Condoleezza Rice was my graduate student, and a woman raised to excel. But she failed the American people because she forgot a higher duty than excellence: Truth.
The official story about Condi Rice, supported by her current tête à tête status with President George W. Bush, is that she is a conservative political activist born and bred, raised by a Republican father, whose intellectual development was formed by conservative scholars. There is obviously some truth in this story, because she has indeed joined the right wing. But there's another side to her history. As her former professor, who taught her at the University of Denver between 1975 and 1979, I am familiar with some of it.
As I watched her performance Thursday before the 9/11 commission, I struggled to reconcile the speaker with the thoughtful young student I knew. But then it struck me that perhaps she had not changed at all.
The glamorous outlines of Condi's life are well known. She grew up with a father who told her she was a "little star." She was a concert pianist, a debutante in Denver, and a student of Josef Korbel, the refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia and father of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Condi has always been a dazzling performer. And as her father John Rice predicted, she has risen.
(snip)
Yet she could not say to her boss and the others: wait a minute. She could not draw a line in defense of principle: the United States' government must wage the "War on Terrorism" on al-Qaida, not on dictators who had nothing to do with terrorism. If the president is going to launch a "preventive" attack on a sovereign state -- a violation of the cardinal ban on aggression, Article 2, section 4 of the United Nations Charter -- and send American soldiers to die, at least don't do it for lies.
Why?
Condi has always been a great performer. As a pianist, as an ice skater, as a student, as a provost, as a presidential advisor, she has always been on stage. She adapts her performance to her audience: Josef Korbel and, to some extent, me once upon a time, President Bush now. She can be fierce. Donald Rumsfeld, who waged war in Iraq without a plan for the occupation, lost control to Condi and the National Security Council. But tragically, she is also a person without a core, who loses herself in her performance. National security was her responsibility. She failed in that responsibility because she was too busy perfecting her performance as a Bush team player when the Bush team, obsessed with wild fantasies of global domination, had lost touch with reality.
more…
http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/04/09/performer/index.html
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