Susan Rice

Susan Rice
United States Ambassador to the United Nations- Nominee
Assuming office on or after January 20, 2009*
President	Barack Obama (elect)
Succeeding	Zalmay Khalilzad
United States Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs
In office 1997–2001
President	Bill Clinton
Preceded by	George Moose
Succeeded by	Walter H. Kansteiner, III
Personal details
Born	(1964-11-17) November 17, 1964 Washington, D.C.
Political party	Democratic
Spouse	Ian O. Cameron (m. 1992)
Children	two
upon Senate confirmation

Susan E. Rice (middle) at the USCIRF hearings (November 27, 2001).

This article is about the diplomat. For the designer, see Suzy Rice.

Susan Elizabeth Rice (born November 17, 1964) is an American foreign policy expert and President-elect Barack Obama's nominee for Ambassador to the United Nations. Rice served on the National Security Council and as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during Clinton's second term.

Biography

Rice grew up in Washington, D.C., in the Shepherd Park neighborhood. Her father, Emmett J. Rice, is a Cornell University economics professor and former governor of the Federal Reserve System. Her mother is education policy scholar Lois Dickson Fitt. Rice was a three-sport athlete, student council president, and valedictorian at National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., a private day girls' school. At the National Cathedral School, she played point guard in basketball and directed the offense, and acquired the nickname "Spo," short for "Sportin."

Growing up, her father told her to "never use race as an excuse or advantage", and as a young girl she "dreamed of becoming the first U.S. Senator from the District of Columbia". She also held "lingering fears" that her accomplishments would be diminished by people who attributed them to affirmative action.

Rice attended Stanford University, where she received a Truman Scholarship, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1986, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. On her graduation day, as she shook hands with University President Donald Kennedy, he said: "I know who you are." She and Condoleezza Rice, the current U.S. Secretary of State, are both female foreign policy experts of African American descent who have ties to Stanford University, but they have no known familial relationship.

Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, she attended New College, Oxford, where she earned a M.Phil. in 1988 and D.Phil. in 1990. The Chatham House-British International Studies Association honored her dissertation as the UK's most distinguished in international relations.

Rice's classmates and professors at Oxford included advocates of the role of the United Nations and international law (Sir Adam Roberts, Benedict Kingsbury), of global economic governance and international economic cooperation (Ngaire Woods, Don Markwell), and of a firm stance against Russian authoritarianism (Michael McFaul). Sir Adam Roberts is also an expert on international humanitarian intervention, a topic in which Rice has taken a close interest.

Rice married ABC News producer Ian O. Cameron in 1992; they had met as undergraduates at Stanford. They currently reside in Washington, D.C. with their two children.

Career

Rice was a foreign policy aide to Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential election. She was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, the global management consulting firm, in the early 1990s. While at McKinsey, Rice was affiliated with the Firm's Toronto office.

Rice served in the Clinton administration in various capacities: at the National Security Council from 1993 to 1997; as Director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping from 1993 to 1995; and as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs from 1995 to 1997. At an interagency teleconference in late April 1994, Rice stunned a few of the officials present when she asked: "If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?" Rice later conceded "If I said it, it was completely inappropriate, as well as irrelevant." After Washington provided a smokescreen for the multinational force that invaded neighboring Zaire from Rwanda in 1996 and overthrew the notorious dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, Rice told one acquaintance at the time: "Anything's better than Mobutu."

Assistant Secretary of State

Secretary of State Madeline Albright is a longtime mentor and family friend to Rice, who urged Clinton to appoint Rice as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in 1997. Rice was not the first choice of Congressional Black Caucus leaders, who considered Rice a member of "Washington's assimilationist black elite". Even at a confirmation hearing chaired by Senator Jesse Helms, Rice—who attended the hearing along with her infant son, whom she was then nursing—made a great impression on Senators from both parties and "sailed through the confirmation process". Rice was Assistant Secretary for African Affairs until Clinton left office in 2001.

Susan Rice was viewed by many officials and diplomats as very bright, but also as inexperienced and inflexible. Rice was considered "young, brilliant, and ambitious", and she worked to "integrate Africa in the global economy while at the same time aiming to increase U.S. national security". At the same time, she was criticized by detractors who considered her "authoritarian, brash, and unwilling to consider opinions that differ from her own", and reportedly having disputes from some career diplomats in the African bureau. Newsweek national correspondent Martha Brant wrote that:

When Rice left for the State Department after five years in the White House, a colleague gave her a Zulu shield. She would need it, the friend explained, to fight the entrenched foreign-service bureaucracy. In fact, the flak started flying even before Rice had moved to Foggy Bottom. She filled a job that for decades had been held by a series of middle-aged career Africanists. Longtime bureaucrats griped that she was too green, that she was a political hire. Some complained that she had the same problem as many Clinton appointees: youthful arrogance. "She doesn't know what she doesn't know," says one Africa expert who deals with her. "And she doesn't tolerate dissenters." Some of the African press suggested that Rice would have little influence with traditional African male leaders. "It may be splendidly progressive of Clinton to place his Africa policy in the care of relatively young women," wrote Simon Barber in the South African Business Day. "On the other hand, he's utterly ignoring a cultural reality." Rice dismisses that concern. "They have no choice but to deal with me on professional terms. I represent the United States of America," she says. "Yeah, they may do a double take, but then they have to listen to what you say, how you say it and what you do about what you say."

Outside government

Rice was managing director and principal at Intellibridge from 2001 to 2002. In 2002, she joined the Brookings Institution as senior fellow in the Foreign Policy and Global Economy and Development program. At Brookings she focuses on U.S. foreign policy, weak and failing states, the implications of global poverty, and transnational threats to security. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Rice served as a foreign policy adviser to John Kerry.

Rice was inducted into Stanford's Black Alumni Hall of Fame in 2002.

Obama Administration

Rice is currently on leave from the Brookings Institution, having served as a senior foreign policy advisor to Senator Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign. On November 5, 2008, Rice was named to the advisory board of the Obama-Biden Transition Project. On December 1, 2008, she was nominated by President-elect Obama to be the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, a position which he also upgraded to cabinet level. If confirmed, Rice will be the second youngest ever US Representative to the UN.

Affiliations

Susan Rice serves on the boards of several organizations, including the National Democratic Institute, the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, board of directors of the Atlantic Council, advisory board of Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, the board of directors of Bureau of National Affairs, board of directors of Partnership for Public Service, the Beauvoir School, and past member of the Internews Network's board of directors.

She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group.

Awards

• Recipient, Walter Frewen Lord prize, Royal Commonwealth Society, 1990
• Association prize, Chatham House-British Internat. Studies, 1992
• Samuel Nelson Drew Memorial award (co-recipient), NSC, 2000.

Criticism

On Oct 5 1998 an article appeared in Newsweek Magazine describing Rice as “widely seen by African diplomats and U.S. experts as bright but inexperienced and inflexible.”

The article also notes “Washington provided a smokescreen for the multinational force that invaded neighboring Zaire from Rwanda in 1996 and overthrew the notorious dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Administration sources insisted they had no prior knowledge of the offensive, but according to one highly placed strategist of the war, Washington had promised not to oppose such an incursion. It's a fine, Clintonian, distinction. ""Anything's better than Mobutu, Susan Rice told one acquaintance at the time. But in the view of many Africa specialists, Washington's tacit complicity in the violation of the Congo's borders was dangerously destabilizing.”

In September 2001 Samantha Power wrote in an Atlantic Monthly piece that while working at the national Security Council, Rice asked, during and interagency teleconference “If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?" However, in the same article Power also notices that Rice acknowledges the mistakes made and "feels that she has a debt to repay."

In a 2002 op-ed piece in the Washington Post, former Ambassador to Sudan Timothy Carney and news contributor Mansoor Ijaz implicated Rice and counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke in missing an opportunity to neutralize Osama bin Laden while he was still in Sudan. They write that Sudan and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright were ready to cooperate on intelligence potentially leading to bin Laden, but that Rice and Clarke persuaded National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to overrule Albright. Similar allegations have been made by Vanity Fair contributing editor David Rose and Richard Miniter, author of Losing bin Laden, in a November 2003 interview with World.

While the writings of Carney, Ijaz, Rose and Miniter each claim that Sudan offered to turn bin Laden over to the US and that Rice was central in the decision not to accept the offer, The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States (the 9-11 Commission) concluded in part “Sudan's minister of defense, Fatih Erwa, has claimed that Sudan offered to hand Bin Ladin over to the United States. The Commission has found no credible evidence that this was so. Ambassador Carney had instructions only to push the Sudanese to expel Bin Ladin. Ambassador Carney had no legal basis to ask for more from the Sudanese since, at the time, there was no indictment out-standing.”

External Links

• The Ethiopian-Eritrean War: U.S. Policy Options Before the House Committee on International Relations, Africa Subcommittee, May 25, 1999. Retrieved 2008-05-13.
• Into Africa
• Stanford Magazine Martha Brant "She's young, she's impatient, she's blunt. Susan Rice is a different kind of diplomat." Jan/Feb 2000
• Brookings Institution biography
• Fox News Interview with Laura Ingraham
• Interview with Dave Ross on MyNorthwest.com