Condoleezza Rice

Born November 14, 1954
Birmingham, Alabama

U.S. national security advisor

C ondoleezza Rice was America's top advisor on the Soviet Union during the administration of President George Bush (1924–; served 1989–93; see entry), helping to write U.S. policy regarding the unification of Germany at the end of the Cold War in November 1990. The Cold War was an intense political and economic rivalry from 1945 to 1991 between the United States and the Soviet Union, falling just short of military conflict. For her part, Rice said she felt fortunate to have been given the chance to help shape America's response to these extraordinary events.

Rice was front and center at one of the most historic scenes in modern political history—the end of the Cold War era: In 1991, the Soviet Union broke apart and relations between the United States and the Soviets normalized. Returning to Washington, D.C., in January 2000 as part of the administration of President George W. Bush (1946–; served 2001–), Rice took on the role of national security advisor, the chief foreign policy advisor to the president.

Early life

An only child born to John Wesley Rice and Angelena Ray Rice, Condoleezza Rice was surrounded by love from the very beginning. Her father called her his "little star" and worked very hard to give her every advantage. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he also worked as a teacher, coach, and guidance counselor. Her mother was a teacher and a pianist. She named her daughter after an Italian musical term, con dolcezza—"to play with sweetness." Condi, as she is called, was the delight of her parents and they were the driving force in her life.

Her education began in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. It was evident early on that she was a high achiever, and she rose to any challenge. She excelled both in academics and in the arts. Under the guidance of her educator parents, she skipped first and seventh grades. After her father moved the family to Denver, Colorado, Rice decided to take college courses while still in high school. She enrolled at the University of Denver at the age of fifteen. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in political science cum laude (with honors) in 1974 when she was nineteen. Rice earned a master's degree at the University of Notre Dame in 1975 and a doctorate from the University of Denver's Graduate School of International Studies in 1981. Both of her advanced degrees were also in political science.

After graduation, Rice went to work at Stanford University as a Soviet expert on the political science faculty. She was twenty-six years old at the time.

Influences

Condoleezza Rice was born at a time when her country was dealing with civil rights on a national level and the Cold War on an international level. Civil rights are personal liberties that belong to an individual such as freedom of speech and freedom from discrimination. A descendent of black Americans from the South, Rice was raised in Titusville, a middle-class suburb of black professionals in Birmingham, Alabama. In the 1950s and 1960s, Birmingham was the most racially segregated city in the South and was a focal point of the civil rights movement. Efforts to achieve civil rights often resulted in violence.

On September 15, 1963, a bomb killed four young girls while they were attending church at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Eleven-year-old Denise McNair was the youngest who died. She had attended kindergarten with young Condoleezza. A group called "nightriders" came out at night to start fires or hide bombs in the segregated black neighborhoods. Rice's father was one of the men who took to the neighborhood streets with a shotgun to protect their families.

Even though her parents could not sit down to eat at the local Woolworth's counter, they wanted their daughter to believe she could one day be U.S. president. In 1965, when Rice was eleven, her father took her to Washington, D.C., where she stood in front of the White House. Even though at the time most blacks were not allowed to vote, according to Antonia Felix's Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story, she told her father, "One day, I'll be in that house."

Rice's parents were devoted to education and achievement, which they felt would enable Rice to be a success in whatever profession she chose. She was also often reminded that she would have to be "twice as good," but never to think of herself as a victim. Her ancestors had taken every opportunity to learn and had passed that appreciation of learning to their children. In the end, it was Rice's own family legacy of dedication to the educational process and not the civil rights struggle that defined her story.

The Cold War

While a junior at the University of Denver, Rice attended a lecture given by Professor Josef Korbel (1909–1977) that would change her life. He was a former central European diplomat and a Soviet specialist. His daughter, Madeleine Albright (1937–), later became secretary of state for President Bill Clinton (1946–; served 1993–2001). Rice spent time in the Korbel home and decided she wanted to study the Soviet Union. She had recently given up on her dream of becoming a concert pianist, and Russia became her new passion. Her attraction for Soviet studies came into focus at Notre Dame. She also had an interest in military strategy. She wrote about the problems of arms control and U.S.-Soviet relations in a research paper, which, in turn, led to her doctoral dissertation. Rice visited Russia several times over a five-year period in the late 1970s and early 1980s while doing research for her dissertation. When she arrived at Stanford University, she was a member of the Center for International Security and Arms Control.

As noted in Antonia Felix's book Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story, George magazine's Ann Reilly Dowd wrote a profile on Rice that summarized her position: "Condi came to see the Cold War not as a war of ideas between communism and democracy but as something more primordial [basic or elemental]—a raw contest between two great competing national interests." Communism is a system of government in which a single party controls all aspects of society. In economic theory, it bans private ownership of property and businesses so that all goods produced and wealth accumulated are supposedly shared equally by all. Democracy is a political system consisting of several political parties whose members are elected to various government offices by vote of the people. Its economic system is called capitalism, where property and business are privately owned and competition in the marketplace establishes financial success or failure.

A call to Washington, D.C.

In 1989, while Rice was teaching at Stanford, she received a call. It was from Brent Scowcroft (1925–), the national security advisor to President George Bush. He wanted Rice to come to Washington. They got along well; both spoke fluent Russian and were academically oriented. Both had taught Soviet history. Bush asked Rice to serve on the National Security Council (NSC), an advisory group in the executive branch of government consisting of the president; the secretaries of state, defense, army, navy, and air force; and the national security advisor and staff. She took a leave of absence from Stanford and put her Soviet expertise into practice.

Rice joined the forty-member team as director of Soviet and East European affairs. Four months later, she was senior director for Soviet affairs. She was also named special assistant to the president for national security affairs. She served as an aide to Scowcroft and helped coordinate the U.S. foreign policy-making process by gathering information and writing briefing papers.

Events climaxed in December 1989 at the Malta Summit. (Malta is an island nation in the Mediterranean Sea 60 miles [97 kilometers] south of Sicily, Italy.) Rice accompanied Scowcroft as part of the U.S. delegation when President Bush met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–; see entry). They met on the Soviet cruiser Maxim Gorky to discuss the reunification of Germany. At Malta, the two leaders opened up a new age of cooperation between the superpowers—and Rice was there. With the collapse of the communist government in East Germany as well as other Eastern European countries in 1989, the Soviet Union soon broke apart in the next two years. Rice was at the center of American-Soviet policy during the breakup until she left her post in March 1991. The Soviet Union would cease to exist on December 31, 1991.

The professor

Returning to Stanford, Rice was again an educator. In 1993, she was appointed provost (a university's chief budget and academic officer). It was a bumpy ride, as the university was facing several financial problems. She was also criticized for not doing enough to promote diversity.

Rice's professional activities were not limited to the university. She volunteered her time as cofounder of the Center for a New Generation. The center was an after-school

academy in East Palo Alto, California, that helped children from underfunded public school districts. She also served as a corporate board member for several corporations, including Chevron, a giant in the U.S. oil industry. Chevron named a supertanker after her. She also resumed her writing career.

Back to Washington, D.C.

In 1999, Rice left Stanford to join the presidential campaign of then–Texas governor George W. Bush. Upon Bush's election in 2000, the president-elect named her as his national security advisor. She filled the crucial role of presidential sounding board. Her combination of charm, intelligence, and charisma served her well as the chief referee between the often powerfully divided opinions within a presidential administration. She was said to deliver her considered wisdom in whispers, not shouts. Her role as national security advisor within the Bush administration brought her into the forefront on the declared war on terrorism following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., and in the war against Iraq in 2003.

Rice claimed her dream job would be to one day become the National Football League commissioner. A huge sports fan, she also worked out regularly. It was reported that more business was conducted on the tennis court at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, than sitting on the porch. Despite giving up her early ambitions of becoming a concert pianist, she continued to play regularly on the Steinway her parents had given her when she was fifteen. She was accomplished enough to have performed with cellist Yo-Yo Ma (1955–) at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., in 2002.

Rice has described herself as a deeply religious person. Like her parents before her, she wanted to make a difference in the lives of young people. As noted in Antonia Felix's Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story, while speaking to a group of graduates at Stanford University in 1985, she urged them to make a difference in their world. She talked to them about tackling the problems of the Cold War. "All you have to do with the large, huge, and very frightening problems that we face is to make a contribution," she said. "If you focus too much on solving that problem, rather than just making a contribution to its solution … you will become paralyzed at the enormity of the task and be unable to do anything at all."

For More Information

Books

Felix, Antonia. Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story. New York: Newmarket Press, 2002.

The International Who's Who, 2003. London and New York: Europa Publications Ltd., 2002.

Thomas, Evan. "The Quiet Power of Condi Rice." Newsweek (December 16, 2002): pp. 24–35.

Web Site

Biography of Dr. Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor. The White House, http/www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/ricebio.html (accessed on February 7, 2003).

Firsts

Condoleezza Rice became the first female national security advisor in U.S. history in January 2001. As a faculty member at Stanford University, she was the youngest provost in the institution's 110-year history and the first African American to hold the position.

Publications and Awards

Condoleezza Rice's books include:

The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948–1983: Uncertain Allegiance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

The Gorbachev Era (edited with Alexander Dallin). Stanford, CA: Stanford Alumni Association, 1986.

Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (with Philip Zelikow). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

She also wrote numerous articles on Soviet and Eastern European foreign and defense policy.

Rice was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was awarded honorary doctorates from More-house College in 1991, the University of Alabama in 1994, and the University of Notre Dame in 1995.