Her entire life has been instilled with ... discipline, from her training as a concert pianist and competitive ice skater to her service on the first President Bush's National Security Council staff and as provost of Stanford University. Even now, Ms. Rice still packs her lunch many days as a way of avoiding the expense and calories of the White House mess. She rises at 5 a.m. to run on the treadmill ... that she keeps in her sparse Watergate apartment, is in the office before 7 a.m. and is in bed by 10 p.m.
But what does she eat for lunch? Broccoli and green beans? Bumiller needs to get some writing tips from Purdum (see previous post). But Bumiller does have the good fashion details in this nice account of the surprise party Bush gave her:
Ms. Rice, who has never married, celebrated her 50th birthday last weekend with a black-tie surprise party at the British ambassador's residence, attended by Mr. Bush, who put on a tuxedo and spent a rare night out in formal Washington.
Ms. Rice, who arrived in casual clothes en route to what she thought was to be a dinner at a restaurant with relatives, changed into a red gown that the designer Oscar de la Renta had created for her for the occasion.
Wow! Beautiful! And there's good material here too about her preference for Brahms:
"I love Brahms because Brahms is actually structured," she said in the interview a year ago. "And he's passionate without being sentimental. I don't like sentimental music, so I tend not to like Liszt, and I don't actually much care for the Russian romantics Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, where it's all on the sleeve. With Brahms it's restrained, and there's a sense of tension that never resolves."
Bumiller ends the article with that point, and you know she means for you to take that statement about Brahms and to read it as Rice's description of her own personality.
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