Today's headlines and history's judgments rarely are the same, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said to a standing room-only crowd on the Texas A&M campus Monday evening.
That's what she told herself when things got tough in the White House, and, she admitted to laughter, "because I didn't like today's headlines."
Rice spoke for less than an hour during a daylong commemoration of the 20-year anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall and the unification of Germany.
No one believed that the Berlin Wall would come down without a shot fired, she told the several hundred people gathered at the George Bush Presidential Library.
If you had said otherwise when the Cold War raged, "they would have had you committed," Rice said. "History plays a trick on us."
She added: "What seems impossible, after the fact sometimes seems inevitable."
Rice -- who served as the nation's chief diplomat from January 2005 to 2009 under former President George W. Bush -- is the first black woman to hold that position.
As national security adviser from January 2001 to 2005 and head of the national security council, Rice played a significant role in decisions about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Rice singled out three world leaders for praise in the aftermath of the wall's fall on Nov. 9, 1989: Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the man sitting in front of her, President George H. W. Bush.
Gorbachev chose not to use the Soviet Union's might to try to "reverse history." Kohl "knew how to seize the moment." And Bush understood that gaining rapport was key.
"Gorbachev could trust George H. W. Bush not to humiliate him, not to take advantage of him, and to ease [the Soviet Union's] decline," Rice said. "That's the most extraordinary diplomatic feat of the century."
Rice is a senior public policy fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of political science at Stanford University.
She joined the Stanford faculty in 1981 as an assistant professor of political science, and served as the school's provost, the top academic official, from 1993 to 1999.
Rice has authored or co-authored several books, including Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft and The Gorbachev Era.
She served as an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1987 and, two years later, was appointed director of Soviet and East European Affairs on the National Security Council.
Her talk zeroed in on German unification, but during the question-and-answer session, some audience members asked her about current world hotspots.
She advocated a "sunshine policy" toward North Korea, essentially opening up the country to outside influence whenever possible. She said her administration had discussed having the totalitarian country's women's soccer team visit the U.S.
"Something has to start to open that place up a bit so that when it collapses, and it will, it won't be so violent," she said.
She said Islam is struggling with "two visions" -- one is the democratic kind in Turkey; the other is the extremist version lacking in tolerance.
"If that other vision wins out, then we're going to struggle for decades and decades and decades with terrorism," she said.
On Sunday, in St. Louis Park, Minn., about 125 protesters greeted her with signs that read, "Torture isn't kosher" and "Would Jesus waterboard?" according to local press accounts. Since she left office 10 months ago, critics have unsuccessfully pressured her to acknowledge that the Bush-era practice of waterboarding -- pouring water over a detainee's head to create the sensation of drowning -- is torture.
In Aggieland, the 54-year-old was greeted with a standing ovation.
Rice spoke as part of the Lenore and Francis Humphrys International Speakers Program, which brings world leaders and renowned international affairs scholars to Texas A&M.
RSS
Mobile
Daily Emails
Twitter
Facebook
