WASHINGTON — In her much-anticipated appearance on Capitol Hill, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice delivered a powerful rebuttal Thursday to critics who say President Bush brushed off warnings of a major terrorist attack inside the United States -- warnings that poured into American intelligence agencies like a torrent in the summer of 2001.
But on the critical question of what the Bush White House did in response to those warnings, Rice's performance was markedly less effective. Repeatedly, she described a White House inner circle that spent its time on broad strategy and left it up to the bureaucracy to decide how to meet the escalating threat, with no real follow-up from the White House.
At one point, asked about a memo written to her by White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke warning that the parochial interests of the agencies would thwart action unless the White House kept the pressure on, Rice said she thought Clarke was just trying to "buck me up."
"The problem for Dr. Rice in her testimony," as Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, put it, "is that the concept of bureaucracy she offers is essentially a passive, not an active concept."
The question is, Jamieson said: "Would it have made a difference if they had a different concept?"
Rice faced more than three hours of questioning that oscillated between hardball and softball, and at times even descended to T-ball as friendly members of the panel served up queries designed to help her score rhetorical home runs.
And Rice gave no ground on the White House line: The president did everything he could, but "structural" defects in the nation's intelligence and security systems made it impossible to detect and avert the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But the portrait of Bush and his closest aides that emerged from her testimony, while acquitting them of ignoring the warnings, left an image of leaders detached from the practical challenges of mounting a defense.
In a sense, it came down to two concepts of how a president should operate: the Bush team's view that the chief executive should delegate authority, and the view espoused by Clarke and others that the White House should actively work to ensure that effective action is taken -- including "shaking the trees" to move sometimes-hidebound government agencies.
Grace Under Pressure
