In 2004, New York magazine reported on a DC dinner party, at which Condoleezza Rice was reportedly overheard saying, “As I was telling my husb–” and then stopping herself abruptly, before saying, “As I was telling President Bush.” As the magazine explained it, those who heard her were quite surprised, though the slip seemed “more psychologically telling than incriminating.” In other words, no one seriously believes Bush and Rice are romantically involved.
But the alleged “husband” gaffe nevertheless points to a relationship that’s kind of … creepy. In fact, with this background in mind, consider Newsweek’s Marcus Mabry’s analysis on Rice’s loyalty to the president (as excerpted from his new biography of Rice).
…Rice was drawn to Bush. “First of all, I thought he was wonderful to be around,” she recalled, sitting on the couch in her State Department office. “He was warm and funny and easy to be around. I thought he had just an incredibly inquisitive mind … You could barely finish an explanation before he was digging into it.”
Bush was also a bad boy. And Rice, according to friends and family, had a thing for bad boys. That was why, as a 20-year-old grad student, she preferred her second Fighting Irish football player boyfriend to her first, said Jane Robinett, Rice’s best Notre Dame friend: John “Dubie” Dubenetzky, cocky and handsome with wavy blond hair, was less deferential than Wayne Bullock, the sweet fullback who had moved Condi’s boxes into Lewis Hall.
Rice’s friends insisted the attraction to Bush was platonic, but Brenda Hamberry-Green, her Palo Alto hairdresser, who had spent years commiserating with Rice over how hard it was for successful black women to find a good man, noticed a change when Rice started working for Bush. “He fills that need,” Hamberry-Green decided. “Bush is her feed.”
Wait, it gets slightly worse.
By the time Rice met Bush, he had become a Christian teetotaler and a devoted family man. The two shared a strong religious faith, a belief in American power, similar senses of humor, and a conviction that sports was a metaphor for life. He admired her brains. She valued his instincts. Politically, she liked his “compassionate conservatism” — the philosophy that those who wanted to lift themselves from poverty and ignorance should be given the opportunity. That had been a leitmotif for generations of minister-teachers in the Rice family. Most important, they saw themselves as outsiders: Rice as a function of her race and gender, Bush because he had never fit in as a Texas boy with the Northeastern elitists he came to see as snobs.
“There was this connective stuff — that was really fully under way by the summer of 1999,” said Rice’s friend Coit “Chip” Blacker. “There’s a funny kind of transfer of energy and ideas that’s almost — not random, but unstructured. It’s as though they’re Siamese twins joined at the frontal lobe.”
The president reportedly refers to Rice as his “sister,” while Rice’s stepmother said she “just can’t say no to that man.”
Like I said, creepy.
