Ambassador Susan Rice in conversation with Mayor Eric Garcetti

Rice served as National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. She 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.  She serves on the board of Netflix and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and previously served on several nonprofit boards, including the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.Rice earned her master’s degree and doctorate in International Relations from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and her B.A. from Stanford University. 

“Susan Rice’s intellect, strategic prowess, and integrity are unrivalled among today’s national security leaders. I have seen firsthand how she has achieved vitally important results for American interests and values. Tough Love finally reveals who Susan Rice really is, much of which has been lost or misunderstood in public portrayals of her.  The fearless, compassionate, funny and selfless woman whom I have known since she was a child emerges as she shares with bracing honesty her challenges with family, motherhood, and leadership in the most demanding of male-dominated fields.” — Madeleine Albright, Former Secretary of State

Rice 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 genocide in Rwanda and the East Africa embassy bombings in the late 1990s, to Libya, Syria, a secret channel to Iran, the Ebola epidemic, and the opening to Cuba during the Obama years. With unmatched insight and characteristic bluntness, she reveals previously untold stories behind recent national security challenges, including confrontations with Russia and China, the war against ISIS, the struggle to contain the fallout from Edward Snowden’s leaks, the U.S. response to Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the surreal transition to the Trump administration.
Mother, wife, scholar, diplomat, and fierce champion of American interests and values, 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, Susan shares wisdom learned along the way.Laying bare the family struggles that shaped her early life in Washington, D.C., she also examines the ancestral legacies that influenced her. Rice’s elders—immigrants on one side and descendants of slaves on the other—had high expectations that each generation would rise. And rise they did, but not without paying it forward—in uniform and in the pulpit, as educators, community leaders, and public servants. Susan too rose rapidly. She served throughout the Clinton administration, becoming one of the nation’s youngest assistant secretaries of state and, later, one of President Obama’s most trusted advisors.Intimate, sometimes humorous, but always candid, Tough Loveculminates with an appeal to the American public to bridge our dangerous domestic divides in order to preserve our democracy and sustain our global leadership.
Eric Garcetti is the 42nd Mayor of Los Angeles and a fourth-generation Angeleno. He was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley — the son of public servants and the grandson and great-grandson of immigrants from Mexico and Eastern Europe. 
As the chief executive of the world’s third-largest metropolitan economy, Mayor Garcetti oversees the busiest container port in the western hemisphere and the fourth busiest airport in the world. He has led L.A. to raise its minimum wage, lower its business tax, enact America’s strongest earthquake retrofit law, and pass the boldest local infrastructure initiative in U.S. history, funding a once-in-a-generation expansion of public transportation. He successfully led the bid to bring the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games to the United States for the first time in more than 30 years.
Mayor Garcetti’s government service began on the L.A. City Council, where he spent four terms as Council President before being elected Mayor in 2013 and winning re-election in 2017. He has served his country as an intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserve and taught at the University of Southern California and Occidental College.
Mayor Garcetti received his B.A. and M.A. from Columbia University, studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, and later at the London School of Economics. He is also a jazz pianist and photographer.
He and his wife, First Lady Amy Elaine Wakeland, are the proud parents of a daughter, Maya, and have been foster parents for more than a decade.

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