No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  Putin reciprocated with an agenda of unusually personal activities when we visited him in his hometown of St. Petersburg. There is significant rivalry between Russia’s great cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, inhabitants of the latter considering themselves far more refined than Muscovites. The President was treated to the magnificent cultural sights of the beautiful city that Peter the Great had built along the Neva River. While in the Hermitage, the President’s staff was split off from his personal tour. I’ve been to the Hermitage numerous times, but Russia possesses so much fine art that the rotating exhibits always make the encounter fresh.

  This time, though, we were shown one exhibit that I had not seen and will never forget: a life-sized doll of Tsar Peter the Great. The guide explained that the doll was wearing the tsar’s real hair. We Westerners who were listening recoiled. “They scalped him?” Apparently so. It might have been the refined side of Russia, but it was still Russia. Several years later I returned to the Hermitage and saw the same exhibit. This time the guide said that the doll was wearing a wig. Perhaps too many guests had found the original explanation unnerving.

  That evening Putin and his wife, Lyudmila, the President and Mrs. Bush, and Sergei Ivanov and I sailed along the Neva to experience “white nights,” the stunning phenomenon of bright daylight at midnight due to St. Petersburg’s far-north location. During the caviar and champagne dinner, the President asked Putin about an old redbrick building on the other side of the river with the most extraordinary view of the Winter Palace. “That’s the prison,” Putin answered and went on to explain that he wanted to do something about the horrible conditions there. The President was incredulous. “The prison! You should give that land to a developer and put the prison somewhere outside the city.” It was one of the times when you could see that the capitalist impulse was not quite developed in the Russian leadership.

  The President then mentioned that he’d seen a ballet barre in Putin’s gym in his Moscow dacha. “Yes,” Putin replied. “Lyudmila is learning ballet. She is dancing Swan Lake. Of course, if I tried to pick her up, I would be a dead swan.” It was impolite to laugh at this rather crude reference to his wife’s girth. But everyone did laugh, even the embarrassed Lyudmila.

  The President used the remainder of the visit abroad to take the temperature of the Europeans concerning Saddam. There was general support for raising the profile of the Iraq problem, and we returned to Washington confident that it was time to do so.

  THE YEAR flew by, what with the President’s landmark speech on the Middle East in June, preparations for the establishment of a transitional government in Afghanistan, and the continuing assessment of our Iraq strategy. The pace was hectic, and I constantly reminded myself to keep exercising and find occasions to take a little time off. After 9/11, the thirty-plus days in a row of late nights and no break had taken a toll on me. When you’re single, you have to be careful not to be drawn into working every waking moment; there are no spouse and children demanding your time and attention. But there are many things that I love to do, and years ago I told myself that I wouldn’t become a workaholic. Even if I had very little time, it was important to get away. I particularly enjoyed an occasional Sunday afternoon at the piano.

  The spring of 2002 gave me one of the best imaginable reasons to practice. One day in March, my assistant Liz Lineberry had come in to say that Yo-Yo Ma was on the phone and wanted to speak to me. “You mean the cellist?” I asked. “I think so,” she answered.

  It was indeed the greatest living cellist of our time, and he had a proposition for me. He was receiving the National Medal of the Arts on April 22 and wondered if perhaps we could play something together at the ceremony. We’d met at Stanford several years earlier, when he’d given a concert there. At the time his “Let’s play together sometime” comment had seemed to be just a polite throwaway line. But now here he was, asking me, the failed piano major, to play with him. I readily accepted, and after some back-and-forth we decided to perform the second movement of the Brahms D Minor Violin Sonata, a piece that cellists often poach for their repertoire.

  On the morning of the concert, we met at Constitution Hall to run through the piece. He was wonderful with such an easy manner that I felt very relaxed almost immediately. There were a few rough places in the rehearsal, but after about an hour we felt ready for the 5:30 P.M. performance. I returned to work and went downstairs to chair a 2:00 P.M. meeting. Steve met me at the door. “Do you realize that you’re playing with Yo-Yo Ma before the President of the United States and two thousand people in a few hours?” he asked. “Yes, but first I have to chair this meeting,” I said. “Then I’ll go to another place in my head and get ready.”

  The performance went very well. The President was beaming as he congratulated us after we finished. It was one of the most memorable days of my life. I’d come full circle and back to music. But I wasn’t confused about what my real destiny was. I would never have played with Yo-Yo Ma had I stayed in music. He played with me because I was the national security advisor who could also play the piano. I had made a good decision when I changed my college major.

  The experience was so enjoyable that I resolved to get more deeply into music again. Within a few months, I formed my own piano quintet. Robert Battey, Soye Kim, Lawrence Wallace, and Joshua Klein would become good friends and my “sanity” crew through the difficult times ahead. Bob, the cellist, and Soye, the first violinist, were practicing lawyers who had been professional musicians. Soye was a graduate of Juilliard, and Bob had been a professor of music at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Bob still occasionally played with the Washington National Opera Orchestra and was our “player-coach.” Larry, our violist, was a retired deputy solicitor general of the United States; he had tried more cases before the Supreme Court than anyone else in the twentieth century and still played the viola and violin professionally. Josh, the second violinist, was a Stanford Law grad who was Sandra Day O’Connor’s clerk and, like me, a good amateur who had never played professionally.

  I had met the members of the group when a friend, the former Stanford Law School Dean Paul Brest, visited me in Washington. Paul and I had been a part of a string quintet in Palo Alto, and he wanted me to keep playing. His introduction worked. The group stayed together after that first session with Paul. They were high-quality musicians, and with them I rediscovered the joys of making music. We even managed to play concerts, including one at the British Embassy with none other than my friend the acclaimed pianist Van Cliburn in the audience, and the New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini did a profile of us in 2006. Playing was not an escape—it came with its own stresses—but it was transporting, a total immersion in the part of me that occasionally demanded attention and nourishment.

  A Dangerous Cocktail

  THROUGHOUT THE SPRING of 2002, we searched for a viable option concerning Saddam Hussein. The Principals were briefed again on the evolving military plan on May 10, and in the State Department, Colin launched the Future of Iraq Project, which researched and assessed various postwar reconstruction issues that the United States would confront after Saddam’s reign ended. The project joined dozens of Iraqi exiles with public administration experts, and together they formed working groups on topics such as health, finance, water, and agriculture. There was a sense of urgency to do something about Iraq, but we wanted to get it right.

  In the middle of these preparations we learned that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a terrorist affiliated with al Qaeda, was operating a lab in the Zagros Mountains in northern Iraq. Zarqawi and his affiliates joined ranks with Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish terrorist organization seeking to produce WMD. The briefing read, “Al-Zarqawi has been directing efforts to smuggle an unspecified chemical material originating in northern Iraq into the United States.” There was some concern that Zarqawi and Ansar al-Islam were conducting unconventional weapons work, testing cyanide gas and toxic poisons on animals and even their own associates.

  The President’s advis
ors were split on what to do. The Vice President and Don favored military action, perhaps air strikes followed by “exploitation,” meaning gathering up evidence at the site after the strike. Colin believed that military action would destroy any chance of building an international coalition to confront Saddam. After one key meeting in mid-June, I followed the President into the Oval Office and told him that I agreed with Colin. I also asked him if he was comfortable with the military option that had been presented to him. Were we really going to put “boots on the ground” after a strike to “exploit” territory inside Iraq—even Kurdish-controlled territory? What would the Turks think? I was relieved to learn that the President had the same reservations. He decided to wait and let the larger Iraq strategy play out over the following months. But the incident was a reminder to all of us that terrorism, WMD, and Iraq were a dangerous cocktail.

  As the military planning progressed, Don and Tommy had to broaden the circle of those “in the know” about the effort to update military options for Iraq. With the “axis of evil” rhetoric in people’s minds and our already established reputation for aggressive policies, those activities leaked into the press as the “march toward war.”

  All manner of people were opining about the risks of war—economic, political, regional, and domestic. But when Brent Scowcroft entered the fray with an opinion column arguing against war in the Wall Street Journal on August 15, the debate took on a different coloration. Brent was thought by many to be speaking as a surrogate for the President’s father, who had, of course, in the first Gulf War, decided not to try to overthrow Saddam. I was known to be close to Brent, and some wondered whether he was speaking for me too. I found this particularly bizarre since I could, of course, speak for myself and enjoyed the President’s confidence.

  The morning that Brent’s op-ed appeared, the President called me immediately upon opening his newspaper. It seemed early since I was on personal leave. “What is he doing?” he exclaimed.

  I said that Brent was just extremely cautious on these matters but that I would call him.

  “When are you going back to Washington?” he asked.

  “Today,” I answered.

  “And when are you coming to Crawford?”

  “Tomorrow,” I answered. “But I’ll call Brent right now.”

  When I later met with Brent, I explained to him that we were working through the issue of Iraq systematically and carefully. I told him that the day before his op-ed was published the Principals Committee had approved a National Security Presidential Directive on our goals and objectives for U.S. strategy. There was no rush to war, but the President felt that he could not leave the Iraq issues unaddressed. I also explained that the President had felt blindsided by the WSJ column. I asked him why he hadn’t called me to express his views or even asked to see the President. Brent was flummoxed by the whole uproar and said that he’d never meant to criticize the President or put him into a box. He was just expressing his perspective and thought it might be helpful to calm down some of the war talk.

  I fully believe to this day that Brent was being completely honest about his motives. But several more times the same thing happened, and each time the level of trust between the President and Brent plummeted until there was nothing left. It was a rift that extended to my own relationship with Brent, one of my most important and revered mentors. We’ve worked over the years to repair the damage and we remain very close friends.

  BEFORE LEAVING for Crawford, I took advantage of an interview with the BBC to say that there was a moral case and a national security argument for overthrowing Saddam. “We certainly do not have the luxury of doing nothing,” I said. That was taken as more evidence that the President was building his case for war.

  Against that backdrop, the NSC met on August 16, and Colin argued that we should go to the United Nations in September. There was unanimous agreement that our new strategy should be launched at the United Nations, but we did not decide the question of what the President would say.

  Then, on September 7, the President met with the NSC Principals again and solicited their views. The Vice President and Don argued that there had already been many chances for Saddam to come clean and that there should be an ultimatum of thirty to sixty days and then the United States should remove him by force if he did not comply. The Vice President argued that with the gathering evidence that Saddam was reconstituting his WMD, there wasn’t time for another resolution and more inspections. Colin pushed for a resolution, saying that it was the only way to get the allies to join and to gather support to execute the military plan if our “coercive diplomacy” failed.

  It was the culmination of a debate that had been playing out over the summer, and the President knew going into the meeting where the Principals stood. In fact, in August the Vice President had publicly stated his case in a speech to the VFW. That had led the President to feel that he was being boxed in. “Call Dick and tell him I haven’t made a decision,” he told me. I went back to the Governor’s House, a separate dwelling on the property where I stayed at the ranch. Once I had the Vice President on the phone, I said, “The President is concerned that your speech is being read as a decision to skip the UN and challenge Saddam unilaterally.” The Vice President immediately responded that it hadn’t been his intention to limit the President’s options. He asked that I call Scooter Libby and give him the exact language to use in a second speech scheduled for a few days later. The Vice President read the text verbatim.

  After listening to everyone at the September NSC meeting, the President said that he’d decided to seek a resolution. That would clear up any ambiguity about where the international community stood. He wanted to make the case in an upcoming speech to the UN General Assembly.

  The President had decided on a policy of coercive diplomacy. He would give Saddam a chance to respond to the united pressure of the international community, and the buildup of U.S. forces would make that pressure credible. The next several months would be devoted to that effort. The reputation of the United States would be at stake. One way or another, the threat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq would finally be removed.

  Some people have claimed that the President never asked his advisors whether he should go to war against Saddam. At that September meeting, with the Vice President, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of Central Intelligence, and the national security advisor in attendance, the National Security Council, after a full and frank discussion, decided on a course of action. Everyone in that room heard the President say, “Either he will come clean about his weapons, or there will be war.” There was no disagreement. The way ahead could not have been clearer.

  A Different Kind of Crisis

  AS THE IRAQ STRATEGY was unfolding, I found myself dealing daily with economic chaos in Latin America. Though what confronted us there was not war and peace, at times it felt like it, especially in Argentina, where the presidency had changed hands four times in less than two weeks before January 1, 2002. In the midst of violent riots throughout Buenos Aires, President Fernando de la Rúa resigned and fled the Casa Rosada by helicopter, triggering a turbulent succession process. Days later, the Republic of Argentina officially defaulted on its sovereign debt.

  When I had arrived in Washington the year before, Argentina had been mired in a perilous public debt cycle that had grown worse in the 1990s and was ballooning out of control. IMF loans were absorbed without stimulating even short-term benefits, creative debt-restructuring programs continually postponed repayment, and the Argentine peso, pegged to the U.S. dollar, was depreciating. Washington is full of academics turned policymakers, which was nice for me, since I often got to work with old friends from Stanford. When I asked my Stanford friend Anne Krueger, a highly regarded economist who was then first deputy managing director of the IMF, what on earth was going on in Argentina, she aptly compared the country’s embattled finance minister to Sisyphus: “Every time he pushes the stone up, it
goes down a bit further in the wrong direction!”

  The crisis posed serious risks to other fragile economies in the region. One might ask why this was an issue for the national security advisor since the President obviously had senior economic counselors. Well, the National Economic Council simply lacked the clout of the long-established NSC; my economic counterparts, Larry Lindsey and later Stephen Friedman, agreed that we should jointly convene the interagency process for resolution of these issues.

  There were so many overlapping concerns that it was hard to separate foreign policy and economic considerations in any case. Was the United States willing to take the lead, through the IMF, in what amounted to a bailout of another country? Though the State Department was inclined to support a lending plan in order to mitigate the diplomatic fallout and back the President’s efforts to establish a free-trade zone in the Western Hemisphere, Treasury and the IMF were reluctant to do anything more. After all, Argentina had already eaten up $22 billion of aid with little to show in the way of reform. Profligate spending and corruption plagued the Argentine government. And what about all the other countries in dire need, such as Brazil and Turkey?

  I found myself in endless phone calls and meetings, trying to broker a reasonable solution. The process was still going back and forth, but Spanish Prime Minister Aznar’s personal appeal to the President turned the tide at the close. “The President really wants to support Argentina,” I told Anne when we met for dinner. “The U.S. can’t be party to a default. We need you to find an arrangement with the Argentine government.” The decision was unpopular among some in the administration as well as in the IMF. Still, Argentina got its deal. Though the Néstor Kirchner government showed no gratitude for what we had done, the Argentine economy improved with five consecutive years of positive GDP growth after the crisis.