Tough diplomat Rice caught in Benghazi tangle

U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s chances of becoming secretary of state have not been derailed by the Benghazi attack, insist aides to President Barack Obama.
U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s chances of becoming secretary of state have not been derailed by the Benghazi attack, insist aides to President Barack Obama.

— Susan Rice was playing stand-in on the morning of Sept. 16 when she appeared on all five Sunday news programs, a few days after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton would have been the White House’s logical choice to discuss the chaotic events in the Middle East, but she was drained after a harrowing week, administration officials said. Even if she had not been consoling the families of those who died, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, Clinton typically steers clear of the Sunday shows.

So instead, Rice, the ambassador to the U.N., delivered her much-parsed account of the episode. Reciting talking points supplied by intelligence agencies, she said that the Benghazi siege appeared to be a spontaneous protest rather than a premeditated terrorist attack. Within days, Republicans in Congress were calling for her head.

In her sure-footed ascent of the foreign-policy ladder, Rice has rarely shrunk from a fight. But now that she appears poised to claim the top rung — White House aides say she is President Barack Obama’s favored candidate for secretary of state — the sharp-tongued, self-confident diplomat finds herself in the middle of a bitter feud in which she is largely a bystander.

“Susan had a reputation, fairly or not, as someone who could run a little hot and shoot from the hip,” said John Norris, a foreign-policy expert at the Center for American Progress. “If someone had told me that the biggest knock on her was going to be that she too slavishly followed the talking points on Benghazi, I would have been shocked.”

At the U.N., and in posts in the Bill Clinton White House, Rice, who turned 48 on Saturday, has earned a reputation as a blunt advocate, relentless on issues such as pressuring the regime in Sudan or intervening in Libya to prevent a slaughter by Moammar Gadhafi.

She was a Rhodes scholar, has degrees from Stanford and Oxford, a card file of contacts and a relationship with Obama sealed during his 2008 campaign. So her ascension to lead the State Department would be less a blow for diversity — she would, after all, be the second black woman named Rice to hold the job — than the natural capstone to a fast-track career.

Yet the firestorm over Benghazi raises more basic questions: Is Rice the best candidate to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton as the nation’s chief diplomat? Does she have the diplomatic finesse to handle thorny problems in the Middle East? And even if Obama gets the votes for her confirmation, has the episode so tainted her that it would be hard for her to thrive in the job?

Rice’s supporters say she has compiled a solid record at the U.N., winning the passage of resolutions that impose strict sanctions on Iran and North Korea. Diplomats praise her energetic negotiating style, though her peremptory manner has bruised some egos. But even those who back her tend to emphasize factors such as her ties to Obama, an advantage that Hillary Clinton, for all her celebrity, did not have.

“Given that he’s probably the most withholding president on foreign policy since [Richard] Nixon, if anyone can get him to delegate, not dominate, it’s Rice,” said Aaron David Miller, a longtime Middle East negotiator now at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “That would be good for her and for our foreign policy.”

While some in the State Department are wary of her, recalling her blustery style as assistant secretary for African affairs in the Clinton administration, Rice has a core of support among Obama’s aides, particularly those who worked with her on the 2008 campaign. They insist that Benghazi will not derail her chances.

Still, other longtime Washington observers question whether Obama would risk a battle over his secretary of state when he needs to cut a deal with Republicans on the budget and taxes.

“The attacks are patently unfair and mean-spirited,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. “Susan’s record at the U.N. is exceptional.” In addition to Rice’s early support and advice on foreign policy, he said, she had been a friend of Obama’s for a long time.

The daughter of Emmett J. Rice, a governor in the Federal Reserve System, and Lois Dickson Rice, an education policy expert, Rice spent her childhood mixing with family friends such as Madeleine Albright, another secretary of state.

At 28, she was an aide in President Clinton’s National Security Council, where she once questioned embracing the term “genocide” in Rwanda because it could put Clinton in an awkward position in midterm elections. At the State Department, diplomats recall her lecturing leaders in Africa who were decades her senior.

Rice’s relationship with Hillary Clinton began on chilly terms, officials said, in part because Rice embraced Obama’s candidacy rather than Clinton’s. In the early days of the administration, one former aide said, Clinton’s and Rice’s offices would occasionally issue competing statements on the same topic.

But over time, representatives of both women say, they have developed a good rapport. They see plenty of each other, with Rice keeping an office at the State Department and commuting between New York and Washington, where her husband and two children live.

In New York, Rice has had little use for the bland artifice of diplomatic language. When Russia and China blocked a resolution condemning the crackdown in Syria, Rice wrote on Twitter, “Disgusted that Russia and China prevented the U.N. Security Council from fulfilling its sole purpose.” At the White House, she tangled with Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, J. Scott Gration, and became so immersed in that country’s looming split that subordinates termed her the “Sudan desk officer.”

By her own account, Rice’s fervor is fueled by the Clinton administration’s inaction in Rwanda. Years later, she told Samantha Power, then a journalist writing about the episode, that “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.”

Last year, working with Power (now herself in the National Security Council), Clinton, and other officials, Rice helped persuade the president to back NATO military intervention in Libya.

In some ways, friends say, Rice’s appearance on the Sunday shows underlines how she has evolved from a headstrong young staff member into a disciplined senior member of Obama’s team.

“She’s really tough, but there is a difference in how she’s tough,” said Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser. “During the Clinton administration, there was a feeling that she had to be tough to earn her place at the table. Now she’s more comfortable.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/18/2012

Upcoming Events