Princess of Speed:
Three and a Half Hours with the Secretary of State

by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
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The hotel is at the other end of the government district, near Capitol Hill and the Library of Congress, where I would present a lecture on a classical Brazilian author the next day. When I tell the taxi driver that we have to be at the State Department in twenty minutes, his black forehead wrinkles. That might be difficult, he says, because of a Latino demonstration against the new immigration laws. Nervously I ask if there is some shortcut and add in a half whisper that I have an appointment with the Secretary. "Good girl," says the driver jovially but only mildly impressed, "not easy in that government." This single empirical case confirms how, compared to her colleagues, Condoleezza Rice receives astonishingly high job approval ratings.

As if it were responding to the driver's equanimity, the traffic begins to move, and the taxi arrives at the State Department at ten minutes before seven. The building displays a particular architectural brutality that must have expressed the euphoria of the years after the Second World War, and the multiple concrete blockades make me wonder if I would ever get inside. However the examination of my documents is polite, and at the next hurdle, reminiscent of the security lines at American airports, the officials are in a joking mode: "You don't look like a terrorist, man," says the colossal guard in a white shirt. At the end of the security check stands a young man, correctly dressed, who pronounces my name correctly in the tone of a question. He leads me through the dark hall to the elevator; when we arrive at the third floor, he asks me to sit down in an elegant, eighteenth-century style chair in the Marshall Room. My attention is immediately drawn to a framed original document, signed by the former Secretary of State Marshall, which authorized the nutritional care for "the children of Europe" in the post-war years. I was born in Germany in 1948: a "Marshall kid."

Ruth Elliot, with whom I arranged the appointment for this visit, is a former student of my university, where the Secretary was first a colleague and then Provost for seven years during the nineties. "Dr. Rice is waiting for you in her office," says the first white employee that I meet in the State Department, two minutes after seven. On this evening, no one would have guessed Dr. Rice to be fifty-two years old. In a bright turquoise suit and with her hair finally looking relaxed, she seems younger than two years ago in the White House, and the hemline of her skirt above the knee proves that as head of the State Department she has definitely not adopted the fashion styles of elderly ladies. Was it historical symbolism to have me wait in the Marshall Room, I ask, but evidently too softly for someone who has entered the realm of the Secretary: she takes me by the hand to lead me, with quick athletic steps, to the office of two colleagues concerned with public relations. The boss introduces me, notes with the pride of an engaged teacher that her former colleague has passed "the test," and we set off in the opposite direction, passing the flag with fifty stars in the reception room, which any visitor would recognize from many press photographs, to her office. I sink into a yellow chair, opposite the couch of the Secretary, who crosses her lovely legs and urges me, in a friendly if somewhat impatient tone, to pose the first question.

Three years ago, the portrait of the then National Security Advisor in the New Yorker, whose left-liberal readers found the account surprisingly positive, emphasized that at key moments in her academic and political career, Rice had relied on the power of her personal presence. I think of the photo in which, together with the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma, she is thanking the public for applause after the performance of a Brahms sonata, but I also recall Machiavelli's comment that great politicians limit their antagonists' options by the tempo of their actions. It is difficult to find the right start for the conversation that we had planned to conduct over the trans-Atlantic views of European and American intellectuals since the eighteenth century. I also know that in twenty minutes we have a dinner date with Stephen Krasner, Director of Policy Planning and another former colleague. Just in time I remark that Joschka Fischer describes his relationship to the United States with reference to the memory of the great promise of freedom that he heard as a young man in the songs of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, but for the fulfillment of which he waited in vain. "That was wonderful music," the concert pianist replies, as if she had been waiting for this opening. "It resonated with the mood of the Civil Rights Movement. But I think the promise has been kept. That is why today songs like these are the liturgy of civil rights." One can hardly contradict the terse opinion of the Secretary of State who grew up in the Alabama of racial discrimination. Instead of getting to the next question, I still want to know what singers like Dylan and Joplin mean to her personally.

But Dr. Rice stands up and confirms my fear that I had missed the rhythm for our conversation. She notes that there was still something urgent for her to finish before leaving and that I should wait a moment. When she left the room, my eyes fell on a small tower of baseball caps with an Iraqi flag on the spot where one expects the logo of a baseball team and with the slogan "The Future Will Be Better." I knew that my colleagues at home in California or in Germany would criticize these words as condescending or even naïve, and I started to wonder to whom the Secretary could give one of these caps without embarrassment. Behind the desk, between the shelves of books in English and Russian, mainly on historical topics, there are two football helmets, from the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Browns, a rather average team but a favorite of the Secretary, as well as balls from playoff games of the military academies. This is not unusual decoration in an American office, but Condoleezza Rice has the reputation of being a fan of hockey and football with professional competence. She was able to hire the most successful football coach in decades at Stanford, despite hesitations in the Athletics Department, and before switching to the State Department she apparently gave serious consideration to an official offer to become director of the National Football League. Next to the football shrine there are two computer screens. One of them displays the state seal on a navy blue background with the designation "Classified: Secretary of State."

On the way to the car, she sets up times for discussions the next morning, expresses delight at a set of new jogging shoes with the name "Condi," and moves in a perfect choreography of steps and motions with her body guard. As soon as she is in the car and has closed the seat belt, she engages the Planning Director, Krasner, in a sophisticated discussion of the aesthetic problems of program music. While some Russian composers succeeded in translating archaic feelings into their melodies, music, she claims, was not at all adequate for the articulation of meanings. Krasner replies with a question about the interplay of drama and music in opera, which she counters with a reference to recent musicological opinion: the libretto functions as a structure for the staging of voices and instruments, but the literary quality is normally third-rate.

Fifteen years ago at Stanford, even passionate opponents of the new Provost were impressed as to how quickly she learned and adopted highly complex positions, as if they were simple equations. People used to say that only some of the Nobel Prize winners in the natural sciences were her equals in analytic ability. That is why every meeting with Condoleezza Rice—like a libretto for music—turns into a staging form for an exchange of ideas, the rhythm and rules of which she controls through shifting attention, questions, and claims. At the start of our dinner in a restaurant on the Potomac, she seems intent on returning to the discussion we had broken off a half hour earlier. She states that she draws her hope for Iraq from the history of the American civil rights movement. Only an unconditional assertion of legality, undeterred by reversals, will help. Shiites and Sunnis have to accept that co-existence under the law is the only viable future. In a similar sense, the United States can leave no doubt that it respects the results of the parliamentary election in Palestine. Hamas remains a political enemy, but the legitimacy of the process that gave official standing to Hamas is not in question. I remark how claims like these would surprise European voters, but her tone would just be treated like so much noise from the center of power.

Such potential reactions do not appear to bother Rice or Krasner. They do not reply to my query as to whether they see symptoms of a new anti-Americanism in Europe. Their one basic orientation that is beyond question, however, is the absolute responsibility of the United States to pursue the establishment of parliamentary democracy across the globe. Both are fascinated by the duty to achieve this goal with political means. When the former professors report on the discussions in the State Department about inventing strategies beyond the polar logic of the Cold War, the stream of words accelerates, and they wax enthusiastic. While current Iranian politics is one of the themes that the legal office of the State Department obliged us to avoid, I nonetheless have the impression that a military intervention is not one of the options currently under discussion.

No topic is discussed that Condoleezza Rice does not link to a long-term successful solution in Iraq. It occupies her imagination. The current standing of European and Asian countries results from this focus. To my disappointment, the Secretary talks about sports only from a friendly distance, as if recalling the loves of one's youth. She admires the Brazilian President Lula, since he has shown how the traditions of the Left can make a significant contribution to the establishment of democratic normalcy. Her famous predecessors in the office, such as Thomas Jefferson, are her models, because they "were led by the idea of a peaceful co-existence among equals." The concept of this "idea" grows increasingly central in the course of the evening, as if the Secretary of State wants to prove that a faithful Christian could also recognize the value of the Enlightenment tradition of separating state politics from religion. Her friends say that religion gives Condoleezza Rice a personal confidence in the victory of important ideas and values. She regards historical experience as a guideline for the pursuit of ideas. Yet she does this in a way that is so pragmatic and aware of power that it cannot be confused with the European tradition of "philosophy of history."

Our hostess asks us if we would like to see the dessert menu in a tone that, full of cordiality, made clear that she had no more time. Krasner and I recognize this moment from the former university provost. Perhaps our conversation had begun to bore her; perhaps she had begun to think of her next task. Any moment now, she would get up from the table and barely have patience for a departure with the friendliness that could round out the evening. Years ago, in a similar situation, I accompanied my colleague and neighbor on the short walk from my house to hers, and I recognized, too late, that my attentiveness was unwelcome.

In front of the restaurant, Krasner answers the one question that I had dared to ask as little as the advisors of Condoleezza Rice. His boss has devoted herself to the demands of Iraq policy with an intensity that prevents any entry into the arena of fundraising one year before the next presidential campaign. Still she may not have made a definitive decision yet. Her biographers agree that long-term career planning is not part of her repertoire. But long-term devotion to ideas is, I understand. The question is whether one shares her values.

This essay, which will appear in TELOS 136 (Fall 2006), was originally published in German in the July 2006 issue of Cicero. Translated by Russell A. Berman.