Cheney book: Condoleezza Rice fires back

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has fired back at former Vice President Dick Cheney over what she describes as an attack on her integrity and other “cheap shots” contained in Cheney’s new memoir.

Rice spoke out -- for the first time since Cheney started promoting his book late last month -- in a telephone interview with Reuters on Wednesday.

The book, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” has generated much buzz in Washington, and has angered some of Cheney’s former colleagues, including retired Gen. Colin Powell, who also recently accused Cheney of taking “cheap shots.” The book discusses the eight-year administration of President George W. Bush, in which Rice served first as national security advisor, then as secretary of State.

“Some of the things that he said about his colleagues are not in keeping with the high respect that I have always had for him,” Rice said in the interview with Reuters. “I do think they fall into the category of cheap shots.”

Cheney suggests in the book that Rice misled Bush during negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program.

“I kept the president fully and completely informed about every in and out of the negotiations with the North Koreans,” Rice told Reuters. “You can talk about policy differences without suggesting that your colleague somehow misled the president. You know, I don’t appreciate the attack on my integrity that that implies.”

Cheney and Rice also butted heads in summer 2003, he wrote, when the White House was debating whether to apologize for Bush’s claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had been seeking uranium for nuclear weapons.

Cheney opposed apologizing, arguing that it “would only fan the flames.”

“I was under the impression that the president had decided against a public apology, and was therefore surprised a few days later when [Rice] told the White House press pool, ‘We wouldn’t have put it in the speech if we had known what we know now.’” Cheney wrote. “The result was the conflagration I had predicted. The media immediately wanted to know who was responsible.”

As Cheney tells it, this led Rice to admit that Cheney had been right to oppose apologizing.

“Rice realized sometime later that she had made a major mistake by issuing a public apology,” Cheney wrote. “She came into my office, sat down in the chair next to my desk, and tearfully admitted I had been right.”

Rice told Reuters that she did approach Cheney to tell him that he was “right about the press reaction,” but said she was “quite certain that I didn’t do it tearfully.”

“It certainly doesn’t sound like me, now does it?” she said. “I would never -- I don’t remember coming to the vice president tearfully about anything in the entire eight years that I knew him.”

kim.geiger@latimes.com