Tough Love

by Susan Rice

  In May 2002, almost six months after the Vanity Fair article, a reporter for Elle magazine, Ruth Shalit, published an investigative report “J’Accuse!” in which she interviewed me and several of my accusers. The article exposed the biases of Carney, Ijaz, and even Rose (whom I’ve never met) through their own on-the-record quotes, which revealed their desire to take me down personally. David Rose told Shalit that I was “a lying toad.” Ijaz told her:

  She had dreams of becoming the first African-American Secretary of State. To build her career, she was willing to ignore every single indication that the Sudan might be willing to come forward and become a member of the family of nations again. She used her blackness, if I may put it that way, to climb a ladder that ultimately ran out of rungs. Never again! Never again should we allow a U.S. government official to allow her personal views on a country to enter into the policy-making realm.

  Similarly, Carney said to Shalit, “You’ve got people saying September 11 wouldn’t have happened.… She [Rice] was seen as someone of enormous potential, but she’s seriously damaged her prospects as a result of being so completely wrong on the Sudan question. There’s no doubt about it.” Shalit also revealed that former CIA operative Milton Bearden, a key unnamed source for Rose and a registered lobbyist for Sudan, was paid $1.35 million by another American, Anis Haggar, an honorary consul for Sudan. Carney was also shown to be close to Haggar and to have taken money from him for travel and expenses for trips to Africa.

  Perhaps frustrated that “The Osama Files” had lost traction, Ijaz and Carney wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post in June 2002 that provided new fodder for right-wing attacks on Bill Clinton. In the Post, they again targeted me and others, recycling the “Osama Files” claims and falsely alleging that, in 1996, Sudan had offered to hand over bin Laden to the U.S., implying that Berger and others had failed to take up the offer.

  Together, these men leveled an audacious and sustained assault on me and my superiors. Their attacks ultimately failed to rehabilitate Khartoum or to sink my career, but not before causing considerable pain. This was my first time in the barrel—my maiden national hazing—in which I faced a public assault on my integrity and competence. It was both shocking and painful to be the subject of vicious lies, and particularly to be blamed for such a horrific and deadly event. The depth of the hate reflected in the attacks on me left me reeling at first. Being publicly vilified was a new and bracing experience. Once I absorbed the blow, my pain turned to anger, as it often has since childhood, and then to resolve—to fight for the truth and press on. In the process, I began developing the emotional body armor I didn’t know I would need in the future.

  Fortunately, facts are facts (or they used to be). The 9/11 Commission examined the allegation that Sudan had offered to turn over bin Laden to the U.S. and concluded that it was unfounded. The Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 specifically examined the Vanity Fair allegations that I and other Clinton Administration officials had refused Sudan’s offer of intelligence files on Al Qaeda. According to a principal staffer on the Inquiry, Daniel Byman, “after many interviews and the review of numerous documents, the Joint Inquiry established that many of the claims in the article had little merit, including the allegation that Dr. Rice and other senior Administration officials refused an offer of serious cooperation. The Joint Inquiry’s review also found no evidence that this supposed offer of help from Sudan in the late 1990s would have prevented the 9/11 attacks.”

  Carney and crew’s smears lost steam for almost a decade, until my dedicated detractors seized a subsequent opportunity to try to block my ascent.

  While in the Clinton administration, I poured the last dirt on the grave of my youthful political ambitions. I discovered that as an assistant secretary (of state or most agencies), one typically has more policy influence and decision-making authority than all but the most senior senators. With direct, line responsibility for distinct areas of policy, plus a budget and staff who carry out those policies, you have much greater ability to determine outcomes than through the cumbersome and uncertain legislative process, or even by exercising oversight responsibility. For a lot less pain, and far more gain, I could make policy without running for office, raising money, or compromising my principles.

  At age thirty-six, I had already had significant experience in national security policymaking; but, down the road, I hoped to serve at more senior ranks—eventually at the cabinet level. To do that, I had to broaden my knowledge and expertise beyond Africa and be accepted as someone who could contribute on foreign policy globally. Making this transition would not be easy. Most former regional assistant secretaries of state continue to work primarily in their original area of expertise after they leave government—whether in the private sector, academia, or think tanks—seemingly content to stick with the region they know best.

  I needed to forge a different path.

  After a recuperative period of low-intensity consulting and speaking, in the fall of 2002 I decided to join the Brookings Institution, an esteemed, nonpartisan think tank, as a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program. From the time I left government, my mother had been pressing me to pursue the think tank life, arguing that it would grant me personal and intellectual freedom, good colleagues, a distinguished affiliation, a public platform, and a solid salary. She was right.

  More importantly, Brookings enabled me to conduct scholarly research, write, and opine on a broad range of subjects, including but not limited to Africa. Long experienced with the menace of Al Qaeda, I was one of the very few scholars at Brookings to openly oppose the Iraq War. From the start, I viewed that war of choice as a dangerous diversion from the main objective of defeating Al Qaeda globally and in Afghanistan, one that would open a Pandora’s box in the Middle East.

  While at Brookings, I traveled to Asia and the Middle East, expanding my understanding of the policy challenges and opportunities these regions posed. My friend and former colleague in the Clinton administration Kurt Campbell, who had served in the Defense Department as the senior Asia policy advisor, invited me to travel with groups of experts to China, Australia, and Singapore. He also opened the door to my joining the Aspen Strategy Group, an annual bipartisan gathering of current and former senior officials who spend several August days delving deeply into complex policy issues.

  Through Brookings, I joined working groups focused on Europe and the Persian Gulf. I wrote articles, policy briefs, and op-eds, and gave speeches, interviews, and congressional testimony on a wide range of subjects. My in-depth research focused on measuring state weakness as well as the nexus between fragile states, global poverty, and transnational threats to U.S. national security. This work drew on my experience working on Africa but applied it to global challenges. My years at Brookings enabled me to broaden my expertise, while allowing me flexibility to travel, serve on numerous nonprofit boards—including the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, the Beauvoir School (following in my mother’s footsteps), and the National Democratic Institute—and, best of all, to grow my family.

  To Ian and me, it felt that over the first five years of our marriage, circumstances continually conspired to separate the two of us. After moving from Toronto to Washington in 1993, when I joined the Clinton administration, Ian was able to work in the CBC’s Washington Bureau; but by 1995 he had been called back to Toronto for a promotion as senior producer of The National. Most weekends, Ian made the trip to Washington and, occasionally, I returned the visit to Canada. Long-distance marriage was tedious but not unfamiliar to us after years of living apart. We didn’t plan to tolerate a commuter marriage forever, but there seemed no obvious end in sight, as we both were doing professionally what we wished. Ian still liked the CBC, and despite several efforts had not been able to secure a comparable job at an American television network. Moving back to Canada was not an option I seriously considered so long as I had the opportunity to work at the White House. So, we resolved to endure the distance for the time being.

  Then
, in 1997, the Almighty, it seemed, intervened yet again. He sent Jake to save us from ourselves. Jake’s welcome arrival accelerated our return to living under one roof. Just prior to Jake’s birth, Ian moved back to D.C., making the first of many professional sacrifices and fulfilling another of his parents’ fears about our marriage. The next year, Ian transitioned from the CBC to ABC News’s Washington Bureau, where he worked as a producer for World News Tonight; yet it took several years to regain the seniority that he had given up at the CBC. Ian knew that for my career to reach its potential, I had to be in Washington. He also knew that his own career could thrive in the U.S. once he made the move to an American network. In effect, Ian generously made a long-term bet on me.

  If marrying Ian is the best decision I ever made, Jake jump-starting our family is our greatest blessing. God has a sense of irony and humor, and Jake is proof. From birth when he had a reparable but delicate condition that required three surgeries and tricky postoperative care, to college where he became known for his outspoken leadership as a conservative, Jake has challenged us every step of the way.

  Born jaundiced and skinny with gorilla-length arms, Jake developed unevenly as a child. He was plainly very smart, with a powerful memory and strong verbal skills. To this day, whatever he is fascinated by becomes an all-consuming passion. He absorbs everything there is to know about his passions—beginning when he was pre-verbal and pointed insistently with his middle finger at every ceiling fan in sight, to his serial obsessions with the Teletubbies, Thomas the Tank Engine, dinosaurs, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, every living mammal, the U.S. presidents (which he could recite in order, forwards and backwards), polls and election results in almost every congressional district from 2008 to the present, world geography, and now finance, birdwatching, and the intricacies of various policy issues, foreign and domestic.

  Jake’s interest in world affairs began early, and I took advantage of my post at Brookings to expose him to events and people of interest. There was no one I was more keen to introduce him to than former South African president Nelson Mandela. When in 2005 a slower moving, yet still-sharp Mandela came to Brookings, Jake and I sat very near the front of the audience. In the middle of his discussion with Strobe Talbott, Brookings’s president, Mandela suddenly paused and, for no apparent reason, interrupted himself. He looked directly at Jake (wearing his little coat and tie) and said in his distinctive South African brogue, “Young man, are you the president of this country?”

  Taken aback but not knocked off his game, Jake replied, “No sir, not yet.”

  Mandela seemed amused by Jake’s answer, which I too thought was cute at the time, but his ready retorts seem less so these days, given how my son’s political views have evolved. After the event, Jake was thrilled to shake Mandela’s hand before giving his first press interview at age nine to the French news service Agence France-Press about his reaction to meeting the great Madiba, which he likened to meeting Martin Luther King Jr.

  We applied Jake to three top D.C.-area private schools for prekindergarten. At four, his first visit was to the Georgetown Day School, a progressive coed school with an excellent reputation, and he distinguished himself. Jake walked into the school for the “play group” interview and marched straight up to the director of admissions. No sooner had I introduced him than he blurted out with intensity, “I hate this school!” He spent the next half hour in the play group refusing to talk to anyone, totally disengaged. At that stage, the director of admissions gently suggested that perhaps we would prefer to come back another day.

  I was livid. When we got outside the school, I gave Jake the harshest talking-to that he received from me until he reached maturity: “You don’t have to like a place, but you are not allowed to be rude. If you pull that trick the next time at Sidwell Friends or Beauvoir, you will be in bigger trouble than you have ever been.” Steaming, I marched him to the car and drove home furiously. As I calmed down, I recalled with some amusement that retribution is fair play: Jake had tormented me (with a little more spice) just as I had my mother when at the same age I refused to speak until the last seconds of my interview at Beauvoir. Jake pulled it together for his subsequent interviews, and now we both laugh at this episode.

  In his early elementary years, Jake initially had difficulty with catching, throwing, and other gross motor skills. During youth soccer, Jake was easily distracted by birds and never much took to the game. Tennis finally caught Jake’s interest around age ten, an attraction perhaps spurred more by the views of his libertarian coach than by any deep passion for the family sport.

  In second grade, Jake’s teachers at the Beauvoir School were puzzled and concerned by the gap they observed between his evident capacity in the classroom and his abysmal results on every standardized test. He had also been slow to read until a savvy teacher found some history books that grabbed him. The school recommended we get Jake tested professionally, and the results revealed that Jake had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) in addition to certain executive function and sensory processing challenges, the latter of which had affected his gross motor coordination.

  In the context of this testing, Jake’s pediatrician Dr. Amy Pullman decided out of an abundance of caution to require a cardiological exam before she prescribed any ADD medication, which is a stimulant. She worried, in part, that Jake (and possibly Ian), both tall and slender with long arms and legs, might have Marfan syndrome (aka Abe Lincoln disease), a genetic disorder that is characterized by their tall, lean body type and can cause the aorta, heart valve, and eyes to degenerate dangerously. The exams ruled out Marfan for both Jake and Ian but revealed by chance that Jake had another rare condition: Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome, in which the heart is wired with an extra electrical pathway that causes it to beat rapidly. In its most severe form, WPW can kill unexpectedly (often during the late teens or twenties), when the heart is stressed by physical exertion or stimulated by drugs like cocaine or ADD meds. Jake needed cardiac ablation, an invasive heart procedure to determine the severity of the WPW and to “zap” the extra electrical pathway in order to return the heart to normal function.

  Bewildered and scared, I took Jake up to Boston Children’s Hospital shortly after he finished second grade to be treated by one of the country’s leading pediatric cardiologists. As it happened, Jake’s doctors determined during the ablation that he had the worst form of WPW, placing him at high risk of death. To our enormous relief, they readily fixed Jake’s heart, and he now has a normal life expectancy due to the hyper-vigilance of his extraordinary pediatrician.

  After the heart scare, Jake’s medical issues abated. With tutoring, physical therapy, medication, and extreme determination, Jake steadily overcame his challenges, blossoming as a high schooler at the Maret School into a top student, a leader among his peers, and a member of the varsity tennis team.

  Maris was born on a snowy day in early December 2002. Jake’s insistence on the previously unheard-of name “Maris” prevailed over our dithering indecision, after our OB-GYN, Dr. Sharon Malone, blew up our planned girl’s name by casually mentioning that she had delivered three “Sophia’s” in just one day the week prior. The day Maris arrived, I was scheduled to meet with the prime minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, along with Gayle Smith and Tony Lake. Meles was visiting Washington to meet with President Bush, and we had planned an informal visit, one of our first since the end of the Ethiopian-Eritrean War, two years prior, when most of our discussions were all business. When I had to cancel, the prime minister, Gayle, and Tony decided to drive through the snow to visit me at Sibley Hospital just two hours after Maris had emerged robust, ample, and charming from the start.

  Five-year-old Jake, ever protective if sometimes smothering of his baby sister, objected when during Meles’s visit the nurse came around to announce she was taking his sister away for a changing. He protested loudly, “Please don’t CHANGE the baby!”

  By Christmas, three weeks later, Maris had firmly established herself as a forc
e within our family. Even as an infant, she exuded a wisdom and cool confidence that prompted my mom to predict that Maris would prove payback to me for my strong-willed challenges to her over the years. (Turns out, she was wrong about Maris but right about payback—belatedly, from Jake). Several friends, who first met Maris before she could even utter a word, observed that she gave the uncanny impression of “having been here before.” Her facial expressions and body language spoke volumes before she could, revealing even her presidential preferences. When, at eighteen months in the summer of 2004, I said the words “George Bush,” Maris would grimace and frown in mock anger. When I said “John Kerry,” she would smile broadly, raise her arms, and clap in approval. I swear I didn’t teach her that, but I can’t pretend that I didn’t encourage this display once I discovered her talent.

  As a baby, Maris ate readily, slept through the night at an early age (unlike Jake), and rarely cried without reason. At her first medical examination at one week old, our pediatrician touched her hairline and matter-of-factly observed, “She’s going to be blond.”

  Stunned, I blurted uncontrollably: “Get the fuck out of here!”