Ambassador Susan Rice on Tough Love

Susan E. Rice is currently Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow at the School of International Service at American University, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.  In her memoir Tough Love (Simon & Schuster) Rice examines her career on the front lines of American diplomacy and foreign policy as one of the nation’s youngest assistant secretaries of state in the Clinton administration and the National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Mother, wife, scholar, and diplomat, Rice connects the personal and the professional. Taught early, with tough love, how to compete and excel as an African American woman in settings where people of color are few, Rice shares wisdom learned along the way. She provides an insider’s account of some of the most complex issues confronting the United States over three decades, ranging from “Black Hawk Down” in Somalia to the opening to Cuba during the Obama years. She also reveals previously untold stories behind recent national security challenges, including the war against ISIS, the U.S. response to Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the surreal transition to the Trump administration. Commenting on Tough Love, Harvard University professor, literary scholar, journalist, and cultural critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote “ In reading these pages, it’s easy to see why President Obama would trust her to give him the clearest assessment of the facts on any day, at any moment, and to offer him unvarnished counsel on how best to keep the country safe. […] In this remarkably honest examination of the opportunities and struggles confronting those charged with national security, Rice has given us an inspiring autobiography while making a critically important addition to the history of U.S. foreign policy.”

Tom Healy is a writer and activist. He leads The Brooklyn Conference on Art and Social Change at The Brooklyn Museum and hosts a public conversation series on creativity at The Bass in Miami Beach. Healy is the author of three books of poems, Velvet, Animal Spirits and What the Right Hand Knows, which was a finalist for the 2009 L.A. Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. From 2011 through 2014, Healy served as Chairman of the Fulbright Scholarship Board, which oversees the worldwide Fulbright scholars program.