Tough Love

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.