Stanford University, about 35 miles south of San Francisco, has one of the most beautiful campuses in America. Oak, palm and eucalyptus trees surround a cluster of red-tiled “California mission” buildings on 8,000 acres in sight of San Francisco Bay.
One evening in 1987, Brent Scowcroft, a former White House national security adviser, attended a dinner at Stanford with many of the top foreign policy minds in the country. He found the conversation “dreary” until a young member of the Stanford political science faculty, Dr Condoleezza Rice, spoke up.
“Here was this slip of a girl,” he recalled. “Boy, she held her own. I said, ‘That’s someone I’ve got to get to know’.”
This was the era when Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan were beginning to wind down the cold war. Rice was an expert on the Soviet Union and Scowcroft realised that their opinions matched. She understood power politics. “She saw where we could co-operate and where not,” he recalled.
He was so bowled over that when he was invited to serve again as national security adviser by the newly elected George Bush in 1988, “one of my first phone calls was to Condi Rice”. As director of Soviet affairs at the National Security Council, her role was to tutor the new president on the rapidly changing pace of events in Moscow as the communist bloc collapsed. She also quickly became a personal friend of the Bush family.
Twelve years later when Bush Sr’s son, George W, was elected president, he made her his national security adviser, and once again it was her ability to break down complex issues to easily comprehensible tutorials that made her so prized in the Oval Office.
Now Dubya has chosen her as his secretary of state at a time when explaining America’s case to the world is possibly more difficult than it has ever been.
How did a black “slip of a girl” — born in America’s segregated Deep South — reach such heights? She is not only the first black woman to become secretary of state; she is also spoken of as potentially the first black person, and first woman, to be president of the United States.
IMAGINE the scene: it is 1867 on a cotton plantation in civil war-era Alabama. Inside the master’s house, slaves search for places to hide the silver. Outside, they scramble to hide food. Triumphant Union soldiers are nearby, stealing everything in sight. Julia, the mixed-race daughter of the white plantation owner by one of his black slaves, rounds up the family’s horses, moving them to a hiding place that only she knows . . .
It could be the opening moments in a film version of the Condoleezza Rice story, introducing her great-grandmother Julia, a child born into slavery. Julia’s success in hiding the horses has been handed down in Rice family lore. So too has something else: a zeal for education.
Julia could read and write and she was determined to better herself. Emancipated by the Union victory in the civil war, she married another former slave and instilled an appreciation for learning in their nine children. This was still a powerful hallmark of her legacy when her great-granddaughter Condoleezza was born on November 14, 1954.
Many people assume that because Condi Rice grew up in Birmingham, Alabama — which in the 1950s and 1960s was the most segregated city in the South and a focal point of the civil rights movement — her childhood was deprived and that she did not see the light of opportunity until the civil rights movement began to bear fruit. But she insists this is untrue: her success did not arise from the civil rights struggle but from her own family legacy.
By the time she was born there were three generations of college-educated family members, including teachers, preachers and lawyers. Her father John Rice was a Presbyterian minister and teacher and the brother of a leading black educationist. Her mother Angelena was also a teacher; her subjects were music and science. She crafted the name Condoleezza from the Italian musical notation “con dolcezza” (with sweetness). It rapidly became simply “Condi”.
The family lived in Titusville, one of Birmingham’s black middle-class neighbourhoods, a close-knit community in which the Rices sheltered their daughter from the harsh realities of segregation. This was a culture in which many black families sent their daughters to college before their sons, knowing that black women stood a better chance because whites saw them as less of a threat than black men.
Like their black neighbours, the Rices dedicated themselves to nurturing a strong, self-confident child by exposing her to all the elements of western culture: music, ballet, foreign languages, athletics and the great books. “They simply ignored the larger culture that said you’re second-class, you’re black, you don’t count, you have no power,” said Connie Rice, Condi’s cousin.
Angelena Rice devoted herself to her daughter’s intellectual and artistic development. With piano lessons and a full schedule of training in other subjects, Condi gained self-discipline long before she started school. “It was a very controlled environment with little kids’ clubs and ballet lessons and youth group and church every Sunday,” she recalled later.
“Condi’s always been so focused, ever since she was really, really young,” said her mother’s sister, Genoa Ray McPhatter, who was a school principal.
Her relatives recall that she was an early reader, but Rice has recounted that she learnt how to read music before books. “My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother all played piano,” she said.
Her mother set her on the fast track immediately by accelerating her education. Because Condi could read fluently by the age of five, Angelena wanted her to start school that year. When the principal of the local black elementary school said she was too young, Angelena took a leave of absence and taught her at home.
The year of “home-schooling” was regimented and intense. Juliemma Smith, a close family friend, said Angelena’s lessons were more rigorous than school. “They didn’t play,” she said. “They had classes, then lunchtime and back to classes. Condi learnt how to read books quickly with a speed-reading machine . . . Angelena and John were just interested in Condi maturing and getting the best of everything. It paid off.”
To confirm their notion that their daughter was gifted the Rices took her to Southern University in Baton Rouge for psychological testing. Angelena told the family: “I knew my baby was a genius!”
By age four Condi had mastered a handful of pieces and given her first recital. She spent more time indoors — practising the piano and French — than most of the other girls on the block. Two who lived across the street remembered “waiting for what seemed like hours for her to finish her latest Beethoven or Mozart and come outside”.
When she did come out to play, it wasn’t usually for long. “She played with her parents,” recalled Ann Downing, a neighbour.
By the time she began school at six Condi was already a serious music student and more ready to get down to business than most of her classmates. She was accustomed to paying attention, behaving well and keeping an orderly routine. Some of her schoolmates took this maturity and perfectionism, as well as her dainty manners and habit of walking nearly on her tiptoes, as a sign of being prissy. But Condi got bored in situations where time was being wasted.
In her spare time she tackled the best literature for her age group. One of the downsides was that books were always an assignment, never an escape. “I grew up in a family in which my parents put me into every book club,” she said. “So I never developed the fine art of recreational reading.”
She was very close to her father, a jovial figure who discussed current events with her and how they fitted into history. His obsession, though, was American football, which he taught to Titusville boys. “My dad was a football coach when I was born,” she said, “and I was supposed to be his all-American linebacker. He wanted a boy in the worst way. So when he had a girl, he decided he had to teach me everything about football . . . It was music with my mother, and sports and history with my father.”
She would watch Sunday games on television while he gave detailed commentary on the rules and strategies. She loved the drama and the players. “When I grow up I’m going to marry a professional football player!” she said to the mother of one of her schoolfriends. (She did later get engaged to one at university, but it did not last.)
Another way her mother sought to expand her horizons was to enrol her in different schools, exposing her to a variety of social and educational experiences. At every school — as well as in all of her extracurricular activities — she was told to go beyond what was expected of her, always to hand in work that was above average, always to rise to the top.
This was the unwritten yet firm law of Titusville families: to raise children who were “twice as good” as white ones to gain an equal footing and “three times as good” to surpass them when they left the secure enclave of Titusville.
“It wasn’t as if someone said, ‘You have to be twice as good’, and ‘Isn’t that a pity’ or ‘Isn’t that wrong’,” Rice said. “It was just, ‘You have to be twice as good’.
“My parents were very strategic. I was going to be so well prepared, and I was going to do all of these things that were revered in white society so well, that I would be armoured somehow from racism. I would be able to confront white society on its own terms.”
For this bid for excellence was being played out in troubled times.
Rice’s maternal grandparents had shielded her mother from the “Jim Crow” laws that materialised in Birmingham before the second world war, segregating everything from “coloured” latrines and water fountains to buses. They told their children to wait until they got home to use the lavatory rather than use segregated public services.
Blacks had won the right to vote in 1869 after the civil war, but the Southern states circumvented the law. And when President Harry Truman brought in racial integration policies in 1948 the powerful Southern Democrats had split off to fight him as the “Dixiecrats”, determined to stop blacks from registering to vote. Rice tells the story that when her father tried to register as a Democrat in 1952, the registrar told him he had to guess the number of beans in a jar correctly before he could do so. His reaction was to join the Republican party.
The Dixiecrats still called the shots in Birmingham when Rice was a girl. But children from Titusville who asked their parents about racist comments they overheard or Jim Crow codes they observed on rare trips into the city were told not to worry: “It’s not your problem.”
Rice’s mother refused to play by the Jim Crow rules. She stood her ground. One confrontation took place at a department store, where Angelena and Condi were browsing through dresses. Condi picked one she wanted to try on, and they walked towards a “whites only” dressing room. A saleswoman blocked their path and took the dress out of Condi’s hand. “She’ll have to try it on in there,” she said, pointing to a storage room.
Coolly, Angelena replied that her daughter would be allowed to try on her dress in a real dressing room or she would spend her money elsewhere. Angelena was composed, firm and resolved. Aware that this elegantly dressed black woman would not back down, the shop assistant decided that her commission was worth more than a public incident and ushered them into a dressing room as far from view as possible. “I remember the woman standing there guarding the door, worried to death she was going to lose her job,” said Rice.
A painful memory of many black Birmingham children was not being able to go to the circus when it came to town or visit the local amusement park, Kiddieland, with its ferris wheels and candyfloss stands. On one day each year the park opened its gates to blacks, but the Rices never went.
One of Rice’s aunts recalled how upset she became when she learnt that she couldn’t visit the Alabama state fair, which was advertised on radio and television with tempting visions of petting zoos and carnival rides. She “just could not understand” why she could not go to the fair whenever she wanted, said Connie Ray. But for the most part Condi’s parents shielded her from such disappointments and taught her about the greater opportunities that lay beyond Birmingham.
“My parents had to try to explain why we wouldn’t go to the circus,” she said, “why we had to drive all the way to Washington DC before we could stay in a hotel. And they had to explain why I could not have a hamburger in a restaurant but I could be president anyway, which was the way they chose to handle the situation.”
They also took her to visit universities in the summer holidays. “Other kids visited Yellowstone national park. I visited college campuses,” she remembered.
Even before she started school she had read about Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s brutally racist city commissioner, in the local newspaper. “She used to call me and say things like, ‘Did you see what Bull Connor did today?’ ” recalled her neighbour Juliemma Smith. “She was just a little girl and she did that all the time. I would have to read the newspaper thoroughly because I wouldn’t know what she was going to talk about.”
Leaders of the growing civil rights movement sought to tackle segregation through sit-ins, boycotts, mass marches and “freedom rides” — the co-racial bus movement. As adult protesters were depleted by arrests, younger ones took their places.
Thousands of schoolchildren participated in peaceful marches in May 1963, taking days off from school to protest the city’s segregation laws. Bull Connor ordered the police and fire brigade to use force to scatter the protesters. Powerful jets of water sent children rolling down the street and several people were bitten by police dogs.
Although Rice’s parents supported the goals of the civil rights movement they did not agree with putting children in harm’s way. Her father urged them to stay at school and fight with their minds. “My father was not a march-in-the-street preacher,” Condi said. “He saw no reason to put children at risk. He would never put his own child at risk.”
But he also wanted to give his eight-year-old daughter a glimpse of history on the march. After letting her watch demonstrations from a safe distance, he carried her on his shoulders to the state fairgrounds to check on the safety of the arrested children.
Connor’s use of dogs and fire hoses brought him national notoriety and prompted President John F Kennedy to start drafting the Civil Rights Act. Within months, two tragic events shocked America. On Sunday, September 15, 1963, a bomb blew a hole in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four girls and injuring dozens of children and adults.
The blast was felt throughout the city. Two miles away at Westminster Presbyterian church the floor fluttered beneath Condi Rice’s feet as she worshipped with her parents. She later found out that one of her friends was among the dead.
“I remember more than anything the coffins,” she said of the funeral. “The small coffins. And the sense that Birmingham wasn’t a very safe place.”
Violence was turning her hometown into “Bombingham” as Alabama’s governor George Wallace fought a federal court order to integrate the city’s schools. The Ku Klux Klan bombed the homes of blacks who were beginning to move into white neighbourhoods. Among the targets was the home of Arthur Shores, a veteran civil rights lawyer and friend of the Rices. Condi and her parents took food and clothes over to his family.
With the bombings came marauding groups of armed white vigilantes called “nightriders” who drove through black neighbourhoods shooting and starting fires. John Rice and his neighbours guarded the streets at night with shotguns.
The memory of her father out on patrol lies behind Rice’s opposition to gun control today. Had those guns been registered, she argues, Bull Connor would have had a legal right to take them away, thereby removing one of the black community’s only means of defence. “I have a sort of pure second amendment view of the right to bear arms,” she said in 2001.
For black people in Birmingham, especially children, 1963 was a terrifying year. “Those terrible events burned into my consciousness,” said Rice. “I missed many days at my segregated school because of the frequent bomb threats. Some solace to me was the piano, and what a world of joy it brought me.”
Those years ended with a second tragedy: the assassination on November 22, a week after Rice’s ninth birthday, of President Kennedy.When President Lyndon Johnson signed Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act into law the following July the Rices watched on television. A couple of days later they went to a formerly all-white restaurant in Birmingham for the first time. “The people there stopped eating for a couple of minutes,” said Rice, but then the novelty wore off and everyone went about their business.
The changes weren’t so smooth everywhere, however. “A few weeks later we went through a drive-in,” she said, “and when we drove away I bit into my hamburger — and it was all onions.”
Rice believes that an important part of the civil rights story lies in the people who were ready to put the new laws into practice in their lives, the blacks who had prepared themselves through education.
“The legal changes made a tremendous difference,” she said, “but not in the absence of people who were already prepared to take advantage of them, and therefore took full advantage of them. You can’t write them out of the story.
“I am so grateful to my parents for helping me through that period,” she said of her childhood in Birmingham. “They explained to me carefully what was going on, and they did so without any bitterness. It was in the very air we breathed that education was the way out . . . Among all my friends, the kids I grew up with, there was . . . no doubt in our minds that we would grow up and go to colleges — integrated colleges — just like other Americans.”
In her case, the college was more than 1,000 miles away in the mountains of Colorado. Here in the early 1960s — unable to study at the all-white University of Alabama — her father began taking summer graduate courses at the University of Denver. When he at last received a master of arts in education in 1969, the university offered him a job.
Rice already knew Denver, having learnt figure-skating there during her father’s summer courses. This became another of her great enthusiasms. She enjoyed the structure of training and would later skate competitively, getting up at 4am to practise before school. “I believe I may have learnt more from my failed figure-skating career than I did from anything else,” she once said. “Athletics gives you a kind of toughness and discipline that nothing else really does. ”
Academically, she breezed through her high school years in Denver, enjoying integrated education for the first time, and had all the credits to go to the university at 15. Initially she studied music with the goal of becoming a professional pianist; but after her first year she ran into the stiffest competition she had ever faced. “I met 11-year-olds who could play from sight what had taken me all year to learn,” she said, “and I thought I’m maybe going to end up playing piano bar . . . but I’m not going to end up playing Carnegie Hall.” If she could not be the best, she would not stay with the programme.
A few months later she walked into a class that changed everything: Introduction to International Politics. The topic that day was Stalin and the professor was Josef Korbel, a former Czech diplomat whose daughter, Madeleine Albright, would later become America’s first female secretary of state.
“It just clicked,” Rice said. “I remember thinking Russia is a place I want to know more about. It was like love . . . I can’t explain it — there was just an attraction.”
Korbel, impressed by her brightness and enthusiasm, encouraged her to join the university’s school of international relations, which he had founded. It was an unlikely pairing. Korbel had previously been doubtful about the ability of women to cope with his subject; and, as Rice’s father put it: “Political science? Here’s the time for fainting. Blacks didn’t do political science.”
But Korbel had a way of encouraging really talented people who worked hard. He taught her the art of expressing complex policies with complete clarity. “I really adored him,” Rice said. “I loved his course, and I loved him. He sort of picked me out as someone who might do this well.”
He became a new father figure, providing the same support and enthusiasm that he gave his own daughter. He did not live to see either of them become secretary of state but his faith proved justified. By 26, Rice had a fellowship at Stanford and was an associate professor when, seven years later, Brent Scowcroft came to dine. It was Korbel’s gift of clarity, combined with the self-assurance instilled by her parents, that impressed Scowcroft and has since become indispensable to two Bush presidents.
She has risen so high that some people think she must be scary, a driven Alpha female. But friends insist this is far from the truth and that she is an extremely content person who draws from a deep well.
“Condi is one of those happy-go-lucky kinds of people,” said her former University of Denver professor, Karen Feste. “She doesn’t have an unhappy side to her; at least I’ve never seen it.” Rice explained: “I’m a really religious person, and I don’t believe that I was put on this earth to be sour, so I’m eternally optimistic about things.”
She does not overestimate herself. “I think I’m above average,” she said, “but not much more. When you’ve been a professor and provost at Stanford, you know what real genius is. I’ve seen genius, and I’m not it.”
© Antonia Felix 2002
Extracted from Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story by Antonia Felix published by Newmarket Press, New York. A new edition is to be published next year
BATTING FOR THE VULCANS: CAREER BLAST-OFF FROM A BASEBALL LOVE AFFAIR WITH BUSH
When Condi Rice was visiting her old boss, George Bush Sr, in 1995, the former president suggested she meet his son, George W, who was settling in as the newly elected governor of Texas, his first political office.
She and the governor hit it off immediately, bonding like the two sports fanatics they are. They looked over his signed-baseball collection and Rice wowed him with rare stories about Willie Mays, a baseball hero who was in her mother’s class at school in Birmingham, Alabama. For a baseball fan, it doesn’t get any better than that. “Governor Bush was very impressed,” Condi recalled.
As a result, Rice would figure large in the next step of Dubya’s political career. During a holiday with the Bush clan at their Kennebunkport vacation home in the summer of 1998, she had a series of intense conversations with him about pressing global issues. The governor was considering a run for the presidency, and he knew that she could give him clear, straightforward summaries of complex issues.
Neither of them was the type to relax and chat while sipping ice tea on the porch, so they hammered out their discussions while running side-by-side on the treadmill, whacking balls on the tennis court or fishing. Rice didn’t actually fish — she isn’t even fond of the water — but she sat and talked.
From early on in the burgeoning presidential campaign, it was obvious that Rice had the candidate’s ear and the closest affinity to him. They shared an obsession for fitness and sports, and it appeared that only she could temper the complexities of foreign policy with the clarity Bush appreciated. And perhaps most importantly, they had chemistry.
“I like to be around her,” the governor said. “She’s fun to be with. I like light-hearted people, not people who take themselves so seriously that they are hard to be around. Besides, she’s really smart!”
The admiration was mutual. “I’ve respected him from the first time we talked,” said Rice, “because he has the kind of intellect that goes straight to the point. You can get a bunch of academics in a room and they can talk for three hours and never actually get to the point.”
George W’s cadre of foreign policy advisers included eminent veterans of previous administrations (including his father’s) such as Richard Armitage, Robert Zoellick, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Blackwill and Richard Perle. As co-ordinator of the group, Rice caught George W’s bug for nicknaming and set out to find a label for them.
She chose the name of her hometown’s mascot, Vulcan. A colossal metal statue of this Roman god, who forged tools for his fellow gods, looms over Birmingham, a steel-mill town. The candidate’s foreign policy advisers were committed to forging the candidate’s grasp of world affairs. They became the Vulcans.
Rice, who has a fondness for football metaphors, described herself as a “quarterback” for the Vulcans. “I don’t try to do it all myself,” she said. “Like a quarterback, I can hand off or throw downfield.”
She fielded this key position because George W valued her ability to decipher complex policy issues into easy-to-digest, nuts-and-bolts language. He described her as someone who “can explain to me foreign policy matters in a way I can understand”.
Rice’s talent for clarity is one of her most highly respected qualities. Philip Zelikow, a former colleague in the first Bush administration, said: “She can be very down to earth in cutting right to the heart of matters.”
Because George W did not like to read prepared manuals about policy or national security, Condoleezza had to devise a more interpersonal approach to his tutoring sessions. She set up question-and-answer round tables for him and the advisers.
The Vulcans worked for a year drafting a clear-cut nuclear weapons policy for the candidate. Their efforts culminated in a speech that was Condoleezza’s baby.
Once she felt the content was as precise as possible, she spent hour after hour going over every line with Bush to ensure that he understood every facet of the policy and the background of every issue it contained.
She and Wolfowitz created a companion document containing questions and answers about topics in the speech for Bush’s study. But George W didn’t like to work on this in isolation, reading and integrating facts on his own, so they again scheduled verbal question-and-answer sessions.
As co-ordinator of the Vulcans, a role she continued as national security adviser in the first Bush administration, Rice found herself taking the lead in what was traditionally an all-male domain.
“She is a novel commodity,” observed Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council member. “Here is a highly accomplished African-American woman . . . being part of what is and always has been (a) boys’ club.”
She was not intimidated, however. Rather, she approached the job of top Vulcan with a confidence that — despite criticisms of her co-ordinating skills from some of the boys, both inside and outside the club, over the past four years — has taken this woman to an unprecedented position of power.
