E-mail a friendElisabeth Bumiller
airdate December 11, 2007
Journalist Elisabeth Bumiller returned to The New York Times after taking a leave to pen a biography on Condoleezza Rice. She was previously the paper's White House correspondent and City Hall bureau chief. She's also author of two other books: The Secrets of Mariko and May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons. Bumiller was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center and, before joining the Times, was with The Washington Post, in roles that included Tokyo and New Delhi correspondents.
Elisabeth Bumiller
Tavis: Elisabeth Bumiller covers politics and more for "The New York Times" and covered the White House for the paper for much of George W. Bush's tenure. She's also an author whose latest book is in stores today, in fact. The book is called "Condoleezza Rice, An American Life." She joins us tonight from Washington. Elisabeth, glad to have you on the program.
Elisabeth Bumiller: Good to be on.
Tavis: Anxious to talk about the book, and I'll get there in just two seconds after I start by asking a couple of quick questions about the news of the day, this front-page story in your paper, "The New York Times," about the race for the White House that points out a few things that are interesting, at least to me. In no particular order, number one, we now know that Huckabee is not just leading in Iowa; he is neck-in-neck with Giuliani in the national race for the White House. News, I think, of interest.
Secondly, which I found really fascinating, that said, 76 percent of Republicans say they could change their mind, so I don't know what to make of the first stat that I just told you. And thirdly, interesting, 44 percent of Democrats who are for Hillary say they are for her because of Bill. So those are just things I found fascinating. It's your poll, your paper. What did you make of it?
Bumiller: Well, I think it shows obviously how unsettled the Republican field is, how unhappy the Republicans are with the candidates they have to choose from. It also shows to me - I used to cover Mayor Giuliani in New York when I was covering City Hall for the "Times." It shows me how much he has hit some rough water in recent weeks with the reports that have come out about the security for his then-girlfriend, Judith Nathan, now his wife. And so I think that's the most important thing to me.
Tavis: Having covered him locally, what do you make of the fact that - I can't even remember the last time a mayor ascendant to the presidency, probably 200 years (unintelligible). But what do you make of the fact with never having held national office, he is one of the frontrunners?
Bumiller: Well, he has a broad appeal because of his leadership on September 11, 2001. When George Bush was flying around the country in Air Force One, Rudy Giuliani - Bush was ordered up there by the Secret Service - Rudy Giuliani was on the ground in New York and was extremely reassuring. I saw him many times in situations not quite like that, of course, but in other situations where there was a crisis, and he is a very calming, rational presence at those times. So that, I think, has driven a lot of this.
Tavis: Before I go to the book, speaking of 9/11, if I have my facts correct you actually started as the White House correspondent for "The New York Times" on the 10th of September, 2001. So the day before 9/11, you start as the White House correspondent. What do you remember when you look back at that time?
Bumiller: Well, it was the last quiet day I had on the beat. I told people this was a very good job for a mother of two children, as I am, because it was a very relaxed presidency. The president was taking weekends off, he was knocking off at 3:00 to go to Camp David on Fridays, and of course that all changed the next morning, as we now know.
Tavis: Yeah. Well, I'm glad you are at the "Times," and I'm glad that you have written this book about "Condoleezza Rice, An American Life," and I want to jump right into it. Let me just start overall with your - you've covered her, you've written a couple of articles about her. And let me just say at the outset that you have the kind of unprecedented access to her where authors are concerned.
She spent a significant amount of time with you. So one, tell me about how you got to her and the time she spent with you for the text, and then tell me overall your impression of Condoleezza Rice. I want to get a little more deeply into the text.
Bumiller: Well, I made the deal to write this book with Random House before I told her about it, so I came to her and to her people and said, "I'm writing this book and I'd like an interview." And so she knew it was happening anyway, with or without her, and I think she made a very rational calculation that it would be better for her if her voice was in the book.
I spoke to 150 other people as well, her friends, her enemies, her administration officials, foreign officials, and the end result was the book was better for me, too, it's a better book because it has a lot of her voice in it, talking about some really sensitive, important moments in the last six and seven years in the White House and in the State Department.
And I guess if I had an overall impression, I have an overall impression of her professionally in the White House and State Department. I think I conclude that she was a weak national security advisor but she's a better, more confident secretary of state. More her own woman.
Tavis: How much time did you get with her for the book?
Bumiller: I had eight one-hour interviews with her at the State Department for the purposes of the book in 2006 and 2007, and then I also drew heavily from two other interviews I had with her for "The New York Times" in 2003 at the White House. And I spoke to a lot of her family, as well.
Tavis: What makes her, for you or for the readers of the book, a weak national security advisor?
Bumiller: I think - don't forget, she came - and I know you know this - she came into the White House with only two years of mid-level White House experience in 2001. She had been the Soviet expert on George H. W. Bush's National Security Council staff. She was in the room with Vice President Cheney, with Donald Rumsfeld, with Colin Powell, and her job was theoretically corralling these elephants in the room and trying to create a cohesive foreign policy.
She had trouble with that, and she saw early on that the source of her power would be her closeness to the president. And so really for four years she was the president's friend, and didn't serve, I would argue, as a check on him as much as she might have.
Tavis: In the book, one of the things that jumps out at you if you follow Condoleezza Rice at all, as I do, she is very good about holding her tongue. And in this book with you, at least, she got comfortable enough to criticize, if I can use that word - I'll see if you agree with me - to criticize, on the record, Dick Cheney.
Bumiller: I'm glad you pointed that out, because people have asked me what is the most surprising thing about Condoleezza Rice after going through this, and I - that is it to me, that the sitting Secretary of State of the United States was willing to talk to a journalist on the record about her differences with the vice president. And I found that extremely revealing, and it indicates to me that there's a little more tension there even than she was willing to admit to me.
Early on, she had to go to the president and basically wrest her job back from Dick Cheney. Cheney had wanted to run National Security Council meetings in the president's absence, but that had always European the job of the national security advisor.
Now you could argue this was just a Washington turf battle, but in fact it was a very important battle early on that she had to win. The president sided with her. I think that's why she told me about it.
Tavis: Now the flip side of that coin, if Dick Cheney's on one side, the flip side of that coin is Don Rumsfeld, you mentioned earlier. And Rumsfeld, by contrast to Condoleezza Rice, has gone on the record any number of times in places that he probably should not have, criticizing, sometimes obliquely, sometimes rather forthrightly, Condoleezza Rice. And yet she holds back, at least in your book, in my reading of it. She doesn't slam Rumsfeld in the way that she could.
Bumiller: I thought that was interesting. Well, let's face it. Rumsfeld's out of office, he's no longer a threat to her. She said at the end of the book after confirming a lot of stories about how Rumsfeld had withheld information from her, how he had been very brusque and dismissive of her, she said, "I actually kind of like Don Rumsfeld. I know people don't believe me, but that's the truth."
But don't forget, she had a hand in his ouster in November, 2006. The president was looking to replace Donald Rumsfeld, we know that now, but he did not want to replace Rumsfeld until he found somebody he was comfortable with to be Defense secretary. Condi Rice knew that, she enthusiastically recommended Bob Gates, her friend from the Bush 41 days. Actually, her supervisor. And I think that was a big factor, and so let's be honest here, she had a role here.
Tavis: I've always liked Condoleezza Rice personally, I get along well with her and we're very friendly with each other. And one of the reasons why I'm always anxious to get my hands on anything about her is for me personally, she still represents a bit of an enigma, certainly for me as a Black man. A political enigma - anyone who grows up in Birmingham, Alabama, who has one of her childhood friends killed as one of the four girls killed in that 16th Street Baptist Church, and then she goes on to have the kind of politics that she has, for a guy like me, you can see why I find that a bit interesting and again, a bit of an enigma.
What's your sense of how this African American woman, born and raised in the South, friend dies in the 16th Street Baptist Church, and she ends up having the kind of politics that are certainly at odds with the majority of Black America, not that she has to be in lock step with the rest of us. But what's your take on how her politics got so right, shall we say?
Bumiller: Well, she was a Democrat.
Tavis: Absolutely.
Bumiller: Don't forget, you know this. She voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and she voted for Reagan in 1980 as a Reagan Democrat. But even by '84, when she was a Republican - she changed registration in '82 - she was still working for Gary Hart, one of the Democratic candidates for president that year. So I always argue she's a moderate Republican.
Now some people argue about Condoleezza Rice, that the reason she's a Republican is that it was in her professional interest. There weren't a lot of Black women Republicans, and she was noticed. Brent Scowcroft certainly noticed her early on, when she was talking about throw weights and weapons and national security and brought her into the Bush 41 White House.
She says - and (unintelligible) that she's told you this - she says that what made her a Republican was that she was very alarmed and appalled that Jimmy Carter was surprised by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and that anybody who believed that was far too naïve, and that she switched to the Republican party because it was tough, it was the party of national security and reality.
Tavis: Is your read the same as mine, which is that throughout her entire career, Democrat or Republican, she has always sought out mentors, and those mentors, for whatever reason, happen to be typically older White men. What am I to make of that, if I'm right about it?
Bumiller: Well, you're right about that, and there's no getting around it, this is true. From Brent Scowcroft to Joseph Korbel, who was her professor at Denver, who was Madeleine Albright's father, to George Schultz to George Bush. However, you have to argue that in her field at the time, there weren't a lot if women, Black or White, to latch onto as mentors and to help guide her through. I can think of Jeane Kirkpatrick, that's about it. So in her defense, she found the men who were the most powerful, who were the most helpful to her, but there weren't comparable women at the time.
Tavis: Finally, and I'm just scratching the surface here of this book about "Condoleezza Rice, An American Life," written by Elisabeth Bumiller, finally for me, at least, is it fair to say that at least - at least two things, maybe the two things that she will forever be most haunted by, one, her role prior to 9/11, and two, when she was shopping for shoes and going to see "Spamalot" when Katrina had left folk stranded in the waters and on rooftops in New Orleans.
Bumiller: I think that would be accurate. You know as well as I that she went up to take a vacation in August of 2005 in New York and right as Katrina was unfolding, and when the lights came up on the "Spamalot" show, the audience booed her. The next day, she was shopping for shoes on Fifth Avenue, and was getting messages from Washington that things were really bad, and all she had to do was look at her television screen, and she was back that afternoon to Washington.
And then she went down, as you know, to Alabama, and also told the president, which was obvious to anybody in America at the time, that "Mr. President, you have a race problem."
On 9/11, one of the most interesting things she told me was that on that day, and we didn't know at the time, but she knew how much she had been warned ahead of time. On that night, she stayed at the White House in the White House residents, the Secret Service said it was too dangerous to go home. And she tossed and she turned and couldn't sleep, understandably.
And I asked her, were you blaming yourself at that point for anything that had happened that day, on 9/11? Missed clues? And she said to me, "I wasn't - not yet." And that was the closest she came to admitting some responsibility.
Tavis: So finally, that was the closest she came to you about that particular issue. Is it your sense, spending time with her, that she regrets or will regret either one of those in the way that we're talking about her regretting it long-term?
Bumiller: She certainly regrets Katrina. She was not part of the domestic apparatus of the administration that managed Katrina. And I think she regrets the missed clues to 9/11. She has never admitted that publicly, but I think she does.
Tavis: Elisabeth Bumiller is the author of this new book about our secretary of state, the first African American woman to hold the esteemed post. "Condoleezza Rice, An American Life," a biography. She is a fascinating study and has made her mark in history, and worth reading about. So Elisabeth, thank you for the text, we appreciate it.
Bumiller: Thank you for having me.
Tavis: My pleasure.
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