Closeness to Bush gives Rice unique role in new term

Rice has been a constant, private counselor to Bush through the tumult of a first term dominated by a devastating terrorist attack at home and two wars abroad, in which diplomacy often took second place to military action. On the world stage, her challenge now would be to bring renewed attention to daunting diplomatic problems from West Asia to North Korea.

Rice would almost certainly face questions in confirmation hearings about her own role in the run-up to war with Iraq, and what appeared to be her failures either to warn Bush away from flawed pre-war intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons programs or, as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell did, to make dogged efforts of her own to ascertain its accuracy. In September 2002, she said that high-strength aluminium tubes seized en route to Iraq were ‘‘only really suited for nuclear weapons programs,’’ though almost a year earlier, her staff had been told that the nation’s foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were intended for nuclear weapons.

Rice has told friends that she sees Bush’s second term as a time when American diplomacy can return to the forefront after three years of international turbulence following the September 11 attacks. But her own skills in the hot glare of public diplomacy have yet to be fully tested.

She would start with one big advantage: Unlike Powell, who often struggled to bend Bush to a more multilateral approach to the world, Rice seems unlikely to have any agenda but Bush’s. She would be closer to her President than any Secretary of State since Henry A. Kissinger served Richard M. Nixon, and probably than any Cabinet officer since Robert F. Kennedy served as his brother’s Attorney General.

Like Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush’s choice to replace John Ashcroft as Attorney General, she is a longtime member of the President’s official family, and has grown even closer to him through weekends of workouts and watching sports at Camp David.

‘‘Her appointment means that the President wants to surround himself with the people he’s most comfortable with, and who are most loyal to his view of what foreign policy’s all about,’’ said Ivo H. Daalder, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution. ‘‘That wasn’t the case with Powell. The President sees himself as vindicated by re-election, and therefore he’s going to implement a foreign policy that is closely tied to the one he has been wanting to run all along.’’

Perhaps. But during the past four years, Rice’s own deepest views on foreign policy have often been more assumed than stated aloud. She sometimes sided with Powell in policy disputes, and sometimes with the more hawkish faction represented by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and it is perhaps only a slight exaggeration to say that the side she chose was usually where Bush himself wound up.

As Secretary of State, Rice herself would perforce become a player, atop a stubborn if beleaguered global organisation with its own traditions, priorities and byways, and not just a behind-the-scenes referee. The big question is how she would wield that power.

Barring health problems, Cheney will be around for four years, and Rumsfeld , with whom Rice has often tangled, has made it clear he wants to stay on for at least a time. Both have far more experience running big bureaucracies and navigating the political rapids of Capitol Hill than Rice, who has testified in public just once in her current tenure, to the 9/11 commission.

Rice, a former competitive figure skater and concert pianist who radiates self-confidence, has built a career marked by willingness to go her own way. She began her relationship with the President as his foreign policy tutor while he was still governor of Texas, and while her appointment as Secretary of State would be a clear signal that Bush long ago grew confident of his own skills without her by his side, she has his ear in ways few others do.