From the moment she landed in London last week on the first leg of her inaugural diplomacy tour, the gaze of Europe smothered Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, focusing on the big picture–such as troubles with Iran–and the tiniest details, including her Italian pumps.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many cameras,” Rice marveled after an appearance last Friday in Berlin.
But if Rice was surprised by the attention, her team seemed more than prepared to try to handle and manage it. Across about 40 interviews or media events, seven days and nine countries in Europe and the Middle East, one clear change in American diplomacy under the new secretary of state emerged: As the former national security adviser moved from the West Wing of the White House to the State Department, the disciplined and sometimes-aggressive Bush message machine also moved with her.
Many moments across Rice’s weeklong tour, which ended Thursday night, seemed stage-managed down to the smallest detail.
Her exchange with audience members after a much-hyped speech in Paris included vetting of the questions and the questioners, although Rice’s aides maintained that officials at the university where the address was given did the managing without them.
Expanded news contingent
Before Rice left Washington, seats on her plane normally reserved for policy officials were cut. The traveling news contingent was expanded from 13 to 19 slots, including four extra for cable news or television networks, although an aide denied that staff was scaled back specifically to expand the media contingent. But there were also extra administration message men aboard.
Throughout the long journey, Rice’s plane often was abuzz, with sometimes as many as four of her aides working members of the diplomatic press corps.
Even in “down” moments, the machine seemed to be on.
“There are so many good vibes, I don’t know what to do,” said one Rice aide, unsolicited, of American relations with Europe as he walked past reporters while boarding the plane in Brussels after meetings at NATO headquarters.
As the cameras watched Rice watching adorable young French children learn the basics of reading music at a Paris school, another aide circled, quietly reminding journalists how “cute” the staged scene looked, according to some who attended.
That is not to say there weren’t moments that seemed both unplanned and genuine for Rice. In Shannon, Ireland, where her plane stopped to refuel on the way home, Rice shook hands with or embraced what seemed to be scores of American soldiers passing through the airport lounge on their way back from Iraq. She thanked nearly all of them personally for their service and posed for snapshot after snapshot, with no television cameras anywhere in sight.
106 `freedom’ references
A senior State Department official acknowledged on the flight home that there was a serious effort to provide “extra” image and message management on Rice’s first trip abroad as America’s chief diplomat. The official said the effort was designed to help Rice overcome or soften her tough reputation. He also said the size of the traveling press corps would remain bigger than usual on future trips, but added that he expected it to eventually recede to its norm.
But the signs of the new message management in U.S. diplomacy also were evident in the words spoken by Rice herself. She sounded far more like President Bush than her predecessor, Colin Powell, as she at least partly picked up the White House’s discipline of hitting the same theme with the intensity of a jackhammer.
During her European appearances or interviews, Rice used the word “freedom” at least 106 times, according to State Department transcripts.
Although Powell was no less disciplined than Rice in delivering America’s talking points to the world, the repetition, afterspin and efforts to manage it all were far more toned down during Powell’s tenure.
Difficult to control message
And Rice, like Powell and many secretaries of state before her, also learned on her first trip how difficult it can be to control the message, no matter how hard one tries.
The morning after her speech Tuesday at the prestigious Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, in which she had urged Europe to start a “new chapter” with America, Rice sat down for an interview with Fox News’ James Rosen and suggested that European leaders weren’t being tough enough in nuclear negotiations with Iran.
The message that emerged: Rice was complaining about Europe, just hours after trying to make up. It swept the world on news services, television and the Internet and didn’t recede until she was able to step back from her own comments at a news conference several hours and another country later.
Beyond freedom, the other big message Rice flew across Europe to deliver appears to at least have a chance of sticking.
Of overcoming the trans-Atlantic rift that emerged over the U.S. decision to invade Iraq, Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, suggested Thursday that Rice’s journey might have finally changed the conversation.
“Probably what we have to do is to talk less about ourselves and to talk more about what we can do together,” he said at Rice’s final appearance in Luxembourg, her last stop.
