Susan Rice’s mother didn’t want her to go on the Sunday morning news shows.

Rice, then the United States Ambassador to the U.N., appeared on all five Sunday shows in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya.

Working from talking points that would later be revised — too late for her, as far as the Fox News crowd was concerned — she became the subject of brutal attacks (the late Sen. John McCain was particularly unsparing in his criticism) and, at least initially, the face of the incident. To some she still is.

Now Rice is telling, or writing, her side of the story, in her memoir, “Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For.”

It’s not all about Benghazi — in fact, she devotes only one chapter strictly to the incident, and it’s more about the fallout and how it affected her and her career (it essentially torpedoed her chances of becoming Secretary of State). She writes in detail about victories and disappointments throughout her career, some of it insidery, some of it more formally related.

Rice also writes a lot about her family — navigating her parents’ divorce was an early experience in diplomacy — and her upbringing and education; sports play a big role (she still plays tennis). She’s blunt and critical, sometimes of herself.

She will discuss the book at the Mesa Arts Center on Friday, Jan. 31. She also talked about it in a recent interview.

'This is not a story of woe is me'

Question: You had to revisit a lot of painful moments, particularly about the Benghazi fallout. Did that make the book hard to write?

Answer: It didn’t make it hard to write. This is something I wanted to do very much, both for the opportunity of presenting me to think back on many aspects of my family, my upbringing, the lessons I learned from my parents and my service in government, but also with the hope that by telling my story, both personal and professional, that it might be beneficial to others.

Q: You do go into some detail about the Benghazi reaction, obviously. Some elements of the media and others really came after you.

A: I’ve had my share of guns trained on me at different times. I really come to this as someone who’s extremely grateful for the opportunity to have served the country for 16 years under two presidents, and for all of the guns trained on me, I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything — the quality of the people I served with, the importance of the issues I worked on, the caliber of the leaders that I got to support and, above all, working for our country, that was just the greatest honor and privilege. This is not a story of woe is me by any stretch of the imagination (laughs).

Q: You say in the foreword that you’ll be blunt. And then you actually are.

A: I’m skeptical of people who write memoirs and say, “Every decision I made was great” and, “I’m the most fabulous person you’ll ever meet” and, you know, “love me forever.” I mean, come on (laughs). We’re all human. We all grow and learn and make mistakes. And we all have painful experiences, personally and professionally. If you can’t treat them candidly, do something else than write a memoir. That’s my opinion. …

What I will say is I wrote every word of this book. And if you know me, you’ll know that it’s my voice. And that was really important to me. … I think a number of people who’ve had senior positions typically have someone co-author or ghostwrite or something like that. And for me, the process of writing and coming to terms with many of these experiences, including those from my childhood I had never had the time to sit back and reflect on and think about how they influenced me, that was part of the purpose of this, on the personal side, for engaging in the project.

'I was either a victim or a villain or a heroine'

Q: I don’t know you, but I get the impression you sound like yourself in the book.

A: That’s exactly the impression I wanted the readers to have, because it is about myself. I said in the beginning of the book, one of the reasons I wanted to tell my story in my own voice is because one of the consequences of my service was that after the Benghazi terrorist attack and my appearance on the Sunday shows, I became sort of an outsized figure that, depending on your politics or which cable channel you watched, I was either a victim or a villain or a heroine. And none of that, positive or negative, bore any resemblance to who I am and where I came from and what I care about.

Q: And now you can say what you think.

A: So long as I was serving — and I wouldn’t trade that for anything — it was my obligation to speak for the country, and speak for the president, and not for myself. And so I had to deal with that quietly for the duration of my tenure, and put my job and my responsibilities above whatever personal feelings I had about however I was being characterized, or mischaracterized.

And so I wanted, when I had the opportunity, for all the reasons I said about sharing the blessing and experiences, to tell my own story in my own words. And to do it credibly, and for it to have any value, it had to be honest. I’m not running for President of the United States and writing a vanity book that’s supposed to make everybody love me. I’m telling my own story as fairly and accurately as I can.

Q: You write that there are some things you still can’t talk about.

A: I say in the beginning there’s some stuff that may be classified or whatever that I’m not at liberty to share. But that which I can, and it was a lot, I have really endeavored to do as honestly as I possibly can.

Q: That kind of thing is fascinating, though — knowing things no one else does.

A: It is fascinating. But it’s also a burden as much as a privilege. There are things I know that make me sleep less well at night. And you don’t need to know that. Because hopefully there are good people working hard to try to make those fears never come to reality.

On letting go of her 'grudge' with John McCain

Q: You write quite a bit about your relationship with John McCain. You went after him hard during the 2008 election. And he returned the favor, and then some, after your appearances on the morning shows after the Benghazi attack.

A: Writing this book was a bit of a reckoning for me with my feelings towards him. I’d met him a number of times, I don’t know him well. The most detailed, substantive conversations I was part of that involved him were ones where he and the president were discussing in some depth a policy matter, and I was there as a participant, not as a principal. So I really don’t know him that well.

But he became a sort of outsized figure in the wake of Benghazi and the prosecution against me. And I owned my own, not deliberate but I think real, attacks on him that some people construed as personal during the context of the 2008 campaign. As I say in the book, I respect his leadership and service enormously, and I regret that they came off as ad hominem. And I own that. I apologize for that. He never apologized to me for what he said about me (laughs), but I’m OK with that. That’s not a grudge I want to hold.

Q: After some deliberation, you went to his funeral.

A: As I describe at the very end of the book, I was confronted with the question of whether to accept a friend’s invitation to go to the funeral, and I wanted to, and I’m glad I did. It was a way for me to say, this is a man whose service to our country, and whose leadership and principles I respect, even if I disagreed with him on a lot of policy matters. I’m glad I had a chance to say that.

'We are all in it together and we sink or swim together '

Q: At the end of the book you sound a hopeful note. Are you?

A: Am I hopeful? Yes, in the long run I’m hopeful. But in the immediate term, I think we are going through really, deeply challenging times. And even in the medium term, potentially. I’m hopeful over the long term because I’m a student of history, and I understand that for all the pain and the gravity of our current domestic political division, and how irreparable they might seem in the moment, we’ve been through so much worse as a nation.

Q: As you write in the book.

A: As I say in the last chapter of the book, we’ve been through a civil war and reconstruction. We’ve been through two world wars where we were divided in our approach to them. We’ve been through McCarthyism and Vietnam and the civil rights era where people were being attacked by hoses and dogs and our cities were burning down. And Vietnam era where students were being shot on campuses, and Watergate. We’ve come through that. Not without a great deal of pain, but we’ve remained whole, and arguably emerged strong.

And I believe, as I say in the last lines of the last page, that nobody in their right mind should bet against America’s capacity to grow and renew itself. But that requires each of us to rise to the urgency of the moment and recognize what’s at stake. And that’s what I try to lay out, and accept the premise that I just outlined that we are all in it together and we sink or swim together, and we bloody well better swim.

'A Conversation with Susan Rice'

When: 7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 31.

Where: Mesa Arts Center, 1 E. Main St.

Admission: $37.43 plus fees for one book and one ticket; $42.43 for one book and two tickets. Tickets available only through Changing Hands Bookstore.

Details: 480-644-6500, https://mesaartscenter.com/index.php/shows/other-presenters/a-conversation-with-susan-rice.

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: @goodyk.

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