WASHINGTON — Condoleezza Rice clashed repeatedly with Vice President Dick Cheney over what to do with captured terrorism suspects and at one point threatened to resign when she felt circumvented, according to a memoir of her time in Washington, due out next month.
In the book, Rice provides a vivid account of the tumultuous years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, when the Bush administration struggled to reinvent the national security structure to protect the country from a new kind of enemy. Along the way, she wrote, the president’s team disagreed sometimes heatedly.
First as national security adviser and later as secretary of state, Rice often argued against the hard-line approach that Cheney and others advanced. The vice president’s staff was “very much of one ultra-hawkish mind,” she wrote, adding that the most intense confrontation between her and Cheney came when she argued that terrorism suspects could not be “disappeared” as in some authoritarian states.
In November 2001, she wrote, she went to President George W. Bush upon learning that he had issued an order prepared by the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, authorizing military commissions without telling her. “If this happens again,” she told the president, “either Al Gonzales or I will have to resign.”
Bush apologized. She wrote that it was not his fault and that she felt that Gonzales and Cheney’s staff had not served the president well.
Rice’s book, No Higher Honor, was obtained by The New York Times in advance of its Nov. 1 publication by Crown Publishing, a division of Random House. It is the latest in a string of memoirs emerging from Bush administration figures trying to define the history of their tenure.
But this volume, at 734 pages, deals only with her time in office, making it the most expansive record of those eight years by any of the leading participants. (Rice described her family background in an earlier book.)
The flurry of books has underscored the tensions within the Bush team. Rice bristled at memoirs by Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which criticized her management of the National Security Council in the first term and her efforts to increase diplomacy in the second term. But she wrote that the disputes were over substantive issues and were not personal.
She uses the book to remind readers of the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty after 9/11 that shaped policymaking. In addition to the anthrax attacks that fall, she recounts other scares that were not disclosed at the time, including feared attacks on Washington with smallpox and radiological weapons. It was in that context that Bush and his team sought ways to stop future attacks.
Rice was perhaps Bush’s closest adviser, often dining with the first family and spending weekends at Camp David. But she wrote of one time that she and the president spoke sharply with each other in a meeting in December 2006 over whether to send more troops to Iraq. He favored an increase in troop levels and a new strategy to protect the Iraqi population, while she instead wanted to pull troops out of the cities.
“So what’s your plan, Condi?” the president asked testily, as she recounts it. “We’ll just let them kill each other, and we’ll stand by and try to pick up the pieces?”
She wrote that she was angered by the implication that she did not care about winning in Iraq and retorted that “if they want to have a civil war we’re going to have to let them.”
After the meeting, she wrote, she followed Bush to the Oval Office to press her point, telling him, “No one has been more committed to winning in Iraq than I have.” He disarmed her, saying, “I know, I know,” and she describes his facial expression as etched with pain over a war going badly.
The most intense confrontation came in August 2006 when she urged Bush to acknowledge holding Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other terrorism suspects in secret prisons overseas. She and Cheney argued for several minutes while others remained uncomfortably silent. Bush sided with Rice and moved the suspects to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The book recounts her signature diplomatic ventures, including a landmark nuclear accord with India salvaged in a last-minute negotiation and a Middle East peace initiative that came achingly close to bringing Israelis and Palestinians together.
She also bluntly assesses foreign leaders. Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, “looked as though he was on drugs.” After shaking hands with President Emile Lahoud of Lebanon, she wrote, she felt as if she needed a shower. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt rejected policy changes, saying, “Egyptians need a strong hand, and they don’t like foreign interference.”
As for Moammar Gadhafi of Libya, who was killed Thursday after a revolution, Rice adds details about his well-known “eerie fascination with me.”
She wrote that he made a video showing pictures of her while a song called “Black Flower in the White House” played.
“It was weird,” she wrote, “but at least it wasn’t raunchy.”
Libyan rebels going through the Gadhafi compound later found a photo album stocked with pictures of Rice.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 10/23/2011