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Susan E. Rice

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2017-11-06

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2017-11-06

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1. “Well, I actually wasn't responsible for Africa and wasn't working on Africa when the genocide happened. I was the director on the NSC staff responsible for UN affairs and peacekeeping. And then in 1995, the year after the genocide, I was appointed to be the senior director to run the Africa office on the NSC staff. But I was involved in it from a junior level because I had the UN portfolio. And we had a UN peacekeeping force in there and all this stuff.”

   2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “But it wasn't a hard choice for me to take the opportunity to come and work in the White House. I was only 28 years old at the time, and the jobs that I was offered were both really interesting and exciting. And so at that point, I had to choose Economic Council, Security Council, chose a high-class problem. That was a high class problem. But it was a sort of decisive moment.”

   2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Well, I'd always wanted to be involved in policymaking. I mean, that was part of the passion and my experience growing up in Washington in these communities. When I was in high school, I worked on Capitol Hill. I always knew that I wanted to get into government in some form or fashion. And when I was younger, I actually thought I might want to run for elected office. And then I decided otherwise, but I still wanted to be a policymaker. And what I didn't know is whether I wanted domestic policy or foreign policy. That was more the dilemma.”

   2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “No, actually, this is. I didn't do the Clint campaign. I did Dukakis in. 1988, and then I was working for McKinsey Company in Toronto and elsewhere. But when President Clinton was elected, a number of the folks who had worked on the Clinton campaign were the same people that had worked with me on the Dukakis campaign. And they found me up in Toronto and asked me to come down and interview for a couple jobs at the White House, one on the National Security Council's staff, the other on the National Economic Council staff.”

   2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “It gave me pleasure that it pissed him off enough And he thought it was a credible enough threat to give me a hard time at my graduation in front of my parents.”

   2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Would stop giving to the university and start giving to this fund. In the event, it proved to be more powerful symbolically than it was practically. But it gave me a little bit of”

   2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Donald Kennedy, when you Yeah, so what we did just to put a little bit in context is we establish something called the Free South Africa Fund, which was a way for Stanford alumni to contribute to Stanford without contributing to their investments in apartheid South Africa. So it was an alternative endowment fund. People could put their money there. And if Stanford divested, they'd receive all the money in the fund. Or if apartheid ended within 10 years, they'd receive the money in the fund. But if neither had happened within 10 years, the money would go to black South Africans for their educational purposes. And Donald Kennedy, then the president of Stanford, I think was concerned that this could gain real traction and that a lot of alumni”

   2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Is a professor now at Stanford, our former ambassador to Russia. Right. And the other was a guy named Bill Hanley, who is an English professor. But in any event, the three of us were sort of shared an interest in the anniaparid struggle and also were cognizant of the irony of accepting Cecil Rhodes' money, which had all been stolen from black South Africans and Zimbabweans, to go to Oxford while having some sense of outrage about what was happening in the current apartheid South Africa. So we got involved and put together a little way to pressure the university by the end of our senior years.”

   2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “And made great friends and traveled overseas and all that stuff. But in my last couple of years, I got quite drawn to the anti-apartheid struggle, which was in some ways the modern day in that context. We're talking about the mid-80s now, the modern day civil rights movement. And Archbishop Tutu had come to Stanford to speak, and he was extraordinarily compelling and powerful. And I got engaged in the anti apartheid campus movement, which at that stage really was, as you said, about divestment, trying to get the university to stop investing in companies that were doing business in apartheid South Africa. And then my senior year I and two of my classmates were awarded road scholarships to go after graduation to Oxford to study there. My colleagues who received the scholarships, one is Mike McFall, who”

   2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “At the school love. I had great time there. And I found it stimulating from an academic point of view. It's where I met Ian, who's now my husband.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Who I'm very, very close to. I don't think I was trying to get away. At least I wasn't a conscious consideration. But as I get older and think it through, I think it wasn't so much that I was trying to get far away from them, but I wanted my own experience. And I felt like I'd been steeped in this rarefied. East Coast elite experience and that Harvard or Yale, which were my other options, would have been more of the same.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Well, they were powerful personalities. They were also divorced by the time I went to college. They got divorced actually. They separated when I was 10. And it was a pretty bitter and unpleasant lead-up to the divorce and the divorce itself. But you have similar.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “This was a lot of drama. My mother really, really, really didn't want me to go to Stanford. She wanted me to stay on the East Coast, go to Yale, go to Harvard, preferably from her point of view. And she thought Stanford was too far away and not as good as her alma mater. My dad was totally cool because he'd gone to Berkeley and loved it, and he got the appeal of going to the West Coast.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “And before she was my mentor, she was my mom's friend, and they served together on the board of the elementary school I mentioned, the Beauvoir School, which is how they became close. And Madeline Albright's ex-husband and my dad played tennis every Sunday together in a foursome. And I went to school with the Albright girls. Katie is younger than me, Alice and Annard, a little bit older than me. But our families would often gather for Sunday lunch. After the tennis matches at Hamburger Hamlet, I don't know. Do you remember Hamburger Hamlet? I do. Yes. They had the best thing about Hamburger Hamlet was that they had these foot-long hot dogs. Yes. And great milkshakes. And so that's one of my childhood memories is those family lunches.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Kennedy kids, Mondale kids, etc. By the way, Brock kids, not just Democrats. I mean, it was, I grew up in a bipartisan community of the children of.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Just trying to keep up with my mother. No, I was very fortunate. My parents liked their parents put a great premium on trying to give me and my brother the best possible education. They didn't have a lot of money, but they made a solid living. were able to finance my private school education and that of my younger brother basically from nursery school through graduation. And I attended the Beauvoir School and then the National Cathedral School for Girls.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “He was the second African American governor of the Federal Reserve. The first was doctor Andrew Brimmer, whose career path in my dad's were highly similar throughout their work. They knew each other well, and I grew up with his daughter Esther Brimmer, so there's a real parallelism there. But Bremer was the first, and my dad was the second.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “So they met in New York. And then they married In something like 1962, and they went almost immediately to Nigeria, where my dad was hired by USAID, the Agency for International Development, to help go establish the brand new Central Bank of Nigerias soon after their independence. And so they live for a couple of years in Nigeria That is actually where I was conceived. And then they came back to the US shortly before I was born, and I was born in Washington in November of 64.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “The difference between going to college and not going to college for so many folks. And she was dubbed in her latter life the mother of Pell Grant. So that was her thing”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Which persists in over 70 million Americans have been recipients of Pell grants. So talk about impact. I was just at a thing”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “We can do that later. But her great distinction in her 30 years at the college board was being instrumental in the creation and the perpetuation of the Pell Grant. Yes.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “It's something like that, but it doesn't exist anymore. But it was a sort of pioneering organization of its time. So she did that for four or five years. And then she began to work for the college board, which She stayed at for over 30 years in different incarnations. She was at the college board in New York, which is, as many people know, the organization that administers the SAT and the AP exams. But her work there.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “She, after graduating from Radcliffe at Harvard, had gotten deeply involved in trying to broaden education opportunities for low-income and minority students. So she worked at a small nonprofit called NISFINIS, which helped Negro, as they called him back then, students from basically black high schools to have the support and the counseling and indeed some financial support to begin to integrate and attend white colleges. And so that was her first misvinous acronym.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Right. They were not hiring African Americans at the skill level that his qualifications And so Cornell hired him, not realizing he was African American. Sight unseen on the recommendation of one of his professors at Berkeley. But he got there and they decided to tolerate it. And he enjoyed his time for about six years at Cornell. And then he had the opportunity to To work at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on loan for a couple years as a staff economist. And then from there, and that's about the time, by the way, he met my mother in New York City.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Yeah, so after graduate school, he went to Cornell, and he was an assistant professor of economics at Cornell. Again, I think in that era, still held back by being African American, he couldn't go into government right away. They weren't hiring in his field. He couldn't. Go into the private sector. So he was sort of confined to academia and Cornell hired the...”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Yes, the first African American in the Berkeley Fire Department. And he describes having from childhood wanted to be a fireman, and he found his dream fulfilled, and then he got into his first few fires and he's realized he hadn't been trained. He didn't know what he was doing. So the fire chief again sort of saw his talents and said, let me make this guy the dispatcher. And he can do his homework. Of the day, and I can't remember exactly what year it was in the early 50s when the Berkeley cyclotron, this is the nuclear facility, was threatened by fire in the Berkeley Hills, and it came very, very close to burning down the cyclotron. He was a dispatcher on duty the night that this happened. And he liked to joke that he was responsible for saving the cyclotron because he got the folks there in a timely way when they were most needed.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Yep, and he went to Berkeley, the University of California at Berkeley, to get his PhD in economics. And he was one of the very few African Americans of his generation to study economics at the PhD level. He also went to India for a year on a Fulbright scholarship, which supported his dissertation research. And when he finished at Berkeley, which he described often with extraordinary affection as sort of the most fun years of his life,”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “And my dad's whole professional life and personal life was deeply colored by the rigidity and the oppression of Southern segregation as he experienced in South Carolina. And then frankly, its manifestation, which was different but very real in New York City in the late 30s and early 40s, and then to serve in the war in a unit where, yes, they were the first to be given the opportunity to fly. But the whole theory of the case was that they were different and inferior to their white counterparts. And so my dad, who was a patriot and deeply loved this country and served it later in his career at the very highest levels. Never got over the bitterness he felt about segregation in the context of serving in World War II.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “It did, but actually, interestingly, my father met two of my mother's brothers just long before you met my mother down at Tuskegee because But the The thing that he spoke most about was the pain and the resentment that he felt not. Fighting or serving in a segregated military that was fighting a war that was about freedom. For everybody except African Americans.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “The remarkable thing is so many of the people that my father came to know and made friends with at Tuskegee, that cadre went on to become some of the most successful African Americans of their generation, pioneers in law and medicine and academia. And I've often wanted to and haven't yet had time to write a book about the history, sort of a social history of Tuskegee. What was it about the people there and how they interacted with one another that enabled them to go on to be such a remarkable cadre of leaders?”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Well, it was fascinating. He did talk about it quite a bit. He was sort of a financial analyst, systems analyst, logistician. They took advantage of the fact that he had an MBA and a BA in economics, and they sent him to Harvard Business School for a year and trained him in a An early stage program that the Air Force pioneered with it for a new kind of systems analysis. So he was not a pilot, but he was a captain down in at the base in Tuskegee, and he learned to fly on the side, but he was, you know, An operations guy and an administrative guy. And it was fascinating because the cadre of African American men who served in that time in Tuskegee, I think were somewhat self selected by the military to because of their background and their skills. They were forming, of course, the first black fighter unit.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Path for immigrants, path for low income but upwardly mobile people, and as he described it back then, nobody lived at City College. It was a commuter ride. College, and it was really one of the few affordable options. So after City College, he got drafted into the Air Force in World War II and served at Tuskegee for several years with the Tuskegee airmen. And then after that, after the war”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “But he had to move to New York City as a teenager because his mother felt that he couldn't get a quality education in South Carolina in the depths of the worst of segregation. And so on both sides of my family, this deeply instilled commitment to education as the means of mobility and as the sine qua non for any future of value was very much imbued in both my parents and they brought that to raising me and my brother. My dad got his BA and MBA from City College of New York.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “To be college educated was rather unusual. But my father's father died when my dad was seven. And that sort of upset all of the economic stability that the family had. They had to move out of the parish house. My grandmother. Who had gotten sort of a community college level degree went back to college to get her BA and she became a teacher and worked through the rest of my father's childhood. He too was the youngest child with some pretty big gap between him and his older siblings.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “He grew up in a family that he was born in 1919 in Florence, South Carolina, but lived as a child in Sumter, South Carolina where his father, my grandfather, was an AME minister and was the pastor ultimately at Mount Pisga AME in Sumter, which was a large parish, and my grandfather was a prominent member of the community. He had gone to college, and his father, my great-grandfather, who had been born a slave in South Carolina in 1845 and then served in the Union Army went to college and got his divinity degree and then actually started a school in New Jersey called the Bordentown School, which lasted almost seventy years. So on my father's side, there was a history. College education. And for African Americans to have generations going back to those that were slaves.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “To give birth at that age. So there was always a lot of anxiety about would my grandmother make it through pregnancy? Would my mother have any disabilities? In the event, thankfully, everything turned out okay. And my mom was in the tradition of her brother's star. She was a valedictorian of her high school class at Portland High School. She was head of the student government. She was active in the production of the yearbook and the newspaper. So she was a standout and then continued to excel at Harvard. My dad's side of the family was from South Carolina.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “They sent her to a lesser institution called Radcliffe College at Harvard University. And so my mom graduated from Radcliffe, and she was eleven years younger than her youngest brother. So she was sort of an unexpected addition. To the family, as it happens. Exactly. And my grandmother was 44 years old when my mother was born, which in that era was actually dangerous to. Yes.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “In Maine. And I think this is the family lore, that my grandfather was the first man to have four sons graduate from Bowden. And in any event, he was named an honorary member of what would have been his graduating class of 1912. And he got to know about Bowdoin because to make money on the side when he wasn't working in the music store, he was bartending at parties on the weekends where he could get an opportunity. And Bowden became one of the places that he served. So he looked at this place and said, this is where I want my sons to go. And they were all excellent students. But my mom, the youngest, couldn't go to Boden because back then it was an all-boys school. And my grandparents really didn't know what to do with her.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “A relatively wealthy family in Jamaica, and her father was Irish and had money and died early, and he had a greedy brother who took over the resources of the family and sent my grandmother off to live with distant relatives as a maid to them in poverty. So she had this sort of sense of entitlement but loss that in many ways she was trying to recruit recoup through her children. So they came to Maine and they had five kids. My mother was the youngest of five. The other four were boys. And my grandparents saved their money and managed it wisely, took out loans from the bank after having established a decent credit record, made their kids work, and sent all five of their kids to college through a combination of their own resources and scholarship resources. My four uncles went to Bowdoin College.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Well, it's interesting. It's hard in some ways, it's hard for me to answer because it was so evident and obvious from day one. I think it partly came from the fact that back in Jamaica they came from families that were religious and serious about upward mobility and for them coming to the United States was an opportunity to fulfill very much the American immigrant dream. And for them that meant making sure that their kids had every opportunity to get the best education because without that they understood that there was very little hope of upward mobility. My grandmother's story was particularly interesting because she actually came from”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Well, they came from very different backgrounds. My mother was born in Portland, Maine in 1933, and she was the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica who had found their way to Portland around nineteen eleven, nineteen twelve, and neither of my grandparents on my mother's side had any formal education beyond, say, eighth or ninth grade. My grandfather was a janitor, a porter in a music store, a cobbler. My grandmother was a seamstress and a maid to the United States with a deeply instilled commitment to educating their kids. That was their whole mission.”

    2017-11-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 188 - Susan E. Rice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source