary of State. Certainly, no other African American woman has held such a high staff position, and only one other woman, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, achieved the same power and reach.

Rice’s personal closeness to Bush was well known (she once accidentally referred to Bush as “my husband” while speaking at a dinner hosted by New York Times bureau chief Philip Taubman69) and likely protected her from blame for an embarrassing series of intelligence failures on her watch as National Security Advisor—from missing all the signals that Al Qaeda was preparing to attack the United States to leading the false charge that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—that would have led to the firing of most anyone else. She served as Bush’s brain on foreign affairs in many instances and personally tutored him during his campaign for president in 2000. Ultimately, her alliance with the administration’s neoconservatives during Bush’s first term, moderated during the second when their discredited policies had obviously failed and their influence waned, left her a poor legacy overall.

However, on domestic and race issues, Rice did not represent the politics of the far right, where many contemporary black Republicans have chosen to situate themselves. During an interview with the Washington Times, she once described slavery and the role it played in the founding of this country as a national “birth defect.”

“Black Americans were a founding population,” she said. “Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together—Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.” As a result, Rice told the paper’s editors and

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