Uniquely among all of Joe Biden’s top VP prospects, Susan Rice had a seat at the table the last time the U.S. faced a pandemic threat
. Two days later, with Rice’s full backing, he tapped Ronald Klain, a trusted longtime aide to Vice President Joe Biden, to be the new full-time Ebola coordinator—tasked with, to put a fine point on it, making their shit tight.
More than perhaps any other crisis of her four-year tenure, her colleagues say, Ebola shows the qualities they admire in her: tenacity, passion, hard-won knowledge of how to work the creaky gears of federal power, an orientation toward action, an insistence on honesty from subordinates—and above all her bluntness.
Rice, like Obama, was no epidemiologist. But she did have a fingertip feel for Africa, having spent years wrestling with the region’s crises as a young aide on Bill Clinton’s NSC staff and then as a State Department appointee. The experience exposed her to harsh criticism;, the book that made Samantha Power famous, tells the story of Rice asking if using the term “genocide” to describe events in Rwanda would be politically unwise.
By July, Rice and her aides were growing alarmed at the reports from West Africa. There was no time, to use one of her common admonitions, to sit around “admiring the problem.” The NSC’s pace of activity on Ebola—meetings, briefings, memos—accelerated rapidly, but it was still getting organized. Led by Smith, federal agencies and departments had to hash out who would do what.
Left: A private plane arrives at Dobbins Air Reserve Base transporting a second American missionary stricken with Ebola, Aug. 5, 2014, in Marietta, Ga. Right: Ebola survivor Dr. Kent Brantly, center, the former medical director of Samaritan's Purse Ebola Care Center in Monrovia, Liberia, and his wife Amer, left, listen as Dr. Anthony Fauci, right, is questioned while testifying before a Senate hearing on Ebola, Sept. 16, 2014.
On Aug. 1, as the overall death toll from the outbreak reached 729, the director of the WHO admitted defeat. “This outbreak is moving faster than our efforts to control it,” she conceded. A week later, the WHO declared the Ebola outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern” and called for hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh aid.
The U.S. was now sending civilians into West Africa drip by drip—another USAID rapid-response team here; a few dozen more CDC experts there. The military agreed to send a mobile medical unit to Monrovia, but it was just 25 beds, and wouldn’t be operational until October. And none of it was enough. Frieden and Raj Shah, the USAID administrator, were at wit’s end.
These traits became invaluable once it became time to get serious about an idea that had been kicking around the staff level for weeks: sending in the U.S. military. As August turned to July, at one of her standing 5:30 p.m. interagency meetings on Ebola, Smith polled the room. “Do you think we can get ahead of this virus with only civilians?” she asked. “Do you think we need the military?” The answer was a unanimous yes.
Still, some in the administration remained leery of greater involvement. A Sept. 10 meeting in the White House Situation Room was pivotal. Rice had orchestrated the meeting, and the key participant was Frieden, his memory still fresh from a disturbing trip to West Africa that he described to others as “like a visit to Dante’s inferno.” Frieden passed around a graph projecting as many as 1.4 million infections if aggressive new measures were not taken to halt the epidemic.
Rice quickly sized up the potential consequences of Frieden’s projections. “It could spread across the globe and kill hundreds of thousands, potentially millions,” she recounts in her memoir, “while sinking West Africa and much of the rest of the African continent under the weight of economic collapse, and massive refugee flows.”
Chuck Hagel, the defense secretary, was skeptical, as were some in the military brass. “If we’re gonna engage the U.S military, I want to be damn sure what we’re talking about,” he remembers thinking at the time. “It wasn’t a matter of being obdurate or skeptical or difficult.” Hagel was conservative by nature, and reliably suspicious of missions outside the military’s traditional role.
Still, Dempsey wanted absolute clarity before committing. He had hesitated, but now he was committed to finding solutions. After an intense flurry of meetings and discussions, he laid down his red lines: The military would provide logistical muscle, but not medical personnel. That was a job for civilians. And U.S. soldiers would come nowhere near the virus.
Obama’s argument was a pragmatic one, and a succinct expression of how he and Rice viewed the proper use of American power. “If the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people infected, with profound political and economic and security implications for all of us,” he said.
It would be months before the full effects of the military deployment were clear, but the announcement itself immediately gave the desperate governments of West Africa an important boost. “Beyond the tangible impact, it signaled that we were taking a leading role and fully invested, which in turn gave us leverage to press others to send workers,” said Ben Rhodes, a Rice deputy. “Compare that to any other outbreak,” Rhodes said. “There’s just never been a global response like that.
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