Bush's secret weapon
Condoleezza Rice discusses her candidate's strong foreign policy convictions, but it's clear she's the brains of the operation.
By Steve Kettmann
salon.com
March 20, 2000 | As much as Americans like to ignore foreign policy -- and did, for the most part, during the primary battles -- the next president will be tested often in this area. Now that George W. Bush has clinched the Republican nomination, attention has turned to those who would be in his cabinet. His chief foreign policy advisor, Condoleezza Rice, has come under increasing scrutiny.
Rice would be a daring choice for secretary of state, given that she's only 45 and shy on high-level diplomatic experience. But if Bush wins, she would be in line for that or another top job. Bush's many foreign policy gaffes guarantee he will face heavy pressure to prove he's smarter on world affairs than he sounds.
Rice, a Russia expert and former Stanford University provost, went to work in the White House in 1989 as National Security Council director of Soviet and East European Affairs, and stayed until March 1991. If words like "lightweight" keep coming up to describe Rice's candidate, no one has described her that way.
Jay Nordlinger predicted last summer in the National Review that given her combination of charm, intelligence and charisma, she will be "rock-star big" if she were to become our first African-American secretary of state. "A major cultural figure, adorning the bedroom walls of innumerable kids and the covers of innumerable magazines."
Former President Bush could not have been more flattering in introducing Rice to Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1989. "This is Condoleezza Rice," he said. "She tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union." Rice is indeed tight with the governor. A report released last week listing the names of overnight guests at the governor's mansion showed Rice to be one of the most frequent visitors.
In a recent phone interview, Rice recalled her rise to political renown. She was born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1954, and since both parents were teachers, education was a major theme of her youth. So was faith. Her father, John Rice, was an ordained Presbyterian minister, as well as dean of Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, and later vice chancellor of the University of Denver. He was also a Republican who influenced the political thinking of his daughter, who calls herself an "all-over-the-map Republican." Rice considers herself "very conservative" on foreign policy but "almost shockingly libertarian" or "moderate" on some issues.
A gifted student who skipped two grades, Rice enrolled at the University of Denver when she was 15, and graduated when she was 19. She gave up on a career as a pianist midway through, and eventually wound up falling under the spell of Josef Korbel, a former Czech diplomat best known for being the father of Madeleine Albright. Rice sometimes dined at the Korbel home, along with the future secretary of state -- but emerged with views much more in line with Korbel's than Albright's.
"I am a realist," she told the National Review. "Power matters. But there can be no absence of moral content in American foreign policy, and, furthermore, the American people wouldn't accept such an absence. Europeans giggle at this and say we're naive and so on, but we're not Europeans, we're Americans -- and we have different principles."
Rice balances a knack for making her presence felt without being aggressive. "She doesn't seem to try to push herself forward in any particular way," former Secretary of State George Shultz told Time magazine last year. "But she has such a level of capability ... that she winds up getting asked to do all sorts of things."
Where other Republican foreign policy intellectuals have often gone out of their way to offend people (anyone remember Jeane Kirkpatrick?), Rice mixes confidence and a light touch, as she made clear in a recent interview. Recalling the time she met Russia's acting president, Vladimir Putin, at a reception (when Putin was working for the mayor of St. Petersburg), Rice insisted he would not remember her. Right. No doubt he meets smart, charming, Russian-speaking Americans with names like Condoleezza all the time. (The name, by the way, came from her mother, like Rice a pianist, who made a variation on the musical direction con dolcezza, or "with sweetness.")
Rice also likes to pay her respects, as she did in naming Harry Truman her man of the century to Time. He "somehow made sense of what America's role in the world ought to be under the most difficult of circumstances, when it would have been easy for the United States to withdraw," she said. "I look to the people of that era in amazement and wonderment at what they were able to do."
She first came to Stanford in 1981 as a fellow in the arms control and disarmament program after earning a master's from Notre Dame and a doctorate from the University of Denver's graduate school of international studies.
Her mentor at Stanford, Coit Blacker, has described what intrigued her academic colleagues about her. "I think what struck people at the time was a combination of all the personal stuff -- charm and very gracious personality," Blacker, deputy director of Stanford's Institute for International Studies, recently told the Stanford Daily. He said Rice possesses "a kind of intellectual agility mixed with velvet-glove forcefulness."
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