Through my interactions with him, by early 2006, I came to believe that Obama could run for president as early as 2008. I also saw a path to his potential victory. Conventional political wisdom aside, the timing felt like it might be opportune.
The Iraq War was intensifying and becoming increasingly unpopular. Over two thousand Americans had already been killed since the war began in 2003; the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib rocked global public opinion; and President George W. Bush belatedly admitted that the war was predicated on false intelligence, even as he maintained the fight was worth it. That past summer, Hurricane Katrina left over 1,800 Americans dead, substantially as a result of rank government incompetence, and Bush seemed out of touch with New Orleans’s suffering.
In this context, I sensed a hunger for change—for capable leadership, for unquestioned integrity, for what Obama came to call “turning the page.” As an anti–Iraq War, young, optimistic candidate, Obama was an antidote to the times—refreshing, hopeful, and consistently principled. In my estimation, it was still too soon for another Clinton. After John Kerry’s defeat in 2004, I believed it was time to move beyond the Vietnam generation, and many of my peers felt the same. Obama could energize youth and galvanize the African American community. It was time to show that America could renew itself, and Obama’s election would be irrefutable proof of that.
An Obama victory, however remote it then seemed, represented the potential for America to fully embrace the principle of equality, to show its resilience in overcoming the debilitating legacy of race, and to validate the worth of education, hard work, and integrity as the keys to succeeding on the merits in this country.
A man of mixed race, of African and Irish heritage, raised primarily by his white Kansan working-class grandparents, Obama embodied unity. Insisting that what Americans hold in common far exceeds what divides us, he offered hope that our future could be brighter than our past. I was drawn to his optimism and shared his belief that we could forge alliances across political, racial, and religious boundaries. Indeed, that had been my experience growing up in Washington, D.C.—in a mixed black and Jewish neighborhood, in school with Republicans and Democrats, and shaped by parents who had broken countless barriers.
They never talked about it. Strangely, my brother and I know almost nothing about my parents’ courtship or their wedding, a second marriage for each. And, somehow, we never asked, maybe because they had such a difficult relationship.
Though fourteen years apart, my parents each came into their own in the 1950s—my mother while an undergraduate at Radcliffe and my father after the war during his formative years as a graduate student at Berkeley. By the time they met in New York in the early 1960s, both were rising in their chosen professions.
At the all-women’s Radcliffe College, despite its academic excellence, my mother found that accomplishment was defined not in professional terms but rather as marrying a Harvard man and raising your sons to go to Harvard. Women were admonished to be prissy and prim, while adhering to “the forbidden six: no slacks, no shorts, no blue jeans, no sprawling in the buildings or on the steps, no smoking in any Harvard building… and no bicycle riding in the Harvard Yard (Harvard men can’t ride there either).” Dating was encouraged. To my amazement, the 1951–1952 Radcliffe Red Book advised young women: “Cambridge is a well-stocked hunting ground, and it’s a wide-open field. There are enough men to go around (recent tabulations tabbed the man-woman ratio at five to one). Just remember, no pushing and shoving.” To reward the successful, “The first girl in each class to be married following graduation is presented with a set of Radcliffe China by other members of the class,” and “the first baby girl to be born… is presented with a silver spoon and becomes the mascot of her mother’s class.”
My mother was one of only a handful of black women at Radcliffe. In her first year, her roommate was determined by race, and she was placed with Dorothy Dean, one of three black women in her class. The other, Jane Bunche, who later committed suicide, was the daughter of Ralph Bunche, the Nobel Prize–winning American U.N. diplomat.
Lois Dickson and Dorothy Dean could not have been more mismatched. Eccentric and hard-drinking, Dean later became known for her roles in various Andy Warhol films and as a fixture in New York gay men’s circles. Mom shared with me her impression that Dorothy was “truly crazy and aimed to drive me equally nuts.” For her sanity, Lois requested a different roommate her second year but was refused, because there were no other black girls with whom she could room. Moreover, as a scholarship student, she was not eligible for a single.
Characteristically relentless, Lois took her protest to the top of the college’s administration and, ultimately, was rewarded with a coveted single room. I always admired and sought to emulate my mom’s readiness to stand up and fight for herself. My mama wasn’t going to let either Dorothy or Radcliffe kill her; she would torture them into submission first.
A natural advocate for others as well as for herself, Lois joined the Radcliffe Association for the Advancement of Colored People to press the concerns of black students on campus and in the greater Boston area. Despite being a rare minority, Mom swiftly emerged as a leader at Radcliffe, first elected to student council her freshman year and then president of her sophomore class. She ultimately won a hotly contested battle for student body president her senior year. (Remarkably, her distant cousin, Clifford Alexander, another child of Jamaican immigrants, was elected the following year to head Harvard’s student government.)
As a student, Lois accumulated numerous academic awards, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in history and literature. As well as Lois performed at Radcliffe, she fell a bit short of her own expectations, lamenting that she failed to achieve Phi Beta Kappa during her junior year or to graduate summa cum laude, as her brothers had. Her self-doubt notwithstanding, Mom was selected as Marshall of her Class of 1954, leading the commencement procession, and made several dear friends whom she kept until her death.
Moved by the politics of the day, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, Lois left Radcliffe determined to do much more than marry and raise children. Despite being an African American woman in the early 1950s, or perhaps because of it, Lois was going places far beyond what was asked or expected of her. Soon after graduation, she enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in English literature; but, after one year, Lois concluded that academia didn’t inspire her.
Instead, she worked avidly on Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign. Mom bragged about being “a Stevenson girl” who proudly served in various capacities, including as a campaign surrogate in local debates where she argued passionately that Stevenson uniquely had the commitment and the ideals to capitalize on the Brown decision and make America more equitable. His loss, a major disappointment to her, may have persuaded Lois to trade politics for other avenues of service.
Mom’s first full-time job out of college reflected her personal mission to expand access to the transformative power of higher education, a calling that animated her entire career. As director of counseling services at the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students, the organization that had helped support her through Radcliffe, Mom provided counseling, as well as admissions and financial support, to qualified African American students to help them attend predominantly white colleges and universities.
One of my favorite stories from Mom’s tenure at NSSFNS involves a trip she took as the organization’s counselor to check on the sole black student in a class of four hundred at DePauw University in Indiana. Mom asked the young man how he was doing. He cheekily reported: “I am fine, except I’m lonely and need a date with an attractive young black woman. You wanna go out with me?” According to both sides, Lois remained resolutely professional and demurred, despite her suitor’s arresting good looks. Thus began a lifelong, flirtatious friendship between my mom and the famed civil rights activist and Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan. To my knowledge, my mother never succumbed to his considerable charms, but I couldn’t have blamed her if she had.
In 1959, Lois moved to the New York–based College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB), now the College Board, which administers the SAT and AP tests. With the exception of two brief sabbaticals, she stayed there until 1981.
Like many of her peers, Lois did marry right out of college—to the much older James Theodore “Ted” Irish, a classmate of her brother Fred’s at Bowdoin. Irish was an interior designer who worked at the Corn Exchange Bank of New York City. Lois’s parents hosted a lavish wedding for them in New York City in September 1954. Mom’s first wedding was amply covered in the social pages of The New York Times. She would enthusiastically relate the details of her elaborate church wedding and reception at the Essex House Hotel, which her parents hosted despite their limited means. In her glamorous wedding photos, Lois Ann Dickson Irish was the quintessential bride—svelte and gorgeous in her long-sleeve silk and lace dress with a full train and intricate bouquet.
Back in those days, Mom lived in Harlem and led an active social life among the close-knit, young black professional community centered around the Riverton Apartments. In contrast to her depictions of their picture-perfect wedding, Mom spoke little about her marriage to Ted Irish, which ended in divorce in 1960. She portrayed Ted as kind, but rather shiftless, their marriage as a benign mistake but by no means a disaster. My sense from her, though never explicit, was that Mom may have concluded that Ted was gay, which rendered an uninspiring marriage untenable. In subsequent years, Mom searched for a more suitable life partner, falling hard at least one time before ultimately meeting my father.
After the war, Emmett Rice, having completed his undergraduate and master’s degrees, decided to pursue his PhD in economics. Friends he met in the military had assured him that race relations were more open in California. Though skeptical, he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where in the late 1940s and early 1950s, blacks comprised less than one percent of the student body.
At Berkeley, Dad was fortunate to live in International House (known as I-House), a predominantly graduate residence of almost four hundred students, roughly two-thirds foreign, mainly from Europe and Asia. He found the I-House experience broadening, stimulating, and enjoyable. As a former I-House staff member recalled, “Both foreign and American friends sought linkage with Emmett’s social and intellectual orbit.… Discussions with him tended to be philosophical rather than confrontational. The result was that there was more light than heat, and people were drawn to him. Many remember the impact these discussions had on them.”
Though in many ways a deeply serious man, my father always knew how to have fun. He had a deft charm and broad smile that rarely failed with women. He loved music, dancing, drink, and laughter. With his closest Berkeley buddies, Dad bought a convertible and shared a funky penthouse apartment on the roof of an old warehouse, where the parties were frequent and legendary. He went crazy for jazz while at Berkeley, taking in as many concerts and clubs as his studies allowed, and later instilled in me and Johnny his deep appreciation for jazz and its greats.
My father regaled us with stories of his years at Berkeley, calling them “the best times of my life.” He made lasting friendships and had more than his share of girlfriends, some white—which was highly unusual in this era, even in California. Dad imbibed the nascent counterculture movement and suffered through the painful McCarthy-era loyalty oath controversy, which bitterly divided the faculty and graduate students. Above all, Emmett proclaimed, he felt liberated: “It was the first living experience… where I did not feel the constant pressure of being black. And the first time I had the experience of people relating to me, not so much as a black person, but as another person.”
The labor market was a different story. In my father’s experience, “It was much harder to get a job on the West Coast than it was to get a job on the East Coast. There was great reluctance to pass laws out here governing fair employment.” He spoke out vocally on campus about the need for fair employment laws, drawing the ire of the director of I-House, Allen Blaisdell, who reproved him for “making statements like that to foreigners who might not understand.” Years later, Blaisdell dimed out my father to the FBI for disloyalty during one of his initial background checks for work in the U.S. government.
Emmett initially faced workplace discrimination in California when he moonlighted while a graduate student as a fireman at the Berkeley Fire Department. The first black man to integrate the force, he started as a line fireman, without training, but soon was given the more suitable task of a fire alarm operator and dispatcher. Dad described the reaction of the white firefighters to his arrival: “They did not like the idea of having to have blacks in the department, because firemen live a fairly intimate kind of existence. Still, they seemed to take the view that it was not my fault. After all, they could not blame me for trying to get a better job.”
My dad’s favorite fireman story involved a little known near catastrophe that threatened the Berkeley cyclotron. One of his proudest and least-heralded successes, which Dad liked to recall for us, was the crisis that occurred when the grass in the Berkeley Hills caught fire near the nuclear reactor. “It was my job,” Dad said, “to decide what resources were needed to fight this serious fire—how many men and trucks would go. Within a few hours, the fire was under control. We had saved the nuclear facility and the town of Berkeley.”
Guided by great teachers and mentors at Berkeley, Emmett became fascinated by the economic transformation of underdeveloped countries and selected India as the subject of his thesis. Awarded one of the early Fulbright Scholarships to support his doctoral research from 1951 to 1952, Dad flourished in Bombay. As a brown-skinned man in a brown society, he was a foreigner but no longer a visible minority—an experience that afforded him great psychic relief. India’s social hierarchy was structured more by caste than color, and my father was not immediately deemed inferior due to his race. Dad’s strong conviction that race is an irrelevant indicator of a person’s worth was further reinforced by seeing people of various dark hues run a major country.
Back from India, my father successfully defended his dissertation in 1955, becoming Dr. Emmett J. Rice, and embarked on a new profession as an academic—although he knew his was not a path to prosperity. In the mid-1950s, the constraints imposed by persistent prejudice barred him from opportunities in industry and government. “I could not have worked in the [U.S.] Treasury at that time. I could not have worked at the Federal Reserve,” he observed. Getting a good academic job, however, turned out to be almost as tough, especially on the West Coast. Much to his frustration, “It was possible for a black person to get a job teaching at a major university in the East. But I could not get a job at San Francisco State.”
So, leaving California, Dad landed his first job at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, as an assistant professor of economics in 1954, teaching money and banking and corporate finance. My father was Cornell’s first black economics professor and was hired upon the recommendation of a Berkeley academic who omitted mention of his race. Cornell was surprised and none too happy to discover when Emmett arrived that he was unmistakably black. Despite this inauspicious start, my father enjoyed his nearly six years at Cornell.
Though we were never told much about how they met, I do know that Emmett and Lois first crossed paths in the early 1960s, after Dad had taken a leave from Cornell to work at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as a staff economist. Apparently, the two met at a dinner for the New York Fed. Each had recently ended childless first marriages, and both were moving up in their respective fields. They married in New York on November 4, 1962, in what I have gathered was a modest civil ceremony, witnessed by a couple of close friends, and followed by a party.
Almost immediately after their wedding, my parents moved to Lagos, Nigeria, where Dad had been sent by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as a research advisor to help establish the Central Bank of Nigeria in the wake of the country’s independence. Mom took leave from the College Board and worked for the Ford Foundation as an educational specialist for West Africa. Their two years in Nigeria, punctuated by travel around West Africa and Europe, were, by all accounts, enjoyable. They amassed an impressive collection of Nigerian art, including valuable wooden sculptures that were a visual fixture of my upbringing.
I was conceived in Nigeria. Toward the end of their stay, Mom became pregnant with me, and I have long amused myself with the hypothesis that my origins in Nigeria, combined with my Irish and Jamaican ancestors, explain a lot both about my temperament and attraction to all things international.
Dad, who had made it known early on that he did not want kids, greeted the news of Mom’s pregnancy with something far less than enthusiasm, suggesting that Mom had tricked him into fatherhood. My mother hotly disputed this assertion, but in Dad’s view this pregnancy was among the first things to undermine trust in their marriage, which mutually dissipated over time. Complicating matters, Mom discovered she was bearing twins, a girl and a boy. To the limited extent my dad had any interest in fatherhood, he wanted a boy. As my parents made their way back to the U.S. to ensure Mom delivered the babies on home soil, they transited through Paris. Their TWA flight from Paris-Orly to New York-JFK on May 29, 1964, was more eventful than anticipated.
On takeoff, the Boeing 707’s front tire blew out. The pilot aborted before reaching full speed, veering off the runway to the right, and crashed the plane nose down into the grass. Dad and Mom (bearing two four-month-old fetuses), along with the 101 other passengers and crew, managed to evacuate safely but were more than a little shaken.
Back in Washington, the remainder of my mother’s pregnancy grew more difficult, as she was confined to bed with nursing assistance for the last two and a half months. Finally, I was born on November 17, 1964, at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C.
My first brother was stillborn.
By the time it was confirmed for me that I was a twin, around the age of twelve, my relationship with my mother had begun to suffer from more than the typical mother-daughter tension. In a rented condominium in Aspen, Colorado, where my younger brother, Johnny, and I had accompanied Mom to a conference, she and I were in the midst of an argument, when I jabbed with something like, “I always knew you didn’t love me as much as the others…”
Looking freaked out by this oblique comment, which, combined with previous ones, suggested to her that I had some subliminal knowledge that Johnny was not my only sibling, Mom blurted out: “How long have you known you were a twin?”
Baffled, I said, “What are you talking about?”
Realizing she had spilled the beans and that my intuition, if any, was totally unconscious, she recovered to explain calmly, “We didn’t want you to know until you were much older, but you had a baby brother who died in the womb. It was very sad for your father and me, but we were very glad to have you emerge healthy.”
Anger dissolved into tears as I softly asked, “What happened?”
“We don’t really know,” my mother replied. “It could have been the trauma of the plane crash. I never liked our first obstetrician—he was always dismissive of my concerns, and I suspect he could have missed something important. Or maybe the baby wasn’t very strong compared to you and couldn’t consume adequate resources.… We just don’t know.”
These last words landed like a punch in the stomach.
Is she saying I might have killed my brother? Does she blame me? Am I to blame? I never dared utter those questions aloud but ever since have felt a tinge of guilt. Perhaps from the very start, I was too strong, and Mom never quite forgave me for it? In my mind, this was a question unstated that hung over our relationship for years to come.
Back from Nigeria, my parents settled in Washington, D.C., rather than return to New York, because in the spring of 1964, my dad was named deputy director of the Office of Developing Nations at the U.S. Department of Treasury—a plum senior civil service position that paid $16,000 (more than the Federal Reserve Bank of New York). It also afforded my father a direct role in advising the secretary of treasury on U.S. financial policy toward the countries of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Taking this job meant effectively closing the door on a return to academia, a choice he never regretted. Mom also quickly jumped back into her career, returning to work just a few months after I was born. From the outset, I had a mother who worked in a professional capacity outside the home—not because she had to work, but because she wanted to work.
When I was twenty-one months old, my brother, John, was born, on September 1, 1966. Dad got his long-awaited, healthy baby boy. Mom once told me that, “Emmett finally made me feel worthy, by giving him a boy,” allowing her to sense that she had at least partially compensated for whatever he viewed as her earlier failure. It was never clear to me whether that meant having children in the first place or losing their first son.
I was not so forgiving. When Mom returned from Sibley Hospital, she followed the best parenting advice at the time: Go immediately to the older child and pay no evident attention to the newborn. Even before I recall meeting the little interloper, Mom came to greet me in my crib. I stood up to welcome her—by biting her squarely on the nose. It was very painful, by Mom’s frequent telling, and she responded reflexively by slapping my little face.
Soon enough, I came to see the merits of having a baby brother. With time, Johnny proved to be a mostly sweet and willing playmate. With chubby cheeks, engrossing brown eyes framed with ridiculously long lashes, and soft tufts of afro, he charmed our parents and made easy friends.
In the same year Johnny was born, my father was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to be alternate U.S. executive director at the World Bank, a Senate-confirmed role in which he served until 1970, after his stint as deputy and later acting director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Developing Nations.
My now complete immediate family moved to the leafy, predominantly Jewish Forest Hills neighborhood of Northwest Washington, as I finished the last months of preschool at the prestigious National Child Research Center, NCRC. My parents applied to send me to the Beauvoir School next, hopeful that, if admitted, I would begin my formal education with the best start the city could offer. Though my parents did not qualify for scholarship funds, paying full tuition would prove challenging on their government and nonprofit salaries. Highly competitive and expensive, Beauvoir is a pre-K through third grade, coed Episcopal school affiliated with the Washington National Cathedral. Like its sister and brother schools, St. Albans School for boys and the National Cathedral School for girls, Beauvoir is located on the Cathedral’s fifty-nine-acre campus, known as “the Close,” and enjoys beautiful, sweeping vistas of Washington from its perch atop Mount St. Alban, the highest point in the city.
My admissions interview got off to a rocky start when Mom took me to Beauvoir for the obligatory testing in a small building at the bottom of a big hill. According to my mother, I was unusually disengaged and diffident during the diagnostic examination. When she walked me slowly up the hill to meet the principal, Mom calmly asked me to be nice and act comfortably. I did not.
The principal, Mrs. Frances Borders, tried to draw me into conversation. I simply stared at her. She talked with my mother, who, hiding her panic and shame, tried to assure her that I was just being shy but could excel at Beauvoir. Mrs. Borders was polite and surely pretended to be understanding, but Mom knew I had flunked my interview.
As we were walking out of Mrs. Borders’s office, I paused to observe her big fish tank and noticed a corpse floating on top. Turning around, I shot back, “Hey lady, your fish is dead!”
Apparently, that blunt, if impolite, insight was enough for them to grant me a spot in the Beauvoir Class of 1973.
Soon after I began at Beauvoir around age four, when Johnny was still a toddler, my parents took us for the first and only time to Jamaica. The vacation was also an opportunity to track down some of Mom’s relatives. Urban Jamaica was a loud, colorful, chaotic conflagration for the senses, one I found both exciting and overwhelming.
We stayed mostly on the coast but traveled inland up into the mountains to visit my mom’s first cousin, known as “Uncle Cyril.” As we pressed our way up the muddy, rutted mountain road, the old rental car labored with increasing difficulty. Finally, it quit with a sudden bang as the front hood flew open and smashed into the windshield. We were stuck in the mud on a desolate mountain road. I don’t recall who rescued us after some hours, but it felt like we had been stranded forever.
Somehow, we managed to make it to our destination, a tropical mountain hollow where my relatives lived proudly among banana trees and flowers in a remote hovel that revealed poverty of the sort I had never seen. I was struck by the incongruity of meeting blood relatives who lived in a rickety wooden structure with a corrugated metal roof and ate from a modest garden plot. Without words, my parents were continuously teaching me about our good fortune.
The time our family spent enjoying the more urbane and touristy parts of Jamaica left us with lasting happy memories. Johnny had long feared swimming pools and any large bodies of water, due to an early encounter with a freezing-cold pool. Yet in Jamaica, he played happily in the sand and impulsively ran without warning into the soothing warmth of the Caribbean waters. Rushing in and out with abandon, Johnny finally ran up to my parents and begged, “Mommy, will you buy me an ocean?” That query has endured as a reliable laugh line in our family, reflecting both Johnny’s adorable naïveté and the sense our parents gave us, even as young children, that nothing was beyond our reach.
The influence of my hometown of Washington, D.C., and those rapidly changing times, which were punctuated four months before I was born by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, proved almost as important to my personal development as family and schooling. Just as my political consciousness began to form, all hell broke loose in my city and across the country—protests, riots, and killings. My parents made sure Johnny and I faced the world as it was. They wanted us to see and absorb the tumult of that era, even if we could not fully comprehend it.
When I was three and a half, my mother sat me in front of the television with her to watch the train carrying Robert F. Kennedy’s coffin make the slow journey from New York to Washington. Another great man was gone, and we were mourning. I barely understood assassination, but its consequences were inescapable. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot two months earlier. Though I hardly grasped why he was so important, I could sense the profundity of Dr. King’s loss.
The proximate evidence for me was that my hometown was engulfed in flames, looting, and chaos. The four days of riots in Washington and in cities across the nation following Dr. King’s murder brought armed troops onto the streets. Smoke blanketed the skies downtown, as the 14th Street corridor and much around it was incinerated. The violence was far removed from our neighborhood, yet my parents made me watch it on television and visit its aftermath when calm returned.
Mom and Dad also rolled my eighteen-month-old brother in his stroller and held my hand as we walked through the muddy, mass camp that was Resurrection City, a tent town on the National Mall established to memorialize the late Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign. It was a weeks-long protest in horrible conditions that dramatized the racial and economic discontent that pervaded our city and larger society.
The old genteel, safely segregated Washington was gone. A new, brutal, bitterly divided carcass of a city replaced it. The shards of burned-out Washington haunted my childhood, as it took well over a decade—what seemed to me like forever—to repair the worst ravages of the riots and for the city’s open wounds to seal into rough keloids.
Walter Cronkite narrated this crisis and every other major event throughout my childhood, memorably concluding each evening’s broadcast with his signature closer: “And, that’s the way it is.” In the bygone era of just three national television networks, our news was delivered unvarnished and un-spun, although with little diversity of sources and presenters. Back then, Americans were blessed with a common fact base, rather than self-selected stories that reinforce our personal preconceptions. This enabled serious and productive debate.
Avid consumers of both broadcast and print news, my parents made sure our dinner table conversations resembled a debate hall. The greatest sin we could commit as children was to cause a delay that made my father miss the lead story on the nightly news. In this time before digital recording devices, when that occurred, we had hell to pay.
Nothing was more arresting for me as a child than the first images of man walking on the moon. On July 20, 1969, my parents called us into their bedroom to watch on their black and white television as Apollo 11 landed and out walked American astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. Piloting the command module was Michael Collins, the father of Michael Jr., one of my contemporaries in school.
Then there was Vietnam—the open sore that bled nightly on our television screens. I was not spared its most dramatic images. As a child, I witnessed film of napalm attacks, air raids, close combat, Cronkite’s nightly body count, the full brutality of war. I also saw the violent protests it inspired back home, on campuses, in my city, and around the world.
President Johnson declined to run for reelection. The Kennedys were gone. Hubert Humphrey was our candidate, and I sported “HHH” political buttons at three years old. The Democratic convention in Chicago devolved into riotous chaos. Nixon won handily, and the war intensified.
In later years, our dinner table remained a stage for a lively discussion club shaped by reports on the nightly news. Johnny and I learned to be assertive and, when necessary, loud—in order to get a word in edgewise. Alliances shifted among the four of us, depending on the issue; but, again, reinforced by lessons from our visits to Maine, we grew up being comfortable with verbal jousting, expressing our views with confidence, and engaging in worthy battle.
We lived history as a family, like the later events of August 8, 1974, when I came running into the kitchen breathlessly to report to my parents that there was breaking news on television: Nixon had resigned! They were shocked and thrilled. A robust family conversation ensued.
Watergate was not just a national phenomenon; it was a personal trauma, hitting us like a tidal wave. As the revelations unfolded and the prosecutions persisted, two of our schoolmates’ parents, G. Gordon Liddy and Jeb Magruder, were sent to jail.
All the violence, the fractious debates, and the Washington political dramas gripped me as a child. I could never wish, nor would I be able, to ignore my city, my nation, or the world. My parents refused to give us that luxury—to allow us to think that public issues were somehow remote from us. They steeped us in the tumult, forced us to confront our relative privilege, and taught us explicitly that we had both agency and responsibility—the ability to effect change and the expectation that we must.
Beauvoir in those days was barely 10 percent black, if that. Of those, about half came from far across Rock Creek Park, the verdant barrier that separated much of Washington’s white minority from the black neighborhoods that most D.C. residents inhabited. Fittingly, after we moved to Shepherd Park, we grew up right in the middle, safely enmeshed in our mixed Jewish and black neighborhood—where we moved not long before I started at Beauvoir. The first (and only) house my parents owned together was on tree-lined Myrtle Street in upper Northwest. With her exquisite taste, Mom turned that dark, imposing, large stone edifice into a warm and elegant home with beautiful art, quality furniture, and a lovely garden, which she personally tended.
As children, we roamed freely throughout our neighborhood, riding bikes, playing basketball and football, hopping between families who felt no need to check on their kids’ whereabouts. Our neighbors were professionals—doctors, judges, businessmen, and academics—plus colorful figures like the musician Van McCoy, who wrote and recorded “Do the Hustle,” and Ron Brown, who years later became my senior colleague when he served as commerce secretary in the Clinton administration.
Our closest neighbor friends were the Cornwells, who had three daughters and three sons, all older than us except their youngest, Michael, who remains close to Johnny. Their mother, Shirley Cornwell, stayed tight over the years with my mom; and Dr. Edward Cornwell, a stout, proud, and loud surgeon, was a good friend of my father’s.
My dad, Dr. Cornwell, and the other men-folk would sit around on weekends smoking cigars, drinking, and laughing raucously to Richard Pryor’s profanity behind closed doors. As kids, we would sneak up and listen for hours to hilariously inappropriate albums, most memorably Bicentennial Nigger, marveling at how Pryor made foul-mouthed cussing and dangerous drug use seem almost unremarkable. I can still impersonate Pryor delivering many of his lines, like: “You know, I first met GOD in 1929. I never will forget this. You see, I was walking DOWN the street.… I was not running. I was WALKING down the street eating a tuna fish san-wich!”
Our other neighborhood buddies came from families with whom we carpooled to Beauvoir. They, like us, lived where our school’s buses would not travel. For my working mother, the carpool was a constant and significant source of stress, as she relied on other families to share the burden of taking us to and from school. Carpool challenges were the main reason Mom chose to join the Board of Trustees of Beauvoir School (on which I served many years later). She arrived on a mission to make the school buses accessible to kids beyond the traditional white neighborhoods from which Beauvoir drew most of its students. As a champion of equality, Mom was deeply frustrated that she had to do carpool duty while wealthier, white moms who mostly didn’t work, simply waited for their kids to be picked up and deposited at their doorstep.
I remember vividly the lengths to which Mom went to make her case. One day, at around age six, I walked in to find Mom creating what appeared to be a major art project. Puzzled, I asked, “Mom, what are you doing? That looks really complicated.” Carefully affixing pins and string to a massive mounted street map of Washington, she patiently explained, “I’m making this poster to show the Beauvoir board how they could easily reroute the school buses so that kids who live east of the park can also ride to school. See, each of these different-colored strings shows a possible new bus route, and the pins indicate where Beauvoir families live.” Never knowing my mom to be particularly arts-and-crafty, I was amazed by the rigor and detail of her project. When Mom set out to marshal data to argue her case, she was deadly serious.
Ultimately, she failed in her bus crusade, but Mom became deeply invested in our school and made good friends on the board, like chairwoman (later Secretary of State) Madeleine Albright and Douglas Bennet, who subsequently served as USAID administrator, NPR president, and eventually turned out to be another close colleague of mine in the Clinton administration. My dad regularly played doubles on Sundays with Madeleine’s then-husband Joe Albright. After tennis, the Albright and Rice families would often gather at Hamburger Hamlet for foot-long hot dogs, thick shakes, and steak fries. It was in that era that Madeleine dubbed me “little Susie Rice,” a diminutive I have always disliked but which she occasionally employed with humor when we worked together, just to remind me of how long she had known me.
An inveterate tomboy from the start, I spent my discretionary time getting dirty, playing sports, cheering the Washington Redskins against Johnny’s Dallas Cowboys, trading coveted Sunoco football stamps, and avoiding all prissy, girly activities. My close friendships were with both boys and girls. But one thing was clear: you would not find me with dolls, princesses, fairies, or anything pink. To my mother’s everlasting dismay, I also acquired a fully formed vocabulary of curse words, which for lack of a better explanation I blame on hanging out with the boys.
By graduation from third grade at Beauvoir, my intellectual and physical confidence was well-established. I had a strong sense of who I was, combined with a readiness to assert myself, even in elementary school. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Kvell, a hard-ass from Estonia, pointedly advised me to “Stay strong,” but, “try to be more gentle and less impatient with the other kids.” Her admonition resonated with me, because she aptly identified a challenge that I have faced ever since—whether in dealing with school friends or work colleagues.
For as long as I can remember, my mother has been a key role model for me. In these years, she was promoted to head the College Board’s Washington office, and we would often visit her after school, playing on the electric typewriters and distracting her staff. Even as a young child, I appreciated how unusual it was to have a professional working mother, as almost all of my friends had stay-at-home moms. It seemed cool that my mother wore stylish Ultrasuede dresses to work and traveled frequently to New York. Plus, despite the demands of her job, Mom remained deeply involved in our daily lives—often cooking family dinners and driving us regularly to and from school. As we grew older, she continued to check on our homework, oversee our social plans, and cheer at our sports events.
Madeleine Albright and my mom, along with their fellow Beauvoir board member and friend Alice Rivlin (who became the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office and later of the White House Office of Management and Budget as well as vice chair of the Federal Reserve), were among the few highly accomplished professional women I knew while growing up. Their dual success as mothers and top leaders in their fields made a powerful impression on me, demonstrating that career and family need not be a binary choice for women. Still, much as I admired Mom’s career and understood that it entailed tradeoffs, I confess to having occasional moments of regret that Mom had no time for, nor little interest in, greeting us after school with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies or delicious fudge pie, like my friend Hutchey’s mom, Muffett Brock, used to do.
To help at home, my parents employed a housekeeper who cleaned, watched us kids, helped cook, and served us weekday dinners. Mrs. Elizabeth Jennings—Mrs. J, as we called her—was a major figure in my upbringing. She was a strong, sturdy woman from Northeast Washington, with a dignity and self-assurance that exceeded her role in the household. To my mother’s annoyance, Mrs. Jennings kept the television on constantly as she cleaned, and I became fluent in the plotlines of All My Children and General Hospital. Without any hesitation, she called my mother “Lois,” and Lois called her “Jenny” or “Beth.”
Mrs. Jennings took absolutely no crap from my mother, who could dish it liberally. A typical argument might begin with my mom complaining in the morning that Mrs. Jennings was behind on the ironing and laundry. Mrs. J would retort: “Loyce, don’t start with me this morning. I am ver-rry ti-ired.” Undeterred, my mom might reply, “Beth, I don’t care how tired you are. I’m not paying you to rest!’ It was then game on, before their banter—at once annoyed and affectionate—petered out.
Over these same years, Dad played a traditional paternal role, bearing little, if any, share of the household responsibilities. He enjoyed spending time with me and Johnny, contributing mainly by teaching us chess, poker, and tennis and playing each game with us frequently. These were “Dad things,” and we cherished them for their intimacy and rigor.
With time, however, Dad grew increasingly frustrated with Mom’s long work hours and travel, insisting that she was neglecting the family. Although he professed support for working women, citing his beloved mother, when it came to his own family he was ambivalent at best and, more often, resentful. This tension was among the factors that sorely strained my parents’ marriage.
Around age seven, my parents’ relationship began to deteriorate rapidly. Up until that point, I mostly ignored, even sublimated, the undercurrent of unhappiness in my household, holding fast to the good times when my parents got along—and bracing myself for the uncertainty of what might come. For fleeting moments, I could breathe and dare to hope they could resolve their differences—like the time when my parents announced they were traveling together to Rio de Janeiro with other members of the TWA Board of Directors. Their wish, and mine, was that this trip would light a spark that could salvage their tattered marriage. It was a fun visit, by both accounts, but failed to reverse their mutually destructive dynamic.
Arguably, my parents were never well-suited. My dad was not only brilliant and charming, but quick-tempered, impatient, and at least somewhat chauvinistic. My mom was beautiful, ambitious, and smart, but also high-strung, domineering, overtly powerful but latently insecure. Ultimately, they agreed on little, except politics, some friends, and their love for their children.
Despite that essential plot of common ground, for the next decade of my formative years, I grew up in the middle of something akin to a civil war battlefield.