Summer 2010
University of Denver Magazine
Facing Forward, Looking Back
Alumna Condoleezza Rice opens up about DU, 9/11, the George Bush legacy and more.
By: Tamara Chapman
As the nation’s 66th secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice (BA ’74, PhD ’81) logged more than a million miles and visited 85 countries. By the time she left her post in January 2009, she had confronted everything from the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian problem to the 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict over South Ossetia.
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DU: There are critics and historians today who say the Bush administration will be ranked as one of the worst in history. How do you feel about that?
Rice: I’d say they’re not very good historians if they’re making those judgments now. I think about all the times that today’s headlines and history’s judgment didn’t turn out to be the same. In fact, I kept four portraits of secretaries of state near me: Thomas Jefferson, although to my mind he’s a little bit overrated as a founding father. Alexander Hamilton is my favorite founding father. I kept George Marshall, certainly the greatest secretary of state. But I also kept Dean Acheson. When Dean Acheson left office, people talked about who lost China. Now Dean Acheson is known as the father of NATO and he laid the foundation for victory in the Cold War, in which I was lucky enough to participate in 1990 and 1991. And I kept William Seward. He bought Alaska, and at the time it was Seward’s Folly and Seward’s Icebox. I think we’re all glad now that William Seward bought Alaska from the tsar of Russia—for $7 million by the way.
So I give no credence to any historian who is ready to make those judgments now. They ought to read their history and realize that it takes a long time, especially for consequential events, to play out the string. History has a long arc, not a short one, and if, in fact, the Middle East is a place that, instead of Saddam Hussein, finally has an Arab democracy in Iraq, that will be a fundamentally different Middle East than we found. If, in fact, al-Qaida is defeated, that will be a fundamentally different situation than we found.
And if the president’s efforts to deal with the scourge of AIDS and malaria and poverty in Africa, something for which he is fondly remembered on the continent, if there are fewer orphans as a result—there are currently 2 million people under treatment with antiretrovirals; there were 50,000 when we started—history will judge our administration well.
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http://blogs.du.edu/today/magazine/facing-forward-looking-back
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