BY DAVID REMNICK
A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Philip Gourevitch and I interviewed Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, at a New Yorker event on stage, at Joe’s Pub. We hoped for a round-the-world survey of expansive and off-the-cuff honesty, but, as it turned out, there was only so much candor that diplomatic propriety would allow. Rice, from Syria to Rwanda, strictly adhered to the made-in-Washington talking points. She even pronounced herself “happy” that she was still U.N. Ambassador, even after losing a bid to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. (I am sure she was “happy” beyond words to have been the hate-object of a cynical gaggle of right-wing senators who exacted some post-election revenge on the President by punishing her for the disaster in Benghazi.) It was frustrating but not unexpected. You had to admire Rice’s discipline—and even how, at the end of the discussion, she robbed some French fries from a guy in the audience who was eating, flagrantly, at the lip of the stage.
You also had to admire the watchfulness of the White House. About thirty minutes after leaving the theatre, I got out my phone to catch up on my messages. There was one from a White House official who had noticed that I’d been “quoted” on Twitter saying that President Obama was not likely to spend any political capital in his second term to help bring about a Palestinian state. The quote was extracted from a question I had asked Rice about what might happen in the Middle East. Was a two-state solution really dead? Would the Obama Administration—with all it faced in the world—risk anything to initiate a renewed peace process?
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