Condi Gets Her Shot

By Massimo Calabresi

In one of the photo albums in her West Wing office, Condoleezza Rice keeps a picture of herself and President George W. Bush in a rowboat on a pond at the President's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Bush is standing at one end, peering over the edge at the bass in his stocked fishing hole. Rice is sitting at the other end, visibly uncomfortable. She may love talking sports with the President, but she's no fan of the water. "She can swim, but she doesn't like it," says a friend. "She and the outdoors are only on distant acquaintance."

It is a measure of Rice's success at building their relationship that Bush is comfortable testing her, even during the off-hours. She started out as his tutor on foreign affairs when he was still Governor of Texas. But once she became his National Security Adviser, "her primary job was to understand the President and understand how he wanted to be served," says former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Rice's previous boss and mentor. "And she did that brilliantly." Now that Bush has nominated her to be his Secretary of State, the question is where she stands on the foreign policy fights of the day. Despite four years as one of the Administration's most vocal advocates on this front, Rice has shown few fixed ideological moorings.

She has changed positions dramatically on several issues, shifting from a hard-nosed student of realpolitik to a true believer in Bush's vision of spreading democracy from Morocco to Afghanistan. Her transformation "was a bit of an iterative process," she told TIME last month. "One of the President's contributions had been to remind us all, again, of the link between our security and our values."

She originally rebuffed attempts by Russian President Vladimir Putin to build relations with the Administration but then accepted him as an ally after Bush famously said he had looked into Putin's soul. When King Abdullah of Jordan first proposed in the summer of 2002 that Bush launch a road map to peace for the Arab-Israeli conflict, Rice tried to block it but later became a fervent backer. In 2000 she scorned the use of U.S. troops for nation building, but has undertaken monumental military reconstruction projects in Afghanistan and Iraq. She led the hard-liners' charge to unilaterally abrogate the antiballistic-missile treaty with Russia but showed a multilateralist streak by backing Powell's push to engage the U.N. ahead of war in Iraq.

Critics say that more often than not she simply has settled into orbit around the real power centers of U.S. foreign policy: Vice President Dick Cheney and his ally Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "She's getting this job because she's not a threat," says retired Lieut. General William Odom of the conservative Hudson Institute. When Rice tried to impose order on prewar planning, Rumsfeld ignored her. Vice President Cheney established a broad and powerful shadow National Security Council early in the Administration and used his close relationship with Bush to drive White House decision making. Yet some foreign diplomats praise her all-business style as the executor of Bush's will, compared with the image-heavy operation of Powell. "When Powell comes, he's got hordes of reporters," says a diplomat. "When Condi comes, she's got no reporters; there are no photo ops. She's there for the kill."

Rice is virtually certain to be confirmed by the Senate, not least because few Democrats want to be on the record voting against the first black woman named Secretary of State. Still, she will undoubtedly be grilled about her record and management. She faced criticism for placing counterterrorism low on her list of priorities in the nine months before 9/11. And she shares the blame both for letting the now discredited allegations that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa get into Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech and for hyping the significance of high-strength aluminum tubes Iraq tried to buy abroad.

Rice's biggest task in her current job is still unfinished: overseeing postwar-Iraq reconstruction. A year ago she publicly wrested control of that portfolio from Rumsfeld and, with her deputy Robert Blackwill, took a pragmatic approach, accommodating popular religious leaders' demands for an early transfer of sovereignty and nationwide elections. That bought the U.S. some goodwill but increased the chances of a pro-Iran regime taking power.

Washington hard-liners worry that Rice won't stand with them once she faces the moderating influences of Congress and foreign leaders. They say it was British Prime Minister Tony Blair who convinced her the U.S. needed U.N. support for a war in Iraq in August 2002. "She does have this vestigial desire to be loved by the Establishment," says a senior Administration official. At least she knows she doesn't have to win the affection of the man who nominated her. After President Bush sneaked off to Baghdad for a Thanksgiving dinner last November, he laughed about how he and Rice had eluded the press, pulling baseball caps over their eyes. "We looked like a normal couple," he said. With Rice's new job, that marriage is about to undergo some big tests in public. --With reporting by John F. Dickerson with Bush

With reporting by John F. Dickerson with Bush