'Meet the Press' transcript for Dec. 21, 2008

MR. GREGORY:  OK.

SEC’Y RICE:  Because the only thing that’s a quote there is that the president demanded optimism.  And the president did demand that we all remain focused on the goal, and that we not give way every day to the kind of pessimism that keeps you from dealing with the problems that you face.  But the, the president never demanded, nor did I give him a ban on bad news or a ban on criticism.  I would go to the president frequently and say, “Mr. President, this isn’t working” or “that isn’t working.” I came back from Iraq in October 2006, and I told him, I said, “Mr. President, the fabric of this society is rending.” And I had had a conversation with each of the Iraqi leaders, and I told them, I said, “The way that you’re behaving now, this sectarian behavior, you’re going to all be swinging from lampposts in six months.” I told the president that.  So I was not afraid to give the president bad news.  But when you, on a daily basis, give in to pessimism or hand-wringing, you’re simply not going to face the problems and, and try to deal with them.

MR. GREGORY:  So, as you look forward, though, as you were giving your successor advice, where is that line between if you want to—you’re serving a president who does demand optimism, who doesn’t want hand-wringing, between that and, “Look, Mr. President, you’ve got to realize you can’t be stubborn about this, we have to change course.” Where’s the line?

SEC’Y RICE:  And it’s not—first of all, it’s not stubbornness.  The president himself said many, many times—I remember shortly before the surge, someone was asking him about the polls about Iraq and he said, “Count me among those who are not satisfied on Iraq.” So this president wasn’t wearing rose-colored glasses.  He did believe that if we “righted the ship,” in a sense, that our values were going to triumph because he believes very strongly in the force of freedom.

But, you know, in those difficult days, David, I would always remind myself not that we—that I needed to take good news to the president, but that I needed to take him my honest assessment of what I thought was going on and what we could do about it.  I do realize in history’s great sweep, though, that when you look at, for instance, where we—I was when I came here the last time to participate in the unification of Germany and the liberation of Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union, that in 1947 or 1948, if you had said that that was going to be the outcome 50 years later, someone would have had you committed.  And therefore I do recognize that history’s long arc is different than the—today’s headlines.

You do have to keep in mind as you’re going through extraordinarily difficult circumstances, that if you stay true, true to your values, if you stay true to your principles, if you believe in these values, then you can work in that context to right policies that may not be working.  And this president, against a lot of odds, went with a surge of our forces.  Not just a surge of our forces, a surge of our civilian presence.  The State Department put officers—diplomats and aide workers—in the field in tough places like Anbar and hard cities of Sadr City and in, in the south.  That kind of effort doesn’t come from a rose-colored view that somehow everything is going right, but it does come from the belief that Iraq was too important to lose.

MR. GREGORY:  Let me talk about your successor a little bit, Hillary Clinton, and the news this week that her husband, the former president, released contributors to his global initiative, to his foundation.  A lot of questions about how that’s going to be managed if he still has a big role around the world.  In effect, if she’s secretary of state with a former president as a husband, is foreign policy going to have two for one?

SEC’Y RICE:  Well, look, it’s a unique situation.  I think we all think it’s unique.  But my successor, Hillary Clinton, is an extremely talented woman. She is a, a woman of integrity.  She believes in this country deeply.  We’ve already had a couple of conversations.  I know her from the time she brought her freshman daughter to Stanford for the first time when I was provost, and she’s going to do this very well.

MR. GREGORY:  So you don’t think the former president’s profile on the world stage will be a problem?

SEC’Y RICE:  I, I also know the, the former President Clinton, and I have to say right here, he has always been respectful of our role, of the president, of me.  He’s been helpful, and I’m sure they’ll work it out.  And it’s up to them and President Obama as to how that goes.

MR. GREGORY:  Who better to span the world with here in our remaining time, and I’d like to hopscotch around the globe a little bit, to talk about some of the challenges that this new president’s going to face.  Let’s talk about North Korea.  A lot of the headlines this week about those talks breaking down in order to get the North Koreans to really back off the pursuit of a nuclear program.  The Wall Street Journal was critical, in an editorial this week, of your approach on all this, writing the following:  “The North has never kept a commitment, verbal or written.  Its negotiating habit is to make promises to win concessions, then renege on those promises and saber-rattle until the U.S. offers further concessions.  ...

“Ms. Rice recently said the only alternative to her Pyongyang policy was short-term ‘regime change,’ which is a classic false dilemma.  Her failure—and Mr. Bush’s—was putting the appearance of diplomatic progress above genuine disarmament.” You actually joked this week during a—an appearance at the foreign—at the Council on Foreign Relations that nobody was trusting of the North Koreans, that you’d have to be an idiot to trust the North Koreans.

SEC’Y RICE:  Right.

MR. GREGORY:  And yet that’s the criticism, that this administration did trust too much.

SEC’Y RICE:  No.  Of course we didn’t trust them.  What we are negotiating is a verification protocol because nobody does trust them.  And, in fact, if you look at the agreement that was signed in September of 2005, it committed the North to denuclearization within a context of the six parties.  That means Russia, China, Japan and South Korea are all at the table to ensure that these, these commitments are met.  Now, step by step, we’ve been going through those commitments, and we have been responding to meet our obligations when the North goes forward with its obligations.  So when they shut down the reactor, we met some of our small obligations in terms of fuel oil delivery. And they did shut down the reactor.  There hasn’t been any more plutonium made since September of 2005.  Now when they, as the North is wont to do, when they tested a missile in July of 2006 and in October of 2006 set off a crude nuclear device, we went back to the other five.  I was on the phone with them, David, within hours; and by the end of the week, we had a Chapter 7 Security Council resolution, sanctions and constraints on the North Koreans, signed on by the Chinese.  That’s extraordinary.

Then, after that, when the North came back and said, “All right, we’re ready to disable our reactor.  It’s now shut down.  We’re going to start to disable it,” we agreed disabling plus a declaration from them about their further nuclear programs and then more assistance from us and they did begin to disable.  They did blow up the cooling tower.  They did really disable certain elements of their nuclear system on the plutonium side, and we delivered.

Then it came the matter of verification.

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

SEC’Y RICE:  And we have about 80 percent of the verification protocol agreed with the North.  Things like interviews with scientists, the right to go and ask questions and probe concerning various facilities, the right to look at operations records, to look at production records.  We have 18,000 documents in our possession.  What the North wouldn’t do is go the last 20 percent, which is to clarify some of the elements of scientific procedures that might be used to sample the soil.  So a lot has been achieved here.  I think more will be achieved, but it’s really only going to be achieved in the context of the six parties, because if you don’t have China and South Korea and Russia and Japan at the table, too, then the North can play the game that they used to play of getting benefits from other parts of the international community and refusing to carry forward on its obligations.

MR. GREGORY:  Really quickly, let me try to get to Iran as well.  The president said in a course of, of his tenure, he would not tolerate a nuclear Iran.  The reality is that, when you came into office, Iran was in something of a box.  You leave office, Iran is resurgent.  Outsized influence in Iraq, outsized influence elsewhere in the Middle East, including in the West Bank and with groups like Hamas, scuttling efforts between the Israelis and the Palestinians.  This is not a reality that you anticipated or wanted.

SEC’Y RICE:  You know, actually, David, I’d, I’d put it very differently. When we came into office, apparently no one believed that Iran really wanted to seek a nuclear weapon.  And so there wasn’t an international coalition that had voted for Security Council resolutions demanding that the Iranians stop reprocessing and enrichment.  There wasn’t an international community that has pulled out of Iran because of, in terms of investment, because of the risk and because of reputational risks.

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

SEC’Y RICE:  There wasn’t an international community that was standing firm, as the Gulf Corporation Council that the Arab states did the other day in a meeting with the so-called “P5 plus 1,” the states that are negotiating with Iran, to say, “We demand that you deal both with Iran’s hegemonistic behavior and with their nuclear program.”

Finally, let me just say a word about, about Iran and Iraq.  Yes, Iran will have influence.  They’re a neighbor.  But Iran was unable to stop this SOFA from going forward, and they pulled out all the stops.  That shows...

MR. GREGORY:  The agreement for with—to withdraw from Iraq.

SEC’Y RICE:  The agreement with the United States.  This shows that the Iraqis are going to be independent, they are going to defend their interests, and they are going to be a bulwark against undue Iranian influence in the region.

MR. GREGORY:  I want to ask you about this moment politically in our country. I know the president spoke to you on election night when the president-elect was elected and when there was this outpouring of emotion in Grant Park and, frankly, across the country.

SEC’Y RICE:  Yeah.

MR. GREGORY:  What did you feel that night, and what did you share with him about the importance of that moment?

SEC’Y RICE:  Well, we saw it similarly, interestingly.  For me, of course, as an African-American, it’s extraordinary.  I was born in segregated Birmingham, Alabama.  I didn’t have a white classmate till we moved to Denver.  And to see an African-American elected president means that this country is really finally coming full circle from the birth defect of slavery.  I’m proud to, to think that President Bush appointed back to back African-American secretaries of state.  That was extraordinary.  And so we’ve been on this journey.  But what happened on that night was really quite something.  And I also know the president-elect.  He was on my committee, the committee on—the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he’s a quite extraordinary man.  But an incredible day for America.

MR. GREGORY:  I know you’re a proud Republican, but were you rooting for Barack Obama?

SEC’Y RICE:  Now, David, you know I’m secretary of state, so I don’t talk about my, my partisan or nonpartisan beliefs.  But I think every American was rooting for the kind of election that we had.  One in which, when it was over, the, the defeated candidate, John McCain, gave one of the most exceptional concession speeches.  One in which we showed that this country does this better than any country in the world.  One in which we’re making a completely smooth transition because President Bush wants it to be that way with our country in a time of war and a, a time of economic difficulty.

What I’ve heard around the world is, yes, there’s, there’s great, great joy that a, a, a minority, an African-American’s been elected.  But there’s also just great admiration and almost a sense that it’s quite remarkable that America does what it does this way.

MR. GREGORY:  What’s next for Condoleezza Rice?

SEC’Y RICE:  Well, I’ll go back west of the Mississippi, where I belong, to California.  And I’m going to go back to Stanford and the Hoover Institution. I want to write a book.  Obviously, I’ll write a book on foreign policy.  It’s been an incredible time, and I think we’ve left a lot of places in much better shape.  And I, I want to write about the post-9/11 end of our innocence in foreign policy.

I also want to write a book about my parents.  My parents were incredible. You know, they, they probably never made more than $60,000 between then.  They were, my father, a high school guidance counselor, later university administrator, my mother a teacher.  But they recognized the value of education and they did everything they could to make sure I had every opportunity and made enormous sacrifices.  And I want that to be known.

But most importantly, as secretary of state—and it’s been an enormous honor to represent this great country that I love so much—I have really seen that our great strengths are in the ability of people to reach their potential here, whether immigrants come here and reach their potential, or whether we continue to believe, as Americans do, that it doesn’t matter where you came from, it matters where you’re going.  We can’t live true to that set of values unless our educational system is strong.  And so, as early as 1992, David, I got involved in K-12 educational issues for underprivileged kids.  I really believe that if we don’t get that right we will not compete because we won’t believe that our people can compete, and we’ll turn inward.  We won’t lead. That will be bad for the world.

But most importantly, in a multiethnic democracy, where we’re not bound by blood, we’re not bound by religion, we’re not bound by nationality, we’re bound by an idea.  And that idea is that every American can come from humble circumstances and do great things.  And, as an educator and secretary of state, I want to go make sure that’s true.

MR. GREGORY:  Well, Secretary Rice, we certainly hope you’ll come back with your books to talk about them.

SEC’Y RICE:  Thank you.

MR. GREGORY:  And thank you for being here, and thank you for your public service.

SEC’Y RICE:  Thank you very much, David.

MR. GREGORY:  Thank you.

Coming next, automakers finally get some help from Washington, the political drama continues to unfold in Illinois, and just 30 days until the inauguration of the president of the United States, Barack Obama.  Our political roundtable weighs in.  Erin Burnett, Carol Marin, Andrea Mitchell and Michele Norris—all here only on MEET THE PRESS.

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