The political memoir
has become de righeur in American
culture and political life. These books
seem primarily self-serving, an attempt to portray the writer as playing an
important role in history and as having acted in the best interests of his or
her constituents. Often, the memoirist includes
explanations for actions they took or accounts of battles they fought during
their time in the seat of power. Some
writers, like Samantha Power in her recent memoir, are excellent
storytellers. Others seek to put their
own spin on their participation in historical events.
Susan Rice, author of Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For (Simon & Schuster,
2019), focuses her book on the major events she was involved in first in the
Clinton administration and then the Obama administration where she was the first
black U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and later, became Obama’s National
Security Advisor. On these pages, she is
obstinate, driven, intense, competitive, and direct, making her a figure of
controversy at times and an unyielding force when making her case on the world
stage. Hence, she spends a lot of time
here explaining her reasoning and actions in the face of controversial crises like
the embassy attack in Benghazi, the explosion of Ebola into a major worldwide
health problem, the numerous civil wars and tribal conflicts in Africa, and the
rising up of the Arab Spring.
Her writing is filled
with memorable images. For instance, she
describes staff at the White House changing out Obama’s Oval to redecorate for
the soon-to-arrive Donald Trump on Inauguration Day. The Obama carpet had a quote from Martin
Luther King Jr. on its edge: “The arc of
the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Little did we know that this was not simply a
change of decor but a profound and seemingly unending negation of morals and values
reflected by the Trump administration.
She writes movingly of
her parents, her role models in everything.
Her mother passed away as President Obama was leaving office, making the
end of Rice’s era doubly poignant. The
twin elements of education and service run through her family and influenced
her from an early age. She had to push
herself through “whatever pain” she experienced to exceed expectations at “school,
university, in [her] work, and as a daughter, wife and mother.” She tells us she does not like being wrong
(who does?) and from early on, she could be abrasive but would characterize
herself in the same breath as an optimist.
It is from her parents that she learned never to doubt herself. Her mother admonished her to never use race
as an excuse for anything.
If style is character,
we see a lot of Rice’s style and
character on these pages. She singles
out today’s media machine, saying that Americans lack a common base of facts
and instead, rely on self-selected stories that “reinforce our personal
preconceptions.” Therefore, we lack the
skill of discourse, of supporting one’s opinion, and having a broad spectrum of
knowledge about issues. At times in her
career, she alienated her own people and was considered “overly directive” and “intimidated
others so much” that her staff felt stifled and unable to offer other
perspectives. Through it all, she
learned “that leadership is more like conducting a symphony than performing as
a virtuoso player of another single instrument,” and that “the most enduring
outcomes are not always the swiftest ones.”
In considering her past, she tells us she has learned “that sometimes
patience is the best strategy for achieving the purest justice.”
Rice defends herself
with the classic line that she was not there to make friends or win a
popularity contest. In one instance,
when she brings her baby to a meeting to be able to keep up with her breast
feeding, she refuses to apologize for making others uncomfortable. “My direct style did not endear me to every
one of those seasoned diplomats,” she writes.
“What I cared about was that I was granted the respect and cooperation
necessary to ‘get shit done.’ And, if I
did, I know those many who cared foremost about outcomes might eventually
accept me on the merits.”
I must admit, her
abrasive style often seems a bit extreme in the situation. She talks about her marriage to a white
journalist from Canada and the undercurrent of race in their relationship. “Sometimes I joke with Ian,” she writes, “that
I am still waiting for that fateful morning when ‘he wakes up and calls me
nigger.’” We need to be more frank and
open about race in this country and not be intimidated by language, but the use
of that term in that context made me uncomfortable. Another problematic part of the book is when
she discusses her battles with the late Richard Holbrooke. At one point, he so frustrated her that she
raises her middle finger at him from across a table during a meeting. I found this a little immature.
The last third of the
book is powerful and moving: the end of
the Obama era, the death of her parents, leaving government service, and living
through the extreme disappointment and trepidation over the incoming Trump
fiasco. The new president actually
accused her of criminal behavior, a charge for which she was decidedly not culpable. The Paris Climate Accords, the Iran Nuclear
Deal, and the Affordable Care Act—all of these events and their demise, as she
makes clear, are now and continue to be devastating to Americans and the world. Rice believes Trump has made us less secure
as a nation, and created destabilization across the globe. He worships dictators and strong men, thugs
and criminals she made a career out of controlling with sanctions and
interventions. One can feel Rice’s pain
over the things the Obama administration worked so hard to bring about only to
see them debased and destroyed by Trump.
In her analysis of the
current condition of our culture, she writes:
“Civil discourse has suffered further from Americans’ growing penchant
to filter out information we prefer not to hear—whether through the issuance of
‘trigger warnings’ in classrooms, efforts to constrain conservatives or
pro-Israel groups on college campuses, or the right’s reactionary dismissal of
progressive views as ‘un-American’ or ‘socialist’ or identity politics…We can
now select what ‘facts’ we want to believe and discount those we do not.”
Susan Rice does defend
her positions, her arguments, her actions and opinions on these pages. Reading Tough
Love made me think that we have not heard the last from her. In an age where we lack moral and ethical
leaders, she would be a welcomed voice.
