I WAS pleased to see that Daddy had done very well in Palo Alto during my time in Washington. He’d made many friends and was active with the university’s Public Service Center and with the Stanford Department of Athletics. We settled into a nice pattern of getting together two or three times a week. Though we spoke by phone every day, we led separate and fulfilling lives.
By the start of 1988, the presidential campaign was, of course, heating up. George Herbert Walker Bush, the sitting vice president under Ronald Reagan, was the front-runner to become the Republican standard-bearer. I hadn’t met Vice President Bush, but I did know his principal foreign policy advisor, General Brent Scowcroft. Brent was one of the wise men of the foreign policy establishment, having served Gerald Ford as national security advisor.
I’d come to know Brent when he visited Stanford in the spring of 1983. At the time he was chairing President Reagan’s independent Commission on Strategic Forces. There had been outrage when the President declared his intention to launch the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a ballistic missile defense system that pundits derisively dubbed “Star Wars.” The Soviet Union, America’s European allies, and most of the American national security establishment opposed SDI as unworkable and dangerous. Brent’s commission was largely a bipartisan attempt to bridge the differences between the administration, Congress, and foreign policy elites.
During the question-and-answer session, I suggested that the Commission was just a cover under which the President intended to do whatever he wanted to do. “It’s an abdication of executive and congressional responsibility,” I said. Brent was somewhat taken aback by the sharpness of my comment, which even I now see as having been a little rude. But he was nonetheless impressed and came over after the talk to continue the discussion with me. He stayed in touch, appointing me to the Aspen Strategy Group, a bipartisan study group of senior national security experts.
As I attended the weeklong summer sessions at Aspen over the next few years, I got to know Brent very well. When George H. W. Bush won the presidential election, Brent called and asked me to join him at the National Security Council. Jim Baker also invited me to join him at the State Department as deputy director of policy planning, helping oversee the Department’s internal think tank on strategic issues in foreign affairs. Then Senator Bill Cohen, whom I had gotten to know during my time with the Joint Chiefs, also called me—during the Super Bowl, no less—on behalf of the designee for defense secretary, John Tower, to offer me a job in the Pentagon. After a brief trip to Washington to check out the prospects, I settled on the job of director of Soviet and East European studies at the National Security Council. I decided that while the other jobs were interesting, there was nothing like being a member of the White House staff. And I liked the people. Robert Blackwill, a former ambassador and veteran of government service who was said to have a “black belt” in bureaucratic politics, would be my direct supervisor. And I was drawn to Robert M. Gates, the deputy national security advisor, with whom I shared a background in Soviet studies as well as an acerbic sense of humor.
When I told Daddy that I wanted to take the job, he was not surprised. “You’re going again!” he exclaimed, smiling broadly to let me know that it was fine with him. Stanford was quite surprised since I would be taking my third leave of absence in four years. Nonetheless, Provost Jim Rosse approved unpaid leave from the university, and I headed to Washington.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
D.C. Again
I QUICKLY LEARNED that work at the National Security Council is hard and not very glamorous. Unlike the layered bureaucracies in the Department of State or the Department of Defense, the NSC staff is small. When I asked how we’d be staffed, I got blank stares. Eventually it dawned on me: I was the staff, assisted only by a secretary who was shared with two other people. That meant that I had to do whatever needed to be done—sometimes whispering important facts to the President and sometimes photocopying his papers.
Generally, NSC staffers write memoranda to prepare the President for phone calls and meetings, take notes to create a permanent record, coordinate other government agencies to keep them on track with the administration’s priorities, and just take care of whatever the President needs to do his job. They have enormous responsibility and little real authority, since they are neither confirmed by nor accountable to the Senate.
The key, I learned, is to work through the agencies, not around them or as a substitute for them. If the NSC staff becomes too operational by trying to execute the nation’s foreign policy instead of coordinating it, there’s usually trouble—especially for the President. The Iran-Contra affair had been one such case where the NSC devised and carried out controversial policies within the White House. As the facts emerged, it was clear that the plan to divert funds from covert Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan resistance (the Contras) had been cooked up secretly within the NSC staff—apparently without the knowledge of even the secretary of state, let alone the Congress. The fallout was disastrous; the affair almost brought down the Reagan presidency.
Brent Scowcroft, former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie and former Senator John Tower had led the commission that made recommendations in light of that scandal. Brent was, therefore, a stickler for keeping the NSC staff in its proper place—as staff to the President, not a rival to the assistant secretaries at the Department of State or Defense.
At the NSC, the hours are long, there is little tolerance for mistakes, and one must pay close attention to details: for instance, making certain that there are no embarrassing photographs of the President in chance encounters with notorious dictators. NSC staffers even approve the guest lists for White House events to prevent international incidents that might arise from omissions of key officials—or, for that matter, invitations to controversial attendees.
Sometimes the work has very little at all to do with serious policy making. My first task, only two days after I arrived in Washington, was to deal with a minor crisis involving the Soviet Union. It seems that a bakery cooperative somewhere in the USSR had sent a huge, several-hundred-pound cake congratulating President Bush on his election. By the time the cake arrived, it had crumbled into pieces, and a number of vermin had had their way with it. The Secret Service called Brent, who called Bob Gates, who called me. I went down to inspect the gift and suggested that we dispose of it—but only after taking a picture of the cake in a part of the White House that would be easily recognizable. We could then send the picture to the wonderful Soviet citizens who’d been so thoughtful.
I settled into my new job and life in Washington, renting an apartment on Connecticut Avenue. Each morning I arrived at the White House at six-thirty and rarely left the office before nine at night. I found the work demanding, and I sometimes wondered if I’d make the cut. The NSC was known as a place where the weeding-out process was pretty severe: it wasn’t uncommon to have a colleague with whom you were working on Monday disappear by Friday. No one ever asked what happened, but it was assumed that he or she had made an unforgivable mistake that embarrassed the White House or, even more unforgivably, the President.
Slowly I found my footing and realized that Brent had great confidence in me. I adored him. Nonetheless, I had to be careful to balance our close relationship with the fact that I reported through Bob Blackwill. Bob and I had good rapport, but he was hierarchical and sometimes prickly if it appeared that Brent had gone around him to me directly. I wanted Bob to trust me and to know that I wouldn’t use my close relationship with Brent against him. On balance Bob and I managed well, becoming good colleagues and friends, but there was a tension there that always bore watching.
I also knew that Brent preferred the NSC staff to remain relatively anonymous and out of the spotlight. He set the standard as the most important man in Washington whom few Americans could identify in a photo lineup. But there was great media interest in me. When the Washington Post wanted to do a profile on the new Soviet specialist, a black woman professor from Stanford,
I asked permission from Brent, who agreed I should do it. The morning the profile appeared, I was stunned to see a long, eye-catching article with a gigantic picture of me reading Pravda, a Soviet newspaper. It wasn’t exactly the anonymity that was expected of the President’s staff. I was relieved when Brent called to say that he thought the article was terrific, but I was appalled to see that there was no reference to my boss Bob Blackwill.
Not long after the article appeared, Vernon Jordan, the civil rights leader and venerable Washington lawyer, called and invited me to lunch, saying that he was going to tell me “how to survive in this town.” He gave me a lot of advice, including an admonition to remember that Washington loved to create celebrities and then tear them down. Vernon and his wife, Anne, became wonderful friends to me in what can be a very lonely town. I resolved not to let celebrity status undermine my effectiveness in Washington. I don’t know why I worried—I never had time to attend the cocktail parties and dinners that came with a high profile anyway.
Office and Beltway politics aside, there were certain moments that reminded me why I had chosen the White House over other, more senior jobs in the administration. The first such experience came when Brent called late on a wintry Friday afternoon in February. The President wanted to invite a group of Soviet specialists to Kennebunkport on Sunday to discuss the unfolding changes in Moscow.
“Could you round up a few experts and bring them to the President’s home at Walker’s Point?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said, and then despaired at having to round up a group of academics so late on a Friday.
I quickly learned, though, that when the White House calls, assistants and spouses manage to find people. So that Sunday I met five other Soviet specialists at the airport in Portland, Maine. We made our way along the icy roads to Walker’s Point, where we briefed the President in the bedroom—the only room at the time that had heat.
My first face-to-face encounter with the President was wonderful. He was kind and thanked me profusely for everything that I’d done. “You’re so good to agree to leave California and help me out,” he said. Is he kidding? I thought. He’s the President. But I learned that day, and would see throughout my time with him, that this wasn’t false modesty: George H. W. Bush is simply one of the nicest and most self-effacing people that I’ve ever met. He taught me so much about leading people. Countless times he would send a congratulatory note to a foreign leader for a seemingly innocuous achievement. I came to understand that he was building a relationship, which would serve him well when he needed to ask that leader to do something hard. Even I frequently received a thank-you note from the President for a job well done, and this propensity for kindness and courtesy made it a joy to work with him. Most important, his natural geniality served American diplomacy well when he was faced with revolutionary changes in world politics.
Because so much was unfolding in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, I began to see the President quite often. Just a few days after Kennebunkport, Jack Matlock, the able U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, came back to report to the President, and I was asked to join them. I will never forget my first time in the Oval Office: I was overjoyed—and overwhelmed—by simply being there. As I sat in the pale yellow room with the sun streaming through the French doors, I suddenly realized that we were two-thirds of the way through the meeting and I hadn’t taken a single note. This snapped me out of my Condi-in-Wonderland moment. I went back to my office, tried to re-create a record from memory, and vowed to remember that I was there to work, not for the ride.
Yet it turned out to be a wild ride indeed. When I arrived in Washington in January 1989, there was simply no way to predict the historic events that I’d witness and help shape. At the beginning of the decade, Ronald Reagan had come to office determined to challenge Soviet power and had done so successfully. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Facing rapid internal decay, Gorbachev began to loosen the reins of communist authority at home and to pursue a more conciliatory course abroad. The Russian terms that Gorbachev adopted for his reforms, perestroika and glasnost, meant “to reconstruct” (or make anew) and “to make clear” (or transparent). It was a course that overturned decades of hostile Soviet policy toward the West and rapidly reshaped the foreign policy landscape.
By 1988, prodded by then–Secretary of State George Shultz, Reagan had decided that Mikhail Gorbachev was indeed a different Soviet leader. A tremendous thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations followed. Some, including Brent Scowcroft and Bob Gates, believed that Reagan had gone a bit soft on Moscow. They—and I—were skeptical of how authentic the shift in Soviet policy really was, and we wanted to slow the pace of the rapprochement to get a better feel for the changes that were taking place in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
When policy makers want to slow things down, they order policy reviews. This is what Brent did in March 1989, entrusting me with the two that would examine U.S.-Soviet relations and American relations with Eastern Europe. I called together an interagency group to conduct the reviews, and we began to plow through the various aspects of U.S. policy, meeting two or three times a week.
While we were meeting, though, history was sprinting ahead. In April, the Communist Party of Poland was losing control of the country and called a “Round Table” negotiation session with Lech Walesa’s underground Solidarity trade union. The talks would, it seemed, end in a power-sharing arrangement that heavily advantaged the Solidarity workers and committed the Polish government to hold free parliamentary elections. There was an internal debate in Washington about how to respond. The State Department urged caution and recommended taking only tiny steps toward the emerging democratic forces. But the outcome of the Round Table negotiations would, I thought, be a turning point. Working quietly with Daniel Fried, the young Foreign Service officer who headed the Polish desk at State, and urged on by Bob Blackwill and Bob Gates, I managed to get the President to take a more aggressive line.
The day that the negotiations were to end, we wrote a statement for Marlin Fitzwater, the President’s press secretary. The United States wouldn’t just welcome the agreement but also would be clear about the implications for freedom in Eastern Europe. Marlin read the statement at his morning press availability. Unfortunately, the Round Table negotiators had taken a break for dinner and hadn’t yet concluded the agreement. They did shortly thereafter, and fortunately no one noted our mistake. Ultimately, it didn’t matter because the President of the United States was now firmly on the right side of the historic changes unfolding in Europe.
Within a few days, President Bush went to Hamtramck, Michigan, to give a speech on Poland. The site was chosen by the domestic side of the White House to honor one of the nation’s largest Polish American communities. I accompanied the President, riding for the first time on Air Force One. When I got home, I called Daddy and gave him a thorough account of the day, including the lunch on the second floor of a miserably hot Polish American restaurant. I didn’t tell him that the President had mispronounced the phrase “Polish people,” calling them instead the “polish people”—as in furniture wax. At that slip, Brent had turned to me and barked, “Did you forget to capitalize the P?” I was mortified and took responsibility, though in fact the P had been capitalized. It was my first experience with the maxim that I would later pass on to NSC staffers: “It’s the President’s triumph and the NSC staffer’s fault.”
Over the next two months we finished our policy reviews, and the President delivered a couple of speeches loosely based on them. The effort to define a new course for U.S.-Soviet relations—called moving “beyond containment,” a phrase that I coined—laid out a series of benchmarks that the Soviets would have to meet in order to show their seriousness about change. We had to keep revising the speech because they kept leapfrogging our “tests.” From then on, even the most cautious among us knew that the changes were real. Now it was just a question of how far the Soviets wer
e willing to go. Or more correctly, it was a question of whether Gorbachev was any longer in a position to stop the cascade of events that he had now unleashed.
I’D BEEN stretched thin by events since arriving at the White House. I continued my long-standing practice of talking to my father on the phone every night, and I could tell that his life was increasingly intertwined with that of Clara Bailey, a principal in the Ravenswood school district where Daddy was volunteering. Coincidentally, Clara had been born in Birmingham too. An attractive, quiet, church-going Baptist lady, Clara was divorced with one grown son, Greg. I’d gotten to know her before leaving for Washington and noticed that Daddy seemed to favor her over the many other ladies who sought his attention.
One night when I called him, Daddy’s voice was halting. “I’d hoped to talk to you about this in person,” he said, “but you’re so busy, I don’t know when you’re coming home. Clara and I want to get married.” Then he abruptly stopped talking, waiting a second or so for me to respond. But before I could say anything he started talking again about how his love for my mother had been so special and nothing would ever replace that. I stopped him. “Daddy, I know that,” I said. I told him that I liked Clara and was glad that they’d decided to get married. Frankly, it never occurred to me to question his decision.
Extraordinary, Ordinary People Page 22
