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Tavis: Gwen Ifill is a respected journalist who now serves as the moderator and managing editor for PBS's Washington Week. She's also a senior correspondent for the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, of course also seen here on PBS. Prior to her now-successful TV career, she covered the White House and politics for The New York Times and she joins us tonight from Arlington, Virginia. Gwen Ifill, nice to see you.

Gwen Ifill: Good to see you, Tavis.

Tavis: Um, let me start with the obvious question. It's going to happen in a matter of hours--Dr. Rice will, in fact, finally testify in public under oath, uh, for all Americans to see what she knew and when she knew it, and I suspect what the president knew and when he might have known it. Before I get too deep into this, what do you make of the fact that it's finally going to happen?

Gwen: Well, the question I guess I want to answer is whether there will be more heat than light. We have to remember that Condoleezza Rice has spoken to this Commission before for 4 hours behind closed doors-not under oath, obviously. But so much stuff has been attracted to her appearance tomorrow. She's going to be speaking in front of live cameras, all the networks are breaking into programming to carry it, and she has to carry the burden on her back of answering a lot of the unanswered questions raised by other witnesses, especially of course, Richard Clarke.

Tavis: I'm not believing the hype, and maybe it's just me, and I'm not believing the hype for 2 reasons: number one, Dr. Rice is no idiot. She might have been born at night but it wasn't last night. So one, she knows how to do this. She knows how to handle this. She's awfully good at what she does. Number 2, I'm not thinking I'm gonna hear anything tomorrow that we haven't heard. She's got to be smart enough to not have said anything before that she's gonna contradict tomorrow. And number 3, because she is so good, the bar seems to be set so high by the media, um, that-- I guess what I'm trying to say is I think she's good enough to clear the hurdle, whatever the hurdle is. She's just that good. So I'm not really looking forward to any major fireworks tomorrow.

Gwen: Well, you know, she is a cool cucumber. I think some people refer to her, I read somewhere today, as the Warrior Princess. She knows what she's coming here to do. She's fierce in her defense of her President and of her administration. Plus, I think that one of the questions that Americans want to know is could this White House have stopped 9/11 had they known, had they done everything they could possibly do? That's at the root of all the questions which are being directed at Condoleezza Rice. The question I have been able to stop it? Even Richard Clarke says that they had followed all of the advice that he gave them, they couldn't necessarily have stopped the attacks from happening, so that's one set of questions. But because Condoleezza Rice is, Condoleezza Rice is such an interesting figure to so many people. They look at her, they try to figure out who she is, what she believes. She's an African-American woman, she is fluent in Russian, she was the Provost of Stanford. As you pointed out, she has accomplished a lot, but yet people are still trying to figure out who she is and how she will carry herself. I think you're right. I think she will carry herself very definitively, she knows what she's there to say, she's had plenty of time to think of what she would say. She has the great advantage that nobody else had of knowing what everybody else has said before her. So she's gonna show up apparently tomorrow with her opening statement in which she's gonna lay out, bit by bit, everything that the President should--could have done, tried to do, and paid attention to in the days and the months leading up to 9/11, and then she'll answer those questions, believe me. I suspect she'll be ready to take on anything Richard Clarke had to say as well.

Tavis: You mentioned so much there. It wasn't just a mouthful, it was a few mouthfuls. Let me back up right quick and try to pick apart some of that-- first of all, the opening statement. We now know that while she's agreed to give 2 1/2 hours of testimony, she has now said--the White House has said she will have about a 20-minute opening statement. I don't want to be too picky here. Does that 20 minutes come out of the 2 1/2?

Gwen: Ha ha ha. I think it does. Yes, it does.

Tavis: All right, so now we know she's testifying for-testifying at least for a little less than 2 1/2. I guess the question is, what do you make of the fact that she has a 20 minute opening statement?

Gwen: I think that's pretty typical. As you know with Congressional hearings, this isn't strictly a Congressional hearing. But hearings of this type, people tend to talk for a long time before the first questions get asked. I read one report, I don't know if this is actually true the way they're gonna do it, that Commissioners were going to question her, just a couple of them were going to question her in a focused way, and that the others would be following up. I don't know precisely how it's gonna play out, but whether she makes her own opening statement--I mean, everyone has had an opening statement before--whether she says everything she came to say in those first 20 minutes, the real rumble begins when people begin to ask her questions and what we'll all be watching is to see how she answers them and how she carries herself when she's doing it.

Tavis: Against the backdrop--this conversation at least is being conducted against the backdrop of Martha Stewart being found guilty, the Tyco guys being let off at least for the moment with a mistrial, I've heard a number of people on radio and television talking about the fact that because she is a woman, she's being put under an intense amount of pressure here, perhaps being mistreated, because she's an African-American that she's being mistreated. I don't know that I buy either, but let me ask you as an African-American woman to assess for me what you make of both of those claims?

Gwen: Well, you know how this works, Tavis. The upside is she's a first, the downside is that she's a first, and I'm sure she recognizes this, too. I do, you do, in the jobs we do, which is that you will always come under special scrutiny by being the first, by being the only. That said, I don't know that if you can link her into all of the other questions. There's been quite a vigorous kind of web-based argument going on within the African-American community about whether Condoleezza Rice can be trusted. Whether she is black enough, whatever that means. And they have this idea that she is supposed to be loyal to a set of principles which have as much to do with race or gender as have to do with what she's been trained to believe. It's an interesting argument and it's very circular. I'm sure that you saw the op-ed piece in today's Los Angeles Times by Deborah Dickerson making some of those points, and there have been other arguments like that on blackcommentator.com. They all start off with one problem, with one issue that I have a problem with, which is somehow she is inauthentic if she doesn't believe just the way somebody else believes. I don't know if that's so.

Tavis: I agree with you on that. Let's set the inauthentic part aside for the moment. Isn't it true that anyone in this position, indeed a white male, given what's happened here on 9/11, given the stories about what the White House knew and when they knew it, given the fact that she is the National Security Advisor, anybody in this position right now, especially given the stonewalling the White House did not wanting her to testify, would be catching hell right about now, black, white, male or female.

Gwen: I couldn't agree with you more. That's exactly the point.

Tavis: All right, let's talk about temperament then. The White House has made no bones about the fact that they do not like Richard Clarke. They've gone after this guy, you know, with everything they have in them. What's Dr. Rice going to say? What's her temperament going to be like tomorrow specifically around the allegations, the testimony of Mr. Clarke?

Gwen: Well, that's risky territory for her 'cause I think anybody can tell you she's not real fond of Richard Clarke right now. She doesn't agree with anything he said, with the conclusions he reached. Remember, one of the things he said in his book was that when he looked at her and mentioned Al Qaeda, he had the feeling from the expression on her face that she had never heard the term before. I think that's something she would definitely take issue with. The question--however, as you know, when a woman begins to criticize anybody too harshly, people say, "Ahh, she's being a shrew." They never say that about a man. So there's a very thin line she's got to walk right here not to look as if she is lashing out too harshly against him. She's got--I assume that what she wants to do is stick to the facts, and that's what the Commission wants to do as well.

Tavis: Let me go back to the race thing for just a second. I neglected to ask something I've been dying to ask you specifically because you were in Washington when this went down. I was, too, for that matter. But you remember, of course, we all remember Clarence Thomas and that infamous now phrase "the high tech lynching." we're not gonna get anything like that with Condoleezza Rice tomorrow are we?

Gwen: Oh, I don't think so. I saw Anita Hill today actually on CNN, and she wrote an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe in which she talked about this. And even Anita Hill made only passing reference, at least in her opinion piece, about race and gender. She talked about being on the hot seat and being under the hot lights, but not about race and gender. It seems that there are others who always want to make that point.

Tavis: What about the notion of the precedent that this sets? The reason why the White House in part did not want Dr. Rice to testify was executive privilege and the whole notion that the National Security Advisor has never done this. There's no precedent for it. Now they obviously tomorrow are setting a different kind of precedent, although it isn't as you said a Congressional committee. What's the inside talk, the talk rather inside the beltway about this precedent we're setting tomorrow?

Gwen: Well, the White House is very insistent that this was a slippery slope, allowing the President's National Security Advisor, the keeper of so many of his secrets, to appear before something they seem to think is a Congressionally mandated panel. This panel was appointed by the President and all of that aside, whether they were legally correct or not, politically, even Republicans started saying that this was boneheaded to resist testifying, especially when the families of the victims were insisting on it by saying "But there is this legalism." you'll remember in 1988 when Michael Dukakis said--he vetoed an amendment that would have forced people to say the Pledge of Allegiance because it was unconstitutional? Well, now of course it turns out he was not wrong, but politically it was not a smart thing to do, and it was used against him. And that same case, that's what happened in the White House over the last couple of weeks. They were insisting on a point of principle which wasn't working for them politically.

Tavis: Speaking of that, let me close at this as an exit question: do you think in retrospect the White House--they would never tell us, of course--maybe somebody's book years down the road--but in retrospect, is the White House kicking itself in the behind for having let Dr. Rice go everywhere--as one member of Congress said, "Except Starbucks and this Commission"-to actually have something to say? Was that a mistake in retrospect?

Gwen: I have reason to believe they believe it was a mistake and that they underestimated the effect of the Richard Clarke book and its incredible popularity, the credibility it seemed that he would bring to his arguments. So now they're trying to clean up, change the subject, and move on to more--in their opinion-important things.

Tavis: I love Washington Week. I love Gwen Ifill. Gwen, nice to see you.

Gwen: Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: Talk to you soon. Up next, Red Hot Chili Peppers' bassist Flea. Stay with us.