Condoleezza Rice Says Painting Bush as a Racist After Hurricane
Katrina Was ‘Unfair’ In an excerpt from her upcoming memoir ‘No
Higher Honor,’ former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
recounts the days after Hurricane Katrina, which decimated much
of New Orleans and whose mishandling was later seen as a debacle
for the Bush Administration. After Rice’s infamous shoe-shopping
excursion in New York, she recalls returning to her hotel room:
The airwaves were filled with devastating pictures from New
Orleans. And the faces of most of the people in distress were
black. I knew right away that I should never have left
Washington. I called my chief of staff, Brian Gunderson. “I’m
coming home,” I said. “Yeah. You’d better do that,” he answered.
Then I called the President. “Mr. President, I’m coming back. I
don’t know how much I can do, but we clearly have a race
problem,” I said. Rice, who grew up in racially-segregated
Birmingham, Alabama, has previously said “the implication… that
President Bush allowed this to h