The nation’s top diplomat?

November 10, 2007

After State Department diplomats heard that many of them may be ordered to Iraq, whether they want to go or not, the American Foreign Service Association polled officers to see who trusts Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to “fight for them.” Only 12% said they did.

It appears our nation’s chief diplomat needs to do some diplomatic work in her own cabinet agency.

…Rice is under fire from inside and outside the State Department for a range of crises that are largely managerial in nature — the failure to monitor private security guards in Iraq, the delays in opening the huge U.S. Embassy under construction in Baghdad and the resistance of some Foreign Service officers to being forced to serve there. Over the summer, the department also fell woefully short in processing passport applications, resulting in ruined vacation plans for many Americans.

Within the department, Rice is viewed by many rank-and-file employees as an aloof manager who relies on a tight circle of aides, leaving her out of touch with the rest of the staff, in contrast to her predecessor, Colin L. Powell, a retired Army general who won praise from workers for treating them as though they were his “troops.” At her last town hall meeting with employees 2 1/2 years ago, Rice told staffers: “I consider myself the chief management officer of this department.” But a poll by the American Foreign Service Association indicated that an overwhelming majority did not feel that Rice was their advocate.

Ideologically within the Bush administration policy apparatus, Rice is usually very wrong, but she at least serves as something of a counterweight against some of the excesses of Cheney’s office.

But as a practical matter, Rice not only seems to have trouble as a foreign-policy diplomat, she seems to have lost the faith of those who work for her.

For any manager of a large organization, making sure problems come to the attention of top officials is critical. When Powell became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he handed out rules to his staff, including “Bad news doesn’t get any better with time” and “If there is a problem brewing, I want to know of it early.” Some officials think that problems at State have trouble coming to Rice’s attention early enough.

Another official who served under both secretaries said Powell asked more detailed questions when facing bad news. “You could not have a greater contrast between two people,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he still deals with the government. “He had a style in which people were encouraged to talk about their problems.”

A third official who served under both secretaries recalled how, after an assistant secretary of state made a mistake resulting in several days of negative news coverage, Powell treated that person with civility. By contrast, the official said, Rice becomes angry over even minor news accounts, turning furiously to the relevant assistant secretary for an explanation. “Dressing someone down like that is not great for morale and does not encourage people to bring up bad news,” he said.

By one estimation, Rice was “the worst” National Security Advisor “in the office’s history.” She’s hardly much better as the Secretary of State.

Fish rots from the head. Rice’s failings as a manager mirror those of the man that hired her. Bush is aloof from details, allergic to bad news, and has horrific judgment generally. No wonder he and his wife Rice get along so well.

  • The irony of this is that Cheney and Rice share the exact same approval ratings: 12%.

    Worst. Administration. Ever.

  • In fairness, it isn’t the Secretary of State’s job to “fight for” AFSA employees. The welfare of State Department employees is only one of many concerns of the SOS, and not the paramount one.

    That said, Rice is clearly a lousy administrator. I won’t even try to discuss her incompetence at helping to set U.S. foreign policy. It’s hard to imagine that she could have been an effective provost at Stanford.

    She had tenure at Stanford. Do they have to take her back when Bush’s term ends?

  • Some officials think that problems at State have trouble coming to Rice’s attention early enough.

    Oh I don’t know about that.
    Remember this:

    BEN-VENISTE: Isn’t it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6th PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?

    RICE: I believe the title was, Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.

    Could be that she is just incompetent.
    And it doesn’t matter whether the problems come to her attention early or late or never at all.

  • Rice has been just a little too much of a “Good German” in this administration for me to be inclined to cut her even a little slack at this point. Sure she’s smarter than the rest of them. Sure she would likely do a few things differently, more intelligently even, if she were making the calls herself. But she hasn’t, in fact, done the things she’s done any differently and unrealized potential is just that: unrealized. It’s like her momma said, “She just can’t say no to that man.”

  • Does Stanford have to take her back? Jeez, I hope not…. The only good thing about the Bush presidency for us was getting her out of there.

    I was a longtime staffer there when she was provost. At an open forum to meet the new provost in about 1994, she emphasized that what was important to her from the staff was efficiency, not effectiveness. Those were her words! This was her message for staffers at prestigious Stanford University: a clear preview of the “don’t think – just follow orders” mentality the Bushies must demand from staff. Her damage was substantial at Stanford though, unfortunately, not well documented the way the Bush administration’s will be. Aside from the lapsed time, her enablers of course remain in denial that it was so bad or her fault: “That’s all in the past, why do you keep bringing it up?”…. We can expect to hear a lot of THAT from the GOP (and Bush voters) in 2009….

  • Gee, a favourite of the president gets put in charge of an Administration. The appointee proceeds to form a clique of similarly inexperienced incompetents and shit all over the people who have been there forever and do know what they’re doing.

    Now where have I heard that before…?

    Every government building in DC should have a plaque dedicated to the competent employees driven out by the Bushies.

    she emphasized that what was important to her from the staff was efficiency, not effectiveness.

    Perhaps I’m not being nuanced enough, but wouldn’t you need a particle accelerator to separate one from the other?

  • “Dressing someone down like that is not great for morale and does not encourage people to bring up bad news,” he said.

    Isn’t this what Bush does, too? There have been stories about people who were terrified to give him “bad news” because of his resulting temper tantrums.

    Neither Bush nor Condoleeza Rice are management material. They simply don’t believe their underlings are worthy of hearing.

  • Condoleeza Rice is every white supremacist Republican’s nightmare of “affirmative action” come true.

  • Colin Powell sounds like a real professional and a great boss.

    A third official who served under both secretaries recalled how, after an assistant secretary of state made a mistake resulting in several days of negative news coverage, Powell treated that person with civility. By contrast, the official said, Rice becomes angry over even minor news accounts, turning furiously to the relevant assistant secretary for an explanation. “Dressing someone down like that is not great for morale and does not encourage people to bring up bad news,” he said.

    She probably learned to be like that from watching Bush and Cheney.

  • When Bush leaves office, his name should go on the Portapotty in the Rose Garden. Nothing else should be named for him, except maybe a landfill in Texas.

  • The answer: I understand it as “Don’t bother getting anyting done (effectiveness), just don’t spend too much time or energy (efficiency) doing it.”

  • I wonder how many of the diplomats were all gung-ho for Bush’s war untill they found out it would be their asses on the line? It seems like it’s TOO easy for the republican party to let some one else do the fighting and dying for them.

  • I’m trying to post a reply but I keep getting errors that say to try again but then don’t tell me what’s wrong. Anyway, I’ll try to be brief and simple and save my analysis for later.

    At Stanford, when I heard her “efficiency, not effectiveness”, I knew she meant it in the sense of “do what we say, don’t gum up the works with your concerns and doubts, because meeting a schedule is more important than getting it right”. In the best light, she may have been thinking of “the perfect is the enemy of the good”.

    My longer reply talks about how her Stanford tenure as provost, as it affected the IT department, is an excellent small-theatre preview of how Bush folk operate, not that we would have predicted the specifics at the time, even though many of us realized she was over-rated and had created a giant mess when she left, one which, once it was cleaned up, she would no doubt declare “it was painful, yes, but it had to be done, and I was the one who did it”. Her brilliant insight, then as now, is to kick down the work and success of those who come before and leave it to the people who actually live with the mess to clean it up, while she starts the next mess or sits back and accepts the laudatory tributes of people more enthralled by destructive power than constructive achievement.

  • jk,

    For future reference, this program seems to have a time out function, I assume to prevent spam, rather than just to eat posts. So if you write a long reply (or start a reply, go away for a while, finish it and try to post) it will fall into the rabbit hole. Copy your reply before posting, get the error message, paste it back in the box and try again. That should work.

    tAiO

  • Thanks, Answer, I thought I tried that at least once but it didn’t solve it then. But I’ll try your advice more carefully next time in case I don’t correctly remember what I tried.

    • Comments are closed.