Rice, Condoleezza 1954–

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Born into a family of educators, Condoleezza Rice became an educator, but she did not limit her teaching to a school setting. In the late 1980s, as director of Soviet and East European affairs on the National Security Council, she explained world events to the president of the United States; in the early 1990s, she was elected to the board of directors of several multinational corporations. Rice taught political science at Stanford University, and is considered a leading expert on Soviet and East European politics and military affairs. She is called upon by many in public office and private business to put her academic knowledge to practical use.

Rice grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. She traced her interest in political science to her parents’ preoccupation with politics and the political discussions held at home. Academic achievement was also important to her from the beginning. Her parents taught her she could, as she told Ebony, “do and be whatever I wanted,” and she succeeded at a variety of activities from an early age. Her mother gave her piano lessons; she was playing Bach and Beethoven almost before her feet reached the pedals. She studied figure skating. She took the most challenging classes at school and excelled.

le.875qEntering the University of Denver at the age of fifteen, Rice first majored in piano performance but switched to political science when she realized she would never be a great pianist. She graduated magna cum laude when she was nineteen. She then when on to receive her master’s degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1975, later re-turning to Denver for her doctorate in international studies.

In 1981 Rice started teaching political science at Stanford University and gradually became well known for her expertise in Soviet affairs. In 1984 she won a teaching award at Stanford. She was a fellow at the Hoover Institute, an internationally-known think tank at Stanford, during the 1985-86 academic year. Her books The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army. 1948-1983 and The Gorbachev Era were published in 1985 and 1986, respectively. In 1987 she served as an advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on strategic nuclear policy and briefed air force generals on strategy and force posture in the Soviet military. The following year, at the invitation of the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Unior, she traveled to Bulgaria to speak

At a Glance…

Born November 14, 1954; raised in Birmingham, AL; daughter of John Wesley and Angelena Ray Rice. Education: University of Denver, 8.A. (magna cum laude), 1974, Ph.D., 1981; University of Notre Dame, MA, 1975. Politics: Republican.

Career: U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC, intern, 1977; Rand Corporation, intern, 1980; Stanford University, Stanford, CA, assistant professor of political science, 1981-89, associate professor, professor, 1991-93, provost, 1993-99; National Security Council, Washington, DC, director of Soviet and East European Affairs, 1989-91; George W. Bush presidential campaign, national security consultant, 2000; National Security Council, national security adviser, 2001-.

Memberships: Member of board of directors of Chevron and Transamerica Corporation.

Awards: Award for excellence in teaching, Stanford University, 1984; fellow of the Hoover Institute, 1985-86; Ford Foundation fellow; fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Addresses: Office— National Security Council, White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., 20504.

to Soviet officials and diplomats on arms-control policy.

At the personal request of Brent Scowcroft, assistant to the president for national security affairs, Rice was named director of Soviet and East European affairs on the National Security Council in 1989. In this capacity she analyzed and explained to President George Bush the events of international importance occurring in the region. She helped Bush prepare for and participate in his super-power summit meetings with then-Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and other top officials in Malta, Washington, D.C., Paris, and Helsinki, Finland. In Malta, she sat at the bargaining table with Bush and Secretary of State James Baker. At the 1990 summit in Washington, D.C., she provided background and analysis in daily meetings and was one of only a handful of senior aides who attended exclusive evening dinner meetings.

The purpose of the summit meetings was to achieve a solid global peace plan. Much of the discussions centered on arms control, expansion of trade, and problems relating to the gradual freedom movement affecting border countries in the Soviet Union. With her expertise in Soviet politics, armaments and military affairs, Rice was in an excellent position to prepare Bush for his meetings. The hardest part of her work, she said in an interview with San Francisco: The Magazine, was remaining objective and “keeping the analyst in me separate from my political views.”

Rice told Ebony, it was a “truly amazing time to be working in the White House,” because so much was changing in the Eastern-bloc countries. The Berlin Wall, which was erected between East and West Berlin by the Communist government of East Germany in 1961, had come down, allowing citizens of the East to move freely to the West. And shortly thereafter, the world witnessed the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In 1991 Rice left Washington to return to the academic life at Stanford University in California, but since then her expertise has been sought and her presence felt by many. After Senator Pete Wilson was elected governor of California in 1990, her name was circulated as his possible replacement in Congress; she had been asked to run for Congress before but had declined. Rice continued to publish her scholarly work and also wrote editorials for magazines such as Time, and newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times. And the Neu; York Times frequently sought her opinion and commentary on foreign affairs.

In 1991, the 37-year-old Rice was appointed by Governor Wilson to a bipartisan committee to draw new state legislative and congressional districts in California. She was the youngest member chosen, and among her colleagues on the committee were several retired state justices, including a 75-year-old former supreme court justice. Wilson told the Los Angeles Times, “All [members] have certain attributes in common. All are distinguished scholars. All are leaders in their fields, known for impartiality and devoted to the truth.” Others agreed with Wilson’s assessment of Rice’s achievements. In May of 1991, Chevron elected her to their 12-member board of directors, and in October of 1991, Transamerica Corporation did the same. She was also named as provost of Stanford and co-authored a book on the reunification of Germany.

Rice grew up in the segregated South and remembers the days when blacks were turned away from restaurants and hotels; she also vividly recalls the civil rights wars that changed some of the inequities. She survived those troubled times because of her family’s “strength of community and strength of spirit,” as she told Katherine Fong of San Francisco: The Magazine.

While she has been fortunate, she also has suffered her share of overt and covert racism. In high school, despite her academically-oriented curriculum and high grades, her counselor told her she wasn’t college material.“I had not done very well on the preliminary SAT exam,” she said in an interview with Ebony. “I remember thinking that the odd thing about it was that [the counselor] had not bothered to check my record. I was a straight-A student in all advanced courses. I was excelling in Latin. I was a figure skater and a piano student. That none of that occurred to her I think was a subtle form of racism. It was the problem of low expectations [for blacks],” she recalled.

An unfortunate public incident in 1990 brought Rice more public attention than her position as director on the National Security Council. At the San Francisco airport where she was accompanying a party of Soviet officials—wearing the appropriate White House identification—a secret-service agent ordered her to stand behind the security lines. When she tried to explain that she was with the group, he shoved her.

While the press made much of the incident, speculating on possible racist origins, Rice downplayed the event.“I was really taken aback at the press it received,” she told Ebony. “To my mind, it was a relatively minor incident and I quickly reported it to the head of the Secret Service who was appalled and promised to look into it. I sort of chalked it up to a field agent who isn’t involved in the activities that often and was overly zealous. What I didn’t feel from him was any racial hostility…. I didn’t write it off to race or gender… but just that he was rude,” she continued.

After many years in academia, Rice was asked to help George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. When he was elected, he named her as the national security advisor in his cabinet. Both she and Colin Powell made history as the first African Americans named as national security advisor and secretary of state, respectively. Rice is also the first woman named to the post.

As the first black woman to hold her post in an area still very much dominated by white males, Rice has also endured her share of sexism. She sometimes counters sexist remarks by referring to other powerful women. “Haven’t they hearc of [former prime minister of England] Margaret Thatcher, [former prime minister of India] Indira Gandhi, or Cleopatra [the Queen of Egypt] for that matter?” she mused in Jet. She told Ebony that sexism “usually comes in the line of ’How’d you end up doing this?’” Her most successful weapon against the racism and sexism she has encountered is her own intelligence and ability.

Selected Writings

The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army: 1948-1983, Princeton University Press, 1985.

(Editor with Alexander Dallin) The Gorbachev Era, Stanford Alumni Association, 1986.

(co-author with Philip Zelikow) Germany Unified and Europe Transformidd: A Study in Statecraft, 1996.

Contributor to periodicals, including Journal of International Affairs, Studies in Comparative Communism, Time, World Politics, and Current History.