Tough Love

by Susan Rice

  Thankfully, Dad came back east a few times a year for extended visits and always for the holidays. He also made regular trips to South Carolina to spend time with and care for his older sister Pansy, until 2007 when she died. In D.C., Dad enjoyed hanging out with his friends and resuming rituals like taking me and Ian to the annual Christmas ball for the Washington-area Boulé, a fraternity of accomplished African American professionals.

  Dad loved to laugh, relished a loud party, and could boogie with the best until his final days. I will never lose the image of my dad at eighty-nine, rocking with Democratic strategist and television commentator Donna Brazile at my house just after President Obama’s first inauguration. As his favorite dance song, Tom Browne’s “Funkin’ for Jamaica” blared and they circled each other on the floor, the party crowd chanted, “Go, Donna. Go, Donna.” To this day, in our household, any subsequent true throwdown has been nicknamed a “Go, Donna.”

  Even from a distance, Dad remained active and present in our lives. When we were apart, Dad and I spoke frequently by phone. He would call to talk current events or comment on my television appearances. If I hadn’t heard from him, I would call almost daily to check in, as I worried increasingly about him living alone far across country. Eventually, we installed a system where we could remotely monitor motion, his comings and goings, and detect anything unusual, but Dad resisted all forms of visiting nursing care. He barked and scared off all the caregivers that the local services sent over at our request.

  Then, one morning, they cracked the code. Dad was home alone when the doorbell rang. When he opened it, there stood an exceptionally attractive, young African American nurse named Ticey Westbrooks. Without knowing why she was there, he opened the door wider and said, “Come on IN!” When she explained that she had been sent by the caregiver agency, he still didn’t put her out. They clicked, and Dad finally had a visiting nurse he liked and we trusted.

  On one of his return trips to D.C. in March 2007, I convinced Dad to give Obama a chance. Dad came to a fundraiser I co-hosted for the then still long-shot candidate. Finally, my father saw what I saw. From then on, Dad supported Obama sincerely, if skeptically, given my father’s experience of race in America.

  My mother was a different story. Like Dad, she attended the fundraiser and became a committed donor. Unlike Dad, she never questioned my decision to join Obama’s campaign. She grasped immediately what animated my enthusiasm for him and would spend the rest of her life fretting and fawning over her favorite president.

  By then, my relationship with Mom had evolved greatly.

  Mom mellowed with age, and I matured becoming less impatient and more appreciative of my mom’s many gifts. By my late twenties, we had become what she always said she wanted us to be: “best friends.” It was Mom who lured me to the Brookings Institution in 2002, where she had been a Guest Scholar since the early 1990s after leaving the Control Data Corporation out of frustration that she was unfairly compensated relative to her male peers. At Brookings, Mom worked on education policy, higher education finance, and workforce diversity issues. She also found a new love and reconnected with friends from whom she had grown distant as she cared for Alfred while he battled cancer. She took great joy in spending summers at her lovely house on Penobscot Bay near Camden, Maine. Overall, her stress level came down considerably, which enabled her to leverage her many talents and temper her most evident flaws.

  Johnny and I both benefited from the changes we saw in Mom. Like mine, his relationship with her improved with age and independence. After Yale, Johnny worked at AT&T before attending Harvard Business School (finally giving Mom a Harvard grad) and thereafter at Disney and the NBA in Latin America and Japan. While at Harvard, Johnny conceived of a nonprofit called Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT), which ten years later he turned into reality.

  Management Leadership for Tomorrow prepares minority college students, largely from lower-income backgrounds, for coveted postcollege jobs and graduate schools that can help deliver true economic mobility for their families. Utilizing one-on-one coaching, mentorship, and connections, MLT supports over a thousand students and professionals annually to become senior leaders who can transform their organizations and communities.

  Mom was a founding board member and avid fundraiser, viewing MLT as a much-needed addendum to her life’s work of expanding access for minorities and low-income students to higher education. Both Mom and Johnny understood that, for the less privileged who grow up without the “social capital” that elites enjoy, merely graduating from college does not ensure full access to the American Dream. These students also need the targeted training, support, and relationships that will help them secure the best jobs and continue to rise.

  Like Mom, Dad was proud that his son had chosen to carry on our families’ tradition of service through education, which dates back to his grandfather’s founding of the Bordentown School. Through MLT, Johnny has taken to scale my parents’ commitment to helping others by partnering with over 150 corporations and universities to prepare more than seven thousand African American, Latino, and Native American “Rising Leaders” to excel in top companies and social sector organizations.

  By contrast, Mom was slower to support Johnny’s personal choices, particularly in women. After expressing some hesitation about most of Johnny’s prior relationships, Mom finally embraced Andrea Williams, the woman he ultimately married. Having only half jokingly admonished Johnny while in college to “never bring home a white girl,” Mom toasted the couple at their wedding rehearsal dinner by bestowing on the bride (a black woman) her highest possible compliment, “Most of all, Andrea reminds me of me.”

  Like Ian is to me, Andrea is exactly what Johnny needs—a calm, patient, devoted, and accomplished partner who balances Johnny’s energy, intensity, and silliness. Andrea played varsity tennis at Yale and continues to compete formidably, rising to the number one ranked woman in America in the 50+ age group. After graduating from Stanford Business School at the height of the tech boom, Andrea worked for top investment banks as a highly regarded equity analyst of Silicon Valley companies. She has since devoted herself to various entrepreneurial ventures, along with their two children, tennis, and nonprofit work. Since Johnny and Andrea moved back to the Washington area from California in 2007, our families could not be closer.

  Becoming a grandmother turned out to be Mom’s greatest joy and also did more than anything to smooth out our edges and elevate our relationship to the high point we sustained over the balance of her life. She was there in the delivery room with Jake and almost every day thereafter, spending quality time with him and Maris throughout their lives.

  Our friendship grew ever stronger over the years. From helping me improve my wardrobe to tutoring me in the fine points of preparing a worthy Thanksgiving dinner, Mom and I were able to cooperate and support each other with rare acrimony. As she battled cancer and other health challenges, from 2006 to her passing in 2017, Mom was deeply appreciative of the attention Johnny and I gave to her care. Her struggles brought us closer, underscoring just how much we loved and needed each other.

  As I returned to the public spotlight, Mom remained fiercely protective of me, bristling at every criticism and bursting with pride at my success. Not at all tech-savvy, Mom could barely use a simple cell phone and had no phone alerts or internet access to track my activities. Instead, she watched CNN incessantly and cultivated a network among my staffers who would call to alert her to watch me on television. Following my public appearances, she would phone me to provide her unvarnished critique of how I looked and what I said.

  By early 2008, Mom had lots of feedback to offer. At this point, in addition to my role as policy advisor and coordinating the outside experts, I had been tapped increasingly by the Obama campaign as a television spokesperson. A full-time volunteer, but not a paid staffer, I kept my base in Washington and visited headquarters in Chicago occasionally. Since Obama’s time was spent mostly on the campaign trail, I had only in
termittent contact with him and engaged mostly with the policy staff. At debate prep, debates, or meetings with the candidate, I also interacted with the political team, including David Plouffe, the wiry, puckish, and super-analytical campaign manager, and David Axelrod, the warm, jovial senior political guru. On and off the campaign trail, I also came to know well senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, one of the Obamas’ closest friends and trusted aides. Valerie always offered me kind support and candid insights from inside headquarters.

  The campaign regularly sent me out on cable television to represent Obama’s positions on key foreign policy issues and sometimes to debate Clinton representatives or Republican opponents. In a hard-fought, sometimes bitter primary, I was confident on the air, a happy warrior unafraid to throw a punch as needed. Yet, as I discovered during the 2008 campaign, it is not hard to make the kind of mistake on television that gives your opponent an opening they can exploit, even if what you say is not technically inaccurate.

  In early March 2008, I appeared on Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show, and the conversation went like this:

  MR. CARLSON: So Hillary Clinton runs this ad, the famous red phone ad, that says when the phone rings at 3 o’clock in the morning, you know, who do you trust to make those snap decisions that could hold all of our lives in the balance? And the Obama campaign, I thought very wisely, came back and said, name one that you—you know name a situation where you’ve judged a foreign policy crisis, and she couldn’t. I’m going to ask the same question to you. Where has Barack Obama been in a position where he has to make those kinds of decisions?

  MS. RICE: He hasn’t, and he hasn’t claimed that he’s been in a position to have to answer the phone at 3 o’clock in the morning in a crisis situation. That’s the difference between the two of them. Hillary Clinton hasn’t had to answer the phone at 3 o’clock in the morning. And yet she attacked Barack Obama for not being ready. They’re both not ready to have that 3:00 a.m. phone call.

  I continued:

  The question is… when that phone call is received for each of them for the first time, who’s going to make the right judgment? On the critical foreign policy issues of the day, whether it was a decision to go to war in Iraq or the decision to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt and beat the drums of war with Iran, Hillary Clinton has made the same wrong judgment as John McCain and George W. Bush. Barack Obama has made a very different judgment. So, neither one of them, and nor John McCain for that matter, have had that 3 o’clock phone call that others have had. And I think we have to be honest about that.

  My comments were seized upon by opponents as a confession by a senior Obama spokesperson that Obama was not prepared to be president. It made for an unhelpful and distracting story for several days. My main point was valid—that no one has had the true experience of taking a crisis call until they occupy the presidency, and what matters in a candidate is good judgment. Still, if I could reformulate my answer, I would not have used the word “ready” and said simply “neither has ever taken a 3 a.m. call.” Obama never mentioned this mistake to me, but thereafter without ever being told so by anyone on the campaign, I was tacitly benched for a few weeks and given only safer opportunities by the campaign to appear publicly, until the furor died down.

  My transgression, however, was rapidly eclipsed by fellow Obama advisor Samantha Power, who called Hillary Clinton “a monster.” While Samantha had asked that her words be treated as off-the-record in an otherwise on-the-record interview, the U.K.’s The Scotsman published her comment anyway. The Clinton campaign took great offense, whether real or feigned, demanding Samantha’s sacking. The Obama team acknowledged that the comment had gone a bit too far, and Samantha felt compelled to resign as an advisor to the campaign and apologize publicly to Senator Clinton.

  Thereafter, I rarely, if ever, ran afoul of the Obama campaign’s sensibilities and continued my active role as a media and in-person surrogate through the end of the general election. As our attention shifted from Clinton to Senator John McCain, the nominees’ relative national security credentials became a persistent theme. The McCain camp portrayed Obama as soft and inexperienced, while we questioned McCain’s policy judgment and temperament. In my press appearances, I criticized Senator McCain’s tendency to “shoot first and ask questions later,” arguing: “… it’s dangerous, and we can’t afford four more years of this reckless policy.” I also noted that, “On critical, factual questions that are fundamental to understanding what is going on in Iraq and the region, Senator McCain has gotten it wrong and not just once but repeatedly.” McCain, I said, “shot from the hip,” and was “very aggressive, belligerent.”

  These jabs, it seems, got under McCain’s skin. Whether it was the substance of my critique or the messenger, I am not sure. John Kerry, General Wesley Clark, and other surrogates had made similar arguments but, in subsequent years, many journalists speculated that McCain’s outsize hostility to me derived in substantial part from my criticisms during the 2008 campaign. Perhaps the comment that most rankled McCain related to Senator Obama’s upcoming trip to Iraq in the summer of 2008 (where McCain had visited earlier). Speaking of Obama, I said: “I think he wants to get out and do as much as he can. I don’t think he will be strolling around the market in a flak jacket,” an allusion to McCain’s much touted, heavily guarded, brief walk in a Baghdad market in which he aimed to show how much security had improved. While I make no apology for my critiques of McCain’s policy judgments, I do regret the “flak jacket” comment, since it was flippant and mocking, and it ran counter to my deep respect for McCain’s service to our country and all he endured as a POW.

  Following the highly successful overseas trip that Obama had taken to the Middle East and Europe to demonstrate his competence on the world stage, the last months of the general election were dominated by the convention, debate preparation, and transition planning. Against the backdrop of the crashing economy and McCain’s missteps in the economic policy realm, Obama’s star continued to rise. Foreign policy receded somewhat as a dominant campaign theme. During the last weeks of the campaign, the balance of my effort shifted to preparing for the transition, including establishing teams to coordinate with the outgoing Bush administration at the National Security Council and each of the national security agencies.

  On election evening, I had chosen not to go to Chicago to be with the campaign team and the Obamas. For me, it was a moment that required the proximity of family. Win or lose, I needed to be with my mother and the kids to watch the election returns. Ian had to work from New York, and my dad stayed out west, but we all were in frequent telephone communication throughout the night.

  Our first stop was to join Tony Lake and Julie Katzman at their home for a small (hopefully celebratory) gathering. It was a fitting coda to a journey that began with Tony four years earlier, when he first asked me to talk to then-Senate candidate Obama about foreign policy. Mindful of how wrong exit polls can be, and still somewhat skeptical that America could actually bring itself to elect a black man, I was taking nothing for granted. As the results began to come in with the Obama-Biden ticket winning several of the most contested states—Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, even Indiana, North Carolina, and Colorado—it seemed that an election evening might finally go our way. After Tony’s, we sped to a party at my brother’s house and arrived shortly before the victor was declared.

  As we awaited the results, Mom and I sat on the couches in Johnny’s family room, glued to the big screen TV. I tried to concentrate on the television but found myself frequently gazing at my kids, five-year-old Maris and eleven-year-old Jake, and my nephew and niece, Mateo and Kiki. This historic evening seemed more about them and their generation’s future than anything else.

  The older kids and Johnny’s guests milled around in muted anticipation. Then the announcement blasted across the airwaves: Barack Obama was the forty-fourth president of the United States! The campaign’s signature song, Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered�
�� blared like a triumphal anthem for the faithful as we all waited for Obama. When at last he took the stage, with his beautiful wife and two adorable daughters, along with Vice President–elect Biden and his massive family, it seemed real for the first time.

  With my mom sitting very close to me and Maris crashed in my lap, I refrained from loud cheers and just cried copious tears of joy and relief. It had actually happened. An incredible, historic, impossible dream come true. America had proved my dad and so many others wrong. Deep down, I too had doubted whether this moment would come in my lifetime. When it did, I couldn’t stop crying—that night and all the next day.

  For all the wisdom we had received from our parents, all their encouragement to reach for the pinnacle of possibility—as a family and as a nation—the aftermath of the election did not allow time to reflect on how we got there, thankful as we were for all that had brought us this far. Following the deluge of my tears, which lasted through Wednesday, it was time for me to look forward, to prepare for where we were all headed next. By Thursday, I had pulled myself together and showed up to work at Transition Headquarters.

  PART THREE The Big Leagues

  12 Represent

  On December 1, 2008, at a press conference on a cold Chicago morning, Obama made my nomination as U.N. ambassador official, while announcing the rest of his national security team.

  For the last three weeks, the transition had been consumed by the full-blown economic crisis the new administration would face and by top personnel decisions. The national security transition team focused on engaging with Bush administration counterparts at the various agencies, supporting senior nominees preparing for their confirmation hearings, and considering lower level staff selections. We also readied the high-profile foreign policy choices we intended to make in the early days of the new presidency. Priorities included banning torture and codifying Obama’s determination to close Guantánamo and reform detention policy. As my focus had necessarily shifted to preparing for confirmation, selecting key staff, and getting ready to hit the ground in New York, the press conference was the first time I allowed the reality and responsibility of where I was headed next to hit me.