On the coffee table — ‘Condoleezza Rice’

Basically, this Elisabeth Bumiller bio of Rice is a biography of an intellectual middleweight BY an intellectual middleweight

Where’s the analysis?

There’s not a lot new here about Condi Rice, especially for people involved enough with tracking politics to have formed a basic picture of her already.

That said, there is a fair amount of information from her childhood and pre-NSC adulthood to confirm what became apparent then was not new.

That includes:
1. A blinkered mindset, not just on things like Iraq issues, either;
2. A lack of original thought;
3. A lack of bureaucratic steel at times, especially when limited by blinkered or unoriginal thought.

The first point goes all the way back to segregated Birmingham, Ala., of Rice’s childhood. She maintains to this day that segregation wasn’t as bad as MLK and other civil rights leaders maintained, and, even more laughably, that more upper-crust black leaders there were making progress.

The lack of originality? The lack of relative depth in her PhD study. Her time as Stanford provost.

Tying some points together, that Bumiller doesn’t look at enough:
1. WHY the blinkered mindset held all the way back to childhood?
2. WAS Condi’s PhD that “derivative”?
3. DID she get tenure, not just appointment at Stanford, on minority grounds? Or female grounds? Or a combo?
4. DID she, per a book like Randall Kennedy’s “Sellout,” “pull the ladder up” after her at Stanford, both vis-à-vis other minorities and vis-à-vis other women?
5. HOW RESPONSIBLE is she for the federal lawsuit against Stanford for discrimination against women? How responsible is she for that having spread to racial discrimination, too?
6. PSYCHOLOGY of her attachment to older, “mentorish” men? Effects on her two stints in Washington?
7. HARD-CORE CONSERVATIVISM after her Bush I service in 1989-91? Everybody at Stanford remarked on the changes, but it doesn’t look like Bumiller asked Question No. 1 about this.

Through in the fact that Bumiller swallows the conservative/BushCo talking points about the pre-9/11 “firewall” between domestic and foreign intelligence, calls Wolfowitz a “conservative” and not a “neoconservative” and you see Bumiller in over her head as much as Rice was on Jan. 20, 2001.

How Bumiller got to be a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, or how Random House thought they would get a serious analytical bio (if it wanted one) from an author whose other publishings are all non-analytical women’s issues books, is beyond me. And, using that leave of absence from the New York Times to write this book and it STILL being this shallow? That is what got it knocked down from three to two stars.

As for alternatives? Judging by other reviewers, I think Kessler’s bio has to be better, and Mabry’s possibly worse than this.

And, let’s not forget this hugely insightful quote of hers, about her squish, nonaggressive coverage of the Iraq invasion:

“I think we were very deferential because ... it’s live, it’s very intense, it’s frightening to stand up there. Think about it, you’re standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country’s about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.”

Glenn Kessler’s bio of Rice, which I’ve not read, rates slightly higher at Amazon. That said, Bumiller at least is a voluminous enough steno to provide confirmation of just what Rice is about is not new to her personality.