Calm, Cool and Collected, Rice Sticks to the Script

Once the White House decided that national security advisor Condoleezza Rice would be allowed to testify in public before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, after first rejecting the idea, it was almost inevitable that her appearance would be the stuff of major television.

ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox, along with all the cable news networks, signed on for what turned out to be nearly three hours of live coverage, beginning at the TiVo-worthy time of 6 a.m. on the West Coast. Fox and CBS wasted no time in returning to their regular programming; NBC and ABC provided postmortems but were back to business within half an hour.

The attention paid any event magnifies its importance, and the rare live coverage certified that the Rice testimony was, as was repeatedly claimed, “historic.” (And it’s not every day a network gives up commercials for three hours.)

Yet it was in no sense revelatory or surprising: Rice was a contained and intently modulated witness and gave up no nuggets of the sort that made Watergate, Iran-Contra or the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings such engaging TV.

She had appeared before the commission in February but not under oath and not on television. And though it was meant to clarify the remarks of previous witness Richard Clarke, Thursday morning’s session was overwhelmingly a media event and as such had less to do with the fact-finding work of the commission than with the current election campaign.

Whatever “Law & Order” moments may have been hoped for -- commissioners Richard Ben-Veniste and Bob Kerrey did their prosecutorial best to provide them -- no one the least schooled in this witness would have expected anything but the cool, collected show she provided.

Among other prodigal accomplishments, Rice trained as a classical pianist and figure skater, pursuits that not only suggested an ability to keep cool under pressure and in front of a critical audience, but that called for bodily control and a muscular memory too.

Apart from the odd nervous smile or quaver in her voice, she showed none of the telltale signs of the taleteller. She didn’t lick her lips, drum her fingers, drink endless cups of water, or sweat.

Like other forms of reality television, Thursday’s hearing fell somewhere between actuality and artifice -- Rice prepared for it with mock question-answer sessions and, though her performance wasn’t actually staged, there was all the same a script from which she did not depart

Rice, 49, is one of the few telegenic members of the Bush administration.

Clad in a suit of soft gray and wearing a simple gold necklace, simple if spangly earrings that swayed slightly as she turned her head from one commission member to another and a small American flag pin affixed to her lapel, she cut an essentially neutral figure.

She was not too modish but not at all drab -- someone to whom a viewer’s preformed notions wouldn’t easily stick.

As a star in a TV show, she was not there to impart information -- there was precious little of it, and what there was was much repeated -- so much as to give a performance.

In that sense, it mattered less what she said or didn’t say than how she said or didn’t say it: What was important was that she should seem credible enough to preserve the credibility of the man she worked for.

As opposed to her earlier attacks on Clarke, whose accusations of ineptitude on the part of the Bush administration she had called “scurrilous,” Rice mostly kept her tone conciliatory, cooperative and collegial. And aside from a creepy habit of consistently employing the phrase “the homeland” for what used to be simply called “the United States,” she never seemed anything less than reasonable.

It made for pretty dull television, but drama was, after all, exactly what she went there to avoid.