Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice discusses leadership, lessons

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a large crowd at Tudor Fieldhouse that leadership requires vision, integrity and optimism. “The definition of leadership in my mind is to inspire people toward a common goal and then get them there,” she said at the Nov. 8 event.

BAKER INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke at Tudor Fieldhouse Nov. 8.

Rice was on hand to publicize her new book, “No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington.” Ernie Manouse, host and producer of KUHT-TV’s InnerVIEWS, posed a series of questions to Rice and then moderated questions from the audience. The event was co-sponsored by the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy and Houston PBS (KUHT).

Manouse asked Rice about her upbringing and the role of her parents in fostering her leadership skills. “I grew up in segregated Birmingham, Ala., with a sense of limitless horizons,” she said. She said her mother taught her that “you might not be able to control your circumstances, but you can control your response to your circumstances.” Despite her modest origins, Rice was instilled with confidence in her own potential and added, “It’s extremely important to carry that sense of optimism into government service.”

Her confidence later affected her relations with world leaders. In one case, she recounted how she literally stood up to Russian President Vladimir Putin when the two argued over the U.S. position on the impending Russian-Georgian conflict. And she maintained that gender should not play any role in such high-level relationships. “If by the time you’re secretary of state you let somebody treat you badly because you’re a woman, it’s your fault — not theirs,” she said.

Rice denied she was ever “bitten by the political bug”; she insisted that her passion is for policy. “I’m a policy person,” she said. “I love policy.” But since “public service has to be a marriage of policy and politics,” Rice said she joined the administration of President George H.W. Bush as a Soviet expert and became involved in the sometimes-bruising efforts to see her policy ideas enacted.

“You can do policy outside the political system and have very little impact,” Rice said. “Or you can roll up your sleeves, get in there, do battle with everybody else, try to make good policy decisions and then go home and do something else. And that’s what I have done.”

Rice, who is currently a professor of political science at Stanford University, cited what she saw as President Jimmy Carter’s insufficient response to the 1979 Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as pushing her toward the Republican Party. “I came to into the Republican Party because of my foreign policy views,” she explained. “I’m a national security hawk, to a certain extent.”

Rice expressed her admiration for the post-World War II founders of the U.S. containment policy toward the Soviet Union. Asked by Manouse about another time in U.S. history when she would have liked to have served, she cited “my great heroes, George Marshall and Dean Acheson, because I believe that was the time when critical choices were made to really engage the United States in a permanent way in the affairs of the world.” The removal of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the USSR and the reunification of Germany affirmed four decades of U.S. policy, Rice argued. “The really good decisions that led to the victory in the Cold War had been taken in ’46, ’47 and ’48,” she said. “So that’s the period that I most admire in American diplomacy.”

Although her role in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was never directly raised, Rice pointed to the resolution of the Cold War as a cautionary example of history’s unpredictability. “Today’s headlines and history’s judgment are rarely the same,” she said. “And I know history’s judgment is a ways off still.”

Rice’s appearance was part of the Shell Distinguished Lecture Series and PBS’s Elevate Lecture Series.

To view the event in its entirety, go to http://bakerinstitute.org/events/no-higher-honor-a-memoir-of-my-years-in-washington.