Rice, Condoleezza

Source:

 African American National Biography

Rice, Condoleezza

(14 Nov. 1954– ),

secretary of state, national security adviser, educator, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the only child of John Wesley Rice Jr., an educator and minister, and Angelena Ray, a teacher. Her mother, an accomplished pianist, named her after the Italian musical direction con dolcezza, meaning to play “with sweetness.” The Rices viewed the restrictions of Jim Crow Alabama as obstacles for their daughter to overcome. She did so effortlessly, taking early lessons in ballet, French, flute, and piano. Extra tutoring from her father enabled her to skip the first and seventh grades.

Though she enjoyed a comfortable, if by no means wealthy, childhood, Rice was not immune to the harsh realities of Birmingham under Bull Connor, the city's notoriously racist commissioner of public safety. Like everyone else in the city, she attended segregated schools, and one of her classmates was killed in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church by white supremacists. While her mother fostered Condi's interest in music, her father inspired a love of politics. He was an avid Republican—as were many middle-class blacks at a time when Governor George Wallace dominated the Alabama Democratic Party—and he sat with his five-year-old daughter to watch the televised Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates in 1960. Family lore has it that on a childhood trip to Washington, D.C., Rice stood in front of the White House and declared that she would one day live there.

When her family moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1968, however, Rice appeared more likely to follow a career in music than politics. At the age of fifteen she entered the University of Denver, where her father served as an administrator, to study piano. Midway through college she left the music program, believing that she could not succeed as a concert pianist. Rice focused her energies on a new love, studying the politics and policy of the Soviet Union. Her mentor, Joseph Korbel, a Czech refugee from both Nazism and Stalinism, headed the university's School of International Studies and was influential in shaping Rice's belief that the United States should adopt hard-line policies against the Soviet Union. After receiving her BA in 1974, Rice spent a year in Indiana at Notre Dame earning a master's degree in International Studies. By then, she had developed a passion for the Russian language and for the arcana of Soviet military strategy, and she returned to the University of Denver to complete a doctoral dissertation in 1981, later published as Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984).

Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Secretary of State, talks to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the foreign ministry in Rome, 26 July 2006. (AP Images.)

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A postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in 1981 helped Rice shift her interests from the more purely academic to public policy. Stanford was home to several conservative think tanks, notably the Hoover Institution, where she found much in common with a new mentor, Brent Scowcroft, a military affairs specialist who had advised presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, and who became national security adviser to President George H. W. Bush in 1989. Scowcroft appointed Rice, by then a tenured professor at Stanford, to the National Security Council staff that same year. Rice's time in the first Bush White House coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and her expertise in that policy area greatly enhanced her personal and political standing with the president. Unlike Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and other hard-liners, Rice urged Bush to work pragmatically with the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in his efforts to reform the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. That stance, and her moderate views on abortion and affirmative action, earned Rice the enmity of the conservative hawks who came to dominate the Republican Party after Bush's defeat by Bill Clinton in 1992.

During the Clinton years, Rice returned to academia and, with Philip Zelikow, published an award-winning examination of the end of the cold war, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1999). She also served from 1993 to 1999 as the provost of Stanford, and was the first woman and the first African American to hold that post. She succeeded in reversing Stanford's financial problems by slashing the university budget, a move that won her the admiration of the board of trustees but also the ire of many faculty, staff, and students. The U.S. Department of Labor even began an investigation into racial and gender discrimination at the university after several women complained that Rice's budget cuts had disproportionately harmed minorities. Rice later admitted that her tenure as-provost had been her toughest ever job and that she may have been too much of a “hard-ass” (Lemann, 171).

Those brusque, no-nonsense qualities proved invaluable, however, when President George H. W. Bush's son, George W. Bush, was seeking a national security expert to advise him for the 2000 presidential campaign. The younger Bush, a man with little knowledge of foreign affairs, needed a clear-thinking, direct mentor to guide him through the thickets of global policy. In Rice, famed for her lucid and entertaining lectures at Stanford, he found the ideal teacher and a common spirit, as well as someone who shared his love of professional sports and physical exercise. She was also an intimate of his father's, a family connection that mattered greatly to “Team Bush.” After his controversial victory in the 2000 election, George W. Bush appointed Rice as his national security adviser.

Rice's actions in the first Bush White House placed her in the “realist” foreign policy camp which advocated a pragmatic approach based on interests rather than values. This conception of foreign policy was echoed in her 2000 essay for Foreign Affairs, “Promoting the National Interest,” where Rice criticized Clinton for pursuing ad hoc foreign adventures. Instead she argued for a more disciplined foreign policy which would serve the interests of America and the world since “the United States is the only guarantor of global peace and stability.” However, after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, Rice began to gravitate toward the “moralist” camp associated with Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

As Bush's first term progressed, Rice became increasingly influential. She was his most loyal adviser and an emollient figure in the tensions between the State and Defense departments. In 2002 Rice received the NAACP's President's Award for her expertise and influence in foreign affairs. It reflected her achievement as the nation's first female national security adviser. Bush placed Rice in charge of the Iraq Stabilization Group in October 2003, thus implicitly granting her overall responsibility for the reconstruction effort. Her star continued to rise despite criticism of her role in assessing intelligence prior to the war in Iraq. Rice rebutted further criticism at her public appearance in front of the 9/11 Commission on 8 April 2004. Displaying poise and stoicism, Rice won admiration for her performance from some quarters, criticism from others. After George Bush's election to another term as president in 2004, Rice was nominated to succeed Colin Powell as secretary of state. Formally announcing her appointment, Bush remarked that the world would see in Rice “the strength, the grace and the decency of our country.” As the first black woman to serve in this position, Rice became, arguably, the most powerful African American of her era.

Unsurprisingly, the war in Iraq dominated much of Rice's period as secretary of state. Despite increasing sectarian violence and a mounting death toll, she remained steadfastly loyal to the president's determination to “stay the course.” Rice played a key role in encouraging the Iraqi political process and consistently asserted the country was “making progress.” Drawing on her knowledge of European history, she often compared the difficulties faced in Iraq to those confronted by America in the period after World War II. The putative rejection of the Iraq Study Group report published on 6 December 2006 by the Baker-Hamilton Commission suggested that Rice had distanced herself from her former “realist” colleagues. Acknowledging that “tactical errors” had occurred, Rice nevertheless supported plans to increase troop levels in Iraq in the early part of 2007.

Rice traveled widely promoting American foreign policy. In her first year as secretary of state she traveled more miles than Powell did in his entire tenure. This willingness to engage in diplomacy and the knowledge that Rice spoke for the president gave renewed vigor to American statecraft. Upon acceding to the post she worked successfully to rebuild bridges with European leaders sidelined over the war in Iraq. This was essential to Rice's efforts to engage diplomatically in other areas, particularly in the Middle East. She led American efforts to further the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and in building a diplomatic coalition to attempt to quell Iranian nuclear development. Working with allies, Rice also led the way in achieving gradual progress in talks with North Korea. Although much of her diplomatic work was undermined by the war in Iraq, Rice maintained levels of popularity significantly above other members of the administration. Rice is often portrayed as the archloyalist who, despite her own realist thinking, unfailingly supported the Bush line of thinking. She admits that his moralism is not “the orientation out of which I came” but attests that, contrary to popular belief, she has learned as much from Bush's thinking as he did from his foreign policy “tutor” (Bumiller).

Rice remained as Secretary of State until the end of the Bush Presidency. Despite some speculation that she might be the running mate for Republican nominee John McCain, she played no role in that campaign. Unlike Powell, she did not endorse Obama, but nor did she endorse McCain. Rice offered support for Obama’s presidency in several ways, however. She noted her great pride in his election as the first African American president, and praised his choice of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Rice also criticized Republicans and others who questioned Obama’s American citizenship. She also defended Obama’s commitment of US logistical and financial support to the NATO bombing campaign against Muammar Qadaffi’s Libyan regime in 2011. In January 2009 Rice returned to academia, both as a professor of political science at Stanford, and as the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution. In 2010, she joined the faculty of the Stanford Business School, as Co-Director of the Center for Global Business and the Economy.

She also released two major books. The first, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family (2010) received critical and popular acclaim for its depiction of life in an upper middle class black family in the Jim Crow South, and allowed Rice to examine the ways in which the death of her friends in the 1963 Birmingham Church bombings shaped her coming of age and personal and political development. Rice’s account of her time at the center of political power, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (2011) allowed her to provide her own account of the Bush White House, following books by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who had disparaged her for not fully accepting their neo-conservative agenda. Rice noted her disagreements with Cheney—notably in her disagreement with his view that America could legitimately “disappear” terrorism suspects. She also rejected Rumsfeld’s criticism of her lack of experience before entering the White House, noting that she had been Provost of Stanford. And she issued a mea culpa for choosing to go shoe shopping and watching the Monty Python comedy Spamalot on Broadway during Hurricane Katrina. But the book also made clear her strong belief that most of the policies that she and the Bush White House pursued had been correct, and had led to a safer world.

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