Transformed By Her Bond With Bush

Longtime Middle East experts in the State Department thought that blind faith in the power of democracy and elections was foolish, and that the only winners would be Islamic extremists. Rice's "realist" comrades from the days of Bush's father, such as Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick, wondered whether something within Rice had been drawn out by the current president -- perhaps something based on her Christian faith or her experience with racism as a girl in the Deep South, something she might have repressed while proving herself as a young Cold War scholar. Now, her authority unquestioned, she could truly express herself. Scowcroft said he was stunned by Rice's new "evangelical tone."

Critics say she shifted with the political winds. "Dr. Rice made a decision," Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff in Bush's first term, said in a 2005 speech. "She made a decision that she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president."

However, longtime friends point to a deep moralizing streak that has propelled Rice to embrace Bush's vision. "Condi always has the capacity to see the world she wants to see -- as opposed to the world that actually exists," said Coit D. Blacker, a Stanford professor and Rice's closest male friend.

When Rice met with Saudi journalists in 2005, after delivering a speech in Cairo promoting Middle East democracy, she expressed hope that extremist parties wouldn't do well because voters would care less about jihad than about the practical aspects of governing. "I think there's at least a very, very good chance that the extremists would not do very well," she said.

Her prediction proved wrong. In the two most liberal societies in the Middle East -- the Palestinian territories and Lebanon -- militia groups were voted into power: Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Rice had shrugged off Israeli warnings about letting Hamas compete in elections without giving up its arms, and she had struggled to contain last summer's devastating war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah. These results, diplomats said, would shape the perception of the United States in the region during Rice's tenure: on the defensive, its influence waning.

'Nothing's Working'

In early 2007, as the Iraq war ground on with few prospects for breakthroughs or success, Rice huddled with top aides and looked for other spots where she could deliver diplomatic results in their final two years. She decided to focus on ensuring a nuclear deal with North Korea, resolving the conflict over Iran's nuclear program and making progress toward a Palestinian state. Rice even spent the 2006 Christmas holiday reading stacks of reports from the office of the State Department historian, trying to glean lessons from President Bill Clinton's intensive Middle East diplomacy in his waning days in office.

"These are scary times we live in," a senior Rice aide said last year. "Nothing's working. We can blame Iran, we can blame North Korea, and we can blame Hezbollah. You can blame them all because they are all terrible people. But at some point you have to ask yourself, are you going about this right?"

During a trip to the Middle East this year, Rice expounded on her views of history and diplomacy with the traveling reporters, often returning to the examples she knew best -- the Soviet Union and Germany -- and arguing that diplomacy is about more than cutting deals.

"You aren't going to be successful as a diplomat if you don't understand the strategic context in which you are actually negotiating," she said. "It is not deal-making." Instead, she said, diplomacy is a matter of waiting until the underlying conditions are favorable and then acting.

Rice's ambitious speeches and image-making early in her tenure as secretary obscured the fact that her approach has been largely tactical -- ad hoc efforts designed to deal with crises that stemmed from decisions made in the first term. Her closeness to the president gave her tremendous clout within the administration, but it appears she did not use it to force a rethinking of the administration's approach to the world.

After seven years of an intense partnership, the president turns out to have been the idea generator after all, shifting Rice from her realist roots and infusing her with the idealistic desire to spread democracy throughout the Middle East. Now, in words that echo the president's, she awaits history's verdict.

"I'm enough of an historian to know that my reputation will be what my reputation is," Rice told reporters earlier this year. "It might be different in five months from five years to 50 years, and so I'm simply not going to worry about that."

This article is adapted from Glenn Kessler's "The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy," to be released tomorrow by St. Martin's Press.