Posted on 11/16/2001 7:17:33 PM PST by anncoulteriscool
Washington -- The name is fascinating and complex: Condoleezza, fashioned from the Italian musical notation con dolcezza -- to play "with sweetness" -- by a mother who taught her little girl to play piano before most children learn to tie their shoes.
Condoleezza Rice, though, prefers to keep it simple.
President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.
"Please call me Condi," she regularly tells visitors to her sunny West Wing office, where top-secret memos lie neatly atop a dark wooden desk and a black and silver Oakland Raiders football helmet is perched on her bookshelf.
Rice, who turned 47 on Wednesday, is the White House national security adviser, the first woman and only African-American to hold the post since it was created by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953.
Her role is to make a complex and dangerous world seem simple and clear to President Bush. The world, though, won't cooperate.
Bush has been forced to build and manage a global coalition to wage war in Afghanistan and help defend the country from the scourge behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
At the eye of the storm sits Rice, who was a Stanford University provost with an academic specialty in the former Soviet empire and arms control. She is Bush's personal brain trust on foreign policy. Rice works for a president who openly disdains what he calls "diplomatic chit chat" and views the world as a place of far more black and white than shades of gray.
She has the hardest job in Washington, some say.
"On a scale of one to 10 in degree of difficulty, this is a 15," said Samuel Berger, who was national security adviser to President Bill Clinton. "I have enormous respect for her and for what she's doing right now."
Order from chaos
On a brilliant autumn morning, war grinds on in Afghanistan. Bush urges Americans to look past a season of terror and anthrax and go about their daily lives. The creaking Cold War edifice of nuclear deterrence is crumbling. The Middle East smolders and burns.
Rice steps into the glare of the TV lights before the White House press corps and for the next half-hour a world turned upside down sounds almost righted again, if only rhetorically so.
"The United States has a very good story to tell," she implores the roomful of seasoned skeptics. And then she begins to tell it.
Of her diverse talents and sundry gifts, this may be what Rice does best: distilling order from chaos, confronting visceral panic with intellectual calm, reducing the most frightening dimensions of a perilous world into measured lines, like sweet musical notes on some grand score.
"America will find that she is a wise person," Bush said about Rice last December, when he named her to the post. "I trust her judgment."
She came with strong references: Rice worked for Bush's father a decade ago, as a Soviet affairs adviser on the National Security Council staff.
Presidents can't be effective if they're numbed by detail or paralyzed by debate. It is Rice's job to tell Bush what he needs to know to get to the heart of a matter, and he believes she does that very well.
Her desk is precious steps from the Oval Office. She's constantly at the president's side when he is hosting foreign leaders, traveling abroad or assessing matters critical to defending or advancing American interests abroad.
And when Bush retires for weekends at the presidential retreat at Camp David or his Texas ranch, Rice invariably goes along. As much a family confidant as a presidential policy adviser, Rice helps liven up conversation, adds her considerable insights to the kitchen-table sports commentary and accompanies first lady Laura Bush on long walks through Maryland's Catoctin Mountain forests or the oak and scrub brush trails of central Texas.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney are men of deep intellect and strong views. None, though, has the access to Bush that Rice does, and none knows as well the mind and priorities of the president, insiders say.
She helps Bush decide how best to exert U.S. power and influence abroad, a function that in the heat of a crisis can make or break a presidency.
"Every day you wake up, you haven't had enough sleep, and you're facing another set of difficult decisions," explained Berger. "It's in the caldron of these types of events that you, obviously, are tested."
'Rock star big'
For Rice, the testing began early. Her marks, to date, are good.
"She's an African-American woman from the South. She's not part of the network of Ivy League elites. She has gotten where she is by working hard, being incredibly smart and being good," said Celeste Wallander, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. "I really admire her."
During the presidential campaign, The Nation magazine predicted that, if Bush won, Rice would become one of the administration's brightest stars, "Rock star big," the magazine asserted, "a major cultural figure, adorning the bedroom walls of innumerable kids and the covers of innumerable magazines."
Sure enough, there was Rice last month, profiled in Vogue magazine and featured in a spread of dazzling photos by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz.
Vogue usually spends lavishly on designer clothes to outfit the subjects of Leibovitz's work. Rice simply reached for a coat hanger with a strapless black evening gown, one from a closetful she owns from her days giving classical piano recitals.
"Obviously we're happy when a woman gets a position in power, but we don't do every woman in the Cabinet," said Vogue senior writer Julia Reed, who wrote the article. "We haven't even done [senior strategist] Karen Hughes, who is obviously very close to the president."
Men who come to know Rice often end up smitten.
"She's arguably the most impressive person on the planet," gushed Stuart Stevens, author of "The Big Enchilada," chronicling his experiences as an aide in the Bush campaign.
"Make a list of people you know who speak five languages, are near world-class figure skaters, are concert pianists, NFL football fanatics and also, on the side, national security advisers," said Stevens.
For the record, it is four tongues, not five: Rice speaks English, Russian, French and Spanish, according to her office. She has been a serious figure skater since childhood and is a concert pianist who still plays the Steinway grand piano her parents gave her when she was 15.
No time for marriage
A devout Presbyterian married to her job, Rice tells interviewers that a husband and children simply haven't figured into her busy life.
She's as comfortable talking about shotgun formations and goal-line defense as about weapons of mass destruction. "My dream job is still to be commissioner of the NFL," she said last summer at the National Press Club.
Rice was born in Birmingham in 1954, the year the Supreme Court decided that school segregation was unconstitutional. It took more than a decade for the ruling to catch up with Rice.
"I did not go to integrated schools until I was in 10th grade," Rice said during her speech at the Republican National Convention in August 2000.
She didn't mention that a kindergarten classmate was one of four girls killed when segregationists bombed a Birmingham church in 1963. Two years later, her family moved to Colorado, where her father, John -- an ordained Presbyterian minister and son of a sharecropper who put himself through college on meager cotton earnings and substantial prayer -- became vice chancellor at the University of Denver.
Entered college at 15
Rice enrolled in the university herself at age 15 -- she skipped first and seventh grades -- and graduated with honors four years later. At 20, she received her master's degree from the University of Notre Dame, before returning to the University of Denver to earn a doctorate in international studies.
Her favorite professor was Josef Korbel, the father of Madeleine Albright, the first woman to become U.S. secretary of state.
Korbel's two foreign policy prodigies took different political routes -- Albright is a lifelong Democrat who served under Clinton -- but both blazed paths for women in the overwhelmingly male U.S. foreign policy establishment.
After her parents, Rice counts among her own heroes people like Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, two in a heretofore unbroken chain of 18 middle-aged white men who preceded her as national security adviser.
Now history has imposed its own twist upon Rice, an African-American woman from the American South. She is helping to lead a war against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic sect that regards teaching a girl to read or write as a hanging offense.
"The Taliban regime has been perhaps the most brutal in the world," Rice told reporters last week. "This is a regime that brutalizes its population, that brutalizes women in particular."
Outstanding article. I agee, she would make an excellent Vice President....and President.
Why?
Clinton had testosterone......look where that got us.
She is Bush's personal brain trust on foreign policy.
I'll take brains, integrity and political savvy over testosterone any day.
Brains, articularity and experience would win over smarm, deviosity and politics.
Which candidate would women vote for? Which candidate would men vote for? Minorities?
If you find out where we sign up for the Grassroots Volunteer list for her candidacy, let me know.
According to the scriptures, women are not to have leadership roles in God's church.
Scriptures don't say anything about women as nation leaders, though! Bush/Rice '04... Condoleeza '08!
Me too. I'll work in Kentucky.
LOL, I asked for that. Obviously the President needs to carry his brains above his belt also. Clinton was lacking in this key qualification, along with a lot of other presidential qualifications.
The point I was (poorly) trying to make is that a President needs to be someone who is less to trade away our freedom for imaginary security. History show us that that prerequisite quality is something men have, and women generally don't. Which is why, until now at least, it is men who generally work their way up to Presidential candiate positions in the Republican party.
Notice that Clinton won with popular female support. Evidently women weren't as discerning as men were when it came to selecting presidential material.
Margaret Thatcher is someone who became a leader, proving the exception, but notice she rose to the top in a nation of ninneys.
There are some, even many, who say that Bush IS IN FACT trading away freedoms for security. I would not necessarily disagree with that assertion. However, until someone shows me a Presidential candidate who is positioned further to the right, and who has a chance of winning an election, I'm fully behind Bush.
Let's wait and see what 2004 brings. Dick Cheney has earned the right to be VP if he wants it. However, due to his age and health, he may want to stand down after the first term. If so, Dr. Rice would be an outstanding VP. Then, depending on whether any other stars arise during the second term, she should have a good shot at 2008. I don't see anyone else on the horizon who has her gravis, her ability or her testerone. Electabilitiy is something that can't be judged this far out. Alot of it depends on who else is in the running.
Any demonrat running against her would be in serious trouble. Their formula is race-baiting, and appealing to the female vote. Condi would blow them out of the water on both points.
What a delicious irony to contemplate the first female president as an African-American Republican!
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