Is Condoleezza Rice’s staunch support of George W. Bush’s foreign policy a matter of political opportunism or something else, asked Anthony Lewis in the New York Times.
Reviewing The Confidant by Washington Post correspondent Glenn Kessler ’81, Lewis found ”an alternative explanation: her change could be religious in origin, a reaction to 9/11 by a person who is a Calvinist with ‘a deeply religious, moralistic streak.’ ” The Economist was harsher on Rice: “Mr. Kessler pays due credit to Ms. Rice’s intelligence and energy. But his clear conclusion is that most of the problems she has tried to solve have been beyond her. He is excoriating about the limits of what Ms. Rice’s team calls ‘practical idealism’; to Mr. Kessler the term is “nonsensical.”