“Don’t forget, it can always get worse.”
Barely ten months into my job as assistant secretary of state for African affairs, on August 6, I was given memorable advice by Tony Lake as I struggled to juggle competing conflicts while establishing my leadership of the bureau. Tony—twenty-five years my senior—was just the person from whom I needed to get wisdom and perspective. Over dinner, I lamented the crush of crises, confessing it was starting to feel overwhelming. He listened intently, but instead of offering much needed reassurance, Tony warned quietly that more could still come.
Hours later, shortly after 3:40 a.m., the secure phone next to my bed rang. I answered to hear the familiar formality: “This is the State Department Operations Center with Ambassador Johnnie Carson for Assistant Secretary Rice.”
“This is she,” I said, rousing myself from a deep sleep.
My deputy, his voice laden with concern, reported, “There have been two near simultaneous attacks on our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. It seems they were truck bombs. Ambassador Bushnell in Kenya reports numerous casualties.”
I jumped out of bed. Within minutes, I was out the door and on my way to State. When I arrived ten minutes later, I went straight to the Operations Center on the seventh floor, the nerve center of the department, where watch officers answer calls from around the world, follow the news, cable traffic, and connect State personnel by voice- or videoconference to every embassy in the world and any department in Washington. I was pointed to a conference room, where a secure videoconference was already in progress.
My former boss, Dick Clarke, was on the screen chairing an emergency session of the Counter-terrorism Support Group, the interagency committee mandated to prevent and respond to terrorist attacks. He asked the military to transport U.S.-based civilian search-and-rescue teams to arrive as quickly as possible to recover victims from the wreckage. He directed the FBI to send teams immediately to Nairobi and Dar to investigate the attacks.
Early reports indicated that the bombings had all the hallmarks of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda—simultaneity, potency, American targets. In Kenya, twelve Americans—diplomats, family members, military and intelligence personnel—were killed, along with an estimated 200 Kenyan civilians, including over thirty who worked at the embassy, plus scores of passersby on the street. Thousands were wounded, many grievously by flying glass and debris. The building caved, the scene conjuring Dante’s Inferno. In Tanzania, eleven Tanzanians were killed but no Americans.
Nairobi was the deadliest attack on a U.S. embassy in American history. We learned later that morning that Al Qaeda also planned to strike a third U.S. embassy at the same time in Kampala, Uganda. By a fluke of luck, however, Ugandan authorities stopped the truck carrying explosives at the border and averted that bombing.
Never had I experienced a crisis of this magnitude—and right square in my chain of command. My colleagues had been killed. Our embassies across the continent remained at heightened risk. Many were vulnerable due to their proximity to roadways and their routine construction in the “pre-Inman” era (that is, before the 1983 Beirut bombing, after which most of our embassies were built to withstand such powerful blasts). Al Qaeda could strike again without notice. Families of Americans in Kenya were overwhelming the phones at the Operations Center seeking information and solace. We set up several twenty-four-hour task forces to support the embassies, monitor developments, and assist the families of victims. As we labored to save the injured, we evacuated many to U.S. military medical facilities in Germany and the U.S.
Throughout this ordeal, I was on the phone with our ambassadors in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, trying to meet their requests for support and intelligence. My deputies and I sought to comfort staff who had lost embassy co-workers and friends, even as we were all compelled to keep working in overdrive, with little sleep, throughout the aftermath of the bombings.
Shortly after the attacks, I received an unsolicited visit from a psychiatrist in the State Department Medical Unit. He came, he said, because he was concerned about morale among the Washington-based staff in the Africa Bureau. With remarkable clumsiness for a shrink, he asked, “You understand, don’t you, how much stress and trauma your colleagues in the bureau feel?”
Indignant and impatient with this seemingly pedestrian intrusion, I said, “Of course, I do.” I thought, what the hell is your point?
He said he hoped that I could assist in reducing their anxiety by easing their workload and assuaging their fears.
Then I snapped, “We are all under stress. Understandably. We have just lost a dozen of our colleagues. They are not coming back. We are working around the clock to support their families and the embassy staff. I hardly see what you think we can stop doing at this stage. We are going to have to muscle through this as best we can. Thank you for your concern.”
Opening the door to let him out, I all but slammed it behind him. I had no patience for his touchy-feely platitudes. With hindsight, I better appreciate that it was his job to show concern and try to alleviate our collective distress. My frustration with the doctor stemmed from failing to see how I or anyone else could have measurably eased the burden we all felt. Additionally, I now wonder if my ability to compartmentalize and plow through pain left me unable to fully appreciate how others may process grief differently.
Days later, I traveled with Secretary Albright to Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. We visited grievously wounded embassy staff in Nairobi’s hospitals, several of whom had lost limbs and suffered life-changing injuries from glass and metal projectiles. We saw the shell of our destroyed embassy, a shocking monument to the potency of the blast. While mourning the Kenyans and Tanzanians killed and wounded, the secretary and I tried to lend emotional support to our country teams in both capitals. Throughout, I felt overwhelmed by loss, stricken by the power of evil, and submerged in the anger and grief of loved ones, especially as we flew eighteen hours back to Andrews Air Force Base in a C-17 military transport plane alongside the flag-draped coffins of our colleagues.
August 7, 1998, was the worst day of my professional life, as it was for many colleagues, from the secretary of state to desk officers in the Africa Bureau. Yet, our grief and devastation bore no comparison to that felt by Ambassador Bushnell, her brave team at Embassy Nairobi, and, above all, the families whose loved ones were killed. On that infamous day, terror took our foreign service officers. A Marine and airmen. Intelligence officers. Civil servants. An epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control. American public servants, all.
Susan Bartley lost both her husband and son. Julian Bartley Sr. was a senior embassy officer, and Julian “Jay” Jr. was interning at the mission over the summer. As with the others, Susan and her daughter, Edith’s, immeasurable pain saddens me to this day. Each colleague lost, each family bereft, weighed on me with almost suffocating force. These dedicated professionals were patriots doing their utmost for their country on August 7, just like they did every day.
Two weeks after the attacks, President Clinton retaliated by sending scores of Tomahawk missiles into an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. The decision to attack and the target selection were closely held within a small group of cabinet-level principals. Dick Clarke, as counterterrorism czar, was in those meetings, but I was not. The attacks were criticized by Clinton’s political opponents as “Wag the Dog” distractions from the mounting Monica Lewinsky scandal. In fact, the U.S. reprisals were justified and barely proportionate responses to Al Qaeda’s terrorism and a warning that we could strike their facilities inside Afghanistan at will.
The Sudan target was a more controversial choice. It was selected largely because a soil sample analyzed by U.S. intelligence revealed the presence of EMPTA, a precursor compound for VX, a deadly chemical agent of the sort Al Qaeda threatened to weaponize against American targets. Bin Laden, who lived until 1995 in Sudan, was also believed to have had some financial stake in the factory. But the Sudanese government and some others maintained that the plant had always been a purely civilian, commercial facility that had been gratuitously hit due to American animus toward the country. The Sudanese claims were never validated.
In the months that followed, we operated on high alert, given the potential that additional U.S. facilities in Africa would be hit by Al Qaeda. We faced an unyielding stream of threat information, much of it specific, revealing plots to attack targets across the continent. It was like playing whack-a-mole, trying to stay ahead of the enemy and thwart any future strikes. I led the Africa Bureau through a detailed assessment of the vulnerability of our diplomatic posts on the continent, with the aim of having a strong basis for seeking additional funds from Congress to harden or rebuild those facilities that needed it most. In the late 1990s, many of our African posts were deemed both “high threat,” meaning we assessed there to be an Al Qaeda presence or ability to hit the target, and “high vulnerability.” We felt like sitting ducks.
Secretary Albright successfully pressed Congress to appropriate supplemental funds to reinforce existing embassies, including with such basic measures as placing Mylar on windows to reduce blast impact and prevent glass flying and installing makeshift barricades to achieve additional “setback” from the street. Albright also obtained funds to rebuild our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in safer locations and to accelerate the gradual pace of new construction to replace other vulnerable missions across Africa.
Within the Africa Bureau, our top priority was to avoid another attack, even at the expense of normal embassy operations. When one evening in December 1998 my principal deputy, Johnnie Carson, reported that we had multiple, credible, imminent threats targeting numerous U.S. embassies, I immediately ordered the shutdown of all our embassies in Africa for the following day. I then returned to the pressing issues at hand, working as usual late into the evening. The next morning, I received an early phone call from my immediate boss, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Tom Pickering. Uncharacteristically irate, he yelled, “How the hell do you close all the embassies in Africa and neglect to inform the Seventh Floor?”
Only then did it hit me: I had forgotten to inform him or any of my superiors that I had unilaterally shut down the entire continent—an unprecedented move. Letting Pickering learn of my directive from the morning press added insult to injury. Apologizing profusely, I took full blame, telling him, “This was entirely my screw-up, a major one, and it won’t happen again.”
I relearned an old lesson. Under sustained pressure from the cumulative crises and fear for our personnel, I had been moving too fast.
My failure to keep Pickering in the loop was hardly my only misstep. Two days before Christmas 1998, and just over a year since I began as assistant secretary, Howard Wolpe invited me to lunch at the Magic Gourd, a mediocre Chinese restaurant near the State Department. Howard was serving with me in the Africa Bureau as President Clinton’s special envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa. His full-time role was to devote high-level effort to ending the conflicts in Congo and Burundi and trying to prevent further mass atrocities. Howard had served fourteen years as a member of Congress from Michigan. A PhD in political science specializing in African affairs, for a decade he was chairman of the House Africa Subcommittee and led efforts to enact legislation imposing sweeping sanctions on apartheid South Africa. A brilliant, principled, gentle man with a self-deprecating humor and goofiness that were incomparable, Howard was uniquely able to trip over his own feet, even fall, and then laugh hysterically at himself.
Twenty-five years my senior, Howard had decades of experience on me. As a respected elder and fellow political appointee, largely invulnerable to any potential vengeance, he gamely accepted the mission (I presume from my career deputies) to deliver some very tough counsel. Over sweet-and-sour something, he calmly explained how I had alienated most members of my team. “You are too hard-charging and hardheaded,” he said. Rather than listen well, he said, “You are overly directive and intimidate others so much that you quell dissent and stifle contrary advice.” He allowed that I was smart, but too brash, knowledgeable but immature. He warned me bluntly that I would fail as assistant secretary if I did not correct course. Yet Howard also made clear that he wanted me to succeed and his advice came from a place of respect and affection.
At first, I was knocked back, not expecting to be taken to the woodshed. As the seriousness of Howard’s message sank in, I collected myself and listened carefully. Crushed by the weight of my own failure, I felt relieved—even in that very difficult moment—that I had someone nearby like Howard who was not afraid to administer the toughest kind of love. I asked clarifying questions, without defensiveness, fully understanding how important and urgent his message was. After thanking him profusely for his guts and generosity, I took the holiday to fully absorb and reflect on what he said.
I was hurt but sobered, chastened but not angry. He was right. I had to do better.
I needed to be more patient, have multiple speeds, slow down, and stop driving my team so hard and fast, as the State Department shrink had counseled. I had to listen and solicit competing opinions, build personal relationships, not simply direct but generate collective ownership of decisions. In addition, as my third-grade teacher had long ago advised, I had to learn to be more patient and forgiving of others and show more respect for the experience of my career colleagues.
Thanks to Howard, I was able to correct course before it was too late. Under his tutelage, I became a better leader and manager, as he kindly acknowledged. I also gained a deep appreciation and respect for the extraordinary talent and experience embodied in the career foreign service and civil service and have since done my utmost to help develop and promote the most promising officers. As assistant secretary and thereafter, I championed increased funding, enhanced security, and due appreciation for the service and sacrifice of the State Department’s and USAID’s career employees who often risk their lives in the line of duty but get a fraction of the public appreciation that our service members rightly receive.
Howard Wolpe, who became a dear friend and comrade in arms, will forever have my gratitude. In later years, when I needed to coach junior colleagues to be more effective policymakers, I often cited the value to me of Howard’s intervention, which truly saved me from myself.
As special envoy, Howard Wolpe played a key role in resolving “Africa’s First World War,” the bloody battle for control of Congo that drew in numerous neighboring countries. During that same crazy summer of 1998, Congo’s eastern neighbors, Rwanda and Uganda, invaded Congo to try to topple the young government of former rebel leader Laurent Kabila. One year earlier, these two governments had helped overthrow the decades-old, corrupt, repressive regime of Mobutu Sese Seko. But after Kabila reneged on his pledge to close the refugee camps housing Rwandan Hutu rebels, including many who had committed genocide, Rwanda airlifted rebel forces clear across the vast Congo to threaten its capital, Kinshasa. Angola, Zimbabwe, Chad, and Namibia rallied to save Kabila’s government, embroiling seven foreign armies in a complex regional conflict. The fighting took on an ethnic cast, where the Congolese army targeted minority Tutsis, and Rwandan-backed Congolese rebels conducted brutal reprisal killings against Rwanda’s Hutu adversaries.
Our fears of renewed genocide in this volatile region resurfaced, along with recognition that intensifying conflict in Congo, the continent’s third largest country that borders nine other nations, would subsume much of Africa in costly warfare. Howard’s job, in coordination with our ambassadors in the region, was to apply the full weight of America’s diplomatic muscle, alongside African, European, and U.N. partners, to try to prevent mass atrocities and broker a peaceful resolution.
As with Tony Lake’s work on Ethiopia-Eritrea, I backed Howard’s efforts with my own diplomatic weight and relationships in the region. Together, we formulated our goals, strategy, and negotiating tactics; and, occasionally, we traveled together to the region. In late October 1998, when the multinational war was raging, we made a strong push for foreign forces to halt the fighting and withdraw from Congo, while pressing Kabila’s government to enter serious negotiations with Congolese rebels. Along with my special assistant John Underriner, I embarked with Howard and Gayle Smith on a regional tour of the key countries involved in Congo, plus Mandela’s South Africa, which was an important mediator.
Such trips were intense and exhausting, as we hopped between distant capitals on small private planes. Commercial airline connections in Africa were scarce, unreliable, and often dangerous. As an assistant secretary, rather than a cabinet official, I did not rate a dedicated military plane, so we often leased four- or six-seat propeller planes (jets were a rare luxury), which were vulnerable to weather and mechanical challenges.
On this trip, we flew in a small plane on what became a particularly memorable leg from Pretoria, South Africa, to Luanda, Angola, a 1,500-mile journey that required a refueling stop in rural Namibia. It was approximately a four-hour flight, so we left South Africa early in the morning to arrive in Angola by midday and go straight into meetings with senior officials. Along the way, as we plotted our message to the Angolans, the four of us sat close—almost toe to toe. Gayle and I faced forward, with John and Howard facing us, flying backward on our tiny plane. It made for convenient conversation, but soon was too intimate.
About an hour into the flight, I started feeling clammy and weak. As my perspiration increased, my stomach turned over, signaling it was quite discontent. I announced to my colleagues, “I’m not feeling well,” and reached for the air sickness bag, which thankfully was handy. With muffled apologies, I opened the bag and threw up voluminously. Suddenly, to my horror, I felt my lap growing warm and wet. The bag had a hole in the bottom, and I was covered in puke. My lightweight, rayon blue dress with white polka dots, once ready for my meeting with the president of Angola, was ruined, and I would have no time to change before my meeting.
In a flash, I caught Howard and John sitting there slack-jawed in shock, but canny enough to gingerly pull back their feet to try to save their shoes from the vomit pooling beneath us on the floor. As soon as I finished being sick and realized the gravity of the situation, there was only one thing I could do: laugh hysterically. Kindly, as friends, they all joined me in howling at the insanity of the moment. But we still had the problem of the dress, and the leader of our delegation being a smelly, unpresentable mess.
We landed on a dirt patch in nowhere Namibia to refuel as planned. There was a single gas pump, a water hole with hose, and some rudimentary bathrooms. The men gave us some privacy, as Gayle turned the hose on me and my dress, spraying me down until I was thoroughly drenched in the desert. She and I then went into the bathroom to strip down and ensure we had washed away all signs of vomit. Confident we had succeeded, all that remained was for me to air-dry over the ensuing couple of hours.
As I have said countless times over the years: “Thank God for Gayle!” Starting when she was my colleague working for USAID in East Africa in the mid-1990s, Gayle quickly became and remains one of my very best friends. Tall and imposing, with a shock of short, spiky white hair, Gayle resembles a white Grace Jones. She is smart, irreverent, fearless, and fun-loving. We have found great strength and solace in each other for some twenty-five years. As partners in leading Africa policy during the latter years of the Clinton administration, we shared a rare bond of trust and common judgment that enabled us to be exceptionally efficient. Often, counterparts at State and the NSC suffer from rivalry, mutual suspicion, or even hot friction. In our case, we could divide and conquer, maximizing our ability to drive policy outcomes without ever doubting or questioning the other’s motives or efficacy.
Our Congo-focused tour of the region was more memorable for the side-dramas than the policy outcomes. Despite our efforts, the Kabila government refused to negotiate with its rivals. Kabila’s external backers extended their commitment to prop him up, and Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda remained unyielding in their determination to rid Congo, by whatever means necessary, of those who had committed the 1994 genocide and still threatened Rwanda.
The war continued unabated until the summer of 1999, when Howard in partnership with Southern African leaders and other mediators negotiated the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement, signed by all the countries involved in the Congo War. Unfortunately, disputes among the rebel groups delayed their signatures, and fighting persisted for a few months after the cease-fire was declared. Even after the fighting quelled, the issues of who would monitor and enforce the agreement and how to catalyze a political reconciliation within Congo remained unresolved.
Sensing another opportunity to best his bureaucratic rivals and perhaps to use Congo to cement his years-long bid for a Nobel Peace Prize, U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke entered the scene to prove that he could seal implementation of the deal that Howard had helped broker but not yet secured.
Over the preceding years, Holbrooke’s career had spanned diplomacy, journalism, investment banking, and various nonprofit causes, but his unabashed goal was to become secretary of state, and he committed his full energies to that objective. Beginning as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Carter administration, he later served as U.S. ambassador to Germany and assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs in Clinton’s first term, when he played a leading role in brokering the Dayton Peace Accords, ending the Bosnian war. In 1998, Clinton nominated Holbrooke to be U.S. ambassador to the U.N., which Holbrooke likely anticipated would bring him within striking distance of becoming secretary of state, perhaps in a first Al Gore term.
Dick combined, in rare measure, impressive diplomatic skills with hubris, persistence, and an unmatched devotion to self-promotion. I’d never met him in person until one day—while he waited many frustrating months to achieve confirmation as U.N. ambassador—he showed up at my State Department office. I was on Capitol Hill in meetings when my assistant Annette Bushelle called my cell. She reported that Ambassador Holbrooke was in my office demanding to see me.
“Please tell him I am not there, and we can make an appointment to meet at a mutually convenient time,” I said.
Seemingly anguished, Annette persisted, “He wants you to come back now to meet with him. He’s not leaving.”
“Tell him I am on the Hill meeting with members of Congress and will not return until my meetings are done.” Annette agreed but predicted, “I think he will be here when you get back.”
He was. Holbrooke camped out in my office for well over an hour. When I arrived, I sat down in my chair next to his encampment on my couch and asked what was so urgent?
“I wanted to meet you,” he began. “You know, I dislike you already because you broke my record as the youngest regional assistant secretary.”
I knew Dick had a well-established reputation, but I was truly surprised to see it demonstrated so amply in our first encounter. We went on to discuss various policy issues, with Holbrooke insisting that we would be working closely together, given that African affairs typically dominate the U.N. Security Council agenda. On this, he was correct, and the next two years proceeded on the course he set in our initial encounter.
Holbrooke, I discovered from our first meeting, was not only a seasoned diplomat but a classic bully: he dominated and abused those he could, but he respected, if demeaned, those he could not. To deal with him, I needed to heed my dad’s advice: push back hard and “don’t take crap off him.”
Once Holbrooke was confirmed in August 1999 as the ambassador to the U.N., some fourteen months after his nomination, it was game on.
One of his first gambits was to embark on a tour of the Central and Southern African region, reprising over a year later the trip Howard, Gayle, and I had taken with the same aim of settling the conflict in Congo. Howard Wolpe accompanied Holbrooke on his whole journey, along with a dozen Holbrooke staffers and Holbrooke’s wife, Kati Marton, while my schedule only allowed me to join for a few stops. Across broad swaths of Africa, Holbrooke bullied and charmed, blustered and berated heads of state, trying to compel them to yield by the sheer force of his personality. It was an impressive, if unsuccessful, display of effort and ego.
Undeterred by failure, Holbrooke tried again when he presided over the Security Council as president. Declaring January 2000 “the month of Africa” at the U.N., Holbrooke invited all the African heads of state involved in the Congo conflict to New York for a summit meeting chaired by Secretary of State Albright.
As the leaders began to arrive at the U.N. in advance of the summit, Holbrooke summoned me, our staffs, and my ambassadors accredited to the countries concerned to a Sunday meeting in his office. The discussion grew heated, as he towered over a cramped conference room table and argued that the mandate of the U.N. peacekeeping force in eastern Congo must not include disarmament of the Hutu militia and former Rwandan army elements who had committed genocide and continued to destabilize Congo’s eastern neighbors. Howard and most of the ambassadors patiently tried to persuade Holbrooke that if the U.N. didn’t take on this task (difficult as it was) no one would, and the region would remain a tinderbox. With each salvo, Holbrooke grew more convinced of the righteousness of his position.
When I weighed in forcefully in opposition to his position, Holbrooke, dripping with sarcasm and condescension, responded slowly, “Ah, I remember when I too was a young assistant secretary…” Whatever else he said thereafter, I didn’t hear.
His aim was to emasculate me (or the female equivalent) in front of the older ambassadors who reported to me. It was a pivotal moment: if I let him get away with denigrating me in front of six of my ambassadors, I would be weakened thereafter as leader of the Africa Bureau and the decider on U.S. Africa policy. If I said anything further, the conversation would have devolved into an ugly shouting match. With no better idea on how to respond, I looked him square in the face, as he continued to speak, and raised my right hand prominently, prolonging the display of my middle finger. He kept talking. It was clear he saw my gesture, but he never acknowledged it.
While Wolpe and Prendergast were plainly amused, my ambassadors were uniformly shocked—some bemused and impressed, others horrified. As the discussion continued, I worried about two things. First, that our distinguished six-time ambassador now serving in Congo, William Swing, might have a heart attack. He was an older man, a genteel southerner with a divinity degree, who agreed with Holbrooke’s position and surely never expected to see a senior official, an assistant secretary no less, address a superior as I just did. Second, I wanted to tell my bosses in Washington what happened before Holbrooke did.
For Swing, I simply prayed. For my bosses, I excused myself some minutes later and walked out into the hallway to reach Secretary Albright and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. When I was connected to the secretary, I started, “I am calling to report that I just gave the finger to a member of President Clinton’s cabinet.” She laughed and asked for elaboration. I explained the back-and-forth, and she simply said, “Good for you!” Berger was equally amused and supportive. While I felt fully justified in my indignation with Holbrooke at the time and still do, if I had it to do over, with the benefit of age and experience, I might have found another way to convey the same message—with words and without profanity.
The Congo Security Council Summit was attention-grabbing and brought the region’s leaders back together for the first time since Lusaka, when a cease-fire agreement had been brokered but not sufficiently respected; yet it yielded little tangible progress. Indeed, it nearly came off the rails before it started when Holbrooke offended the elderly, prickly Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, the senior African leader in attendance, who threatened to boycott and thus torpedo the meeting. Holbrooke pleaded with Secretary Albright to visit Mugabe on an emergency basis at his hotel in New York and try to soothe him. She obliged, reluctantly saving Holbrooke’s signature summit.
In the months to follow, Holbrooke gradually lost interest in Congo, concluding both that there was little prospect for a high-profile diplomatic victory and the publicity value of the enterprise had been exhausted. Holbrooke moved on to other targets, including Ethiopia-Eritrea, and far more successfully the battle against HIV/AIDS, which he helpfully catalyzed by elevating it to the U.N. Security Council agenda. In a signal achievement, he negotiated the reduction of U.S. dues paid to the U.N. and, in turn, secured funds from Congress to pay off long-standing U.S. arrears to the U.N.
Holbrooke’s retreat from the Central African field left it largely open again to Howard Wolpe. Through persistence, skill, and deft diplomacy, Howard played a critical role in implementing the Lusaka Agreement and fostering peace and reconciliation in neighboring Burundi.
Holbrooke’s disdain for me endured until his untimely death in 2010 while serving in the State Department as special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Over the years, Holbrooke had mastered the Washington influence game, cultivating influential members of the press by providing generous access and copious leaks and building an army of dedicated acolytes by nurturing talented young experts. As needed, he enlisted his faithful foot soldiers and journalist friends to aid his own ascent and trip up any perceived adversaries, myself included.
It took me years to understand why Holbrooke had seen me as a threat or some kind of competitor, starting even as far back as the late 1990s in the Clinton days. He was almost twenty-five years my senior and three levels above me in government. Yet, perhaps mindful that he himself had risen swiftly from an assistant secretary to the cabinet, Holbrooke and his posse deemed it necessary to work hard during the Bush years to undermine my prospects for higher office by disparaging me to my boss at Brookings and stoking negative press stories about my work on Africa. If it hadn’t been for Barack Obama, whose rise Dick failed to foresee, Holbrooke might have succeeded. Instead, eight years after my most heated encounter with Holbrooke, Obama elevated me to U.N. ambassador.
During the two and a half years that we wrestled with resolving the Ethiopia-Eritrea war and Congo’s conflagration, the U.S. faced numerous other serious challenges in Africa, which converged in the summer of 1998 shortly after President Clinton’s historic trip to the continent. Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha died suddenly in June, enabling the start of a transition to democratic rule. Fierce clashes erupted in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, between government forces and rival militia, which enveloped the American embassy and forced the emergency drawdown of U.S. embassy staff in September 1998. In Angola, the tenuous 1994 peace agreement between the government and UNITA rebels disintegrated, plunging the northern part of that strategic, oil-rich country back into conflict. Simultaneously, war and famine in southern Sudan intensified.
As laser-focused as my colleagues and I were on resolving these and other conflicts raging across the continent—from Burundi to Sierra Leone—we still devoted significant energy to advancing the lasting, beneficial aspects of President Clinton’s Africa agenda. The president’s Partnership for Economic Growth and Opportunity, which I helped envision and later implement, aimed to spur economic reform and regional integration throughout Africa by combining a near 50 percent increase in development assistance with unprecedented debt relief and concerted steps to increase U.S. trade and investment in Africa. Most agencies were eager to rally to President Clinton’s call to do more with Africa. Some, however, were less enthused, notably senior leaders at the Treasury Department, who were skeptical of granting many poor African nations debt relief.
At Treasury, Secretary Robert Rubin and later his successor, Larry Summers, at least initially viewed debt relief to most African countries as a costly moral hazard, which would encourage their further profligate spending. At State and the White House, we considered African countries’ bilateral and multilateral debt to be an unsustainable drag on their prospects for economic reform and growth. The battle was engaged on the eve of President Clinton’s first trip to Africa, after a meeting in the White House’s Cabinet Room where I had urged the announcement of a presidential push for international debt relief.
Bob Rubin, whom I like and deeply respect, grew furious at me as I pressed the issue. He launched into an uncharacteristic rage, concluding with a line that approximated “over my dead body!” Rubin’s influence and importance far exceeded mine, so I assumed I was defeated on the spot, but the proposal gradually gained traction within the interagency, thanks in large part to the combination of Gayle’s efforts within the White House and my persistence at State.
By 1999, when Larry Summers led Treasury, support had grown at the International Monetary Fund for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC). Frustrated with the growing momentum behind the push for debt relief, and particularly any consideration of relief for Nigeria, which he considered especially undeserving given its history of corrupt military rule, Summers summoned my immediate boss, Undersecretary Tom Pickering, and my deputy for economic policy Witney Schneidman, to a meeting in his office. He pointedly excluded me. Witney returned to report that Summers began the discussion by angrily asking Pickering: “Can you control Susan Rice?” Pickering replied undramatically, “No.” The meeting failed to thwart progress toward meaningful debt relief but underscored how much frustration greeted my tenacity in some quarters.
Among the Clinton administration’s notable accomplishments was the enactment of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) in May 2000, following years of intensive effort by the administration and allies in Congress to grant duty-free, quota-free access to the U.S. market for most goods exported from Africa. This landmark legislation, which I championed as a top priority, finally accorded Africa the same status as many other regions, like the Caribbean, and promised to catalyze substantial growth in the economic ties between the U.S. and the continent. With strong bipartisan support, AGOA was extended by Congress in the Obama era and endures as the cornerstone of the U.S.-Africa economic relationship.
With backing from the White House and secretary of state, during my tenure the Africa Bureau launched significant initiatives in Africa to improve education, especially for girls. We worked with the U.S. Department of Transportation to strengthen aviation safety and security. With the Defense Department, we established the African Center for Strategic Studies, a war college for African officials to bolster civilian control of the military, and strengthened African capacity to conduct peacekeeping operations in Sierra Leone and elsewhere.
Faced with the mushrooming HIV/AIDS crisis, President Clinton declared the pandemic a national security threat, vastly increased American investment in HIV drugs and treatment in Africa, and pressured the pharmaceutical industry to reduce prices and substantially improve access to life-saving drugs in Africa. Subsequently, President George W. Bush built on these efforts and established PEPFAR, a historic, large-scale program to fight HIV/AIDS globally that has endured with strong bipartisan support and saved countless lives.
The advance of democracy in Africa, ever fitful and nonlinear, scored two major wins in the 1990s, supported by large American investments of diplomatic attention and financial resources. In South Africa, after Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994, the Clinton administration provided over $600 million in bilateral aid and established the U.S.–South Africa Binational Commission—co-chaired by Vice President Al Gore and South African deputy president Thabo Mbeki. This multi-agency commission helped spur bilateral cooperation across sectors ranging from sustainable energy to black economic empowerment. Through painstaking negotiations, the U.S. and South Africa also managed to resolve the notorious ARMSCOR case, which had prevented renewed bilateral military cooperation due to violations of U.S. export control laws by the apartheid regime. Though we struggled through disputes with South Africa over trade policy and HIV/AIDS, the Clinton administration managed to establish warm ties with South Africa’s new black majority government and to cooperate in addressing conflicts in Congo and Burundi.
Nigeria marked this period’s second major breakthrough for democracy in Africa. Following Abacha’s death by heart attack and Abiola’s untimely passing, the interim military leader kept his pledge to return Nigeria to democratic rule through free and fair elections. Thus, in 1999, the experienced and respected former president Olusegun Obasanjo was now elected president. Obasanjo is a wise, plainspoken former general, a devout Christian, and a down-to-earth leader who personally eschewed corruption and endeavored to return Nigeria to its regional leadership role as a military and diplomatic heavyweight.
Obasanjo and I enjoyed an easy and candid relationship, which facilitated deeper bilateral ties and effective policy coordination. One evening when Obasanjo was visiting New York, he called me and Gayle over to his suite in the U.N. Plaza Hotel for consultations. When we arrived, Obasanjo was arguing amiably with his sassy wife, Stella, while munching on scrawny, roasted chicken wings. As we sat talking about conflicts in West and Central Africa, Obasanjo punctuated his message by nonchalantly hurling well-picked chicken bones—much to our amusement—backward over his shoulders across the presidential suite.
This warm and strategic relationship yielded the establishment of a U.S.-Nigeria Bilateral Commission chaired by the secretary of state; a visit by President Clinton to Nigeria in 2000 on his second and final trip to the continent; and crucial U.S. military training and equipment to enable the deployment of five Nigerian battalions to help restore order and stability in Sierra Leone, where civil war had raged since 1991 and the capital was repeatedly threatened by rebel forces.
As difficult as this period was for Africa, given the proliferation of conflicts, which underscored the mismatch between Africa’s extraordinary potential and its proclivity for backtracking, during the Clinton era we accomplished much of which I remain proud. It was also a period of enormous professional growth for me, even if fitful and sometimes painful.
I learned that leadership is more like conducting a symphony than performing as a virtuoso player of any single instrument—often with multiple, potentially dissonant musicians and the need to achieve harmony among them. I also found that securing the buy-in and support of those career officials who will outlast any political appointee can be slow and cumbersome, but the extra effort and patience it takes to get there can pay lasting dividends. The most enduring outcomes are not always the swiftest ones; indeed, the best route from Point A to Point B is not always a straight line but could be a path with twists and turns.
Belatedly, I resolved to make enemies wisely: if it is not necessary to burn a bridge, don’t. Enemies you thought you left behind on the side of the road have a nasty habit of getting back up, dusting themselves off, and trying to chase you down. Another lesson learned: some adversaries aren’t worth the effort; they are better ignored or given the Heisman (a stiff-arm) than combated directly. Others merit combat. As a matter of temperament and morality, I always prefer to be direct, as my father taught me, and thus to launch a prompt frontal assault. But I have learned with time that sometimes patience is the best strategy for achieving the purest justice.
It was arguably a huge risk to give a thirty-two-year-old, breast-feeding, African American woman the job of assistant secretary for African affairs. If I were Madeleine Albright, knowing now what I didn’t know then, I’m not sure I would have offered me the job at that age. She had my back, however, at every turn and believed in my abilities.
Winning the respect of African leaders, my superiors in the cabinet outside of the White House and State, the bulk of my ambassadors, and my Washington-based staff was a serious challenge. I met it, perhaps against the odds, because we were able, ultimately, to achieve significant policy results.
Despite tragedy and setbacks, for the first time American policy elevated Africa to a place of priority, not due to Cold War competition but rather mutual interest and mutual respect. By arguing strenuously that bolstering African security, prosperity, and democracy served both American interests and values, and by driving multiple complex policy initiatives and negotiations in tandem, my team and I helped enlist the whole of the U.S. government in concrete efforts to transform our economic and strategic relationship with this vast and rising continent.
Not only did I gain invaluable experience as a policymaker but also as a manager, diplomat, and spokesperson for U.S. policy. Through testimony before Congress, numerous speeches to wide-ranging audiences, television appearances, and press interviews, I grew adept and comfortable with the public-facing aspects of foreign policymaking. And I tasted both indisputable failure and harsh public criticism, arming me with the first layers of tough skin that I would need in greater thickness when the going got much rougher.