Bush, Rice Are Tightly Bound by Experience

Official Washington has seldom seen a relationship between a president and a member of his staff as close as the one between George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice, his first-term national security advisor and now his choice for secretary of State.

What is less obvious is how this relationship came to pass -- and why it seems to have grown stronger, more trusting and more symbiotic through years of cutthroat political campaigning, foreign policy crises, national calamity and war.

Their backgrounds could hardly be more different: Rice, 50, the daughter of a black preacher, grew up in Birmingham, Ala., amid protest marches and Ku Klux Klan violence. Bush, 58, grew up heir to one of America’s WASP fortunes, a Skull and Bones aristocrat who followed his ancestors to Yale and then went to Harvard for good measure.

Yet close friends, government colleagues and others who know Rice and the president see threads of common experience and shared values and attitudes that seem to have drawn them together.

“The main element is trust,” said a close associate who has watched Rice and the president work together firsthand and spoke on condition of anonymity. “I’ve worked for a lot of top executives. When they don’t trust you, they don’t call you. He calls her all the time.”

Rice’s ability to become an almost clone-like extension of the president -- to understand what he wants, to make her only agenda his agenda and to carry out his wishes with unfailing loyalty -- has made her invaluable.

“The president does rely on her. If she’s not literally the first person he talks to every morning, it’s close,” said Coit D. Blacker, one of Rice’s closest friends, who worked with her during her time as provost at Stanford University. “I think that will continue. They’re deeply influential on each other.

“Condi,” Blacker said, “came in with some academic textbook notions of how foreign policy works. Bush relies on his instincts; his policy is morally grounded. People think she’s done a switch.... Those people don’t know her. She’s the daughter of Rev. John Wesley Rice, a Presbyterian minister. She’s always placed high importance on morality and values and personal integrity.”

One key to Rice’s value to the president is her ability to translate his moral instincts into practical foreign policy, said Abraham D. Sofaer, a senior State Department official in the Reagan administration. Sofaer was part of a foreign policy briefing team that Rice led when then-Texas Gov. Bush began to plan his first run for the White House.

“What the president leans on Condi for is her analytical ability,” Sofaer said. “It’s one thing to have values and opinions, but it’s another to apply them to a problem. It takes skill and diligence, and she’s really good at that.”

Wherever she goes and whomever she’s talking to, admirers and critics agreed, Rice has exercised unusual power because she has had only one agenda and spoken in only one voice: the president’s.

“You don’t get the tension you had with [Henry S.] Kissinger, who had his own agenda,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), comparing Rice to President Nixon’s legendary national security advisor and secretary of State.

Kissinger exercised extraordinary power but never submerged his own ideas and ambitions -- as associates said Rice had.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats and Republicans said that when she spoke, it was Bush’s positions she expressed. Indeed, Sen. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) complained that even in secret briefings, she never deviated from the White House line.

Others agreed.

“She is remarkably effective in being a very attractive mirror for whomever she is working with,” said a foreign policy specialist who had known Rice for 20 years and who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“It’s not just that she knows how to adjust and absorb,” the foreign policy specialist said. “She manages to develop a relationship of trust in the process. She’s not a sycophant, but she knows how to be effective in promoting her case.”

For some who know Bush and Rice, the closeness between them goes beyond policy and principles. Different as their backgrounds are, their personalities have been forged in similar fires.

Both have experienced the pain of being looked down on by their peers. Growing up, even his parents never saw George W. as the son who would do great things. It was his brother Jeb, now governor of Florida, who was expected to become the second President Bush.

As a mediocre student and flailing businessman, George Bush got little respect. Even as president, he has been mocked for his occasionally mangled use of English and his reputed disdain for the details of policymaking.

Rice grew up in a brutally segregated city, but made her way not only as a student but as an athlete -- a black figure skater in an almost purely white sport.

And once in academia, many of her colleagues tended to dismiss her, pointing out that she had been trained not at one of the nation’s elite institutions, but at the University of Denver.

“They have both known the experience of being ‘misunderestimated,’ ” a former administration official said, borrowing one of Bush’s made-up words. “People still underestimate Condi.”

From early in his quest for the presidency, the Texas governor was attracted not only by Rice’s command of facts and policy but by her ability to provide briefings without being condescending.

“She was always immensely respectful of him as a personality, even as governor. She clearly was in tutoring mode [during the campaign],” Blacker said. “But it was very apparent to me from the first moment I saw her in conversation with him after Jan. 20 [2001, when Bush was inaugurated as president] that there was none of that left. The arrows had stopped flowing in one direction and started flowing in another.”

Blacker continued: “He concluded early on that she would be a good partner. She thought, ‘Here’s a guy I can work with -- but also spend time with, hang out with.’ ”

The result has been a unique Washington relationship that reveals itself in the small details.

In meetings, said one close associate, Rice can become prim and proper or let fancy words creep in. During one Oval Office session, the associate said, Bush came across the word “hubris” while reviewing a National Security Council document and stopped short.

“Hubris? Hubris?” he said, repeating the word slowly several times. “Then he started reading out loud, making fun” of the entire passage, the associate said. “Do I talk like this?” Bush reportedly asked an increasingly uncomfortable Rice.

“First she tried to defend ‘hubris,’ ” the associate said. “But then the whole thing broke down into a laugh-fest.”

The comfort level between the two is visible when Rice is at home and gets a call from the White House operator, said Blacker, who has stayed with her during visits to Washington.

“Her tone wouldn’t change. She’d pick up the phone and say, ‘Good evening, sir,’ and just talk.... I saw her take calls [from him] while she was sitting on the couch. That, to me, said there is a deep level of comfort there.”

Then there are the endless conversations about sports. Bush is omnivorous when it comes to sports, making a special point of rooting for Texas teams. Rice is a little more selective, preferring football -- especially the Cleveland Browns, her team since childhood.

Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), who has been in more than a dozen meetings and settings with Bush and Rice, said “she is an encyclopedia of knowledge about pro football,” noting that Rice and Bush sometimes watched “Monday Night Football” on Air Force One together.

“I think her real ambition is to be commissioner of football,” Boehner said, repeating a one-liner from Bush’s nomination remarks Tuesday.

Though it became visible to the public only when Bush ran for president, the relationship between the two actually goes back long before that.

Rice served in his father’s administration, and Brent Scowcroft, who was President George H.W. Bush’s national security advisor, saw Rice as a rising star and repeatedly arranged for her to have contact with his boss.

The elder Bush came to admire her, and eventually Rice was invited to the Bush family’s summer compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, as a houseguest.

In 1998, when Gov. Bush met with a group of Stanford academics to discuss policy issues, Rice -- then provost -- took part. She made such a good impression on the younger Bush that he invited her to follow-up briefings in Texas.

That August she was asked back to Kennebunkport. The governor was there too.

Rice and the younger Bush went fishing together and worked out on treadmills, rowing machines and other fitness equipment at the Bush compound. “Over a few days, the son of the former president and the protege of the former national security advisor tested each other,” James Mann said in his book “The Rise of the Vulcans,” a detailed account of how the Bush foreign policy team was forged.

Before long, the governor made Rice his chief foreign policy advisor for the 2000 campaign. Other experts would be added later, but Rice’s personal relationship set her apart. And once the two entered the White House, it only grew stronger.

Said Scowcroft: “It’s probably as close a relationship as any that’s ever been between an NSA and the president.”

Times staff writers Janet Hook, Peter Wallsten and Doyle McManus contributed to this report.