The Condi Fallacy

Unless there's a wild surprise and Condoleezza Rice is chosen as John McCain's vice presidential nominee, she will probably fade into relative obscurity after January 20. She could enjoy the vaunted life of a former secretary of state, lucrative corporate board memberships like the ones she held before being appointed National Security Adviser in 2001. She was on the Chevron board as well as those for Hewlett Packard and Charles Schwab. And she could continue speaking out on foreign policy issues. But it will be a life lived mostly out of the spotlight.

I've tried to understand why Condi Rice is such an enigma. On one hand, she has this incredible life story, growing up in Birmingham, Alabama at the time of the civil rights movement, and she lost a close friend in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church. Her upward trajectory is well known to the University of Denver where she studied under Joseph Korbel, the father of Madeleine Albright, the only other female secretary of state. She's a concert pianist, Soviet expert, adviser to George H.W. Bush, Stanford provost, and finally national security adviser and secretary of state.

When you meet Condi Rice, you're pretty bowled over. She's incredibly poised and coifed and confident. I've interviewed her a couple of times and each time I left pretty darn impressed.

And then there is the record.

The role of national security adviser, since it was created during the Truman years, has been to be the traffic cop of the foreign policy and defense bureaucracies. Inevitably, the State Department and the Defense Department will clash. It's in their nature. And invariably the national security adviser has to sort it out.

During the first Bush term Rice, for all her vaunted competence, allowed State and Defense to be at loggerheads. The vast State Department planning for securing Iraq after the occupation was shelved. Defense took the lead and chaos ensued. Never mind the fact that Rice was an advocate for a war that turned out to be a trillion-dollar mess. Her mismanagement of her coordinating role is pretty amazing.

As Secretary of State in the Bush term she's done some good things. She's shown more softening towards negotiating with Iran and North Korea and less of the hard line that Bush displayed in his first term. On this Georgia mess of recent weeks, I'm pretty amazed by what a back seat role the U.S. played in the negotiations. It's not that Rice and Bush weren't on the phone, but clearly the lead player was French President Nicholas Sarkozy. He's the one who jetted between Moscow and Tbilisi to broker the deal—if it can be called that—that stopped the heaviest of the fighting. Where was Condi, the Soviet expert? It's hard to imagine a Henry Kissinger or a George Shultz, her Hoover Institution mentor, staying in Washington during a crisis like this. She's supposed to go to the region next week and not a moment too soon.

Is there a lesson here for business folks? I think it's that the appearance of competence and executive authority can be misleading. It's not enough to look the part or to have an incredible life story. Sometimes you have to go by results. Rice has many wonderful qualities, but being a great secretary of state, arguably, isn't one of them.

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