Bush Chooses Rice for New Secretary of State

President Bush on Tuesday nominated his most trusted foreign policy advisor, Condoleezza Rice, to be the next secretary of State, a move that signaled a desire to elevate the importance of diplomacy in his second term while raising questions about whether his inner circle would include fewer dissenting voices.

In a distinctly warm and personal speech in the White House, Bush praised Rice for “her sound and steady judgment” during the four years she served as his national security advisor. He said her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, would be her successor.

“The secretary of State is America’s face to the world,” Bush said. “And in Dr. Rice, the world will see the strength, the grace and the decency of our country.”

Rice, 50, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from Birmingham, Ala., grew up to become a scholar of the Soviet military and senior advisor on the Soviet Union to the first President Bush. She served as provost of Stanford University before signing on as George W. Bush’s foreign policy advisor during his 2000 presidential campaign. She has been by his side since.

“It has been an honor and a privilege to work for you these past four years, in times of crisis, decision and opportunity for our nation,” Rice told the president during a brief announcement at the White House. “I look forward, with the consent of the Senate, to pursuing your hopeful and ambitious agenda as secretary of State.”

If confirmed by the Senate, Rice would step into the job being vacated by Colin L. Powell, whose popularity rivaled that of the president throughout his first term. Powell was the first black to serve as secretary of State; Rice would be the first black woman to do so.

The Senate is expected to confirm her nomination when it convenes a new session in January. Powell will continue to serve as secretary in the interim.

During Bush’s first term, Powell was seen as the moderate counterweight to the hard-liners in Bush’s inner circle, primarily Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Rice largely stayed out of the fray, styling herself less as a referee between the rival departments and more as a private confidante to the president.

As national security advisor, she did not head a public agency and answered to only one person -- the president -- who clearly has given her job performance high marks.

Outside of the Oval Office, Rice’s record as national security advisor was generally seen as mixed.

Although she earned the president’s trust, critics said she did not have a strong enough hand when it came to another part of her job: coordinating policy between the various agencies and departments who together make foreign policy.

Critics inside and outside the administration said she was a weak coordinator who failed to rein in the Defense Department, particularly when it took the lead in planning for postwar Iraq, considered one of the administration’s central failures.

Rice was also criticized by the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks for failing to alert the president to the dangers of terrorism in the months before the attack, and by other critics for overstating the intelligence suggesting that Iraq possessed nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

In the months before the war against Iraq, Rice acknowledged that the intelligence was incomplete but argued, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said there would “probably not” be any problems with Rice’s confirmation, but said her role leading up to the war in Iraq did “not bode well for America’s image abroad if she is going to be secretary of State.”

On the other hand, proximity to the president is the coin of Washington’s realm, and few are wealthier in that regard than Rice.

She spends several hours a day with him, as well as many weekends at Camp David or at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas. Bush and Rice share an abiding interest in fitness and professional sports.

In private, Rice was said to speak bluntly to the president, but in public, there was no sign of disagreement. In fact, Rice was perhaps the most articulate spokesperson for the president’s policies.

As Bush’s first term progressed and Powell grew more estranged from the president’s inner circle, foreign governments increasingly cultivated a relationship directly with Rice and the Pentagon officials considered closer to her thinking and to the president’s.

In that light, foreign governments greeted Rice’s promotion to the State Department as beneficial to what Bush has said would be a renewed effort in his second term to mend relations with allies who disapproved of his decision to go to war in Iraq.

“Certainly, the State Department will recover a lot of influence at the White House,” said a senior European diplomat. “Even if she is a bit away from the daily life of the president, she will have the trust of the president.”

David Rothkopf, author of a forthcoming book on the National Security Council, said Rice’s new role was likely to be similar to that played by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III in the administration of Bush’s father.

“The first President Bush had his best friend as secretary of State. Baker was on the phone with him the whole time,” Rothkopf said. Rice “is going to be the president’s secretary of State. They will continue to be joined at the brain about most things.”

But others saw danger in the closeness between Bush and Rice. With Powell’s departure, critics feared that Rice would not be independent enough to clash with the president’s other advisors or represent dissenting views during policy debates.

“We deserve an independent-thinking and capable secretary of State who will make our nation safer and restore America’s credibility, alliances and leadership in the world,” said Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), a member of the House International Relations Committee. “Unfortunately, over the past four years, Dr. Rice’s accomplishments have been minimal and her mistakes costly.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that although administration critics were inclined to support Rice’s confirmation, “she’s so close and so much an arm of the president that he’s not going to get some independent thinking.”

At his daily briefing for reporters, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan rejected suggestions that Powell’s resignation meant that Bush would no longer be presented with a diversity of opinions.

“That’s a very uninformed view of how this White House operates and how this president makes decisions,” McClellan said.

In Western Europe, where relations with America’s traditional allies are troubled, there was wariness about Rice.

In France, whose leaders have clashed loudly with the administration, many described Rice’s ascent as a clear sign that the Bush administration would pursue an aggressive, conservative foreign policy influenced by neoconservatives who seek to remake the world in the image of American democracy.

“She’s probably very close to the neoconservatives,” said Paul Quiles, a former defense minister and Socialist legislator. “We can fear a number of tough policy evolutions, notably concerning Iran and the unilateral policy put in practice since a number of years ago.”

The office of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, perhaps Bush’s closest overseas ally, described Rice as “someone who we have a very close working relationship with and for whom the prime minister has immense regard.”

There were signs in other quarters that the substitution of Rice for Powell was a cause for some dismay. Asked how the appointment of Rice would be received in Europe, Michael Cox, a professor of international relations and a specialist on the U.S. at the London School of Economics, answered: “Badly.”

“I don’t get the impression that Rice much likes Europeans, Europe, France or diplomacy,” he said. “All the indications are that she is a total loyalist to Bush who is there to make the State Department loyal to Bush in ways it has not been so far.”

Before serving as Bush’s national security advisor, Rice was generally seen as a foreign policy realist who eschewed idealistic projects such as building new nations or promoting democracy. But along with the president, after the Sept. 11 attacks Rice increasing spoke of foreign policy goals in sweeping, idealistic terms of promoting democracy as an antidote to terrorism.

In his White House remarks in the Roosevelt Room, the president suggested that focus would continue.

“Dr. Rice has a deep, abiding belief in the value and power of liberty, because she has seen freedom denied and freedom reborn,” Bush said, referring to Rice’s childhood in segregated Birmingham. “She was taught by her mother, Angelina, and her father, the Rev. John Rice, that human dignity is the gift of God, and that the ideals of America would overcome oppression. That early wisdom has guided her through life, and that truth has guided our nation to a better day.”

Times staff writers John Daniszewski in London; Jeffrey Fleishman in Berlin; Sebastian Rotella in Paris; and Warren Vieth, Sonni Efron, Janet Hook, Richard Simon and Emma Schwartz in Washington contributed to this report.