American Faust: From Condi to Neo-Condi Transcript

GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER UNITED STATES PRESIDENT, VO:
History will say that Condi Rice was one of the greatest secretaries of state…

BUSH:
0:00:14 :  …that our country has ever had.

GEORGE H.W. BUSH, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT:
She’s knowledgeable, she is strong…

JOHN MCCAIN, SENATOR (R), VO:
I’m a great admirer of Secretary Rice…

0:00:20 I think she’s a great American.

DICK CHENEY, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT, 2001-2009:
She’s known far and wide as one of the great personalities in American public life.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER, CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR:
Look at this face, beauty and intelligence.

FEMALE TV HOST, VO:
You’ve been to 85 countries; you’ve traveled over a million miles.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, FMR. SECRETARY OF STATE, VO:
[0:00:39]
This job is pretty all consuming.

RICE [0:00:41]
It’s 24/7 and 365 days a year.

OPRAH WINFREY, TALK SHOW HOST, VO:  [0:00:55]
In all my years of interviewing I’ve never been prouder to spell my name woman than after spending time with Condoleezza Rice.

LAURA FLANDERS, AUTHOR, BUSHWOMAN, VO: [0:01:08]
Condoleezza Rice’s father took her to the White House …

FLANDERS: [0:01:11]
… in Washington. She was 10 years old. They looked at the White House. She said, I wanna be there.

FLANDERS VO: 
She was on a mission from her earliest age to prove to her father, to her mother, rising up in those very tough years… in Birmingham.

FLANDERS VO: [0:01:33]

Her mission was to get to the top, get to the top politically. And that’s exactly what she did. 

RICE:

I think what’s happened to me is 90 percent upbringing. I really do believe that my parents were extraordinary …

RICE VO: [0:01:44]
…. in the kind of self confidence that they gave me. We couldn’t have a hamburger in a Woolworth’s lunch counter…

RICE:
0:01:50 … but they had me convinced I could be president of the United States if I wanted to be.

FLANDERS VO: [0:01:54]
She came of age in the critical years of multiracial America…

FLANDERS:
… when it was really make or break. Was segregation going to survive, or be knocked out?

VIDEO CLIP: [0:02:06]

MARTIN LUTHER KING JNR, CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER, VO: 
Birmingham is a symbol of hardcore resistance to integration.

KING:
0:02:12 It is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.

END CLIP

RICE:
In September of 1963 I was 8 years old. And I was at my father’s church.

RICE VO: [0:02:24]
I remember feeling something like a roar of trains or something of that sort.

ANTONIA FELIX, VO:
A bomb went off at the 16th Street Baptist Church in downtown Birmingham next to a Sunday school room and four little girls were killed.

RICE VO: [0:02:47]
And Denise McNair was someone that I had known as a child. She had been in kindergarten with me.

ANTONIA FELIX, BIOGRAPHER: [0:02:55]
What stands out in Condi Rice’s mind about that bombing is particularly memories of the funeral.

FELIX VO: [0:03:01]

She recalls being very moved by seeing those little coffins.

RICE VO: [0:03:07]

These were innocent children. This was home-grown terrorism.

RICE:
It was awful.

FELIX VO: [0:03:16]

She lived in a violent world. And as much as her parents …

FELIX:

…. protected her from real head on violence – like they wouldn’t let her do those street demonstrations with other children that Martin Luther King and others organized.

VIDEO CLIP OF CIVIL RIGHTS DEMONSTRATIONS IN ALABAMA: [0:03:26]

FELIX VO: [0:03:34]

Her father didn’t believe in putting children in harm’s way for the sake of a cause. But, he wanted her to know what was going on.

FELIX:

He showed her, he talked to her. She was very aware of what was going on.

MARCUS MABRY, BIOGRAPHER, VO: [0:03:51]

John Rice, who was a Presbyterian minister, was …

0:03:53 … the most important person in Condoleezza Rice’s life.

MABRY VO:

Kind of a big mountain of a man who really believed the most important thing he could do for black children, including his daughter…

MABRY: 

0:04:02…was to give them a sense of self and pride that would allow them to quote unquote conquer racism.

MABRY VO: [0:04:08]

Both John Rice and his wife, Angelena Ray Rice, Condoleezza Rice’s mother, they told her as a little girl…

MABRY:
0:04:14… that segregation wouldn’t matter in your life; racism would not matter in your life. You can be whatever you want to be, regardless of whatever the outside world tries to enforce upon you.

FELIX: 

The way that she was integrating a lot of this…having to stay home from school because of all the bomb threats, day after day after day, was that she found incredible solace in the piano.

JULIA EMMA SMITH, NEIGHBOR AND FAMILY FRIEND VO: [0:04:42]

Her mother started her taking piano when she was a little girl, like three. And by the time she was five …
SMITH

… she could play Beethoven and other classical music. She was …she was good as a little girl.

SMITH VO: [0:05:02]

 Everybody thought music was going to be her career.

MABRY VO:  [0:05:15]

When she was 17, as a sophomore at the University of Denver, she went to a famous music camp at Aspen. And at Aspen she saw little kids who could play from sight music that had taken her weeks or months to learn how to play. And at that point she saw she wasn’t good enough and she dropped it…

MABRY:

… with no emotion, no feeling whatsoever.

RICE VO: [0:05:33]

I encountered the realization that if I stayed a music major …

RICE:

… I would end up teaching kids to murder Beethoven.

THEODOR LICHTMANN, COLLEGE PIANO TEACHER:

0:05:39 In taking very specific technical directions she was very good.

LICHTMANN VO:  [0:05:44]

Emotional directions she didn’t have an easy time doing that.

LICHTMANN:

As long as it was mechanical – things do this, hold your hand this way, or do that – fine. But as soon as I touched her inside there was a resistance.

RICE:  [0:06:03]

I didn’t like teaching piano. And I always wanted something that I was going to be interested in, that I loved. But perhaps it says that I didn’t wanna really be second best.

MABRY VO:  [0:06:11]

This was a very important turning point in Rice’s life.

MABRY: 

And so in one of our interviews I asked her about it. And she said to me I don’t do life crises, period.

MABRY VO: [0:06:20]

She said she does not believe in regret. She thinks life is too short. And so she doesn’t look back on mistakes, she keeps looking forward. And I think it had a profound impact…

MABRY: 

…her one goal she had set, she failed at. I think she didn’t want to fail again.

RICE VO:  [0:06:34]

I had decided that I was not going to be a great concert pianist, but I didn’t know what I was going to be. I wandered into spring quarter, junior year, a course in international politics taught by Josef Korbel.

GLENN KESSLER, BIOGRAPHER VO:  [0:06:44]

Korbel was this kind of autocratic, fascinating character, a refugee from communism.

KESSLER:

… he had fled his native Czechoslovakia after the Soviets took it over.

MABRY VO:  [0:06:55]

 Josef Korbel taught her the drama that was inherent to global politics.

MABRY:

He would tell these amazing stories and he would really bring international relations to life.

RICE VO:  [0:07:11]

I remember the exact lecture that won me over. And it was one about how Joseph Stalin had consolidated his power. And I thought, this is just terrific, this is what I want to study.

MABRY: 

Those human stories, the questions of power and weakness, those are things I think really animated (ph) an interest in Rice.

MABRY VO:  [0:07:30]

And it was because of Korbel, that kind of drama with which he told the story, that Condoleezza Rice became a political scientist.

KESSLER: 
Korbel was what is known as a realist. Then (ph) a group of foreign policy specialists who believe that you deal with states as they are. You know, great powers –

KESSLER VO:

-- the internal dynamics of those states doesn’t quite matter as much.

MABRY: 

0:07:51 Realists don’t believe, and don’t trust, moral aspirations.

MABRY VO:

They don’t trust countries that say, we’re the moral ones, we have God on our side. Realists don’t trust that stuff.

AUDIO CLIP: [0:08:00]

JOSEF KORBEL, PROFESSOR:
Only by freeing the emerging nations from of encroachment upon their national liberties can we change the tide and alter its political anti-Western tinge into a companion.

END AUDIO CLIP

MABRY: 
0:08:14 Realists believe that all that matters in the world is power. All that matters is which countries have it and what do they want to do.

MABRY VO: [0:08:21]

And Condoleezza Rice was very much a realist, in that mold of Josef Korbel –

MABRY:

-- for a good chunk of her political career.

MABRY VO: [0:08:28]

Now the other extraordinary thing about Josef Korbel was that he was also the father of Madeleine Albright.

MABRY:  So two American, female secretaries of state were the daughters of Josef Korbel.

MABRY VO: [0:08:38]

Albright literally and Condoleezza Rice, as she says, figuratively, his daughter. He was her second father.

DOUGLAS VAUGHN, RICE’S CLASSMATE, UNIVERSITY OF DENVER, VO:

Korbel is an expert in U.S. diplomatic history. And he was the one that taught diplomacy.

VAUGHN:

Condi was actually taking a couple of the graduate level courses while she was still an undergraduate.

VAUGHN VO: [0:08:51]

She learned her lessons all too well, in how the exercise of power by big countries could have devastating effects on people far away and over a long period of time that would eventually come back to haunt those who were thinking that they did right.

VIDEO CLIP

VAUGHN VO: [0:09:57]

I would call her being close to tears and expressing outrage upon hearing first person accounts of what our government was doing, or allowing to be done in its name, in places like Chile, during the dictatorship there.

ALAN GILBERT, RICE’S HISTORY PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF DENVER, VO: [0:10:21] 

She took every course I offered and two courses that I co-taught with Josef Korbel.

GILBERT: 

And then did a year long project working with me on music and politics in the Soviet Union.

GILBERT VO: 

And in the course (ph) of all this we became friends.

0:10:39 The story she now tells about how she was always a budding neo-con…

GILBERT:

0:10:44…there wasn’t a whiff of neo-conservative about her, and I taught her a lot of conservative political theories.

FELIX:  

Her fascination with football started at her father’s knee.

RICE: 

My dad was a football coach and athletic director when I was born.

RICE VO: [0:11:12]

And I was supposed to be his all-American linebacker. He already had the football bought. I was going to be named John, like him. And so he had to teach me about the sport instead. Two-years-old, I just loved football.

FELIX: 

Even as a little girl running around in the neighborhood, she would tell people, when I grow up I’m going to marry a football player.

MUSIC

RICK UPCHURCH, DENVER BRONCOS WIDE RECEIVER, 1975-83 VO:  [0:11:35]

When Condoleezza first saw me, I was in my second year with the Denver Broncos. I had a fantastic year that year.


UPCHURCH:

I had set a couple of records, had returned two punt returns in one game against the Cleveland Browns.

UPCHURCH VO:  [0:11:49]

I just remember the fans, man, would just start chanting, Upchurch, Upchurch, Upchurch. All of the sudden, everybody was starting to recognize that Rick Upchurch was here and he was making some noise out on the football field.

One of those fans that was in the stands …

UPCHURCH:

… was Condoleezza Rice, and her dad – they were Broncos fans.

0:12:09 My first encounter was going over to Condoleezza’s house and meeting Dr. John Rice and talking with him about school.

UPCHURCH VO:

And she met me and says, oh, you’re that guy that returns those punts in that whole deal. You’re a pretty good ball player.

UPCHURCH:

She was just a very good looking young lady who carried herself with class.

UPCHURCH VO: 

She was very fluid in her movement. She could dance pretty doggone well. Very good dancer. And she was a good ice skater as well.

UPCHURCH:

Condoleezza and I became very close. I would go over to the house…

UPCHURCH VO:  [0:12:45]

… listen to her play the piano. And we would go out in the back and start playing catch. And she would say, gee whiz, look at you dropping the football. What’s wrong with your hands? They look like lobster claws.

(LAUGHTER)

UPCHURCH:

0:12:54 It was funny. It’d make me laugh.

UPCHURCH VO: 

I just grabbed both of her hands and just told her that I really liked her and I thought I was falling in love with her. She looked and me and says, you know, I like you, too.
And at that point in time…

UPCHURCH: 

….I felt like we could go some places as far as our relationship was concerned.

UPCHURCH VO: [0:13:12]

I asked John Rice if I could have his daughter’s hand in marriage.

UPCHURCH:

And he looked at me and says, sure you can.

UPCHURCH VO:  [0:13:23]

It was a nice, warm evening. And after dinner we went out on the back porch and was sitting out there and was talking about what we wanted out of life. And at that particular time I asked Condoleezza …

UPCHURCH:

0:13:36 …. if she would marry me. And she said, whoa. And she said, well I gotta think about this.

UPCHRUCH VO: 

And it was a few weeks before she actually said that she would marry me.

013:59 I saw the passion in Condoleezza. She was a very warm person. But one thing she says is that …

UPCHURCH:

0:14:03 … she was respectful of her body. And that was something she was going to save for marriage.

UPCHURCH VO:

You know Condoleezza had gone out on dates and had seen other people.

UPCHURCH: 

0:14:14 But she didn’t feel like she needed to give her body up to show her love to anyone. And so she wasn’t going to have sex before marriage.

UPCHURCH VO: [0:14:25]

I remember her coming to me and her saying to me that I have a great opportunity to go to Washington…

UPCHURCH:
… and do some positive things with my political career. And I have to make a decision.

UPCHURCH VO: [0:14:45]

With you here and me there, it’s going to be awful tough for us to keep a relationship. And so…

UPCHURCH:

…I think that we’re going to have to break this engagement off.

UPCHURCH VO: [0:14:59]   

The thing that she wanted to do with her life is get into politics, and to be in Washington. And her opportunity had come, and she didn’t turn that opportunity down. She chose power over love.

UPCHURCH:

0:15:14 She handed me my ring back and I was awful devastated in that whole situation. And so ah…ah.. that’s how our engagement – that’s how it ended.

FELIX VO:  [0:15:40]

After Condi got her doctorate …

FELIX:

….she was offered a fellowship out at Stanford.

CECILIA BURCIAGA, FORMER STANFORD PROFESSOR: 
0:15:47 I was an associate dean in the office of faculty affairs when a faculty member came to us and said that he had just discovered a young scholar who had given a pretty good paper on Sino-Soviet relationships and he thought that might be wonderful for Stanford to use affirmative action funds in this way.

RICE: 

I went to Stanford as a young fellow, fresh out of graduate school. I had never had a job doing anything. I think they saw a person that they thought had potential, and yes, I think they were looking to diversify the faculty.

FLANDERS VO: 

This was at a time when Stanford was at the bottom of the rankings …

FLANDERS:

… when it came to inclusivity, diversity, on a college campus.

LARRY DIAMOND, STANFORD PROFESSOR AND COLLEAGUE, VO: 

She was remarkably articulate, very poised, very precise, very sharp.

DIAMOND:

0:16:37 I’m sure there was a concern not to miss an extraordinary opportunity …

DIAMOND VO: [0:16:44]

…to hire someone who was a woman, who was black, and who was also…

DIAMOND:

…stunning, personally and intellectually.

GILBERT: 

0:16:55 She discussed with me how she was counted six times as a black and a woman for affirmative action purposes in the Arms Control and Disarmament Center, the Political Science Department and one other unit. So she actually showed up as six at Stanford. So she was making fun of the Stanford affirmative action program.

RICE: 

I’m clearly a package; I’m black and I’m female. But I’ve always thought that the most important thing is to do your job and do it well, and don’t question other people’s motives for your selection.

GILBERT VO: [0:17:27] 

When she first went to Stanford I realized that she really had pursued …

GILBERT:

…. a trajectory of movin’ on up.


GILBERT VO: 

She had the feeling that she needed to rise.

RICE: 

0:17:44 It is true that I was once a Democrat. I voted in 1976 for Jimmy Carter. And then over the time that he was president I really thought that America’s power in the world was waning, that the Soviet Union was kind of playing us like a violin and I decided that I really thought Ronald Reagan would be a better steward of American power. And I think I was right.

RICE: 

I did meet him. And he was just as you might imagine, just an extraordinary man. Tall and just very strong.


RONALD REAGAN, FMR. U.S. PRESIDENT: 

0:18:18 We’ve learned by now that it isn’t weakness that keeps the peace, it’s strength. Our foreign policy had been based on the fear of not being liked. Now it’s nice to be liked, but it’s more important to be respected.

GILBERT: 

0:18:39 She went to work for Gary Hart, who was of course a Democrat. And if there had been a Hart administration, everybody would have been as fond of communism as I was and she would have done wonderful things.

MABRY VO: [0:18:51]

Her goal was to make sure that you’re always in a seat of power.

MABRY:

So it’s not right or left, or conservative or liberal, neo-con or otherwise, it is the belief that you must be at the seat of power in order to influence events.

FLANDERS: 

0:19:12 You had a conservative think tank, the Hoover Institution at Stanford, offering her an almost unheard of array of benefits, scholarships, fellowships, an opportunity to be in fellowship with people like George P. Shultz, former secretary of state, Brent Scowcroft, Casper Weinberger. And then to invite her to come and be part of a Republican administration, there’s nothing like the seductions of power.

RICE: 

I’ve not always been a Republican. My father was always a Republican.

RICE VO:  [0:19:41]

The first Republican that I knew was my father, John Rice.

RICE:

My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did.

(APPLAUSE)

RICE VO:  [0:20:04]

I was a fellow at the Joint Chiefs of Staff when Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev had the famous Reykjavik Summit. And I did some of the support work for that work on ballistic missiles.

RICE: 

0:20:16 I was one of the high priestesses of arms control.

(LAUGHTER)

In fact I used to count how many war heads could dance on the head of an SS 18.

FLANDERS: 

0:20:25 I think the Republican right was smart enough in the 1980s to realize their party was associated with the values of the Klan.

FLANDERS VO: [0:20:32]

This was the party that had voted against civil rights. They had to overhaul their image.
So what do they do?

FLANDERS:

They bring into their circle people like Clarence Thomas, people like Linda Chavez, Elaine Chao, Condoleezza Rice. They’re all part of an effort to change the complexion of the picture of the Republican Party.

RICE: 

0:20:50 I found a party that sees me as an individual, not as part of a group. I found a party that puts family first. I found a party that has love of liberty at its core. And I found a party that believes that peace begins with strength.

MABRY VO:  [0:21:04]

Condoleezza Rice would not have risen as high as she has risen in the Republican Party had she been a Democrat.

MABRY:

0:21:10 The Republican Party, if you’re a black, or a woman, or a black woman, you’re a rarity.

MABRY VO: 

Condoleezza Rice, I think, certainly has used all of her attributes strategically.

FELIX: 

0:21:32 Condi became a member of the Bush inner circle when she was discovered by Bush Senior’s national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and brought into Washington to be part of the National Security Council. 

BRENT SCOWCROFT, FMR. NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR: 

0:21:45 There among all these grand men was this little slip of a girl. But I soon found that she held her own with all these very senior people. She was one of the first calls I made to come and be my Soviet specialist.

RICE: 

0:22:02 You don’t get any luckier than to be the White House Soviet specialist at the end of the Cold War. And I got to participate in the unification of Germany, and I got participate in the end of communism in Eastern Europe.
 
FELIX VO:  [0:22:14]

George Senior was very impressed with her.

FELIX: 

When he introduced her to Gorbachev he said this is Condoleezza Rice, she’s taught me everything I know about the Soviet Union.

GEORGE H.W. BUSH VO: 

She knew a lot more about the subject than I did – her subject, her field.

GEORGE H.W. BUSH: [0:22:31]
Her advice during that period was very sound. And she was ..she was right a heck of a lot more than she was wrong.

KESSLER: 

She managed to pick a field, Soviet studies, where a black woman was really unusual. And so she stood out by that fact.

FLANDERS: 

Think of an African-American, young woman, a Sovietologist at the height of the Cold War, who could go to the Soviet Union, say to the Russians, look, it’s not true that African-Americans can’t succeed. Look at me. I’m at the top of the world and just getting higher.

FELIX: 

0:23:13 When Condi Rice was at Stanford she had started an afterschool program for kids of East Palo Alto who weren’t getting enough education to try to apply for Stanford.

RICE: 
It’s called Center for a New Generation. It’s an afterschool and summer program. It gives kids instrumental music, hands on math, science.

FELIX: 
And she had over a hundred children in this program. And she considered them her children.

RICE: 

0:23:38 I really believe that as Americans, the one thing that holds us together is that we really do believe you can come from humble circumstances and do extraordinary things -- that it doesn’t matter where you came from; it matters where you’re going.

FLANDERS: 

0:23:52 Condoleezza Rice was made provost. She’s the youngest person to ever get that job, the only African-American, the only woman.

FELIX: 

As provost of Stanford she would be the chief academic officer making the policy decisions for 1,400 faculty people and their curriculum, the big decisions.

0:24:12 And she would also be in control of the budget, which at Stanford then was $1.5 billion.

FLANDERS: 

Suddenly she is inheriting a deficit in the budget of some $20 million.

0:24:24 What does she do? She decides to cut some $6 million from the budget. And one of the positions she cuts is that of Cecilia Burciaga.

BURCIAGA: 

0:24:32 For my 20th  tenure at Stanford she called me in. She said, oh, Cecilia, I’m so glad to see you. And I want to thank you because you really were so helpful to my father. And that’s why this is a bit hard. But you know, I know you’re not happy, and I know you want to leave. So I’m making it possible for you to leave.

0:24:53 We were quiet. I stood up, I walked out. And she said to her secretary, in a deep – she took a deep breath and she said, oh good, who’s next? I always remember that little tone.

FLANDERS VO:  [0:25:12]
Cecilia Burciaga was the super popular dean of students. The reaction on campus was severe. Students were furious. They went on hunger strikes. Condoleezza Rice – she didn’t seem to care. 

0:25:21 For her it was more important to show she was tough, show she could cut the budget even when it came down to cutting the most advanced Latina.

KAREN SAWISKLAK, FMR. STANFORD PROFESSOR: 
During Condi’s administration, many, many people suffered these kinds of problems with their employment. These were all people who were enormously talented, successful, accomplished, but unable to be successful at Stanford.

0:25:49 She essentially pulled up the ladder after she had gotten that helping hand.

RICE: 

When people assume that blacks or women are somehow less capable, and therefore in a kind of patronizing way begin to say, well, we need to lower this standard, or they’ve had a rough background – that’s the killer. That’s the worst thing you can do to anyone.

FLANDERS: 

0:26:33 While Condoleezza Rice was provost at Stanford, she was on the board of Chevron. And she wasn’t just on the board; she was on the public policy committee of the Chevron Corporation, just six people.

FELIX: 

0:26:45 Condi supplemented her Stanford income with a $35, 000 per year retainer, over 3,000 shares of Chevron stock and $1,500 for each board and committee meeting attended. She’s a leader. She is aggressive. She is very much at the top of a field that has primarily been the purview white men.

FLANDERS: 

0:27:08 This was a period when the Chevron Corporation, big oil developers, they were exploiting the oil off the coast of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, home to some of the world’s poorest people and indigenous people, like Ogoni people, who at that time were fighting for some revenue to come to them from this oil that was being drained out from underneath their homeland.

0:27:32 Throughout that period, it was Nigerian government’s policy to suppress protest and to arrest and in some cases shoot down and kill protesters. The corporations that cut deals with the Nigerian government were complicit with that.

FLANDERS VO:  [0:27:50}

During that same period, good shareholders at Chevron were bringing shareholder initiatives to the public policy committee, on which Condoleezza Rice sat, to call on the government of Nigeria to change their ways.

FLANDERS:

0:28:04 And every single time the committee would turn them down for consideration by the full board. So she was playing an active role in turning shareholder initiatives back when the shareholders were saying, we want to be pushing for more human rights, not ignoring the abuses at the Nigerian government’s hands. 

FLANDERS VO:  [0:28:26]

She picked colonialism over being a concert pianist.

RICE: 

0:28:42 I’m not a driven person. I’ve found myself in the right places at the right time several times and since I’m a deeply religious person, I’d like to think it’s part of some larger plan.

KESSLER: 

She was a Christian from day one. In fact her father was a preacher and read her the Ten Commandments as a little girl.

KESSLER VO: [0:28:57]

She prays everyday. She goes to church regularly. She believes that God has set forth a plan.

RICE VO: [0:29:06] 

I’ve never doubted the existence of God. My father was a theologian, and I can remember, from the time I was a very young kid, debating with him about the Bible, and debating about this aspect of Jesus’ life. He never made me feel that my faith and my intellect were at war with one another.

KESSLER: 

0:29:27 One reason why she doesn’t really look back, she doesn’t dwell on the kinds of mistakes she might have made, because what is happening is God’s plan is unfolding and this is how it’s going to be.

FELIX VO: [0:29:39] 

When Condi first met George W. down in Texas he was thinking about his presidential run. Bush Senior wanted his son, George, to meet her.

FELIX:

Of course she’s a foreign policy specialist, especially an Eastern European specialist. He had a lot of studying to do.




SEBASTIAN DOGGART VO: [0:29:56]
 
Can you name the president of Chechnya?

GEORGE W. BUSH: 

No. Can you?.

Uhh, the new prime minister of India is uhhh…I don’t know.

PHILIP SHENON, AUTHOR, THE COMMISSION: 

0:30:16 During the course of the 2000 election campaign, she’d really been President Bush’s tutor on foreign affairs.

SHENON VO:

President Bush had been governor of Texas, had very little background in foreign policy or national security.

SHENON:

She’s the one who taught him these issues during the course of the campaign.

RICE: 

I advise him on how to take his very strong principles and values, what it is he wants to do in the world, and translate those into policy initiatives.

MABRY: 

0:30:44 George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice hit it off right from the very beginning, based on their common affinity in things like sports and their Christian faith. They had this instant, as one of Rice’s best friends called it, mind meld that happened from the very beginning.

ELEANOR CLIFT, EDITOR, NEWSWEEK:  0:30:57
She never patronized him, and I think that’s very important to President Bush, that he not be patronized because he is so made fun of in the public realm.

GEORGE W. BUSH: 

Dr. Condoleezza Rice is the former Provost of Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute. She is my chief foreign policy advisor. She’s also a concert pianist. Please welcome my dear friend, Dr. Condi Rice.

RICE: 

What really attracted me to George W. Bush was when he talked about the soft bigotry of low expectations. I’d been there. It really resonated with me.

RICE: 
0:31:36 George W. Bush believes that America has a special responsibility to keep the peace…

MABRY: 
Rice saw in this young Texas governor, the values, the strength of vision, of Ronald Reagan. And at the same time she saw the moderation and wisdom and intelligence of Bush’s father for whom she had worked. She thought with these two personalities combined into one president, she thought they could burst into Washington and they were going to remake the world.

SHENON: 

0:32:09 When President Bush was named president in 2000 he quite quickly chose her as national security advisor.

RICE: 

I am honored, in fact humbled, that President Elect Bush has asked me to serve as his national security advisor.

0:32:23

SHENON: 

It was certainly an exciting appointment. You had the first African American woman – the first woman – as national security advisor. She was a first in many ways.

MABRY: 

0:32:34 It was the ultimate rise in political power.

0:32:37 We’re talking about a little girl who grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama and yet she had gone from that place in her life all the way up to literally, the right hand of the president of the United States.

CELESTE KING, CHILDHOOD FRIEND: 

She was the girl next door. She went to church with us, she bowled and she became the most powerful woman in the world.

0:32:52 Just because she was a woman, and just because she was black, did not stop her from doing what she wanted to do.

MABRY: 

0:32:59 Her parents told her as a little girl, while bombs were going off around her, that as a little black kid you had to be twice as good as white people in order to be considered equal to them. That directive, I think, greatly motivates Condoleezza Rice.

Reverend Rice, who didn’t trust Washington very much – he didn’t want her in politics at all. He didn’t want her close to politics.

CLARA BAILEY RICE, RICE’S STEP-MOTHER: 
0:33:19 He wanted her to stay at Stanford. This was his main wish, that she would stay there.

MABRY: 

0:33:27 Condoleezza Rice’s step-mother, Clara Bailey Rice, tells a story of John Rice at the end of his life – and he was bed ridden by now -- looking at the television when George W. Bush was announcing in Austin, Texas, that Condoleezza Rice would be his national security advisor.

0:33:43 Reverend Rice couldn’t speak at this point, but she says that on his face – looking at his face – he looked like he didn’t like it, is the way Clara put it.

But she said she was saying, oh look, there’s your baby, about to have this position in Washington that’s so important. And she says there was no registration of happiness on his face. If anything, he looked a little perturbed by it.

GEORGE W. BUSH: 

0:34:16 I expect every member of this administration to stay well within the boundaries that define legal and ethical conduct.

MABRY: 

Rice coming into the administration made very clear the outlines of the Bush foreign policy in a famous article in “Foreign Affairs.” 

0:34:32 It was going to be a very realist, as opposed to an idealist, foreign policy in which the U.S. would walk softly but carry a big stick.

RICE:

0:34:46 A country that wields as much power and influence as the United States could easily be perceived as arrogant in the world, that it could be perceived as we know best about everything. There’s quite a long section on the need to be humble with power.

KESSLER: 

Her appointment as national security advisor came amid a series of appointments that pointed to the idea that President Bush would have an extremely experienced team working for him.

0:35:15 You had Former Defense Secretary Cheney, as the vice president, you had the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, as the secretary of state, you had a former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, back as defense secretary.

DAVID ROTHKOPF, AUTHOR, THE INSIDE STORY OF THE NSA: 

The job of national security advisor is balancing the obligations to – of staffing the president with the obligations of running the policy process.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON, COLIN POWELL’S CHIEF OF STAFF:

0:35:37 When Secretary Powell talked to me about Dr. Rice in the beginning I derived the view that she was looked at by him as a favored protégé.

Dr. Rice’s qualifications to be national security advisor were fairly slim. If you compare her with people like Zig Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger, I think her credentials become extremely slim.

DR. HENRY KISSINGER, NSA AND SECRETARY OF STATE, 1969-1977: 

0:36:00 I’ve seen her fairly often, and she’s extremely intelligent, very articulate and has an academic background in foreign politics, especially on (INAUDIBLE) affairs.

WILKERSON: 

She was a Sovietologist. That’s a strike against her even; the Cold War is over.

KESSLER: 

0:36:20 National Security Advisor Rice was really out of her league. She only had one, two year stints as a mid level aid in the White House years earlier.

MABRY:  

A lot of people will tell you that Rice was weak.
0:36:34 She was too weak to be national security advisor when she had these titans on either side, Rumsfeld and Cheney on one side and Powell on the other.

WILKERSON: 

Probably three of the best bureaucrats that have ever worked the system, huge egos, much more experience than she had, particularly in national security issues and foreign policy.

MABRY, VO:  [0:36:57]

So I think what you see is that she realizes she can’t beat Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld….

MABRY:
…she learns how to maneuver around them. She decided to use her personal relationship with the president to gain power inside the administration.

WILKERSON: 

0:37:09 Dr. Rice is no fool. I think she came to this conclusion very early and she said well, basically I have two choices: one is I try to discipline the system, I try to stand up against these people, and I lose most of the time; or, I build my intimacy with the president, I become a very close confidante of the president.

0:37:32 And my eye’s on the prize. If I do this, I’ll be the next secretary of state.

KESSLER: 

0:37:40 Rice’s relationship with President Bush is very close. She goes to Camp David a lot. She stays in the main house at Crawford. So it is a very unusual relationship between the President and his national security advisor.

GEORGE W. BUSH: 

You can be my date.

(LAUGHTER)

GILBERT: 

0:37:57 I think she referred to him in subconscious slip as her husband at one point.

FELIX: 
0:38:02 That Freudian slip that she actually made at a dinner party when she was going to say, I just told my husband – I mean President Bush --  that really showed how close they are. If you are a woman who has never been married, you don’t usually say husband. It’s just not in your vocabulary.

MABRY: 

0:38:20 Well there’s a famous story about how Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush are in the U.N., in the General Assembly, and he actually passed a little note to Rice.  What the note said was, can I go to the bathroom.

MABRY VO: [0:38:30]

You have a President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, who literally would not go to the bathroom without asking permission from Condoleezza Rice.

KESSLER: 

President Bush tells world leaders that Ms. Rice is like my sister. And those are very powerful words coming from the president of the United States.

RICE: 

We are good friends, I think. I am very fond of him. We have an easy relationship. Probably most importantly, I think I can tell him anything and I think he feels he can tell me anything.

CLIFT: 

0:38:57 She is close to this man, she is admiring of this man. And her almost reverence for him has made it difficult for her to challenge him.

SHENON: 

0:39:09 The national security advisor has a pivotal role. He or she is really the gate keeper of what intelligence, national security information, gets into the doors of the Oval Office for the president to see.

SHENON, VO [0:39:24]

In the spring and summer of 2001, Condoleezza Rice was flooded, flooded, with information about what appeared to be threats of an imminent and catastrophic terrorist attack…

0:39:35 The CIA, led by George Tenet, and Richard Clarke, Condoleezza Rice’s counter terrorism director, were really banging on the door every day, her door every day, saying, there is this dire threat.

RICHARD CLARKE, U.S. CHIEF COUNTER TERRORISM ADVISOR, 1992-2003:

0:39:46 On January 24th of 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for urgently, underlined urgently, a cabinet level meeting to deal with the impending al-Qaeda attack. 

GEORGE TENET, CIA DIRECTOR, 1992-2003: 

0:40:01 Essentially the briefing says, there are going to be multiple spectacular attacks against the United States. We believe these attacks are imminent. Mass casualties are a likelihood.

SHENON: 

And the information did not move from her desk to the desk of the president.

KESSLER: 

0:40:18 In that pre-9/11 period, Rice and Bush were just not focused on terrorism.

RICHARD BEN-VENISTE, 9/11 COMMISSIONER: 

0:40:36 I ask you, Dr. Rice, whether you recall the title of that PDB?

RICE:  I believe that title was Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States.

SHENON: 

0:40:50 How much more explicit a warning was the President to receive?

This document was telling the President that there was recent evidence that Al-Qaeda was plotting something within the United States. And they were pretty specific; they were specific about the New York City skyline, they were specific about hijackings.

BEN-VENISTE VO:

The president was in Crawford, Texas at the time he received the PDB. You were not with him, correct? 

RICE: 

That’s correct. I was not at Crawford. But the President and I were in contact. The president was told, this is historical information – I am told he was told – this is historical information, and there was nothing actionable in this.

BEN VENISTE:

0:41:28 Had we been attacked by brush on 9/11 instead of Al-Qaeda, then we would have been prepared.

RICE: 
0:41:40 I just don’t buy the argument that we weren’t shaking the trees enough, and that something was going to fall out that gave us somehow that little piece of information that would have led to connecting all of those dots.

BEN VENISTE: 

0:41:50 Had photographs of Mihdhar and al-Hazmi been put on television, would they have come to the airports on September 11?

RICE VO: [0:42:10]

Life has never been the same since that day.

RICE: 

It was first and foremost a shock that we were so vulnerable. It was secondly a shock that people using means that cost them as the president has said, less than the cost of a single tank, could inflict such danger...

RICE VO: [0:42:37]

 And third it was a surprise.

CHENEY: 

0:42:43 Once we got hit on 9/11 and lost 3,000 people that day we recognized, and it was one of the key decisions President Bush made, that this is not a law enforcement problem; it is a strategic threat to the United States. It’s a war.

GEORGE W. BUSH.: 

Every nation, and every region, now has a decision to make: either you’re with us, or you are with the terrorists.

KESSLER: 

0:42:47 9/11 was such a traumatic, terrible, horrible event; it forced her to re-evaluate things that she thought were true before.

RICE: 

0:43:17 In times of tragedy and heartbreak, like the passing of my own parents, or September 11th, I have found solace and strength in the power of prayer.

MABRY: 

0:43:37 There are critics who say there was a Condi before 9/11 and a neo-Condi after 9/11. I believe what happened with Condoleezza Rice after 9/11 was that we saw a realist transform into an idealist. This thing that Josef Korbel had such an important role in sculpting in Rice’s own head came apart.

0:43:47 Realism talked about countries, it didn’t talk about people who were not actually countries. These were people without land, people who didn’t actually care about balance of powers or conquering territory or getting resources. They had an ideological, extremist agenda, and realism had no prescription of how to deal with that.

RICE: 

0:44:04 September 11th happened for a reason. And it happened because there were people out there who believed that they can take down our way of life.

MABRY: 

0:44:16 And that’s when I think she really moved even closer to George Bush’s idea of idealism.


GEORGE W. BUSH:  

0:44:23 We go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.

KESSLER: 

After 9/11, she adopted whole heartedly, the President’s nostrum.  It’s a complete break from many of the ideas and positions she had taken for decades.

RICE: 

0:44:41 The magnificent men and women of America’s armed forces are not a global police force; they are not the world’s 9-1-1.

0:44:50 The United States has got to stand for the universality of freedom and the universality of democracy. And it has to stand for it because it is in our interest to do so. But also because it is the moral thing to do.

WILKERSON: 

0:45:07 I think the President, with his deep religious roots, impressed upon Condi the need to do things big and different.  And that coupled with the fact that she was trying for her own personal ambition – it became almost like a psychological group think between the two.

KESSLER: 

Some would say she was an enabler, that she wasn’t there to put the brakes on. Instead, she would kind of see which way the winds were blowing and she would shift with them. And clearly in the post 9/11 period, the winds were blowing toward Baghdad.

RICE: 

0:45:43 When we put the map out on the table and – you look at the map, and you look at Afghanistan and you look where it is, and I think the color kind of drained from everybody’s faces.

RICE VO:  [0:45:59]
Given our exceedingly hostile relationship with Iraq, it was a reasonable question to ask whether, indeed, Iraq may have been behind this. 

CLARKE: 

The President dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door and said, I want you to find whether Iraq did this.

0:46:17 I said, Mr. President, we’ve done this before, we’ve been looking at this, we looked at it with an open mind, there’s no connection. He came back at me and said, Iraq, Saddam, find out if there’s a connection.

0:46:32 We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts, we wrote the report. It came to the same conclusion. And we sent it up to the president, and it got bounced by the national security advisor. It got bounced and sent back saying, wrong answer, do it again.

And frankly I don’t think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don’t think he sees memos that he wouldn’t like the answer.

RICE VO: [0:47:01]

The attack was so sophisticated, was this really just a network that had done this?

TENET: 

0:47:13 The context is, it’s post 9/11, I’ve got reports of nuclear weapons in New York City, apartment buildings that are going to be blown up, planes that are going to fly into airports all over again, plot lines – I don’t know what’s going on inside the United States, and I’m struggling to find out where the next disaster is going to occur.

KESSLER: 

0:47:45 According to White House insiders, Rice signed off on these techniques by instructing CIA, this is your baby, go do it.

RICE: 

0:47:58 What we knew about how they operated and what they might be planning and how their networks worked, and how their financing worked, was really very, very minimal until we were able, after September 11th, to get new tools.

KESSLER:

0:48:16 These quote, enhanced interrogation methods included waterboarding, fingernail extraction and sleep deprivation.

CHRISTOPHER ANDERS, ATTORNEY, AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION: 

0:48:25 And then the combination of those, how often they could be used, could they be used together with each other – to the point where they were choreographing the interrogations and the torture from the basement of the White House itself.

TENET: 

This program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots.

DICK MORRIS, AUTHOR, “CONDI VS. HILLARY”: 

0:48:43 There was a plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, under his 118th waterboarding or something, told us the name of the guy who was going to knock down the bridge.

MANFRED NOWAK, U.N. TORTURE COMMISSIONER: 

0:48:58 The extraordinary renditions were used to send suspected terrorists to countries where, one knows, that they would apply even harsher interrogation methods than those that were authorized by the Bush administration, countries like Egypt, like Syria.

MICHAEL ISIKOFF, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST, NEWSWEEK: 

0:49:32 There is a striking, almost eerie parallel in the story of – in the use of these enhanced, aggressive interrogation techniques, waterboarding, and the run up to the war in Iraq.

It is in August of 2002 when the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah begins. That is precisely the time that the Bush administration is preparing to launch its case for the invasion of Iraq.

RACHEL MADDOW, POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: 

0:49:59 Did the Bush administration use torture to try to obtain false confessions about a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda that did not exist in order to justify the war with Iraq?

0:50:09 The Bush administration developed an interrogation program from the techniques that were used on American Prisoners of War to get false confessions out of them.

ISIKOFF: 

0:50:20 It was Ibn Shayk al Libi who, after being rendered to the Egyptians, provided the bogus intelligence about Saddam Hussein training al-Qaeda operatives in chemical and biological weapons, a claim that was later cited by President Bush in a speech in Cincinnati in October 2002.

GEORGE W. BUSH: 

0:50:37 We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gasses.

ROTHKOPF VO: [0:50:47] 

They were looking to see what was going to provide them with the kind of political free pass to go ahead and do it.

ROTHKOPF:

0:50:55 And ultimately they discovered that the only way that they could get the Europeans onboard was to say it was about weapons of mass destruction.

RICE: 

0:51:02 We do know that there have been shipments going into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited for nuclear weapons programs.

FELIX VO:  [0:51:16]

Condoleezza Rice played a very big, very significant role in this invasion of Iraq.

FELIX:

0:51:21 She was really the White House’s mouthpiece for selling this war.

RICE VO: 

It simply makes no sense to wait any longer.

RICE: 

0:51:29 We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

SCOWCROFT VO:  [0:51:31]

Saddam Hussein is not a threat to his neighbors.

0:51:36 He’s a nuisance, he’s an annoyance, but he’s not a threat.

ROTHKOPF: 

Scowcroft was one of the people writing in the press, this is a mistake, don’t go in this direction. And there was real tension that emerged between the two of them during this period.

RICE: 

0:51:52 A healthy debate is to be expected in a democracy, and it is a healthy thing.


RICE VO: [0:51:57]

But I will say this, there are considerable risks to inaction as well.

MABRY: 

This is a little girl who at 9-years-old, when she couldn’t eat a hamburger in a downtown restaurant in Birmingham, told her father, as she stood in front of the White House, daddy, one day I’ll work inside this house.

0:52:12 That kind of arrogance, that confidence, served her well, and was largely responsible for all her successes.

Well, when it came to the war in Iraq, and the lead up to the war, that same arrogance and confidence led Rice to discount what the critics said. It was Condoleezza Rice’s job to say no, to say what happens if it goes wrong?  And she didn’t do that.

KESSLER: 

0:52:30: There’s no evidence that she ever put up any kind of system in place to allow the President to have the full range of choices he needed to decide whether or not to go to war. In fact, I investigated it. I tried to find if there was ever a meeting where they discussed the pros and cons. There never was a meeting.

GEORGE W. BUSH: 

0:52:48 In a free Iraq there will be no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near.

MABRY: 

0:53:03 I think on the eve of the Iraq war, Josef Korbel – if he had been alive – he would have reminded Rice probably of Hans Morgenthau’s word, the father of realism. And those words were, never trust any country that thinks it has God on its side because that’s when the greatest mistakes are made.

RICE VO: [0:53:18] 

I don’t know what he would have done; I wouldn’t try to second guess. He was a great diplomat, but I know that his heart was in the belief that democracy belonged to everybody.

GEORGE W. BUSH:  

0:53:32 I have carefully weighed the human cost of every option before us. We go into battle as a last resort.

SHENON: 

0:54:11 You have to remember that the war with Iraq is happening at the same time the 9/11 commission is doing its work. And I certainly think there was a belief that the pattern they had seen with Rice in the run up to 9/11 was the same sort of pattern they were seeing in the run up to the war in Iraq.

0:54:28 That she had talking points, that the talking points were incomplete, in some cases evasive, and that she was relying on them too much in trying to lead the nation to a policy that she and the president supported.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE VO:  [0:54:52]

Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

RICE: 

0:54:55 I do.

SHENON: 

What actually pressured Condoleezza Rice to appear before the 9/11 commission with the testimony a couple weeks earlier of Richard Clarke, who had gone public explosively to say that President Bush, and Condoleezza Rice in particular, had ignored this flood of 9/11 suggesting an imminent attack.

BEN-VENISTE VO:  [0:55:18]

I think Dr. Rice was well aware of the restrictions of time, and was …

BEN-VENISTE:

…chewing up the clock with long and rambling discourses.

RICE: 

0:55:29 The question is, what did we need to do about that ….

0:55:34 There were 17 full-field investigations underway…

SHENON: 

There’s this thing called a filibuster, which means you talk and talk and talk to avoid action on some bill or some proposal. And it seemed to a lot of folks in the audience that Condoleezza Rice was a master in the arts of the filibuster.

RICE: 

0:55:51 I really don’t remember.

0:55:53 I – I don’t remember.

0:55:55 I don’t know.

0:55:57 I don’t personally remember it.

CLIFT: 

Well that epidemic of amnesia is the product of briefings by lawyers in the administration.

0:56:10 You’re trained not to implicate yourself or any of the people that you work for. And she was very well trained.

SHENON: 

Throughout the investigation of the 9/11 commission what you saw of Condoleezza Rice, it appeared to many people certainly on the commission, was a tremendous amount of wordplay. A warning was not a warning, intelligence wasn’t intelligence unless she said it was. She relies on this wordplay to the point of being dishonest.

WILKERSON: 

0:56:37 Dr. Rice, Colin Powell, George Tenet, George Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, they all told untruths. I don’t know how many – 30, 40, 29 – I don’t know. 

REP. ROBERT WEXLER, U.S. CONGRESSMAN: 

0:56:52 This study has found that you, Madame Secretary, made 56 false statements to the American people.

Isn’t it true that you had intelligence that cast doubt on your repeated claims that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction?

RICE: 

0:57:11 I did not at any time make a statement that I knew to be false, or that I thought to be false, in order to pump up anything.

RICE: 

0:57:19 We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

WILKERSON: 

None of the intelligence community said that he had a nuclear bomb. That’s really going a long way with that talking point – when you’re suggesting to the American people that it might go off tomorrow morning.

MABRY: 

0:57:35 I do believe in Rice’s mind she doesn’t believe she lied; I believe that. I believe that she believes that she did what she had to do, and if she kept some things strategically absent from the public record – I think that’s how she would see it. I think would see that that’s what she had to do.

KESSLER: 

I think the evidence is that she didn’t really read the full, classified nearly 200 page document on weapons of mass destruction.

KESSLER VO: [0:58:05]

There were lots of caveats. The Energy Department was saying, we don’t think those aluminum tubes have anything to do with a nuclear weapons program. Instead, she went out on TV and said it was clear the tubes were being used for a nuclear weapons program.

KESSLER:

0:58:21 I don’t think she ever read the footnotes.

BARBARA BOXER, U.S. SENATOR: 

0:58:23 I personally believe that your loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell this war, overwhelmed your respect for the truth. This product is a war, and people are dead and dying.

RICE: 

0:58:36 We went to war not because of aluminum tubes, we went to war because this was one of the world’s most brutal dictators and it was high time to get rid of him.

BOXER: 

You sent them in there because of weapons of mass destruction. I have your quotes on it –

RICE: 

It was the total picture, Senator, not just weapons of mass destruction that caused us to decide that it was finally time to deal with the threat of Saddam Hussein.

BOXER:  [0:59:05]

Well you should read what we voted on when we voted to support the war. It was WMD, period.

If you can’t admit to this mistake I hope that you –

(CROSSTALK)

RICE: 

Senator we can have this discussion in any way that you would like, but I really hope that you will refrain from impugning my integrity. Thank you very much.

BOXER: 

I’m not; I’m just quoting what you said.

WILKERSON: 

0:59:22 She walked in with all the credentials for having principles, and in the process of joining that unholy alliance for the crusade in Iraq I think she rose above principle.

RICE:

0:59:37 For 60 years the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy here in the Middle East. And we achieved neither.  Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.

WILKERSON: 

0:59:56 I was stunned when she made the remarks that essentially criticized Brent Scowcroft and everyone before him. Fifty years of stability -- to bring freedom and democracy, human dignity and rights to the Middle East, which is a noble, noble aspiration, but a real shot coming from someone whom you thought was a disciple of Brent Scowcroft.

KESSLER: 

1:00:22 Rice throughout her career has shown a talent for attaching herself to a very powerful man, and becoming so close to that person, that that person thinks Condi Rice thinks exactly like they think.

KESSLER VO: [1:00:39]

You saw it with Brent Scowcroft, you saw it with Josef Korbel.

ROTHKOPF: 

She had the best teaching you could have, and she tossed it aside, accepting the notion that the United States should go out there and make the world in its own image.

VAUGHN: 

My main recollection of Condi in the classroom – I always got the impression that she was tailoring her views in order to meet the approval of the professor.

KESSLER: 

1:01:15 The interesting thing is that when Rice moves in the orbit of another person, her views and opinions seem to change. And so you have people like Brent Scowcroft who now look at the Condoleezza Rice who works for President Bush and say, that’s not the same Condoleezza Rice that I knew.

ANDERS: 

1:01:56 After Abu Ghraib broke, after the photographs shocked the world, the CIA was still pushing for interrogations and the use of torture of specific detainees.

And this group continued to meet with Condoleezza Rice chairing the group.

CLARKE: 

1:02:15 She sat in the White House with these torture meetings and decided what torture to use on what person.

RICE: 

The United States does not permit, tolerate or condone torture under any circumstances.

ANDERS: 

1:02:28 She tries to have it both ways. She tries to go out there and say we don’t torture as her public statement. But it depends on what you mean by the word ‘torture.’

The United States has this bizarre view about what the responsibilities are under the Convention Against Torture.

1:02:45 One area where there’s been a real problem has been in the practice of extraordinary rendition.

JUMANA MUSA, AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL ADVOCACY DIRECTOR VO:  [1:02:49]

The outsourcing of torture is a perfect name for what extraordinary rendition really is.

MUSA:

1:02:53 People are picked up, they’re bundled onto an airplane, sometimes drugged, shackled, taken somewhere where they don’t know where they are, sometimes their family doesn’t know where they are, and then put into prisons where they are frequently tortured, at times transported to places even from which they were seeking asylum.

GILBERT: 

There are innocents like Maher Arar, who is a Syrian-Canadian engineer who was sent to Syria to be tortured in a coffin size cell for a year.

MAHER ARAR, CANADIAN, EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION PRISONER 2002-2003 VO: [1:03:22]

But I said, if you send me back to Syria I’ll be tortured. It was very clear that the message is, that’s why we’re sending you to Syria. We are sending you there to be tortured.

ARAR: 

1:03:32 When I was not being beaten, I was put in a waiting room so that I could hear the screams of other prisoners. The cries of the women still haunt me the most.

RICE: 

1:03:44 The United States doesn’t and can’t condone torture.

WILKERSON: 

Dr. Rice knew about the renditions, so I have to assume that she knew about the ones that went awry where we essentially rendered totally innocent people.

ANDERS VO: [1:04:00]

Khalid El Masri is taken from his family after what looked like a pretty routine passport check. He was drugged, sodomized and then flown to Afghanistan.

ANDERS:

This was a completely 100 percent innocent man who was held in a secret prison for four months with no charges, no suspicion, no anything.

GILBERT: 

1:04:19 Detaining people without habeas corpus is all (sic) violations of the American Constitution.

GILBERT VO:  [1:04:30]

Habeas Corpus distinguishes a system of law from tyranny. Every prisoner gets a day in court. There is no indefinite detention. And the tyrannical authorities cannot torture you to get you to say whatever they want.

ALBERTO GONZALES, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL, 2005-07: 

1:04:43 The Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured a right to habeas. It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended.

ANDERS VO:  [1:04:58]

This extraordinary rendition policy is a policy that goes right into the White House.

ANDERS:

And Condoleezza Rice, her job at that time was to be the president’s national security advisor and coordinate all the policies coming from the CIA and the Defense Department.

ANDERS VO:  [1:05:13]

She herself is implicated in dozens and dozens of scenarios where the United States has essentially kidnapped people from around the world and sent them to places where they’d be tortured.

RICE: 

1:05:22 Renditions take terrorists out of action and save lives.

BOB BAER, FORMER CIA OFFICER: 

1:05:29 If you want to get a good interrogation you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want somebody tortured to death you send them to Syria. If you never want to hear from them again you send them to Egypt. That’s pretty much the rule.

CLIP, CELL PHONE FOOTAGE FROM EGYPTIAN PRISON

(INAUDIBLE)

(SCREAMING)

PHILIP ZELIKOW, SENIOR ADVISOR TO RICE, 2001-07: 

This was an interrogation program for which there was no precedent in the history of the United States. We have never done a program like this before. So where the administration is moving into unchartered waters, they’re clearly doing things that folks know are legally questionable.

ABU OMAR, EGYPTIAN, EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION PRISONER, 2002-2007, (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE): 

1:06:12 They practiced all means of crucifying, along with electric shocks. Another torture was laying me down with hands cuffed behind my back on a wet mattress connected to a power source.

ROTHKOPF: 

1:06:24 I think it was recognized by Condoleezza Rice, among others, that they did make a pact with the devil. They essentially said we will do whatever it takes, regardless of morality, regardless of law, in order to protect the American people.

MAMDOUH HABIB (AUSTRALIAN) EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION PRISONER 2002-2005: 

1:06:47 They have like electric guns -- that’s what they use to go through your body with.

I have no nails, all of them – they pull them out.

NOWAK: 

1:06:59 These are very, very brutal forms of torture that create severe pain, physical pain, but at the same time create anguish and fear.

GILBERT: 

1:07:10 Binyam Mohamed was picked up in Pakistan. He was rendered to several secret bases of the United States. He was tortured. The torture included cutting all over his body, including his penis, and putting acid in the cuts.
 
BINYAM MOHAMED’S DIARY, READ BY HIS BROTHER VO:  [1:07:28]

They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor’s scalpel. One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make a cut and then stood still for maybe a minute and watched my reaction.

I was in agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress my feelings. But I was screaming.

ANDERS: 

1:07:52 I’ve talked to people who’ve said that there was an effort made to try to keep the president somewhat isolated from these decisions because they were so concerned about the possibility of the president being impeached some day.

They knew that what they were doing was illegal; they knew that what they were doing would bring shame to the world if the world found out about it.

GILBERT VO:  [1:08:22]

Binyam Mohamed was then sent to Guantanamo and charged with capital crimes by the Bush administration.

YVONNE BRADLEY, BINYAM MOHAMED’S ATTORNEY AT GITMO:  

1:08:30 There’s no reliable evidence that Mr. Mohamed was going to do anything to the United States.

ANDERS: 

Condoleezza Rice has been the key person, she has defended Guantanamo against the rest of the world.

RICE:

1:08:40 Guantanamo is a necessity because of the nature of the war on terror.

NOWAK: 

1:08:45 The only reason that the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay have been used in the fight against terrorism is that Guantanamo Bay is outside U.S. territory in the strict sense.

ANDERS: 

1:09:01 It was set up as a legal black hole in the view of the administration, as a place where there were no habeas rights, where there were no protections, where people could be tortured, abused. You would have no right to ever get out, now you’d have to be charged with a crime (ph).

RICE: 

1:09:16 No one that would like to shut down Guantanamo more than this administration. We don’t want to be the world’s jailists. 

But what do we do with the hundreds of dangerous people there who regularly say that if they are released they’re going to go back to killing Americans? Do you really want those people on the streets?

KESSLER: 

I threaten (ph) that Rice is the most ineffective national security advisor in U.S. history. She didn’t really manage or run the process of the National Security Council; she kind of let it run amuck.

WILKERSON: 

1:09:52 I think her mistakes were made because of a combination of things: personal ambition, eye on the prize, build my intimacy with the President. All of that contributed to what I think is going to be one of the worst tours by a national security advisor in the history of the position.

GEORGE W. BUSH: 

1:10:15 Dr. Condoleezza Rice, now Secretary Condoleezza Rice, our 66th Secretary of State.

(APPLAUSE)

ROTHKOPF: 

I think as Secretary of State she sought to undo some of the damage that was done to the first term.

RICE: 

1:10:32 Now it’s time to build on those achievements to make the world safer and even more free.

KESSLER VO: [1:10:44]
Rice and her staff worked hard at the beginning of her term as secretary of state to overcome her image as a weak national security advisor in order to create the illusion of a powerful diplomat who might even have presidential aspirations.

MABRY: 

1:11:26 A large number of African Americans were dying or stranded in New Orleans after the hurricane, and Condoleezza Rice famously went on vacation in New York right after the hurricane had hit. It was all over the Internet that Secretary Rice shops while New Orleans floods.

SPIKE LEE, FILMMAKER AND CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: 

1:11:42 I wanted to interview Condoleezza Rice when she was buying Ferragamo shoes on Fifth Avenue and went to see Spamalot while people were drowning.

MABRY: 

1:11:52 She was very surprised by the controversy. She said, these are not my accounts. That is not her job. And she was right of course. Those are not the accounts of the Secretary of State.

However, as she told me, she learned a lesson then. She learned that she’s also a black leader, she wasn’t just a Secretary of State. 

RICE: 

1:12:06 I was the highest ranking black official and it was hard to see. But what really did make me angry was the implication that some people made that President Bush allowed this to happen because these people were black.

FLANDERS: 

You had 250,000 people made homeless and you have no response for a week. There was a very big disparity in the way the African-Americans were treated as opposed to white people. And I think what really sticks in people’s craw about what Condoleezza Rice says was that racism had nothing to do with it.

RICE: 

1:12:39 I don’t believe for one minute that anybody allowed people to suffer because they were African-American. I just don’t believe it.

FLANDERS: 

1:12:46 I think a lot of African-Americans looked to her as a sort of trailblazing hero and on that day realized, she’s not one of us, she doesn’t care about us and she doesn’t care about the situation we live in

BILL O’REILLY, TALK SHOW HOST VO:  [1:12:58]

Does it hurt your feelings when some anti-Bush people say that you’re a shill for him and sold out your race?

RICE: 

1:13:02 Oh I don’t – come on. Why would I worry about something like that? 

Bill, the fact of the matter is I’ve been black all my life, nobody needs to help me know how to be black.

MABRY: 

1:13:27 If you look at the whole arc of Rice, she has gotten more and more powerful over the term of this administration. At the beginning, she was weaker than Rumsfeld, absolutely. He rolled her and everyone else in the administration.

1:13:40 She learned, she grew and by the end of 2004, by the end of the first George W. Bush administration, you see Rice actually taking things back from Rumsfeld…

MABRY VO: [1:13:50]

… taking responsibilities back from the Department of Defense, and from the State Department, and bringing it into the National Security Council with her.

By 2006, Rumsfeld is out. Rice is at the height of her power, and now she’s actually more powerful than I think she’s ever been before.

DAVID PRICE, U.S. CONGRESSMAN: 

1:14:31 The State Department for years now has used private security contractors to protect its personnel. Secretary Rice should have known that there was an accountability problem. There was a marked contrast, which, believe me, our service people noticed, where the military were under a strict code of conduct and were subject to the code of military justice. And these contractors working along side of them basically answered to no one.

WILKERSON: 

You would go into a bar in Baghdad for example, you would see soldiers who couldn’t even drink a 3.2 beer. You’d see contractors in there who had whiskey, beer. They’d be drunk, and they’d be fully armed. This was crazy.

PRICE: 

1:15:15 This was a disaster waiting to happen. And then the major disaster did happen on her watch.

KESSLER VO:  [1:15:26]

On September16th 2007, Blackwater guards who were working for the State Department opened fire on the central square in Baghdad. Witnesses say that the guards did this, even though the attack is unprovoked.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE): 

1:15:38 The driver of a Volkswagen was going backwards out of fear.

ABDUL WAHHAB, BLACKWATER MASSACRE SURVIVOR: 

1:15:47 One of the armored cars hit my car. So I opened the door and dropped myself in the street because I thought they want to kill me.

ERICA RAZOOK, AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: 

1:15:55 What resulted in that day was the death of 17 Iraqi civilians.

 JOHN SARBANES, U.S. CONGRESSMAN: 

1:16:02  I’m curious to know whether you regret the failures of the department to conduct the kind of oversight of these outside contractors that appears to have occurred.

RICE: 

I consider it my responsibility both to acknowledge it, and to try and fix it.

SARBANES: 

1:16:17 That wasn’t my question. My question was whether you regret the failures of your department, whether you regret your failures to conduct oversight -- ?

RICE: 

I certainly regret that we did not have the kind of oversight that I would have insisted upon.

RAZOOK: 

1:16:33 Blackwater contractors say that they were defending themselves and that they were receiving fire, but what came out of one of the hearings was that Blackwater has been involved in hundreds of shootings, an average of 1.4 a week. And 84 percent of the time they shot first, Blackwater personnel shot first.

RICE: 

1:16:54 We need protection for our diplomats and I’m quite certain that with goodwill we can resolve this.

FLANDERS: 

1:17:03 Condoleezza Rice has to be the public face of our foreign policy. And the only way we’ve been able to advance and implement the foreign policy she supports is thanks to the use of private firms like Blackwater.

FLANDERS VO: [1:17:13]

To be able to use Blackwater that both obscures how many soldiers are actually fighting, because half of them are fighting under private corporate cover …

FLANDERS:

1:17:22 … and we never get the data on who’s there and what injuries they’re sustaining.

FLANDERS VO:

It also cuts the cost in dollar terms because it’s not part of the formal budget. The cost is there but we don’t see it in our military spending.

RICE: 

1:17:34 In this war zone I don’t think that people have been either reckless …

UNIDENTIFIED BLACKWATER CONTRACTOR:

I got all these fuckers right here.

UNIDENTIFIED BLACKWATER CONTRACTOR: 

Jesus Christ, it’s like a fucking turkey shoot.

RICE:

1:17:42 … nor have they been trying somehow to shield people in this circumstance.

RAZOOK: 

1:17:47 Secretary Rice granted immunity to these contractors for prosecution in the United States. And what that means, given the fact that contractors enjoy immunity in Iraq, is if you can’t have the trial in Iraq and you can’t have a trial in the U.S., you’ve essentially pardoned these crimes.

ANDERS: 
1:18:08 The State Department then offered $10,000 to the families of the victims in exchange for an agreement not to sue.

RAZOOK: 

1:18:16 In fact the State Department was actually trying to negotiate down the compensation to victims, saying, we don’t want to give Iraqis a reason to try and get killed. Even with scores of reports that all showed this very gruesome picture of the way Blackwater operates, the State Department, and Condoleezza Rice as the head of the State Department, renewed Blackwater’s contract.

KESSLER: 

1:18:43 The continuing support of Blackwater by the State Department has fueled anti-American violence. Blackwater mercenaries have been lynched.

PRICE: 

1:18:54 All I can see is a dereliction of duty. It puts our military personnel in jeopardy. It contradicts out values. It makes us out to be hypocrites. On virtually any level you’d want to assess this, this is a disaster for our country.

RICE: 

1:19:40 I’m very happy to get up in the morning, read the newspaper and not think I have to do anything about what’s in it.

RICE VO:  [1:19:50]

I’ve been getting a little more sleep, playing a little more piano, playing a little golf.

I’m headed back to a wonderful life in California where eventually I can end up back in the classroom.

MARJORIE COHN, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD: 

1:20:08 By nailing this petition to the door, we are asking the university to sever its ties with the war criminal Condoleezza Rice who has absolutely no business being a tenured professor at Stanford University, and we hope to continue this pressure until Condoleezza Rice and her other fellow war criminals are tried, convicted and punished for their crimes.

JEREMY COHN, STANFORD UNDERGRADUATE:

1:20:34 Considering the incidents at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, including the indefinite internment of detainees there, how are we supposed to continue promoting America as this guiding light of democracy?  How are we supposed to win hearts and minds in the world as long as we continue with these actions?

RICE: 

1:20:50 Well, first of all, you do what’s right. That’s the most important thing.

1:20:57 Three thousand Americans died in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

JEREMY COHN, STANFORD UNDERGRADUATE: 

1:21:02 Five hundred thousand died in World War II.

RICE:  No –

(CROSSTALK)

COHN: 

And we did not torture – we did not torture prisoners of war.

RICE: 

1:21:06 And we didn’t torture anybody here either.

WILKERSON:  

If Jesus Christ were speaking to Condi Rice I think he would say the idea that you’re saving tens of thousands of lives by torturing someone – the one doesn’t weigh more than the other.
1:21:24 If you do it to the least of these you do it unto me.

MABRY: 

1:21:28 In Rice’s mind I don’t think it’s a difficult thing to, one the one hand believe in turning the other cheek in a Christian context personally, and then professionally say, it’s your baby, go with it. I think Rice would have no problem with those contradictions. I think she would keep them separate in her own mind.

WILKERSON: 

1:21:46 I think John Rice would have been appalled. I think Americans should be appalled that Dr. Rice was sitting there giving the authority to waterboard.

JANE MAYER, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST, THE NEW YORKER: 

1:22:00 The Red Cross is probably as good a source as you can get on this, and they defined the U.S. program as torture. Just – they said – not tantamount to torture, it is torture. And that one of the top people in the U.S. government did this could be equivalent to war crimes.

MAYER: 

1:22:17 Since the founding of America, George Washington made a point of saying that when there were captives in war, we were going to treat them humanely. And what the Bush administration did was say, we’ll only treat them humanely in accordance with our military necessity. Meaning, when we want to we will, when we don’t want to we won’t.

GILBERT: 
1:22:37 By Article 6, Section 2 of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, treaties signed by the United States are the highest law of the land. The United States signed the Convention Against Torture in 1988 and the Geneva Conventions in 1949. They bar the crime of torture.

GEORGE W. BUSH VO:  [1:23:09]

Common Article 3 says that there will be no outrages upon human dignity…

BUSH: [1:23:16]
It’s very vague. What does that mean?

NOWAK: 

1:23:22 The Bush administration maintained that this a war situation and since these are illegal enemies combatants, even the Geneva Conventions only apply in part.

GILBERT:

1:23:34 One of the articles in the Convention Against Torture says even in war, or in threat of war, you may not torture.

RICE: 

1:23:45 We were told nothing that violates our obligations of the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition if it was authorized by the president it did not violate our obligations of the Convention Against Torture. Alright?

VAUGHN: 

There’s a very strong contradiction between the old Condi that we knew and the neo-Condi. She is now an apologist for war crimes and torture that the United States has actually prosecuted as war crimes.

1:24:31 For example, waterboarding after World War II, which Americans prosecuted Japanese officers for.

NOWAK:  [1:24:40]
There is an obligation, an obligation under the Convention Against Torture, to investigate every single allegation of torture just to find out the tools: what happened, who is responsible. Then there is also an obligation to bring this person to justice.

RICE: 

1:25:02 Torture, and conspiracy to commit torture, are crimes under U.S. law, wherever they may occur in the world.

ANDERS: 

1:25:12 You can be sitting in your office in the White House or the State Department, and if you’re making decisions that are authorizing, ordering, facilitating a crime being committed, you’re responsible for that crime.

SEAN PENN, ACTOR/ACTIVIST: 

1:25:25 Condoleezza Rice should be in fucking jail.

GEORGE W. BUSH: 

1:25:29 Dr. Condoleezza Rice is an honest, fabulous person and America is lucky to have her service, period.

BARACK OBAMA, U.S. PRESIDENT, 2009- 
Obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.

RICE: 

1:25:52 I’m sure there will be dissertations written about mistakes the Bush administration made. And I’ll probably even oversee some of them at Stanford University.

1:26:01 But I don’t regret that we liberated Iraq. That I don’t regret.

GILBERT: 

1:26:12 I think Josef Korbel would turn over in his grave at what Condoleezza Rice and the Bush administration have done.

FELIX: 

1:26:21 We’re an entirely isolated nation and our reputation has eroded so much. And she is responsible for a lot of that.

ROTHKOPF: 

1:26:33 She didn’t analyze properly. She didn’t execute properly. She led to terrible policies. She undercut some of the most precious things that the United States has going for it. But that doesn’t mean that she didn’t overcome great odds of getting where she was going. And so as a human story, I think you can appreciate it. And as a policy story you can recognize what an incredible disappointment it was.

UPCHURCH: 

1:27:00 As she gets older she’s going to really realize that there are some things she missed in life, and that’s having a family. 

UPCHURCH VO: [1:27:10]

She chased her dream.

UPCHURCH:

She chose power over love.

WILKERSON: 

1:27:18 A large part of what Dr. Rice’s hubris was -- her Shakespearean flaw – was this ambition for power. I can rise above almost anything else as long as I am increasing my power and getting what I want.

[1:27:45]

End Credits