The Women Who Shaped Obama’s Foreign Policy
VERY FEW PEOPLE SHOULD WRITE THEIR MEMOIRS. If you become rich, powerful, or famous, however, people will assure you that you have a story to tell and that you should tell it. And you may. But the very reasons for your success are probably also inversely correlated with the kind of self-understanding needed to make the story worth telling. While readers may really want to know what it’s like up there, they’re less likely to be interested in the fact that when you were still in the cradle, daddy admonished you not to “take crap off of anyone.”
That, by the way, is the “tough love” that Susan Rice, in her book of the same name, writes that her parents applied to her and that she has since imposed on friends, loved ones, and subordinates, some of whom appear not to have been very grateful for the treatment. Still, it must have been an effective formula, for Rice became a U.S. assistant secretary of state at 32 and President Barack Obama’s national security advisor at 48. But tough love is not a source of human insight. Having spent her life running as far and as fast she could, Rice writes, “I’ve had very little time to absorb and reflect on what I have discovered about myself, my family,” or much else. She has, she feels, put off that hard work until now. In , Rice recounts, very briskly, her triumphs in the classroom and the playing field, the pain of her parents’ divorce, her rapid ascent up the ladder of power, and the inevitable dangers to family life of a career in
