Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For

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To my parents, Lois Dickson Rice and Emmett J. Rice, who gave me all I needed and much more,

To my husband and life partner, Ian, without whom none of this would be possible,

To our beloved children, Jake and Maris, who have taught me what matters,

And to my brother, Johnny, who has never let me get away with anything.

Prologue

Farewell to the Moral Universe

WASHINGTON, D.C.

JANUARY 20, 2017

It starts like every other day, even though it is the last.

My intelligence briefer waits in the Secret Service vehicle outside my house to hand over the classified iPad containing the last President’s Daily Brief of the Obama administration. We ride downtown together, as usual, but on this day the streets are eerily empty. Gray overcast skies, promising a good chance of rain, weigh on the city as we drive past familiar landmarks—Georgetown, the Kennedy Center, the State Department, and the Federal Reserve.

Outside the temperature is an unseasonable 43 degrees and rising, and I’m relieved to be wearing just a comfortable black, fitted jacket and black pants with a gold short-sleeved top underneath. No heavy winter clothing on what would typically be a frigid day.

There are five of us in the black armored SUV. My briefer and I sit behind two Secret Service agents who man the front seats. Between us is a red and black secure phone that comes in handy when I am on the road and the White House Situation Room needs to reach me. Often it’s Secretary of State John Kerry on the line. Behind me in the back row of seats, where my kids normally ride, is my husband, Ian, who is coming to help me carry away my last boxes and, more importantly, to share in the nostalgia of closing this chapter of our lives.

As we pull into the White House complex, my briefer passes me a gift bag containing a very nice bottle of scotch—a totally unexpected parting present—which he says presciently, may come in handy some days down the road.

Because the driveway separating the White House from the Old Executive Office Building is packed with two motorcades—one for President Obama and one for President-elect Trump—we have to jump out of the car and walk through the final exterior gate with Secret Service agents trailing behind, rather than drive up to the door of the West Wing basement to disembark, as we always do.

It’s 9 a.m. on Inauguration Day: Friday, January 20, 2017. It feels more than a little strange.

Almost all of the White House staff is gone. The most senior worked through January 19. Only a handful remain. As national security advisor, I am on duty—until 12:01 p.m. when the forty-fifth president takes the oath of office. If, God forbid, there is a terrorist attack before noon on the Capitol where almost the entirety of the U.S. government is collected, I will be expected to respond as I would on any other day during the prior three and a half years. Assuming that no such crisis will occur, I plan on spending the final hours of my tenure tying up some loose ends, relinquishing the remaining documents that must go to the Archives, packing the last personal items in my office, and saying goodbye to those few colleagues I’ve yet to bid farewell.

My feelings are all jumbled up. I am sad to leave, knowing that I will mightily miss working with such good people and close friends every day. To a person, the senior staff of this White House, Obama’s second-term team, are committed, kind, collegial, and selfless. It is them and my extraordinary National Security Council (NSC) colleagues I will miss the most. For years, through all kinds of trials, we hung together in battle on behalf of what we believed was right for our country, on behalf of a president we respected and loved. I will miss seeing President Obama every day and receiving his customary smart-ass ribbings about my shoes, my short stature, or my tennis game, which he claims without any evidence (and much to the contrary) that he can best. I will miss the thrill and the import of serving my country at the highest levels and working on issues of utmost consequence. I can’t imagine that anything hereafter will compare.

Yet I am also excited to be free. To be back in charge of my life. To be responsible primarily to my loved ones and myself. To wake up when I want, exercise as much as I wish, wear yoga pants every day if I feel like it, spend quality time with my kids, and refresh the romance with the love of my life. Most immediately, I am looking forward in two days to running off to a faraway island with Ian (and no kids) for almost three weeks!

At one point, I might have worried about surviving devoid of the ongoing adrenaline rush that is a life of service, particularly in the White House. Not now. Sixteen years earlier, at the end of the Clinton administration, I made the transition from an intense government job to private life. Over the course of my fifty-two years, I had learned how to drive myself at varying speeds—from fifth gear to second gear—and am confident that I remember how to downshift.

Three hours left.

Curious, Ian and I walk around the first floor of the West Wing. Tall, lanky, as handsome and almost as youthful-looking as when we first met in college, my husband—who worked for years in television news, most recently as an executive producer—has his phone camera at the ready. All the jumbo photos of Obama and his family and staff have been removed from the walls. Empty wooden frames await Trump photos to fill them.

Susan— I hear the unmistakable voice of Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor and one of my closest friends, calling to us. I know I’m about to get one of the best hugs in the world. Ben is compact, with short-cropped hair and an impish demeanor. No one can beat him for loyalty, devotion, or dangerous tandem moves on the dance floor. I turn and see him approaching with Anita Decker Breckenridge, the striking blond, appropriately fierce deputy White House chief of staff, who carries a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne. We follow her like she’s the Pied Piper to find Ferial Govashiri, the president’s unfailingly warm and upbeat assistant. She is standing vigil in the outer Oval Office, making sure that as long as Obama is president, nothing untoward is going down on his premises.

Inside the Oval, the scene is surreal—the final stage of the presidential transition in all its banality, speed, and extraordinary professionalism. A crew of moving men is ripping down the old Obama curtains and putting up Trump gold. The Resolute Desk behind which President Obama sat—made of wood taken from the Arctic explorer HMS Resolute, and used by almost every president since Rutherford B. Hayes—will soon be Donald Trump’s. It is lying upside down in the center of the Oval with wires and cords hanging out, as the communications systems are reconfigured. The crew is changing out the Obama carpet, on which the famous quotation attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. is woven along its edge: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

We do not linger. It is painful to witness the literal dismantling of Obama’s White House. With a full appreciation of the irony of drinking champagne on the morning of Trump’s inaugural, Anita pops the cork, and the five of us share the bottle. Without much in the way of words, we drink to our friendship, to the privilege of public service, to the pride we share in the accomplishments of the Obama administration, and to our prayer that the country is strong enough to endure whatever is to come.

Ian and I meander back to my suite, diagonally across from the Oval Office in the compact West Wing. I settle down at my desk for the last time to tackle the loose ends. Despite the press of end-of-administration responsibilities, I want first to act on a letter that I received from a former State Department employee who was gravely injured in the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings. We originally met when he was being treated at the Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. His son wants to go to the Naval Academy, and he wrote to ask if I could help. Though I doubt I can be of much assistance, I want to make the effort on his behalf. I call a senior career staffer in the vice president’s office, someone who will stay behind after Joe Biden departs, to ask if he can please try to help the son of a man who sacrificed immeasurably for his country. The vice president’s office can nominate candidates for the service academies, and my hope is that the permanent staff can lend apolitical support to this family. I then call my former State Department colleague to relay that, while I am not optimistic, I made the request.

I shift gears to clean out the remaining items in my desk and finish up with the final boxes. It’s a little after 11 a.m., and time is running out. The last weeks of the administration, not surprisingly, have been even more intense than usual. On top of the crush of enduring issues—the counter-ISIS campaign, North Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya—I have had to spend many hours on additional tasks: briefing my successor as national security advisor, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn (Retired); coaching NSC staff who are leaving government on how to think about their futures; moving mountains of final paperwork to be signed by the president; and overseeing my team’s yeoman efforts to archive my documents.

In the midst of those undertakings, came the sudden loss of my mother, Lois Dickson Rice. Her passing on January 4, 2017, left me shocked and bereft but also demanded a significant share of my time. Even though my younger brother, Johnny, took on many of the tasks that are invariably part of losing a loved one, it fell to me to obtain the death certificate, complete paperwork for the funeral home, schedule her memorial, pay severance to her caregivers, host grieving relatives, and ensure that her obituaries were both worthy and published in the right places.

There was no time to grieve. Too much was happening to allow myself to succumb to the undertow of pain inside me.

As these final days flew by, I left to the end one last email—a memo for the record, requested by our White House counsel’s office. I knew I must get it done, but it wasn’t urgent. It didn’t seem to matter much when I wrote it. So it fell to the back of the jammed queue. The email was to memorialize a brief meeting that President Obama hosted on January 5 with Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, FBI director Jim Comey, Vice President Biden, and myself. This discussion followed a larger meeting in which President Obama was briefed on the highly classified version of the Intelligence Community report, Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.

In this follow-on meeting that the White House lawyers had asked me to document, President Obama sought the Justice Department leaders’ judgment of whether there was any reason that he should instruct me and other senior administration officials to be careful in how we briefed incoming Trump administration officials on Russia. Obama was explicitly not seeking to inject himself into any law enforcement business and, as always, he insisted that we proceed by the book to avoid any inappropriate White House involvement in Justice Department matters. Rather, from a national security vantage point, Obama wanted to know if there was any risk in fully sharing information related to Russia with the incoming Trump team. Comey offered his best judgment, which remains classified, and agreed that, if anything changed, he would let the president know. This is what I hurriedly write up as a summary of that brief conversation. I email it to myself in order to record, at the White House counsel’s request, that this discussion should not subsequently be misconstrued as the president improperly injecting himself into a matter under Justice Department purview.

The clock’s minute hand inches past 11:15 a.m.

Time to turn on the television in my office to watch the inaugural proceedings.

Before saying goodbye to cherished colleagues in the Situation Room and the NSC front office, who will stay behind, I ask Ian if I should pen a note to my successor, Michael Flynn, who will take over my desk later that afternoon.

Over the last two months, Flynn and I have spent over twelve hours together. He is a wiry, taut man, fit with a chiseled angular face and military-cut dark hair. In my presence, he seemed quite a different person than the fiery partisan who led the Lock Her Up chant at the Republican National Convention. With me, Flynn seemed subdued, even daunted by the tasks ahead. He was civil and respectful, hungry for advice on how to do the job of national security advisor, if not so much for my views on policy matters. At the end of our final meeting, after I wished Flynn all my best, I started to extend my hand to shake his. He surprised me by asking, Can I have a hug?

Flynn seemed to understand what a tough assignment he was embarking on and recognized that I had done my best to help him succeed. I had, despite my misgivings. Though unexpected, I provided the requested hug—which was awkward, if a little touching.

In this context, a note seems somewhat superfluous, but Ian and I agree it is the patriotic and professional thing to do. On a White House stationery card, I reiterate my best wishes for his success in a job so crucial to the nation’s security. I offer to help him, if ever I could, which is a duty and a creed among former national security advisors, regardless of party affiliation. I had always been grateful for the wisdom and generosity of my predecessors—from Henry Kissinger to Sandy Berger, from Tony Lake and Tom Donilon to Condi Rice and Steve Hadley. I would, of course, return the favor to anyone who came after me.

I leave the note on top of the desk and take one last look around the wholly sanitized national security advisor’s office, burning into my mind’s eye the image of the spotless walls, empty shelves, and, for once, a completely clean desk. Gone are the photos of my children and family. The wall is bare where the massive, gorgeous, reputedly $5 million Willem de Kooning painting entitled … And the Cat (Untitled XI) had hung, which was loaned to my offices at the U.N. and the White House by the de Kooning Foundation courtesy of the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies. Gone too are the painted purple and blue wooden sign with a green handprint made by my daughter, Maris, at summer camp that greeted guests at my front office door with Susan E. Rice’s Office, National Security Advisor; the placard with my signature mantra Get Shit Done, which was strategically placed on my bookshelf to spur me on over the years; and the wooden carved desk plate emblazoned with United States of America, which I liberated from the 2015 Camp David Summit with Gulf Arab leaders. The only remaining color in the room comes from the television set still playing the lead-up to the oath of office.

Ian snaps some final pictures of my former office and captures me as I walk out one last time. The clock above the door reads 11:52. Time to go.

As I head out, I gather my beloved colleagues senior advisor Curtis Ried and special assistant Adam Strickler, who sit outside my office. Curtis is dressed to the nines as usual—in a perfectly tailored suit, funky colorful socks, and expertly coiffed hair. Adam is ready, as always, with his sweet smile, sparkly brown eyes, and unfailingly even demeanor, which have helped soothe me and several of my predecessors through countless storms. The four of us head down the stairs and out the door of the West Basement back to the driveway separating the White House from the Old Executive Office Building. We all pile into the Secret Service black armored Suburban. Before we pull away, I see John Fitzpatrick, NSC senior director for records and access, across the driveway. I jump out of the car and hustle over to give him a hug goodbye and thank him. An experienced career civil servant in his fifties, John has the enormous, ongoing job of overseeing the transfer of all Obama-era NSC records to the Archives.

As we roll out of the White House gates for the last time, my lead Secret Service agent, Tom Rizza, leans back and says, Ma’am, I need to ask you for your White House cell phone and your badge. I hand them over dutifully, with a combination of sadness, finality, and relief.

The radio is tuned to the inauguration and, shortly after we leave the White House complex headed to Joint Base Andrews, President Trump takes the oath of office, concluding: So help me God.

I’m thinking to myself, Please God, help us all, especially President Trump. I struggle to persuade myself that his presidency will be better than his campaign and transition. Surely, the weight of the office will sober and steel him. It couldn’t possibly be as bad as some fear.

Trump’s speech is unpleasant, if unremarkable, until he utters words that seem to make the armored vehicle shudder: This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

We all look at each other, stunned.

Did he just say ‘carnage’? In his Inaugural Address? I ask no one in particular. I really wasn’t sure I heard him correctly.

Seated behind them, I sense the agents wince almost imperceptibly. No one is prepared for the cynicism and ugliness of American carnage. We ride the rest of the way to Andrews in near silence.

When President and Mrs. Obama depart the Capitol after the swearing-in, they will helicopter to Andrews in order to fly to their destination in Palm Springs, California, on the plane that we think of as Air Force One (but isn’t because Obama is no longer president). But before they depart, there will be one last goodbye.

Two months earlier, in November 2016, on our final overseas trip with the president, I suggested to Anita Decker Breckenridge that we organize a proper send-off for the Obamas at Andrews. I recalled fondly the moving and emotional goodbye for the Clintons staged in a big hangar with staff and cabinet, active duty military personnel, an honor guard, and military band. It was a great way to bond the team at the end of the administration and put a bow on eight years of triumph and tribulation—to say goodbye and thank you. I thought the Obamas deserved the same and knew how much it would mean for staff to be together with them one last time. Anita made it happen, as she did so much over the years.

We pull up to the packed hangar in time to hustle inside, make our way up to the front, and position ourselves close to the podium alongside the rest of the senior staff. Conversations are muted and abbreviated as we wait together for former President Obama and the first lady to arrive and speak to us assembled one last time.

When that moment comes and the president begins, Michelle and I, we’ve really been milking this goodbye thing, so it behooves me to be very brief, someone calls out, No, no!

Yes, yes! he says, and continues from there.

As if to comfort the bereaved, he reminds us all that our jobs are not over. Democracy, he tells us, is not the buildings; it’s not the monuments; it’s you being willing to work to make things better, and being willing to listen to each other and argue with each other and come together and knock on doors and make phone calls and treat people with respect. And that doesn’t end. This is just a—just a little old pit stop. This … is not a period. This is a comma in the continuing story of building America.

He tells us all how proud he is of us, that he can’t wait to see what we do next and, he concludes, "And I promise you, I’ll be right here with you.

"All right?

"God Bless you. Thank you, everybody.

"Yes, we did. Yes, we can.

God Bless America.

Then, too soon, it’s time for them to leave. Former president and Mrs. Obama each give me and Ian farewell embraces and deliver many others. It is a fitting send-off for a president who had done so much good, with such humility, and who made his whole team proud every day he served.

Rain falls as the Obamas walk outside along the red carpet, up the stairs to the plane door, then turn and wave one last time. Many of us stay behind to share memories, comfort one another, and promise to stay in touch. The Secret Service has kindly agreed to take their former protectees home, including me and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and his family, rather than leave us curbside at Andrews. The four of us cram back into my agents’ SUV, plus my (now former) chief of staff Suzy George, and we head to my house.

Outside our home, Ian and I thank my four Secret Service agents from the bottom of our hearts. The bond of gratitude and trust you form with men and women who would give their lives to protect you is hard to convey.

After we take a few final pictures, I ask them, Where do you go from here?

Well, ma’am, one says with a hint of trepidation, we are going to pick up Kellyanne, the incoming White House counselor to President Donald J. Trump.

Stoically, I reply, Good luck and thank you again, and turn to walk into the house with Ian and my team.

As soon as the door slams shut, overwhelmed by a flood of mixed emotions, I burst into tears.

NOVEMBER 2012

FIVE YEARS EARLIER

Honey, can you tell the doctor what’s happening?

First, it was voices. And now it’s like people, real people, but I can tell they aren’t real… they are coming out of the walls. And they move toward me and talk.

Are they scary? Do they threaten you?

No, not really scary, but it’s creepy. They come at bad times like in class at school, or when I was at Frannie’s house for a sleepover. And I don’t know when to expect them, and it really bothers me.

Do you recognize them?

No, it’s mostly a man. I don’t know him, but he is very real.

This was the recurring conversation my daughter, Maris, my husband, Ian, and I were having with various doctors at Children’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. It was November 2012, and our beautiful, happy, seemingly healthy eight-year-old was suddenly having frequent and unpredictable hallucinations. She was bothered, and we were terrified.

Over a span of three weeks, a phalanx of neurologists, psychiatrists, ophthalmologists, and radiologists pummeled Maris with MRIs, needles, exams, and repetitive questions. The doctors said the most likely cause was a brain tumor. Other possibilities included schizophrenia, a visual disorder, abuse, or psychological stress. I was flying back and forth from New York, where I was serving as the United States ambassador to the United Nations, to attend these various appointments and to comfort Maris.

Eventually, the tests ruled out the worst possible explanations. No tumor, no mental disorder, no physical trauma or abnormality. Still, no explanation. The episodes continued for almost a year, albeit with diminishing frequency after January 2013. Over time, her doctors concluded that Maris was experiencing a stress reaction to watching her mother being assailed for my role in characterizing the Benghazi attack.

While serving as U.N. ambassador, I had appeared on five Sunday shows in mid-September 2012, just days after four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, had been killed in a terrorist attack on the U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya. Speaking from talking points prepared by the Intelligence Community, I provided their initial assessment of what had happened. Rapidly thereafter, I became the target of right-wing commentators and Republican members of Congress who falsely accused me of incompetence and, worse, of lying to the American people about the circumstances surrounding the tragedy.

Still a young child, Maris had internalized the distress that had infused our household. In hindsight, Ian and I realized we had failed to turn off the television quickly enough and to keep it off at home, before it was too late. Maris was hurt and angry. She couldn’t understand what was happening or why. But she was damn sure of two things: she loved her mother intensely, and she despised Senator Lindsey Graham. She wanted nothing more than to call his office and tell him so.

We didn’t let her make the call, but we were sorely tempted.

Washington’s politics of personal destruction don’t come free of cost. They damage and destroy the lives of innocents who neither signed up for the public spotlight nor can comprehend vicious character assassinations of the ones they love.

Our son, Jake, then thirteen years old, managed to distance himself from the uproar that swept through our lives like wildfire. Or, at least at the time, he seemed better able to compartmentalize his feelings—something I know a little bit about too.

In addition to Maris, I worried a great deal about my seventy-eight-year-old mother, Lois. Brilliant, accomplished, and elegant, my mother was stuck at her Embassy Row town house in Washington, D.C., recovering from her third surgery in her battle with cancer, rather than enjoying the first of fall foliage in her home state of Maine, as she normally would in September.

My mother warned me: I should never have gone on the Sunday shows.

Until she passed, on appropriate occasions, Mom would remind me, with a gentle smile, of her advice unheeded.

In those early days, it was hard to grasp the depth and force of the reaction to my appearances. It was harder still to imagine that it would endure, not only through the entirety of the 2012 presidential campaign, but long thereafter. I became a household name and the poster child for bilious Obama-haters on Fox and in right-wing social media. For months, it was relentless. And though it ebbed, it has never ended.

I have always viewed myself as a professional, a patriot, a dedicated public servant. I do not much mind if some people don’t like me. And some don’t. Never before, however, had I been accused of being stupid or, worse, dishonest. None of which mattered when, on September 16, 2012, I became and remain, as one commentator on MSNBC said, the right-wing’s favorite chew toy. Or at least one of them.

Ever since my name became synonymous with Benghazi, I have wanted to tell my story. Almost overnight, I went from being a respected if relatively low-profile cabinet official to a nationally notorious villain or heroine, depending on one’s political perspective and what cable news channel you watch.

I am neither. The portrayals of me on both sides are superficial and uninformed by who I am and where I come from, by what motivates and truly defines me.

I could not tell my own story—until I left government. When I was a senior official who spoke publicly, I was speaking on behalf of the United States of America and our president. For the five years after Benghazi until I returned to private life, I was compelled to allow myself to be defined by others—something I never had to do before or otherwise would have tolerated. It’s hard to convey how frustrating that feels, especially when the public portrayal is false or demeaning. Now I am free to not only tell my own story but also what I have learned over the course of my life in service.

Recently, the renowned professional tennis coach Nick Bollettieri watched me hit a few strokes on the court and said: I can tell what you are. You are fiercely competitive and a sore loser. My younger brother, Johnny, and I laughed uproariously. Ten minutes into our first encounter, Bollettieri had nailed me. My hope is that I have grown more gracious in both winning and losing over time, but neither I nor Johnny was prepared to argue this point with Nick. He was more right than wrong.

For over four decades, I have been sprinting. Running as far and as fast as I can—through whatever pain—to try to exceed expectations, in school, at university, in my work, and as a daughter, wife, and mother. I’ve had little time to absorb and reflect on what I have discovered about myself, my family, my hometown of Washington, D.C., or the extraordinary professional experiences I’ve had. From my first job on the White House National Security Council staff, starting in the Clinton administration at age twenty-eight to becoming the youngest ever regional assistant secretary of state, from representing our country at the United Nations to wrestling as national security advisor with the toughest threats we face, I have been privileged to participate in making many of the most complex and consequential decisions the U.S. has confronted over the last twenty-five years.

I haven’t had time to breathe. Until now. In retracing my steps and reclaiming my voice, it was necessary to revisit the foundations of who I am—to study my family history and build on the knowledge imparted to me in disconnected snippets over decades. To recall the myriad blessings I have been given, and to renew my vows to fulfill the responsibility that comes with such blessings. To relearn the fundamental lessons my parents taught me about race, resilience, equality, excellence, education, and overcoming adversity.

I am a direct person. You will find that what you see is what you get. I’m not pulling my punches, even when they land on me or the ones I love most. That’s part of the tough love way I was raised. I also can’t tell you absolutely everything. There are too many important issues on which I have worked over the years to recount them all. By necessity, I have been selective, since this is a personal story, not a comprehensive diplomatic history, yet one that I hope will elucidate how American foreign policy is customarily made. There are some matters—personal, professional, classified—I will keep to myself and take to my grave. Tell-all books, which sell copies at the expense of others, are tacky and not my style. But I am giving you all I can, the best I can, straight-up, with whatever wisdom I can add for good measure.

In the earlier chapters ahead, I’ve opened each with reflections on my time leading up to and including the Obama years. This nonlinear approach links my more recent past with my childhood and young adulthood, when I learned many lessons that would help shape me as a leader. From then, as I delve into my time in the Clinton and Obama administrations, I have opted for openings that typically go to the heart of the chapter to come.

Reflecting on our current complex and disconcerting times, I recognize that many Americans are questioning our leadership role in the world. Many also doubt the relevance of the American dream to huge segments of our society who have been left behind and locked out of the kinds of privileges that I’ve been fortunate to enjoy. My mother used to look back on her amazing life and say, Not bad for a poor colored girl from Portland, Maine. We need more Lois Dickson Rices who can overcome the odds and win in tomorrow’s United States.

Almost by definition, I am an optimist, or I couldn’t stay sane while doing the intense and sometimes terrifying work of national security. I am a big believer in our country, which has given so much to me, my family, and to so many others with far less than what my grandparents had, who were both immigrants and descendants of slaves.

Yet, I am not naive. I know that it’s works that matter—not words, not hope, not even the most powerful dreams. We each have agency and responsibility. We can’t be passive bystanders, victims, or vigilantes. We must each commit to unify and to heal. We must fear none, especially our fellow Americans.

I still believe that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but nobody is going to do the hard bending, if not you and me. It’s our choice, and I have always believed we must choose each other.

My sincere hope in telling my story is that others may find in it inspiration and empowerment, perhaps a source of strength and fearlessness. If nothing else, I aim to share what I have learned along the way: the importance of always doing your best; picking yourself up and dusting yourself off; and driving down the court to the bucket—all while maintaining grace under fire.

Finally, I hope that you will see the value of my father’s core doctrine. Emmett J. Rice, who overcame Jim Crow, the segregated armed forces, and pervasive employment discrimination to rise to the top of his field, hammered something essential into me and my brother: Don’t take crap off of anyone.

PART ONE

Foundations

1

Service in My Soul

My first contact with Barack Obama came in a phone call from him in the summer of 2004.

At the time, I was serving as a senior foreign policy advisor for the Kerry/Edwards presidential campaign, while on leave from my job as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. My primary responsibilities involved helping craft policy positions, supporting Senator Kerry in debate preparation, and managing our small foreign policy team. I also served as a television surrogate on foreign policy matters and liaised with our senior outside advisors.

Earlier that summer, Tony Lake asked me if I would be willing to speak to Obama, a state senator who was then running for the U.S. Senate from Illinois. Lake had been President Bill Clinton’s first national security advisor and my first boss in government. Both a mentor and a close friend, Tony has a puckish smile, piercing blue-gray eyes, and a quick, dry wit. He may seem self-effacing, in part because he shuns the public spotlight, but he is tough and those people who think they can roll him will be sorely surprised.

Tony explained that he had been asked by his old friend Abner Mikva, a former White House counsel and member of Congress, to talk to Mikva’s young former colleague on the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School. Behind the scenes, Tony had recently begun advising Obama on foreign policy issues and encouraged him to talk to me about Darfur, Iraq, and other salient issues. This would enable Obama to stay connected to the foreign policy side of the Kerry campaign—so that, as a candidate for Senate, he could make deliberate determinations as to whether he wished to align himself with, or depart from, the party nominee’s positions. Glad to assist, I talked to Obama a couple times that summer by phone.

Like most Americans, my first real exposure to him came on the Tuesday night of the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. Stuck at the Kerry/Edwards makeshift office in an unimpressive downtown hotel, my colleagues and I were on deadline, working through the campaign’s response to the just released 9/11 Commission Report, and unable to make it to the convention center for the keynote address. Frustrated by having to miss the action at the arena—which we enjoyed every other night of the convention—we hustled downstairs and pitched ourselves in front of a television in the cramped and loud hotel bar.

When Barack Obama took the stage, we listened intently.

His speech was tremendously powerful and compelling, but for me it was much more. It drew me beneath the television set, where I looked up. As I watched, tears silently streamed down my face. I was amazed. For the first time, I saw an African American political leader of my generation who was passionate, intelligent, principled, and credible. He was neither an icon of the civil rights era nor a race-man (as my father used to call those who viewed the world primarily through the prism of race). He was a new American leader—for all. Like my children, he was both black and white, a role model for my son, Jake. Young and visionary, he spoke movingly of one America—Not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America. For the first time in my life, I had found a political leader to whom I could completely relate and who excited me.

In September, John Kerry spoke at the annual gala dinner of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation—a must do for any Democratic presidential nominee. Kerry was well-received, but the star of the evening was the magnetic Barack Obama, who was on track to be the next senator from Illinois.

By chance, I was talking with the Reverend Jesse Jackson and other Illinois heavyweights as Obama dutifully made his rounds at the front tables. He stopped by the Illinois crowd to pay his respects and, as I turned from Jackson and stood up to see what the commotion was about, I found myself face-to-face with the senator-to-be. I introduced myself. He said he knew who I was and thanked me again for talking foreign policy with him on the phone back in the summer. I wished him good luck, and he moved on.

Following the election, in early 2005, Obama was sworn in as the junior senator from Illinois and tapped to serve on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Tony Lake and his dynamic, effervescent wife, Julie, hosted a dinner at their home in Washington to introduce the freshman senator to a small group of Obama generation national security experts, including me and my good friend Gayle Smith, with whom I had worked closely during the Clinton years. At the dinner table, Obama and I sat next to each other and found that our instincts on many issues were closely aligned. He was wicked smart, confident, and well-versed on foreign policy, but also funny and personable. Thereafter, he called me occasionally and invited me to meet with him and his team to discuss policy matters or planned travel.

In 2006, Senator Obama asked me to speak on a panel at his Hope Fund conference in Chicago and to comment on the foreign policy chapter in his forthcoming book, The Audacity of Hope. After reading it, I gave him my unvarnished opinion, saying, You’re giving too much credit to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, while being comparatively ungenerous to Bill Clinton.

There was a pause and then he asked me to continue.

As we talked through my critique, he acknowledged the imbalance and ultimately made some minor adjustments, giving greater weight to Reagan’s failings (like Iran-contra) while treating Clinton’s tenure more analytically and less subjectively. Most revealing during our exchange was the extent to which, much like me, Obama was by nature a pragmatist—more a foreign policy realist than a woolly eyed idealist. Yet his pragmatism neither rendered him cold nor tempered his high aspirations for America’s capacity to do better at home and abroad. Barack Obama’s fervent belief in our fundamental equality as people and in the goodness of our nation is what I think led him to community organizing, teaching, and ultimately to public service.

This is the same America in which my family, the Dicksons and the Rices, believes. These are the values that my parents and grandparents instilled in me. They raised me to remember where we came from. To honor the richness of my inheritance, value myself, do my best, and never let others convince me I can’t. With good fortune came responsibility, they taught me; therefore, my duty was to serve others, in whatever way best suited my talents.

It seemed like the biggest car ever. A massive, yellow Pontiac Bonneville station wagon, which our family drove each summer in the late 1960s and early 1970s for ten long hours from Washington, D.C., all the way up to Portland, Maine. For my younger brother, Johnny, and me, these trips were much anticipated and never disappointed.

We piled into the station wagon stuffed with our luggage and some toys. Dad drove. Mom issued instructions, often without finesse, and smoked cigarettes constantly as we plied the endless route, elongated by the New Jersey Turnpike with its smelly refineries and countless rest stops. If we got lucky, we could persuade our parents to stop at one of several Howard Johnson’s for burgers or hot dogs and fries. By Boston, we could begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And finally, in Portland, when we arrived at Grandma and Grandpa Dickson’s house, we were rewarded with the incomparable smell of Grandma’s signature square-shaped molasses and sugar cookies that wafted through their big, old, musty, beautiful house.

We referred to my grandparents’ home by its address, 51 Melrose Street, a place that looms large in my memory as the summer gathering spot for my mother’s family. In the early 1960s, before my brother and I were born, my grandparents, with help from their children, managed to purchase this spacious, off-white, clapboard New England house with big porches and a widow’s walk. It was close enough to Back Cove to smell the saltwater and, when the winds were unkind, the unrivaled stench of a nearby paper mill.

My childhood summers there were carefree. If Johnny and I weren’t chasing our older cousins through the nooks and crannies of the antique house or poring over old photographs and mementos we found stashed in the attic, we were playing outside. My Grandpa David, a believer that children should be seen and not heard, would guide us through the tall corn of his prolific garden plot that spanned the lot just across the street. My uncle Leon and aunt Val taught us how to bait our hooks and cast to catch both small fry in Sebago Lake and bigger Atlantic fish off the rocks at Two Lights State Park on Cape Elizabeth. Johnny always seemed to reel in the foot-long, heavy fish while I’d fume over my puny haul of two-inchers—an early sign of my relentless competitiveness.

We swam in the frigid ocean at Crescent Beach, built sandcastles with our cousins, and marveled as my octogenarian grandfather—despite his Jamaican origins—braved the North Atlantic chill. We played kickball on the side lawn, and my right elbow still bears the keloid scar of a bad cut I sustained backpedaling to catch a fly ball. We rode bikes to Deering Ice Cream on Forest Avenue where I always got my Maine favorite: colorful, creamy rainbow sherbet.

In the evenings, we had lively family dinners, often with friends like the boys, Chester and George, the kind gay couple up the street who kept close watch on my elderly grandparents during the harsh winter months, and with Aunt Moo-Moo, an overly perfumed, colorful woman, another rare émigré from Jamaica. At these dinners, Johnny and I learned the rich family lore and how to consume the entire contents of a lobster, leaving no portion unmolested. We listened rapt, if a little cowed, during the high-decibel battles my father and my mother’s brothers would get into over just about everything. My father and living uncles were highly educated black men who first crossed paths in the segregated Army Air Force during World War II at Tuskegee, and they each carried the rarefied arrogance and wit of those proud black men of their generation who achieved way more than society expected or appreciated.

Their intense arguments, peppered with God dammits! and pithy ad hominem zingers, were about all manner of issues, particularly race and politics. Hearing their raucous debates taught me the merits of fierce, often cocky contention. Arguing with a firm command of the facts, combined with dead certainty, whether feigned or real, I would discover, was an effective means of besting your opponent. My elders’ bull sessions, along with constant debates at the dinner table, bequeathed me an early comfort with verbal combat and a relish for righteous battle. Raised not to fear a fight or shy away from advocating for a worthy cause, this aspect of my upbringing often (but not always) served me well in later years—whether on political campaigns, in policy debates, or during difficult negotiations with foreign adversaries.

More than anything, I was fascinated by the stories heard around my family tables—both in Maine and during trips to South Carolina to visit my dad’s family. I grew up infused with the legacies of my elders—parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. Despite their very different histories and experiences—the immigrants on one side and the descendants of slaves on the other—the Dickson and Rice families shared common values, high expectations, and the compulsion to rise. As people who came from humble roots, their professional accomplishments outdistanced any constraints that institutional bias aimed to place on them, and they never failed to inspire me. They were New Englanders and southerners, Democrats and Republicans, who made great strides—with each generation exceeding the achievements of the last.

There was no single path for all, though two elements run consistently through my family tree: education and service. For my family, education is of utmost importance, worthy of every sacrifice, because it is the key to upward mobility and to securing the American Dream. (There was never any question as to whether my brother and I would go to college and graduate school. In our household, it was mandated, if not preordained.) The corollary to education—service—was embedded in my genes and seared into my soul. My forebears on both sides heeded the call to serve, to pay back far more than they were grateful to receive.

With a good education, economic stability, and physical security, my parents assured me I had everything needed to thrive—if not always a happy family life. Given these blessings, rare for many, but particularly for an African American girl, I was expected to give back, especially to those less fortunate than myself. Service could take many forms. It needn’t be in the military or government. It could be in the nonprofit world, journalism, law, academia, medicine, business, or elsewhere. But I had to do for the larger community, the many, not just myself—as my parents, uncles and aunts, grandparents and great-grandparents had long exemplified.

My recollections of our earliest trips to Maine are mostly impressionistic, many of them crystallizing in my memory around the age of seven. But I vividly recall how my grandparents—gentle yet imposing—towered over our extended family, despite being notably small of stature. From my petite grandmother Dickson, I inherited my five-foot-three-inch frame, even though my parents were much taller and my brother dwarfs me by a full foot.

My grandfather David Dickson was a man of few words, but those he spoke carried weight. Though kind and restrained with his youngest grandchildren, in his prime he was a strict disciplinarian who wielded a razor strap, a swath of leather, to beat his boys. For lesser offenses, my uncles had to go fetch a switch—a thin tree branch—for their own whipping. Years later, whenever any of us kids were behaving badly, my mother would warn half in jest, Don’t forget Grandpa’s razor strap is still hanging in the pantry.

As much as our grandfather appeared to be the ultimate authority in the family, my grandmother really called the shots in their household of five children—four sons, born between 1913 and 1921, and one daughter, my mother, Lois Ann, born in 1933. Ever warm, cheerful, and talkative, Grandma Mary Dickson was the salve that soothed the wounds and calmed tempers when they flared. To her children, Mary taught culture and refinement, making sure each played musical instruments, learned the details of their Jamaican heritage, and were thoroughly steeped in the Episcopal faith. She was also there for her children in more simple ways—like the times she’d wait up for Lois to come home from her dates in high school, to ask how they went, offer a snack, and tuck her into bed.

For her success in rearing five accomplished children, my grandmother was named Maine State Mother for 1950 by the American Mothers Committee of the Golden Rule, and thereby a candidate for the national American Mother award. In a full-page, photo-filled spread in the Portland Sunday Telegram, Mary Dickson was lauded for her industriousness, piety, skills as a cook and gardener, and, above all, devotion to her children. On that same page, my seventeen-year-old mother wrote a tribute to Grandma Mary:

Mother has a quiet, unassuming but unshakeable faith in God’s beneficence. She has an assurance, frequently put to the test, that if she and her family lived as best they knew in keeping with the will of God they would be protected against all adversity and find true happiness and peace of mind.

Beyond the love I always felt from my grandparents and the fun I had visiting Maine every summer, what sticks with me about Mary and David Dickson is how much they made out of so little. They came to this country as immigrants with nothing but faith, pride, and a strong work ethic. Here, they raised a tight-knit family, educated their children, built a nest egg, and gave back to their community without ever forgetting where they came from. As my uncle David wrote of my grandparents in his memoir: They were Republican in politics, conservative in spending, dedicated to clean living, the gospel of hard work, home owning, the family unit and very proud of the freedom and economic opportunity of the U.S.A.

Their story epitomizes the American Dream.

As an adult, I have come to realize how profoundly my grandparents’ and parents’ journeys have shaped my own.

Grandpa David Augustus Dickson was born in 1887 in Mandeville, Manchester Parish, Jamaica. With little formal education, managing only to complete a few years of secondary school, my grandfather was trained as a cobbler and worked as a clerk in the British woolens department at Sturbridge’s clothing store. His frustration with his limited educational opportunities fueled his determination to do better, especially by his eventual children.

Grandma Mary Marguerite (Maude) Daly was born in 1890 in St. Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica. One of eight children, Mary was the daughter of a well-heeled Irish landowner and a mother who, according to family lore of uncertain reliability, was born in Calcutta, India. My great-grandfather Daly died at fifty, when my grandmother was ten, leaving his large family in economic peril and subject to the exploitation of his stingy millionaire brother. Mary was shunted off to live with distant cousins, the Millers, and perform menial tasks in their household. She never received much education beyond middle school and always resented that her circumstances were far inferior to that to which the Dalys’ wealth should have entitled her.

David and Mary met at a confirmation class at the Mandeville Parish Anglican Church, and a committed courtship began. My grandfather would pedal his bicycle six miles uphill to visit with Mary on the front porch or walk her through the local market square. The Millers were not fans of my grandfather, because he was darker-skinned than they and hailed from the countryside rather than the more refined town.

Lured to the U.S. by an American hotelier who offered him a job in Harpswell, Maine—promising him the fruits of the American Dream—David set out by ship for Portland, Maine, and arrived in New York on May 16, 1911. David never made it to Harpswell, instead finding his first work in Portland as a janitor. A severe injury to his hand prevented him from plying his Jamaican trade as a cobbler.

Once he was settled, Grandpa David sent for Mary. Defying the Millers, in October 1912 my grandmother boarded a ship bound for Boston. A major hurricane interrupted the voyage, forcing her to disembark in Philadelphia and make her way alone to Portland. I still wonder at the bravery and resolve that would propel my tiny grandmother, at age twenty-two, to leave the only family she knew, sail alone, and find her way hundreds of miles across a strange land to reach her fiancé.

Devoted Anglicans, David and Mary were married on Christmas Day 1912, in the Emmanuel Chapel of their beloved Cathedral Church of St. Luke in downtown Portland. After sixty-six years of marriage, their funerals, which I would attend, would be held two years apart in the same chapel.

Hardworking and penny-pinching, my grandparents managed to eke out a decent living. Mary labored as a seamstress and laundress for affluent families. For nearly four decades, David worked as a porter, janitor, piano refinisher, and shipping clerk at Cressey & Allen’s music store in Portland. He also moonlit as a bartender. Later, after the company went out of business, Grandpa would work another fifteen years as a janitor until age eighty at the Blue Cross and Blue Shield building.

To improve his lot, David took courses at Gray’s Business College in Portland. Despite his innate intelligence and additional schooling, race prevented his advancement even to becoming a clerk at the music store. The owner, George Cressey, came to respect David deeply and told him years later that, had he been white, he would have enabled him to buy a share in the business and become a partner.

David read voraciously, with a passion for history and poetry, insisting his children do the same. In public, Grandpa always wore a well-tailored suit and tie. He made sure his kids had the finest clothes, if few to their name. A man who tracked every dime spent, he never bought a car, declaring that public transportation would suffice; yet he stocked the household with the highest quality of food—meat, fish, fruit, and, on special occasions, Maine lobster.

Soon after their arrival in America, Mary and David managed to become naturalized U.S. citizens and later buy a three-story, two-family home in a working-class area on Portland’s Munjoy Hill. The neighborhood in which my mother grew up was inhabited by a mix of Irish, English, Jewish, and a cluster of black families, including several from the West Indies. Maine has long had very few blacks—according to the 1930 census, there were just 268 blacks in Portland (or 0.4 percent of the city’s population). In that era, the Ku Klux Klan was active and the local NAACP chapter fledgling. For decades, my grandparents aspired to move into a better neighborhood, but realtors consistently refused to sell to blacks. My very light-skinned grandmother would sometimes be shown nice places, but when my brown-skinned grandfather showed up, suddenly none was available.

As Jamaican émigrés of different hues, my grandparents had complex views on race. My grandmother, while fully conscious of her second-class status as colored, knew she had little discernible African blood. Half Irish and a quarter East Indian, with gray-blue eyes and faintly olive skin, she appeared only to the acute eye something other than typically white. Yet she identified as black, not least because her husband and children were unmistakably black. Like most West Indian immigrants, my grandparents were steeped in the British/Caribbean racial caste system, in which the whiter you were the better you were and the more opportunity you would likely have. Upward mobility was everything to them, and they viewed darker skin as a drag on one’s future prospects. Because of their Jamaican origins, it seemed to me that my grandparents felt superior to darker American blacks and those, like my father, who descended from slave stock. I detected that subtle prejudice in them early on and perceived that they instilled in their own children at least a small measure of the same condescension.

Paradoxically, I also knew that the Dicksons were proud of their race and committed to its advancement. My grandfather founded and chaired Portland’s Negro Community Forum, which brought distinguished speakers to Sunday meetings and dinners in the Dickson home. David was active in the local NAACP and helped establish the USO Marian Anderson Club for colored troops stationed in Portland during World War II. After the war, he hosted Anderson in Portland and fought for blacks to be granted equal access to the white USO facility.

As a child, I didn’t fully appreciate the extraordinary lengths to which my grandparents went to ensure that their children went to top colleges, but over the years, with each telling of their remarkable story, I came to admire their sacrifices and the seriousness with which they approached their duties as parents. Their kids were going to excel—whether they liked it or not.

As soon as his first son was born, Grandpa David purchased an endowment policy to fund his first year of college. My grandfather later learned of Bowdoin, Maine’s preeminent private college, from his boss, Mr. Cressey, a Bowdoin graduate, who helped him obtain extra work there as a server at weekend parties. David saw