by Susan Rice
There were additional sides to Emmett Rice that I got to see on full display as we grew older, particularly how he never wasted a teaching opportunity. Every time a word was uttered in conversation that we didn’t know, Dad would say, “Go look it up in the dictionary.” Feeling cheated that his father had died young without passing on his wisdom, Dad was determined to impart to us everything of importance he had learned. This, he hoped, would spare us from making unnecessary mistakes, as he had done. From Dad’s perspective, our role was to listen carefully and take free advice respectfully, since it came from, as he said, “Someone who has your best interests at heart.”
Dad’s method of discourse was sometimes to be the devil’s advocate, usually employed with a hearty sense of humor disguised by his serious quasi-scowl or a look that combined a smile with an air of disdain or, occasionally, a chiding remark. If someone had done something stupid that just lacked common sense, he would shake his head, as if to say, “C’mon, man,” and then employ a common refrain, “Don’t you know when to come in from out of the rain.” Above all, he consistently insisted, “Don’t take crap off of anyone”—that is, don’t let anyone demean you, limit you, or define you.
Learning to live with divorced parents and their individual idiosyncrasies was one thing. Adjusting to my mom and her marriage to a different man was quite another.
With considerable trepidation, Johnny and I walked into Mom and Alfred’s new town house on Embassy Row in Washington. As we passed through the vestibule and the front parlor, I glanced back at my little brother to see if he was okay. Wearing a pained, if brave, expression, he followed me into the melee.
As cold as it was outside on this January day in 1978, it somehow felt even less comfortable inside. Mom and Alfred had just gotten married on the grounds of the Washington Cathedral, and the house was crowded with family and friends celebrating at their wedding reception. The crowd included my grandparents, Mary and David, Uncles Leon and David, various cousins, my brand-new stepbrothers, Ben and Craig, and stepsisters, Cate and Ann (all grown), and countless invited guests. Food and drink were plentiful and elegant, as at all my mom’s affairs, yet it wasn’t festive to us. We didn’t really want to be there but felt we had little choice.
As soon as Mom spotted us, she hurried over, hugging us in delight. Our presence was the product of a carefully orchestrated compromise over how to approach this day. Dad was immensely bitter about Mom’s marriage to Alfred, while Johnny and I were highly skeptical of this new man in our lives. We viewed their union as tainted by arising from an illicit affair, which sounded the death-knell for our unitary family. The fact that Alfred was a WASP was tolerable from my perspective, but for my dad, I believe, losing his wife to a white man added insult to injury. He pressed us hard to boycott the entire event—wedding and reception. Mom, of course, desperately wanted us at both momentous occasions, as her joy would have been sorely dampened by our absence. By necessity, Johnny and I had become adept at balancing their competing demands. Looking to thread the needle, I decided that Johnny and I should attend the reception but not the wedding. No one was happy, but everyone dealt with it—the hallmark, I would later learn, of a sustainable solution to an intractable conflict.
My stepfather, Alfred Bradley Fitt, a graduate of Yale College and Michigan Law, and a World War II veteran, served most of his career in government. Before his stint on the staff at Yale, he was assistant secretary of defense for manpower during the Vietnam War, general counsel of the army, and deputy assistant secretary of the army for civil rights. In 1975, Alfred was named general counsel of the newly created Congressional Budget Office.
Clearly devoted to my mother, Alfred exerted largely a calming influence on her and also took a kind interest in me. He later taught me to drive stick-shift, helped type some of my term papers, and advised me on my college applications. Trying to temper some of Mom’s excesses, at least those she took out on me, Alfred healthily reinforced my own sense of self.
However, it soon became evident that my stepfather had a drinking problem. Mom too could become petulant and impulsive when inebriated. Alcohol came to exercise an outsize influence on their household, creating a stressful dynamic that restored a measure of unpredictability to our lives when we so craved stability.
To make matters worse, Alfred clashed with Johnny. Those battles almost rivaled the ones I had with my mother. From the time I was ten to almost thirty, my mother and I were mutually combustible.
Mom was a complex character whose strengths and weaknesses were strikingly juxtaposed. Lois, as I sometimes called her (in part to annoy), was super-smart, highly intuitive, even prescient, as well as a talented cook, gardener, floral artist, and an elegant decorator. Extremely generous, she adopted strangers and made them her lifelong friends—bank security guards, waitresses, manicurists, workmen, and caregivers. Once she was your friend, my mother protected you mercilessly. Possessing a rare inner strength, toughness, and resilience that was evident from her stand-out academic success to her steely battle with six consecutive cancers, my mother was ultimately my biggest booster and fiercest defender.
But no one could cut me down to size faster or more harshly. For most of my teenage years, Mom and I picked at each other, seizing on each other’s weaknesses and exploiting them. Typically, it would begin in her kitchen with something like:
“Susan, you really need to watch it. Your behind is getting too big. And you are not helping yourself with the butch way you dress—baggy pants, tasteless tops, and everything.”
“Mom, I don’t need this from you. Just stop,” I’d rejoin, trying to end it.
“Well, if I don’t tell you the truth, I don’t know who will. You have the potential to be a pretty girl, but that afro is no help and you need to start ‘putting your face on.’ ”
Incensed, I would escalate, “I don’t know why you always have to be such a bitch. Maybe if you drank less you would be easier to tolerate.”
Indignant, she would say, “Don’t you talk to me like that! I’m your mother. You had better show proper respect.”
“I will when you earn it,” I would say, delivering the coup de grâce and storming out of the kitchen and upstairs to my room.
Neither of us meant to be as hurtful as we were, but ours had become an unhealthy dynamic. I had indeed lost a certain measure of respect for my mom, given the knowledge that she deceived my dad and left him for another man. I resented that she sometimes drank too much and lost a measure of her self-control. In my view, she had to own those failings, as they were inescapable; thus, the power balance in our naturally fraught mother–teen daughter relationship tilted more than normal in my favor. I smelled weakness and went for the jugular—in ways both overt and subconscious—an instinct I have learned to temper with age.
While letting Mom know I saw her flaws, I struggled not to expose my own insecurities. She harshly criticized my appearance, undermining my body image, such that I long doubted my attractiveness and remain sensitive about my weight. By contrast, Mom reliably reinforced my confidence in all other realms, particularly my intellect and integrity. Once into adulthood when our relationship blossomed (and I dressed better), Mom frequently told me that I was beautiful and helpfully contributed to selecting my wardrobe, even if she never quite gave up on my hair and, when deserved, my behind.
Despite all her strength, beauty, and style, Mom suffered from a nagging insecurity. Especially before she aged, Mom could be defensive, quick-tempered, and even dissemble. She never dwelt on the sources of her uneven self-esteem, but I suspect she always felt she didn’t quite belong in the rarefied circles in which she traveled. At root, Mom still viewed herself as “a poor colored girl from Portland, Maine.” She also repeatedly speculated that her own mother, Mary, having risked her life to bear such a late child, somehow resented or may not have truly wanted her. Mom regretted failing twice at marriage and was candid about the myriad professional challenges she faced as an early, lonely woman in white male
executive suites and boardrooms.
Outside the home, Mom hid her self-doubt adeptly and largely overcame it as she rose professionally. Her passion remained education and equal opportunity for poor and minority youth. Over thirty years at the College Board, Mom lobbied strenuously to make college affordable for all. She worked closely with Senator Claiborne Pell to establish Basic Education Opportunity Grants, later renamed Pell Grants, which provide federal financial aid for low-income students. I am deeply proud that Lois D. Rice is widely lauded as “The Mother of Pell Grants” for her work in launching and sustaining this critical program, which has supported approximately 80 million Americans to attend college since 1973. Later, Mom would serve as senior vice president for government affairs at Control Data Corporation and as a director on eleven major publicly traded corporate boards, bringing her knowledge of Congress and public policy as well as her passion for equality to the private sector.
After marrying Alfred, Mom decided to sue for equal visitation rights, concluding that Dad was never going to honor his fifty-fifty pledge once Alfred became a permanent fixture. Their legal war involved high-priced, nasty lawyers on both sides, along with a judge who was the husband of a senior administrator at my school and also taught one of my classes. I wished he had recused himself; instead, for years, I felt like our family business was out on the street.
My parents’ lawyers had the brilliant idea to call me and Johnny to testify before the judge as to which parent we preferred to live with. We were mortified by the notion of being forced to takes sides publicly against our parents. We loved them both dearly and did not want to lose either by choosing. Moreover, we were outraged that they and their lawyers were so consumed by winning that they failed to appreciate the impact on me and Johnny.
Thankfully, we had our own (pro bono) lawyer. In 1976, we became close to an angel named Peggy Cooper Cafritz. Peggy was the aunt of Casey Cooper, a close friend of Johnny’s and mine whom we had met at Sidwell Tennis Camp.
Peggy was a lawyer by training, an activist, and pioneer in the D.C. arts community who cofounded the Duke Ellington School for the Arts. Peggy—hip, not quite thirty, and no BS—adopted me and Johnny as her godchildren, like she later did for scores of kids who needed help over the years.
When Peggy heard we had to testify, she invited us over to her house to conspire. “I have an idea,” she said. “Why don’t you write the judge and tell him how you feel about your parents and explain that you don’t want to testify?” Impressed by her brilliance and deviousness, we lay on Peggy’s floor to compose individual letters to the judge. Not accidentally, we neglected to tell our parents what we had done—blindsiding their flabbergasted lawyers and, for once, seizing the advantage in the case.
The judge had the decency to heed our wishes, so we never had to appear in court. In writing, we both proclaimed we loved our parents, though Johnny added that he just wanted to see his parents “on an equal basis.” I steered clear of the issue at hand. Ultimately, the judge ruled in favor of my mother, granting her equal visitation rights.
My father appealed, and the appellate court reversed the decision, ruling 2–1 in favor of my dad. Mom was crushed. Even as Johnny and I sympathized with her loss, we were mostly relieved that the legal saga had finally ended—just as I was completing tenth grade.
Spanning almost ten years, my parents’ prolonged fighting, brutal divorce, and lengthy court battle were my first major searing trauma. I was disgusted by my parents’ inability to put their children’s interests first and seethed with a rage that overrode my sadness and sense of loss. Forced to grow up faster than I should have, I resented that my parents had stolen a piece of my childhood.
Their divorce also left me wary of commitment in relationships with men, skeptical of the desirability and durability of marriage, and fearful of failing like my parents. Though I remained angrier at my mom than my dad, as an adult I have come to understand their actions and motives more clearly, and I am substantially more sympathetic to my mother’s plight than I once was.
Unable to sway the outcome of their marriage, I turned my focus to what I could control—school, friendships, sports—and willed myself not to be undone by my parents’ drama. Understanding the difference between what I could influence and what I could not proved an important survival tool for the future. From this ordeal, I began learning how to nurture my relationships rather than take them for granted, to channel my frustrations into constructive effort rather than letting my anger fester. Discovering that I had the ability to steady myself, even in the eye of a storm, I emerged with greater confidence and inner strength. The onslaught had shown me I could take a bruising hit and keep running. Instead of being a victim, I counted my perseverance as a personal triumph.
Painful as it was, the divorce gave me steel and grit, an early taste of adversity, and what I came to know as its corollary: resilience.
4 Twice As Good
By early 2007, we were off to the races.
Having cast our lot with Obama, Tony Lake and I sped to assemble the best possible stable of foreign policy experts to assist the campaign. There was little competition, as it turned out. Clinton relied, initially, on the most senior advisors like former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, and former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke. She had lots of bosses but few workhorses.
We took a different approach, targeting younger, thirty-, forty-, and fifty-somethings—experienced but not cabinet-level former officials—who would do the thinking and writing we needed, not just offer sage advice. My colleagues at the Brookings Institution were ripe for the picking, and many of them were our best early recruits. My dear friend Gayle Smith, who had also worked for President Clinton and was much closer to him than I was in his post-presidency, signed on with Obama at the outset, as did my former NSC colleagues Richard Clarke and Randy Beers, who were both then retired from government and brought unparalleled counterterrorism and homeland security experience. Some prospective additions needed convincing that Obama had a prayer of winning, but most were excited by his powerful personal narrative, oratorical skills, and compelling policy views.
Tony and I swiftly assembled a large team of energetic, experienced talent who were able to support Obama across all issue areas. We also led a steering group of about a dozen core supporters, several of whom Obama involved in speech preparation, drafting articles, debate prep, formulating key policy positions, and occasional conference calls. As the campaign matured, Obama built out his paid campaign staff, and colleagues like Ben Rhodes, Denis McDonough, and Obama Senate staffer Mark Lippert took on the day-to-day policy leadership, drawing upon our external team for expertise as needed.
My campaign appearances at house parties, fundraisers, public panels, rallies, churches, and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) events consumed a lot of travel time but were among my favorite activities. Over the course of the primary season, I journeyed from Iowa to New Hampshire, from South Carolina to Utah, New Mexico, South Dakota, Florida, Michigan, Georgia, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Indiana, often paired up with elected officials or celebrities, to talk to voters about why I believed Obama was the right person at the right time. Sometimes my pitch was generic; at other times I would speak in depth on his foreign policy credentials and positions.
The excitement on the hustings for Obama was palpable—from rural midwestern communities to big cities and suburbs, among people of all ages and races. Obama was tapping into a vein that was hungry for the kind of “hope and change” he represented.
One of my favorite trips was to New Hampshire in early January 2008, because I was joined by my ten-year-old son, Jake, who campaigned with me in the frigid, snow-covered southwestern corner of the state. From the bar in a modest hotel in Keene, New Hampshire, Jake and I watched television with friends as Obama was declared the winner in the hard-fought Iowa caucuses.
The victory was gratifying not only because it was the first contest of the primary season, but be
cause, for Obama, everything depended on Iowa. Adjacent to his home state of Illinois, Iowa was the place where Obama bet the farm, gambling the bulk of his early money and field organization. It was no small feat for an African American to triumph in such a white state, where both his main opponents, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, had long histories and faithful followers.
Buoyed by the prospect that we could replicate the Iowa victory in New Hampshire, Jake and I spent several days knocking on doors in Keene where voters craved substantive discussion with campaign representatives. To maximize our efficiency, Jake and I sometimes split up and went to houses individually, since one knock could result in being invited into the owner’s living room for warmth from the deep snow, a hot beverage, sweets, and extended conversation.
Jake, who began his political journey as a lefty Dennis Kucinich supporter and has since migrated to the other extreme, was then a knowledgeable and persuasive Obama spokesman. At an Obama rally later in the week, I met charmed residents who gushed about how impressed they were with young Jake’s confident command of Obama’s policy positions and how polite and persuasive he was.
As the primary approached, I headlined events in Manchester, phone-banked, and served as a press surrogate in the pre- and post-debate spin room at Saint Anselm College. After days of rallies, debates, and GOTV activities, the primary outcome seemed uncertain. The Obama campaign remained hopeful, despite the negative impact of Obama’s dismissive comment in the debate that Hillary was “likable enough” and, thereafter, of Hillary fighting back tears while in conversation with women voters at a local diner. As I canvassed in Manchester on primary day, the mood didn’t feel great, and I worried that the night might end badly.
When the votes were counted, Obama indeed fell short. Even though I had hints of the outcome, the loss still felt like a breath-seizing blow. Obama’s concession speech was graceful and featured the introduction of his signature rallying cry, “Yes, we can!” That night, at the New Hampshire staff party, which ended like a wake, we all realized we were in for a long, tough primary battle.
