It's the Condi Rice Show

By Mike Allen

Back in 2003, Condoleezza Rice, then the National Security Adviser, decided that U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer's plan for getting a government going in Iraq wasn't viable. Without telling Bremer or his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Rice went to President George W. Bush after her summer vacation to put the viceroy on a shorter leash. She knew that the President exercised with Bremer when he visited Washington, appreciated his strong Catholic faith and treated him like a Cabinet member. But she drew on her even deeper bond with the President. She soft-pedaled her views of Bremer's record so as not to make it personal and got herself put in charge of Iraq policy.

The episode, a precursor of Rice's outmaneuvering of Bush hard-liners when she became Secretary of State, is revealed in Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a forthcoming book about the Green Zone by the Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The details were confirmed for TIME by an official who was involved, who added a telling coda: Bremer actually liked the new arrangement because he "got to deal with Condi, who had the President's ear." Since moving out of the West Wing to take over State in early 2005, Rice has returned there often and has remained close to the President and First Lady. Now the President's hopes for becoming a Middle East peacemaker lie with the imperturbable and at times inflexible concert pianist and childhood championship ice skater he calls "an unsticker"--a solver of insoluble problems.

Rice announced before heading off to Israel and Lebanon last week that she was not after "a temporary solution," much to the consternation of Arab and European allies of the U.S. The New York Times ran a vivid front-page photo of Rice, eyes closed, holding her head as if in despair. In fact, she was wiping off perspiration that was pouring down her forehead in a broiling conference room in Rome. (The hall normally seats about 100 people but was packed with 1,000; firefighters showed up to remove doors to cool the place down.) Her goal is grander than the instant results demanded by her critics. She says she is after nothing less than a changed Middle East, which requires more than a cease-fire that could quickly be breached. As White House press secretary Tony Snow put it, the objective is to "create the conditions so that you not only have the piece of paper, you have the peace."

Rice has greater access and latitude than any Secretary of State since Henry Kissinger left government after Gerald Ford lost in 1976, and she has capitalized on every bit of it. Many senior officials at the National Security Council are Rice loyalists who date back to her days there, so the State Department and the White House work closely together and sometimes cut the Pentagon out, according to participants. Until now, she has won generally glowing marks for a record that includes offering the first substantive talks with Iran in 27 years. But some Bush aides were miffed that she embarked on what they sarcastically called the "Condi Rice Show" without a clearly attainable goal. Her initial round of diplomacy in the Israel-Hizballah hostilities was mostly portrayed as a failure, and she looked drained as she emerged from a meeting of world powers in Rome, where many allies had pushed to call for an immediate cease-fire.

Earlier this month Rice took her senior staff to the Wye River Conference Center on Maryland's Eastern Shore to plan the fall, including a presidential trip to the U.N. The former plantation was the site of Bill Clinton's negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. A reprise looks very far off to the Bush team. Nevertheless, friends say, Rice, 51, is thriving in her higher-profile role, working from 6:30 a.m. until 7:30 or 8 at night, then treating herself to tennis, the Kennedy Center and brunches with friends on weekends. Roughly one Sunday a month she has her chamber-music group over to her Watergate apartment.

She worked on the National Security Council of President George H.W. Bush, and some Bush-family aides say Rice's election as the first black and first woman President could be one of the clan's greatest legacies. Although no national race appears to be in the offing for 2008, friends hope she will eventually run statewide in California. Rice's staff recognizes that the speculation about her political future may be useful, and has overhauled the optics of the job to give her coverage greater pizazz. In Washington she appears with world leaders in front of a fireplace that could be in the Oval Office. Abroad, she is photographed stepping from a plane with an almost presidential wave, a shot that Colin Powell's staff rarely facilitated. "The time for diplomacy is now," she said at her confirmation hearing. It was a message not only to the world but also to parts of the Administration that had thwarted Powell.

Rice's staff asked State Department historians for the dossiers of successful Secretaries. One characteristic they had in common was clout. She can check that off. Now she must show she can use it.

With reporting by Elaine Shannon, traveling with Rice