Rice, Condoleezza

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Rice, Condoleezza

November 14, 1954

Condoleezza Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the only child of Rev. John W. Rice Jr., a pastor at the Westminster Presbyterian Church, and his wife, Angelena Ray Rice, who taught science and music at an all-black high school in the segregated city. Her parents named her after a musical term, con dolcezza, which means to play with sweetness, and the young girl, nicknamed Condi, began piano lessons at the age of three. Besides music, Rice became an accomplished ice skater and a sports fan, particularly of football, an interest she shared with her father.

Rice grew up in the black middle-class neighborhood of Titusville, where her parents encouraged education and achievement. Her family left Birmingham for Tuscaloosa when Rice was eleven and her father became the dean of Stillman College. Two years later, he became an administrator at the University of Denver, and Condoleezza was enrolled at her first integrated school, a private academy from which she graduated at fifteen; she enrolled as a freshman at the University of Denver in 1970. After realizing she would not become a first-tier concert pianist, Rice switched her focus to political science, influenced by the lectures of former Central European diplomat Josef Korbel (the father of the first female secretary of state, Madeleine Albright), who sparked Rice's interest in Soviet and East-Central Europe studies.

Rice received a B.A. in political science from the University of Denver in 1974, a master of arts from the University of Notre Dame in 1975, and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981, where her doctoral thesis was on the ties between the Soviet and Czech militaries. Rice's father had become a registered Republican in 1952 when Democrats in Alabama would not register African Americans to vote. Rice herself registered as a Democrat in 1976 in order to cast her first presidential vote for fellow southerner Jimmy Carter. Disappointed with Carter's weak response to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Rice voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and changed her registration to Republican in 1982.

Rice joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1981 as a political science professor. While at Stanford, Rice received the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching. She published Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army: 1948–1983 (1984); The Gorbachev Era, coedited with Alexander Dallin (1986); and coauthored with Philip Zelikow Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1995). Rice was also a founding board member for the Center for a New Generation, an educational support fund for schools in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, California, which offers at-risk children tutoring, music lessons, and college preparation courses. In 1993, she became Stanford's youngest, first female, and first African-American provost.

Rice stepped down in 1999 and in 2000 became a foreign policy adviser for then–Texas governor George W. Bush, who was in the midst of his presidential campaign. In 1986, while an International Affairs Fellow of the Council of Foreign Relations, Rice had served under his father, President George H. W. Bush, as a special assistant to the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. From 1989 to March 1991, she was the director and then senior director of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council. President George W. Bush named Rice as assistant to the president for national security affairs, more commonly referred to as the national security adviser, and she was confirmed on December 22, 2001, becoming the first woman to hold this position. Considered an expert on international security policy and the military, Rice followed Colin Powell as the sixty-sixth U.S. Secretary of State, confirmed by the Senate on January 26, 2005. She is the first African-American woman to hold that position.

Rice is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded a number of honorary doctorates, including those from Morehouse College (1991), the University of Alabama (1994), the University of Notre Dame (1995), the National Defense University (2002), the Mississippi College School of Law (2003), the University of Louisville (2004), and Michigan State University (2004).

See also Politics in the United States