Archive - December 11, 2012

 By Ruth Marcus, Published: November 29 Does gender – or the supercharged combination of gender and race – play a role in the preemptive strikes on not-yet-secretary of state nominee Susan Rice? For perspective on this complex question, it helps to return to 1974 and the nomination of another woman, Alice Rivlin, to head the Congressional Budget Office. As Rivlin tells the story, the office had just been created, she was selected by a search committee – and the House Budget Committee chairman made clear his adamant, gender-based opposition. “Over his dead body was a woman going to run this organization,” Rivlin recalled at an Atlantic magazine “Women of Washington” lecture last year. No one would say that today. No one, I’d venture, would even think it. A woman, after all, has been secretary of state for all but four of the last 16 years; during the interregnum, the job was held . . .

Updated December 3, 2012, 7:23 p.m. ET Stephens: Failing Up With Susan Rice Benghazi was not her first African fiasco. By BRET STEPHENS in the Wall Street Journal Long before Susan Rice became a household name thanks to her part in the Benghazi fiasco, she was building a career from the ruins of other African fiascoes. To some of these she merely contributed. Others were of her own making. Ms. Rice’s misadventures in Africa began nearly two decades ago when, as a 28 year-old McKinsey consultant with an Oxford Ph.D. (her dissertation was on Zimbabwe), she joined Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. The president, who had been badly burned by the Black Hawk Down episode in October 1993, was eager to avoid further African entanglements. So when a genocide began in Rwanda the following April, the administration went to great lengths to avoid any involvement-beginning with the refusal to use . . .