With Powell’s Departure, Rice Takes The Stage

After widely respected diplomat Colin Powell’s resignation as secretary of state, Tufts experts looked back on his tenure and forward at his replacement, Condoleezza Rice.

Medford/Somerville, Mass. [11.18.04] As Secretary of State Colin Powell announced his resignation on Monday from President Bush’s cabinet, political experts from Tufts said that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would leave with a record of mixed results.

“I think that Secretary Powell's legacy will mainly be one of frustration,” Tufts political science professor Jeffrey Taliaferro told New England Cable News. “He was not part of the president's inner circle. He was not the most influential voice in the war cabinet.”

Bush’s choice for Powell’s replacement will be national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, a close friend and trusted confidante of the president.

Powell is widely respected and admired around the world, but the moderate secretary reportedly clashed often with the Bush administration’s more hawkish members.

In February of 2003, Powell gave a presentation to the United Nations explaining Iraq’s weapons program and capability for widespread aggression. He later regretted that his presentation was based on faulty intelligence.

Still, Powell was admired at home and abroad for his outreach to and diplomacy with other nations.

“Powell was much more willing than many in the administration to work with traditional American allies to use multilateral institutions, if not to legitimize U.S. actions in the eyes of the world, at least to consult with other states who might be affected by U.S. actions,” Taliaferro told NECN.

One Fletcher School professor cited Powell’s failings as the nation’s top diplomat.

"He allowed the State Department to be run over by the global war on terror, and did not fully articulate a positive view of what the United States is for, its capacity to inspire as well as its ability to intimidate," Alan Henrikson, a diplomatic historian and associate professor at Tufts, told the Los Angeles Times.

Rice’s selection is not without controversy. In April, she was called to testify before the Sept. 11 commission, where her handling of a presidential intelligence brief about Osama bin Laden issued before the terror attacks was questioned.

Antonia Chayes, visiting professor of international politics and law at the Fletcher School, said that the replacement of Powell with someone so close to the president has both its advantages and disadvantages.

“[Rice] has not shown neither a very deep knowledge of foreign affairs, nor the ability to disagree,” Chayes told Tavis Smiley on National Public Radio on Wednesday. “The advantage, of course, is that she is in lockstep with the president, has tutored the president, and will speak with the voice of the president and always have his ear.”

Another challenge for Rice will be managing the bureaucracy of the State Department.

“The head of the [State] Department can be undermined by the vast army of the bureaucracy,” Chayes, former undersecretary of the Air Force during the Carter administration, told NPR. “It takes enormous skill to bring them along. Colin Powell did have that skill.”

In November 2000, before her selection as Bush’s national security adviser, Rice spoke at IFPA-Fletcher Conference on National Security and Policy, co-sponsored by the Fletcher School. In her talk, she discussed some of the challenges that U.S. foreign policy faces.

“I'm not sure we very effectively integrate the various instruments of diplomacy that we have,” she said. “We've never been particularly good at integrating our economic instruments into our foreign policy more generally.”

In her 2000 address, Rice also commented on organizational reform in government. Since then, a new Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security has been established.

“I think sometimes we get overly caught up in moving the boxes when it isn't clear what else to do,” she said at the time. “And we all know that sometimes you can make structural reforms that end up creating new problems and you wish you'd stuck with the old structures.”

Still, even amid an election that at the time of her talk was still unsettled, she expressed faith in the democratic process.

“Democracy is sometimes a little bit messy,” she admitted. “But if you have strong institutions, and you have a belief in those institutions, you can come through it just fine.”