Biography of Condi Says She's Loyal to Bush Because 'She has a Thing for Bad Boys'

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Excerpt: Condi's Rescue Mission

In his forthcoming biography of Condoleezza Rice, NEWSWEEK's Marcus Mabry explains the roots—and the consequences—of her loyalty to the president.


"No way, I don't want that job!" Condoleezza Rice had told her Birmingham girlfriend Deborah Carson. And yet here she was, three days after Bush's re-election, the president asking her to take that job: to replace Colin Powell as secretary of State. Rice laid to rest the rumor that what she really wanted was Donald Rumsfeld's post at Defense. She didn't. "The question for me is not where I go," she told Bush flatly that afternoon at Camp David. "I'll go where you want me to go. The question is do I stay. And that's what I have to grapple with."

It wasn't the first time Bush had asked Rice to do something she had decided not to do. During the 2000 campaign, she had planned to advise Bush informally; instead, Rice ended up leading his foreign policy team. "In a political sense, I think he kind of courted her," said Carson. "He really went after her. He's very charming."

And Rice was drawn to Bush. "First of all, I thought he was wonderful to be around," she recalled, sitting on the couch in her State Department office. "He was warm and funny and easy to be around. I thought he had just an incredibly inquisitive mind ... You could barely finish an explanation before he was digging into it."

Bush was also a bad boy. And Rice, according to friends and family, had a thing for bad boys. That was why, as a 20-year-old grad student, she preferred her second Fighting Irish football player boyfriend to her first, said Jane Robinett, Rice's best Notre Dame friend: John "Dubie" Dubenetzky, cocky and handsome with wavy blond hair, was less deferential than Wayne Bullock, the sweet fullback who had moved Condi's boxes into Lewis Hall.

Rice's friends insisted the attraction to Bush was platonic, but Brenda Hamberry-Green, her Palo Alto hairdresser, who had spent years commiserating with Rice over how hard it was for successful black women to find a good man, noticed a change when Rice started working for Bush. "He fills that need," Hamberry-Green decided. "Bush is her feed." :puke:

article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368744/site/newsweek/page/0/

[Starbucks Anarchist]

1. She's got the "boy" part correct.

:puke:

[AspenRose]

2. Great. Now I can't get that picture of her with the thigh-high black boots

out of my mind. :puke:

[marmar]

3. So we have an administration full of people with psychological problems and codependence issues....

Great.

[RaleighNCDUer]

4. I wonder why the first thing to come to mind with that heading

was high heeled boots, fishnet stockings, leather, whips and handcuffs.

[WinkyDink]

9. We know she's got the boots!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51640-2005Feb24.html?nav=E8

[no_hypocrisy]

5. "I thought he had just an incredibly inquisitive mind . . . "

* asking Condi to show him where Russia is on the map doesn't qualfiy as an "incredibly inquisitive mind".

[HeraldSquare212]

7. Balkan Hill

I'll never forget that a hill on GWB's ranch is named "Balkan Hill" because Condi and Bush were walking up it as she explained the situation in the Balkans to him. I didn't know they had mountains in Texas.

[WinkyDink]

10. Stepping over an armadillo.

[Benhurst]

6. I can see her dressed only in a bustier and thigh-high black boots,

spanking Joe Stalin's bare bottom, while cooing "Naughty boy! Naughty boy!"

[Supersedeas]

8. interrupting for you have finished the explanation...yea, we see the pattern