by Susan Rice
Our current assessment is that what happened in Benghazi was in fact initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo—almost a copycat of—of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, which were prompted, of course, by the video.… Obviously, that’s—that’s our best judgment now. We’ll await the results of the investigation.
Despite my effort to be clear that the violence in Cairo stemmed from the video, reputable commentators and journalists elided my comments and established a public narrative that I blamed Benghazi on the video. It stuck.
Subsequent investigations, including by The New York Times, that took account of the motivations described by Libyans—who witnessed or were involved in the attacks—revealed that, contrary to what we thought at the time, the video did appear to have been a catalyst for the attack on the Benghazi diplomatic facility. Among those who reportedly said so was Ahmed Abu Khattala, who was convicted in U.S. court for his significant role in the attack.
Finally, I was lambasted for stating that there had been a protest or “demonstrations” at our diplomatic facility in Benghazi that evolved into a larger and violent attack. Hewing carefully to the talking points provided by the IC, which initially assessed that there had been “demonstrations” in Benghazi, that was the assessment I provided. This information turned out to be wrong, and days after my appearance, the IC revised its judgment to reflect their subsequent determination that there were no protests. This proved to be the main error in the original talking points.
As Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy, a career foreign service officer, told Congress, “if any Administration official, including any career official, were on television on Sunday, September 16th, they would have said what Ambassador Rice said. The information she had at that point from the intelligence community is the same that I had at that point.”
Throughout October, the attacks on me—some ferocious—were sustained. Romney himself gave a speech on October 8, in which he said, “This latest assault cannot be blamed on a reprehensible video insulting Islam, despite the Administration’s attempts to convince us of that for so long.” Senator Lindsey Graham said on October 11 that I was “either incompetent or untrustworthy—she’s one of the two.”
Once the DNI’s statement was released updating its assessment on September 28, Democrats began coming to my defense. Senator John Kerry issued a statement saying, “I’m particularly troubled by calls for Ambassador Rice’s resignation. She is a remarkable public servant for whom the liberation of the Libyan people has been a personal issue and a public mission. She’s an enormously capable person who has represented us at the United Nations with strength and character.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid insisted: “In order to inform the American people, the Obama administration, including Ambassador Rice, reported the preliminary information they had after the attack, despite the uncertain nature of intelligence in the fog of battle, and have responsibly updated the American public as new details have emerged.”
After his brief visit to the General Assembly in late September, I didn’t see much of President Obama for the duration of the campaign season. He was frequently on the road, and I was mostly in New York. But on October 12, shortly before the second presidential debate, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon invited me for lunch in his office at the White House. This was rare, if not unprecedented, so I suspected there was a larger reason for the invitation. Sure enough, in the midst of our meal, in popped President Obama.
No substantive discussion ensued; his purpose was simply to ask—You okay? He underscored his concern for me and his view that the attacks on me were all political gamesmanship. Obama had my back. “Stay strong, Susan,” he assured me.
“I’ll be all right,” I said, “but I can’t say the same for Maris or my mom.” We didn’t go into the details of the trauma that my daughter and Mom were experiencing. In these highly stressful weeks after my Sunday show appearances, Mom kept CNN blaring in her kitchen through almost all her waking hours, obsessed with what was happening to me. Like nine-year-old Maris, who was having batteries of tests to try to explain the frightening hallucinations she had recently begun to experience, Mom was traumatized. But unlike Maris, Mom understood what was going on. Still, she couldn’t stand to see her daughter attacked, my integrity maligned. That stung her. And me.
Confessing that having Senator Graham denigrate my intellect and honesty was beyond galling, I told the president, “I will hang tough.” I appreciated the Boss’s very deliberate effort to buck me up. His private and public support helped sustain me through the heat of the October onslaught.
Just four days later, in the October 16, 2012, presidential debate, Governor Romney attacked President Obama on Benghazi. After Secretary Clinton had said that she “takes responsibility” for the thousands of State Department employees and their security, President Obama declared in the debate that the buck stopped with him: “Secretary Clinton has done an extraordinary job. But she works for me. I’m the president, and I’m always responsible, and that’s why nobody’s more interested in finding out exactly what happened than I. …”
Still, Romney went on the offensive: “There was no demonstration involved. It was a terrorist attack, and it took a long time for that to be told to the American people. Whether there was some misleading, or instead whether we just didn’t know what happened, you have to ask yourself why didn’t we know five days later when the ambassador to the United Nations went on TV to say that this was a demonstration. How could we not have known?”
Jesus, I thought, as I watched from home. Now I’m in the middle of the presidential debate. This is nuts!
Obama came back swinging, “The suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the Secretary of State, our U.N. Ambassador, anybody on my team, would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, Governor, is offensive.”
Boom. He sure did have my back.
Undeterred, Romney kept going, accusing Obama of refusing to call Benghazi an “act of terror” until fourteen days later, and was incredulous when Obama replied that he called it that right away, on September 12, the day after the attack.
CNN moderator Candy Crowley intervened, dutifully reading aloud the transcript of Obama’s September 12 Rose Garden statement, in which he clearly used the words “act of terror.” Romney appeared flummoxed and deflated. That was the last time Romney tried directly to bury Obama with Benghazi.
Over the remaining weeks of the campaign, I continued to be called all manner of things by Republican surrogates and pundits. It was incredibly frustrating to be publicly denigrated and not be able to fight back. As U.S. ambassador to the U.N., I spoke every day for my country and the president, not for myself, especially on a politically fraught issue in an election season. So I largely kept silent on the subject even as the attacks mounted.
I don’t mind being disliked. I would always rather be respected than liked, if I had to choose. But to have my integrity impugned, to be branded a liar, hurt like nothing I had experienced before.
I fully understood that the attacks on me were a proxy for attacks on the president and, to some extent, that helped me not take it too personally during the election season. I also recognized that I was irresistible to Fox News, given my relatively high profile as Obama’s U.N. ambassador and my perceived closeness to the president going back to his 2008 campaign. For the remaining weeks before the election, I viewed my role as to suck it up, take the hits, keep my head down, and survive to fight another day. It wasn’t easy but putting mission first—continuing to represent the U.S. at the U.N.—made it a tolerable sacrifice.
October lasted an eternity. Feeling numb, I focused on my job and my family, reserving no space for my own emotions. Plowing through was an effective, if diversionary, coping mechanism, but I figured I could come to terms with my own emotions later.
Throughout this period, my incredibly loyal staff at the U.S. Mission to the U.N., wounded and
appalled, worked crazy hours on top of their regular duties to defend me in the face of relentless media inquiries and congressional scrutiny. Only later would I learn how much they suffered on my behalf. Years after, when attacks against me resurfaced, or they were forced to relive the fall of 2012, they acknowledged to me their pain and stress. They had suffered to a degree that I had not, because I couldn’t let it be about me. But they too put mission first, and their mission was to protect me when I couldn’t and others wouldn’t. My team performed thankless and lonely roles with enormous devotion and skill.
Strangely, in the halls of the U.N., it was as if nothing had happened. Few, if any, colleagues broached the subject of Benghazi. The U.N. press corps, which questioned me multiple times a week, never once asked me about the Benghazi controversy, until after the election. At the U.N., this was a non-story—a dishonest political attack not worthy of distracting from the real issues we were dealing with such as Syria and the push for Palestinian statehood.
By the third week of October, I briefly thought perhaps the tide was shifting. Several reputable press outlets, including CNN, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, reported that I had relied on talking points which had been written by the CIA, not the White House, and had been approved by the Intelligence Community as a whole. It was plainly reported that, only after I was interviewed, did the IC receive information that changed their assessment. Despite the facts being widely disseminated, the attacks continued. I soldiered on, consumed by the responsibilities of representing the U.S. at the U.N. The weight of the job helped me stay focused and prevented me from wallowing too much in the assaults on my integrity.
Still, I wasn’t prepared for the attacks on me escalating after the election. Naively, I had assumed that once the campaign was over and the president was reelected, the Republicans would see little continued utility in maligning me. During the campaign, White House chief of staff Jack Lew told me that the president wanted me to be vetted as a candidate for secretary of state. I had been thoroughly scrutinized in 2008 before being nominated for the U.N., but this was to be an updated and potentially even deeper vetting. I agreed and indicated my interest in the job, fully understanding that I was not the only candidate in contention. Senator John Kerry was also under consideration, and perhaps others. I had no firsthand reason to believe I was the president’s preferred choice, despite a great deal of press speculation to that effect.
No sooner was the election over than Senators McCain and Graham, joined by New Hampshire senator Kelly Ayotte, launched their campaign to prevent me from becoming secretary of state. On November 14, McCain threw down the gauntlet, declaring: “Susan Rice should have known better, and if she didn’t know better, she’s not qualified. I will do everything in my power to block her from being the United States Secretary of State.” For good measure, McCain accused me of “not being very bright.” Graham also vowed to do his utmost to thwart my nomination, dutifully echoing McCain in his attack, saying, “I don’t trust her. The reason I don’t trust her is because I think she knew better, and if she didn’t know better, she shouldn’t be the voice of America.”
That same day, President Obama was forced to respond to McCain’s and Graham’s comments at his first press conference after winning reelection. ABC News’s Jon Karl asked for the president’s reaction to their comments and “would those threats deter you from making a nomination like that?” Totally uncharacteristically, President Obama nearly erupted:
Well first of all I’m not going to comment at this point on various nominations that I’ll put forward to fill out my cabinet for the second term. Those are things that are still being discussed. But let me say specifically about Susan Rice, she has done exemplary work. She has represented the United States and our interests in the United Nations with skill, and professionalism, and toughness, and grace. As I’ve said before, she made an appearance at the request of the White House in which she gave her best understanding of the intelligence that had been provided to her.
If Senator McCain and Senator Graham, and others want to go after somebody? They should go after me. And I’m happy to have that discussion with them. But for them to go after the U.N. ambassador who had nothing to do with Benghazi? And was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received? And to besmirch her reputation is outrageous. And, you know, we’re after an election now. …
But when they go after the U.N. ambassador, apparently because they think she’s an easy target, then they’ve got a problem with me. And should I choose, if I think that she would be the best person to serve America in the capacity at the State Department, then I will nominate her. That’s not a determination that I’ve made yet.
I was in a luncheon for Security Council ambassadors at the Indian Mission to the U.N. when my phone started blowing up. I excused myself to find out what on earth was going on and ran smack into my assistant, who was coming to pass me a note about the president’s statement. Mortified that he was compelled to defend me yet again, I was also deeply moved and gratified by the president’s response. The force of his answer and his rare display of public anger revealed how determined he was to make his selection without regard for partisan political attacks.
For my detractors, it was showtime. Republicans launched a sustained assault from multiple sides led by McCain and Graham. Nearly one hundred House Republicans joined the fray, writing a letter to Obama opposing my potential nomination:
Though Ambassador Rice has been our Representative to the U.N., we believe her misleading statements over the days and weeks following the attack on our embassy in Libya that led to the deaths of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans caused irreparable damage to her credibility both at home and around the world.… Ambassador Rice is widely viewed as having either willfully or incompetently misled the American public in the Benghazi matter.… We strongly oppose any efforts to nominate Ambassador Susan Rice for the position of Secretary of State.
Soon it became a bench-clearing brawl. Democrats decided they had had enough of what Senator Dianne Feinstein called “character assassination” and what Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton termed my record being “mugged.” They went out in my defense. House Democrats, led by the Congressional Black Caucus and women members, launched a counter-letter praising me and supporting my nomination. House leaders, including Nancy Pelosi previously, and Steny Hoyer, Adam Smith, and Adam Schiff now came robustly to my defense.
No one did more to counter the attacks on my character and qualifications than Jim Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat and senior member from South Carolina, who had known my dad as well as me. Clyburn took serious offense that a fellow South Carolinian, Lindsey Graham, was leading the attack on me and noted, as did Congressional Black Caucus incoming chair Marcia Fudge from Ohio, that by calling me “incompetent” and “not qualified,” despite my evident academic and professional qualifications, they infused racial and sexist “code words” in their attacks. Clyburn said:
This had nothing to do with Susan Rice. Now we know from testimony of [former CIA director David] Petraeus… that the talking points she was given, she absolutely read from the talking points.… Now, if she had deviated in some way from the talking points, then they would have some issue with her.
… You know these are code words.… These kind of terms that those of us, especially those of us who were born and raised in the South, we’ve been hearing these little words and phrases all our lives, and we get insulted by them. Susan Rice is as competent as anyone you will find.… Say she was wrong for doing it, but don’t call her incompetent. That is something totally different.
Senators, who I think would have preferred to stay on the sidelines until the president made his choice between me and their colleague John Kerry, felt compelled to swarm the field, because the attacks had continued after the election and gone too far. Democratic senators, led by Dick Durbin, Barbara Boxer, Carl Levin, and Feinstein, energetically debunked the Republican attacks
on my qualifications and integrity, stressing my effective service at the U.N. and that I had done nothing but accurately convey the information provided to me. Editorial boards from the Los Angeles Times to USA Today, from The Washington Post to The New York Times blog, did the same.
The month of November was worse than October, because there was no end in sight to the incoming hits. While finally able to speak in my own defense, I was distressed initially to see little pushback coming from the White House, with the very notable exception of the president himself. I could not have asked for more from Obama, but he could hardly make me his principal priority. I needed colleagues in the White House to assist from the podium in the press room and to provide support to my small press and legislative affairs teams.
One day, in utter frustration, I called Ian from my office at USUN and complained, “I feel I’m floating out here alone, without the necessary support. Like a piñata.” Wondering how long I was going to have to put up with this crap, I confessed, “I don’t know what to do anymore. I just don’t know.” Out of exhaustion and helplessness, I cried with him on the phone.
At the U.N., my press team and I concluded it was finally time for me to go on the record and speak for myself. On November 21, at the press stakeout following a Security Council discussion on the cease-fire in Gaza, a reporter asked me, “Explain your view of the controversy concerning your comments about Benghazi? And… is Senator McCain fair in what he has said?” Explaining that I had relied solely on the information provided to me by the Intelligence Community and made clear that it was preliminary, I continued:
