Susan Rice has revealed how the political firestorm sparked by the 2012 Benghazi scandal took a toll on her and her family – and even caused her nine-year-old daughter to have hallucinations.
The former US ambassador to the United Nations under President Obama says her youngest child Maris was so traumatized by the public backlash that she began to see ‘men coming out of walls.’
And her mother, who was recovering from cancer surgeries and a stroke at the time, was ‘losing her mind’ through rage and anxiety.
In her new memoir, Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For, released on Tuesday, Rice said watching her family suffer ‘brought me crashing down to Earth.’
She also says she believed she was harshly criticized due to her race and gender.
Former US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice tells how the 2012 Benghazi scandal took a toll on her family and how she believes her race and gender played a role in the backlash, in her new memoir
Rice was serving as the US Ambassador to the United Nations under President Barack Obama when the attacks took place and agreed to fill in for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to address the incidents on television. Above they are pictured in 2012
‘The combination — being a confident black woman who is not seeking permission or affirmation from others – I now suspect accounts for why I inadvertently intimidate some people, especially certain men, and perhaps also why I have long inspired motivated detractors who simply can’t deal with me,’ she writes.
Rice became the public face of the scandal when she infamously fronted cameras in the wake of the incident and claimed it was a spontaneous attack.
Investigations later concluded the attack was in fact, premeditated and carried out by an Islamic militant group.
The controversy ultimately derailed her chance of succeeding Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and turned her into a hate figure for the right.
Four Americans died in the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012 including ambassador Chris Stevens, the first American ambassador to die on the job since 1979.
Rice’s new memoir, Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For, was released on Tuesday
The scandal sparked ten investigations including one by the FBI and one from the House Select Committee on Benghazi in front of which Clinton testified for 11 hours.
Days after the tragedy, Rice was asked to do a round of Sunday TV interviews addressing the incident because Clinton was unavailable.
In her book she writes that her mother Lois Dickson Rice advised her to refuse, saying: ‘Why do you have to go on the shows? Where is Hillary?’
Rice told her mother that Clinton was ‘wiped out after a brutal week’ and that the Obama White House asked her to step up in the place.
‘I smell a rat. This is not a good idea. Can’t you get out of it?’ her mother said.
Rice told her: ‘Mom, don’t be ridiculous. I’ve done the shows. It will be fine.’
It was far from it and Rice committed what would become the defining error of her career.
She called the attacks ‘spontaneous’ and said they were carried out by a mob fueled by an anti-Islamic video.
US officials later said the comments were based on a preliminary assessment that was worked into her talking points.
But that did not stop her facing a firestorm of criticism from Republicans who claimed she deliberately downplayed the attacks to apparently protect President Obama with an election looming.
In the wake of the attack, Rice did a round of Sunday TV interviews where she claimed the attack in Libya that left four Americans dead was ‘spontaneous.’ Above she is seen on NBC’s Meet the Press that Sunday
An investigation later contradicted Rice’s (pictured on CBS’s Face the Nation) comments and proved the attacks were premeditated. US officials later said the comments were based on a preliminary assessment that was worked into her talking points
Four Americans died in the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012 including ambassador Chris Stevens. The scandal sparked ten investigations including one by the FBI and one from the House Select Committee. Above Rice is pictured during a 2011 visit to Libya
The late Republican Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham said they would block Rice’s nomination as Secretary of State.
McCain called her ‘not very bright’ and Graham said she was ‘either incompetent or untrustworthy.’
At the time Rice put on a brave face and said that she ‘relied solely and squarely on the information provided to me by the intelligence community.’
But in her book she says that in private the toll was huge, especially on her family.
US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens was killed in the attack, making him the first American ambassador to die on the job since 1979
Her mother was ‘furious and obsessed’ and could barely cope, while her daughter experienced hallucinations after first hearing ‘voices.’
‘Now it’s like people, real people but I can tell they aren’t real…they are coming out of the walls. And they move toward me and talk,’ Maris told her mother.
Asked if they were scary, Maris said: ‘No, not really scary, but it’s creepy. They come at bad times like in class or at school, or when I was at Frannie’s house for a sleepover. And I don’t know when to expect them, and it really bothers me.’
Maris said it was ‘mostly a man’ who she didn’t recognize but it felt ‘very real.’
Rice took the girl to Children’s Hospital in Washington in 2012 and over the next three weeks doctors theorized that she had a brain tumor or schizophrenia, or perhaps a visual disorder.
One idea that was floated was that it was a result of abuse, but after the episodes went on for a year they concluded Maris was internalizing the stress of seeing her mother insulted all the time on TV over the Benghazi scandal.
Initially, Rice says she felt she didn’t have the option to say ‘woe is me’ because of the serious issues she was working with.
‘I don’t think I understood at the time how traumatic it was for my family,’ she says.
During that time, Rice says CNN kept ‘blaring’ in her kitchen ‘through all her waking hours.’
She told President Obama ‘I will hang tough’ but her family were ‘traumatized’ and her mother ‘couldn’t stand to see her daughter attacked, my integrity maligned.’
Rice suffered furious backlash from the right who accused her of deliberately downplaying the attacks to apparently protect President Obama with an election looming. The late Republican Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham (pictured) later said they would block Rice’s nomination as Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton testified for 11 hours before the House Select Committee on the Benghazi scandal in 2015
The controversy led Rice to withdraw her nomination to be Secretary of State in December 2012 and she became Obama’s national security adviser instead
‘That stung her. And me,’ she writes.
During one of the presidential debates Mitt Romney brought up Benghazi and asked: ‘How could we not have known?’
Rice says she thought to herself: ‘Jesus…this is nuts!’
The situation left her feeling ‘numb’ for weeks and at one point she called her husband to say she felt like a ‘pinata.’
She said: ‘I don’t know what to do anymore. I just don’t know,’ she cried on the phone to him out of exhaustion.
The criticism continued unabated with news stories calling her ‘screeching’, claiming she had a ‘personality disorder’ and falsely stated she was not opposed to the Iraq War.
Even the Russian government joined in, calling her ‘ambitious and aggressive’, a barb she wore as a badge of honor.
Rice thought long and hard and eventually decided to pull back from her nomination from Secretary of State even though she thought the row was a ‘manufactured controversy and a political hit job.’
Under fire: Rice said the situation left her feeling ‘numb’ for weeks and at one point she called her husband to say she felt like a ‘pinata’. Above she is seen leaving the US Capitol in the wake of the scandal
Her mother was ‘heartbroken’ and she cried with her for several minutes.
Rice writes that she became ‘irresistible to Fox News’ and put it down to her race and gender.
‘There are those who have reacted to me, at different times, through that prism. But I’m also careful not to be quick to ascribe every bad thing that happens to me to racism and sexism. More significant was my perceived closeness to Obama – and that this was a way of getting at him.’
Her former colleague Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s closest advisers, told the Washington Post that the attacks on Rice ‘bring up uncomfortable issues of race and gender.’
‘As a black woman, she was a ripe target. Her critics often have villains who are women and people of color,’ Rhodes said.
Rice thought that the controversy over Benghazi would subside after the November 2012 election and admits she ‘wasn’t prepared for the attacks on me escalating’ after the vote.
The sprawling investigations across the FBI and Congress would ultimately fail to conclude that Clinton or Rice ignored intelligence warnings about a terrorist attack.
But it kept the issue in the public eye and in December 2012 Rice withdrew her nomination to be Secretary of State and became Obama’s national security adviser instead.
Rice writes it wasn’t worth the ‘demolition derby’ that would ensue to replace Clinton.
Rice (pictured with her family) grew up in Washington D.C, as the daughter of Emmett Rice, an economics professor at Cornell who later became the governor of the Federal Reserve. Her mother Lois developed Federal Pell Grants for college students while working at what is now the College Board. Both parents have since died
Rice, pictured as a child in a family photo, said her mother taught her never to use her race as an excuse and advised her to ‘just beat them all’
Her son Jake cried and told her: ‘You are not a quitter’ and her younger brother told her she ‘acted like a girl’ – but Rice saw it differently.
‘I put everyone else’s interests above my own. I didn’t promote or campaign for myself the way a guy would have,’ she writes.
Since leaving office, Rice has been accused by Donald Trump of trying to learn the identities of his campaign operatives.
She has also watched on – she currently has visiting fellow appointments at American University and Harvard – with horror as Trump has dismantled Obama’s foreign policy legacy such as the Iran nuclear deal, which she helped to negotiate.
‘It’s not fun. The decision to undo all these are made not out of an alternative strategy or objective but seemingly out of spite,’ she said.
‘The world now is going to have reason to doubt our constancy. If you’re, in essence, playing ping-pong with each change of party, why would anybody commit to a binding agreement with us? Why would they view us as a reliable partner?’
In a chapter titled ‘Farewell to the Moral Universe’, Rice describes the handover to President Trump in 2017.
On Trump’s inauguration day Rice says she was thinking: ‘Please God help us all, especially President Trump…it couldn’t possibly be as bad as people fear.’
She says she found the President’s speech ‘unpleasant’ until he vowed to end ‘American Carnage.’
Rice claims the Secret Service agents behind Trump even ‘winced’ because ‘no one is prepared.’
Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Mike Flynn, appeared ‘subdued, even daunted by the tasks ahead’, and asked her for a hug during the handover, she added.
Now aged 54, Rice is married to Ian Cameron, a former executive producer with ABC News
The couple has two children, daughter Maris (left) and son Jake (right). Rice lamented how her son, a college senior and former head of the Stanford College Republicans, is a Trump supporter
Rice revealed one of her briefers gave her an unexpected gift of a bottle of Scotch saying it ‘may come in handy some days down the road.’
Growing up Rice’s father Emmett was an economics professor at Cornell and later became the governor of the Federal Reserve.
Her mother was the one to develop Federal Pell Grants for college students while working at what is now the College Board. Both have since died.
When it came to race her mother had a simple message – never use it as an excuse.
She used to tell Rice and her brother: ‘Just beat them all.’
Rice was one of just six black students in a class of 60 girls at the National Cathedral School.
Rice’s act of ‘rebellion’ as a teen was telling her mother she was going to Stanford University instead of Harvard, she says in the book.
The family were so well connected that when Rice was debating whether to attend law school US House delegate Eleanor Holmes North gave her career advice.
Another mentor was former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who has called her ‘one of the smartest people I’ve ever met’.
In her book, Rice addresses her reputation for directness which she says has rubbed some the wrong way.
‘People who are so intent on being liked may not have the fortitude to do the right thing or the tough thing.’
Rice once gave then US ambassador Richard Holbrooke – who she calls a ‘classic bully – the middle finger for mocking her in front of other diplomats who reported to her.
When she confessed to him he laughed and said: ‘Good for you!’
Rice admits she is an ‘inveterate tomboy’ and her childhood nickname was ‘Spo’, short for ‘Sportin’.
She was a ‘scrappy’ point guard in her youth who would chase down every loose ball.
Now aged 54, Rice is married to her husband Ian Cameron, a former executive producer with ABC News; he arranged to have Aretha Franklin play at her 50th birthday because she loves to dance.
Rice also lamented how her son Jake, a college senior who is a former head of the Stanford College Republicans, is a Trump supporter.
‘I confess it can be deeply painful to love someone so powerfully with whom I disagree so profoundly.’