'NYT' Reporter's Condi Book Will Reveal 'Conflicts' With Che

'NYT' Reporter's Condi Book Will Reveal 'Conflicts' With Cheney
By Joe Strupp - E & P
Published: November 06, 2007

Condoleezza Rice's relationship with Vice President Dick Cheney in recent years was "much more conflict-driven than we have been led to believe," according to Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times, who has just finished a biography of the secretary of state.

"There was much more conflict on the Middle East and detainees and on Guantanamo Bay than has been written," Bumiller, who returned to the Times D.C. bureau in September after a 15-month leave, tells E&P. "There had been disagreements over those and a little leading up to Iraq. But it is clear she was behind the war."

The book, being published by Random House, is due out in December.

Bumiller, who had covered the White House for five years before her leave in June 2006, is now a general assignment reporter, with no firm plans for her next long-term beat.

The veteran reporter said she had eight, one-hour interviews with Rice for the biography, adding "she was very cooperative." She also spoke with Colin Powell, but was denied interviews with President Bush, Cheney, and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "I also drew from two lengthy interviews I had done with her for The New York Times," she adds. "Most of that had not been printed."

The book "is her life from her childhood in Birmingham until now, and the first half looks at Alabama and her life up until 2000," she says. "More than half of the book is about her past seven years, 2000 to 2007 and it looks at her years at the White House."

Declining to reveal too much from the book, titled "Condoleezza Rice: An American Life," Bumiller said "there is a lot of stuff about her relationship with the president that was interesting." She adds that she found Rice to be "more human, someone who has made mistakes. She spent part of her college years floundering. She wasn't a brilliant student."

Bumiller also looked at her time as Stanford University provost, saying, "she got into a real tangle with women and minorities and a real conflict with factions out there."

Saying her book leave ended up being three months longer than planned, Bumiller explained she spent nine months of the time as a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars working on the project, as well as three months at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

"One of the reasons I wrote the book is it is also 50 years of astounding history," she says.

Bumiller is the third newspaper reporter this year to pen a Rice book, joining fellow Times scribe Marcus Mabry and Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post.