The Susan in question is Susan Rice. And, according to a New York Times article by Neil MacFarquhar, it's Stewart Patrick who gives her the good grades. Rice is U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. So who is Patrick? He is one of those hundreds of I.R. wonks in Washington who moves from fellowship to fellowship, eating up foundation money, and ends up being an expert in what actually amounts to nothing or maybe, just maybe, the same thing: "multilateral cooperation in the management of global issues; U.S. policy toward international institutions, including the United Nations; the challenges posed by fragile, failing, and post-conflict states; and the integration of U.S. defense, development, and diplomatic instruments in U.S. foreign and national security policy; the intersection between security and development, with a particular focus on the relationship between weak states and transnational threats and on the policy challenges of building effective institutions of governance in fragile settings..."
I won't torture you any longer. But rest assured: There's a lot more of the same junk in the bio put out by the Center for American Progress. Still, he has only himself to blame, being the Times source who called Ms. Rice a "multitasking workaholic ... [who] doesn't suffer fools." It isn't that she doesn't suffer fools gladly. She doesn't suffer fools, just plain and simple. How intolerant!
Yet the real problem is Ms. Rice's. No, forget about her passivist role in the Rwanda genocide. And forget also about her covert cooperation, when she was assistant secretary of state for African affairs, with Jesse Jackson in trying to rescue Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor from justice. Let's just look at now. Or, actually, the last nine months.
Even before the president was inaugurated, she was, quite properly, being vetted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Rice was disappointed that she hadn't been given the big job at State. But the president had bigger fish to fry. So he gave State to Hillary, where she's been eating her heart out ever since. Adlai Stevenson graciously took from JFK the U.N. mission (not, by the way, the U.N. embassy, as Mrs. Clinton erroneously continues to label it) while Dean Rusk, a safe little nothing, got Foggy Bottom. Still, Rice is on the tube quite a bit. There are so many U.N. extravaganzas that she can't help but be. Her key word is "engagement." We'll engage with them ... and with them ... and with them, too.
Being Treasury secretary is usually not a job that calls for great political skills. But with a banking crisis crippling the economy and threatening to turn a recession into a depression, Tim Geithner has been plunged into the center of politics--as both the person responsible for what the administration should do, and as the main exponent of that policy. But he has faltered in crafting an effective policy and failed miserably in putting it forward.
This article originally appeared on November 20, 1961
These last hundred days have been so dizzying, so astonishing, and to some of us so dismaying a reversal of what we all took to be the inevitable course of history, that one can still hardly believe, much less explain it all. A reporter, trying to sum it all up in a few columns, cannot hope to capture the drama, the acute anxiety, the universal confusion. All he can attempt is the patchiest of outlines.
