Condi or Rise of the Vulcans

Condi: The Life of a Steel Magnolia

Author: Mary Beth Brown

An in-depth look at the life, faith, and achievements of one of America's most fascinating women.

Condoleezza Rice rose from humble beginnings in racially segregated Alabama to become an accomplished classical pianist, Stanford University professor and provost, US national security advisor, and secretary of state. In this gripping and inspiring book, Mary Beth Brown artfully explores the roles played in Condi's life by her parents, mentors, faith, and key events and how those things have prepared her for her present position of power and global influence.

In 2005, Condi topped Forbes' list of the world's most powerful women. In 2007, she topped GQ's ranking of Washington's most powerful players. Not only does she appeal to moderates and Republicans, she draws women, African Americans, and Hispanic voters from the Democratic Party. Additionally, Condi may emerge as a strong vice presidential candidate, a possibility the book explores.

Table of Contents:

Introduction     VII
Prologue     XI
Transforming America     1
Entering a New World     19
A Strong Family Heritage     31
Childhood Matters     47
Becoming a Steel Magnolia     65
Not Your Average Teenager     83
Education Is the Way to Success     97
Professor Rice     111
Dealing with the Soviet Union     135
Tackling a Monstrous Deficit     153
Condi the Campaigner     175
Advising a President     191
The Most Powerful Woman in the World     217
Epilogue     239
Bibliography     243
Notes     273
Index     305
Acknowledgments     317
About the Author     319

Book review: Organisatorische Kultur und Führung

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet

Author: James Mann

When George W. Bush campaigned for the White House, he was such a novice in foreign policy that he couldn't name the president of Pakistan. But he was advised by a group that called themselves the Vulcans—a group of men and one woman with long and shared experience in government, dating back to the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and first Bush administrations. After returning to power in 2001, the Vulcans—including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Condoleeza Rice—were widely expected to restore U.S. foreign policy to what it had been in past Republican administrations. Instead, they put America on an entirely new course, adopting a far-reaching set of ideas and policies that changed the world and America's role in it.

In this revelatory and newsworthy volume, James Mann narrates the hidden story of these six history makers, their early careers and rise to power, the interactions and underlying tensions among them, their visions, and their roles in the current administration. Along the way, he offers a wealth of new information (about how Rumsfeld schemed in the Nixon White House, how Cheney toiled as Rumsfeld's doorkeeper, how Wolfowitz first warned of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East in the 1960s) to complete a remarkable look at George W. Bush's inner circle.

Author Biography: James Mann is the senior writer in residence at the CSIS International Security Program and the author of two critically acclaimed books: About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China from Nixon to Clinton and Beijing Jeep. Previously, he was a long-time correspondent with the Los Angeles Times, and his writing has also appeared in The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly.

The New York Times

… lucid, shrewd and, after so many high-decibel screeds from both the right and left, blessedly level-headed. It is necessary reading for anyone interested in understanding the back story of how and why America came to deal with the rest of the world the way it is doing under the Bush administration. — Michiko Kakutani

The Washington Post

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again," Ronald Reagan liked to say, quoting Thomas Paine. But the efforts of the Vulcans to create a new world order today, Mann persuasively argues, are at heart not new at all. They are an effort to repeal the inhibitions and restrictions that have constrained American power in the last 30 years and to revive an earlier moment when the unapologetic and unbridled pursuit of global primacy was a widely accepted national goal. — Alan Brinkley

Publishers Weekly

Mann, a former correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, offers a lucid, nonpolemical and carefully researched history of President Bush's foreign policy team, the self-described "Vulcans" (after the Roman god of fire). In doing so, Mann illuminates the administration's rationale for the Iraqi war with impressive clarity. For the Vulcans, he shows, the war is not an anomalous foreign adventure or a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11. On the contrary, the foreign policy, devised by Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, was 35 years in the making and has its roots in the Republican Party faction that opposed d tente with the Soviet Union. Vulcan philosophy has three major tenets: the embrace of pre-emptive action, the notion of an "unchallengeable American superpower" and the systematic export of America's democratic values. Implicit is the rejection of both the notion that transatlantic relationships are the natural focus of U.S. foreign policy and the Kissingeresque realpolitik that dominated much of 20th-century policy. Mann's purpose is to explicate Bush's foreign policy, not to make sweeping value judgments about its wisdom; he takes care to expose not only errors in the Vulcans' assumptions about the war in Iraq but also those of the war's opponents. This well-written, serious, evenhanded effort should be essential reading for anyone interested in American foreign policy. Agent, Rafe Sagalyn. First serial to the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker. (On sale Mar. 8) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Today every presidency has its own shelf of contemporary histories and other accounts, but rarely do these books combine the immediacy and depth of this one. Mann (About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China from Nixon to Clinton) has written a collective biography of George W. Bush's foreign policy inner circle: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Condoleezza Rice. In tracing their personal histories in the military, government, business, and academia, Mann aims to show how America's stance toward the world changed over the 40 years between the Vietnam War and our invasion of Iraq and how the notion of distinct pre- and post-Cold War eras is misleading. "The ideas that the United States should emphasize military strength, should spread its ideals and should not accommodate other centers of power," Mann shows, were long in the making. Mann interviewed dozens of insiders, including several of his principals, and researched archival and other printed sources to produce this exceptionally evenhanded and well-written book. Highly recommended.-Robert F. Nardini, Chichester, NH Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Intricately shaded and scary profile of President George W. Bush's foreign policy team: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, and to a lesser degree Condoleeza Rice. In a steady voice that likes to hew to the facts, Mann (About Face, 1999, etc.) profiles a group of associates with close, intricate, and overlapping ties. Dubbing themselves the Vulcans in honor of the Roman god of fire, they craft, in the stead of a president with little to no experience in the greater world, the global vision of the current administration, which the author broadly summarizes as a willingness to deploy sledgehammer and fire to protect and further American interests abroad. Not that this chorus sings in harmony, notes Mann: they have manifold strategic and tactical differences, but they share an overriding sense of the country's potential as a unilateral military power, with its unbridled ability to affect events on the global stage. The author anatomizes in exquisite detail the players' backgrounds and the experiences that shaped them, to whom they are beholden, and the trajectories of their careers-no mean feat with this seemingly incestuous and opportunistic lot, whose alliances and perspectives shift through time and space. But they all emphasize US supremacy, confrontational and self-interested, diplomatically thuggish, built on "coalitions" or "ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted." Iraq, of course, is the unpersuasive field test for their belief in retaliation, an emphasis on weapons on mass destruction (real or otherwise), stanching terrorism, containing the "axis of evil" states. None of these rationales obviously apply, but all are brought tobear. Mann doesn't address the thorny question of how the Vulcans plan (or have failed to plan) to contend with the swarm of variables that assert themselves once the facade of tyranny is dismantled. A neat dissection of current American tactics overseas that, understandably, as history has yet to be played out, leaves hanging the question of their efficacy.