Condoleezza
Rice, born November 14, 1954)
is an American political scientist and diplomat. She served as the 66th
United States Secretary of State, and was the second person to hold that
office in the administration of President George W. Bush. Rice was the
first African-American woman secretary of state, as well as the second
African American (after Colin Powell), and the second woman (after
Madeleine Albright). Rice was President Bush's National Security Advisor
during his first term, making her the first woman and first African
American to serve in that position. Before joining the Bush
administration, she was a professor of political science at Stanford
University where she served as Provost from 1993 to 1999. Rice also
served on the National Security Council as the Soviet and East European
Affairs Advisor to President George H.W. Bush during the dissolution of
the Soviet Union and German reunification.
Following
her confirmation as Secretary of State, Rice pioneered a policy of
Transformational Diplomacy, with a focus on democracy in the greater
Middle East. Her emphasis on supporting democratically elected
governments faced challenges as the Islamist militant Hamas captured a
popular majority in Palestinian elections, and influential countries
including Saudi Arabia and Egypt maintained authoritarian systems with
U.S. support. While Secretary of State, she chaired the Millennium
Challenge Corporation's board of directors.
In
March 2009, Rice returned to Stanford University as a political science
professor and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public
Policy at the Hoover Institution. In September 2010, Rice became a
faculty member of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a
director of its Global Center for Business and the Economy.
Early life
Rice
was born in Birmingham, Alabama the only child of Angelena Ray Rice, a
high school science, music and oratory teacher, and John Wesley Rice,
Jr., a high school guidance counselor and Presbyterian minister.Her
name, Condoleezza, derives from the music-related term, con dolcezza,
which in Italian means, "with sweetness". The family had roots in the
American South going back to the pre-Civil War era, and worked as
sharecroppers for a time after Emancipation. Rice grew up in the
Titusville neighborhood at a time when the South was racially
segregated.
Early education
 |
| Condoleezza Rice as an undergraduate student at the University of Denver |
Rice
began to learn French, music, figure skating and ballet at the age of
three. At the age of fifteen, she began piano classes with the goal of
becoming a concert pianist. While Rice ultimately did not become a
professional pianist, she still practices often and plays with a chamber
music group. She accompanied cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing Brahms's Violin
Sonata in D Minor at Constitution Hall in April 2002 for the National
Medal of Arts Awards.
High school and university education
In
1967, the family moved to Denver, Colorado. She attended St. Mary's
Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Cherry Hills Village,
Colorado, graduating in 1971. After studying piano at the Aspen Music
Festival and School, Rice enrolled at the University of Denver, where
her father was then serving as an assistant dean.
Rice's
initial college major was piano, but after realizing she did not have
the talent to play professionally, she began to consider an alternative
major. She attended an international politics course taught by Josef
Korbel, which sparked her interest in the Soviet Union and international
relations. Rice later described Korbel (who was the father of Madeleine
Albright, a future U.S. Secretary of State), as a central figure in her
life.
In
1974, at age 19, Rice was inducted into the honor society Phi Beta
Kappa, and was awarded a B.A., cum laude, in political science by the
University of Denver. While at the University of Denver she was a member
of Alpha Chi Omega, Gamma Delta chapter. She obtained a master's degree
in political science from the University of Notre Dame in 1975. She
first worked in the State Department in 1977, during the Carter
administration, as an intern in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural
Affairs. In 1981, at the age of 26, she received her Ph.D. in political
science from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the
University of Denver. Her dissertation centered on military policy and
politics in what was then the communist state of Czechoslovakia.
Early political views
Rice
was a Democrat until 1982 when she changed her political affiliation to
Republican in part because she disagreed with the foreign policy of
Democratic President Jimmy Carter, and because of the influence of her
father, who was Republican. As she told the 2000 Republican National
Convention, "My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim
Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans
did."
Academic career
 |
| Condoleezza Rice during a 2005 interview on ITV in London |
Rice
was hired by Stanford University as an assistant professor of political
science (1981–1987). She was promoted to associate professor in 1987, a
post she held until 1993. She was a specialist on the Soviet Union and
gave lectures on the subject for the Berkeley-Stanford joint program led
by UC Berkeley Professor George Breslauer in the mid-1980s.
At
a 1985 meeting of arms control experts at Stanford, Rice's performance
drew the attention of Brent Scowcroft, who had served as National
Security Advisor under Gerald Ford. With the election of George H. W.
Bush, Scowcroft returned to the White House as National Security Adviser
in 1989, and he asked Rice to become his Soviet expert on the United
States National Security Council. According to R. Nicholas Burns,
President Bush was "captivated" by Rice, and relied heavily on her
advice in his dealings with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.
Because
she would have been ineligible for tenure at Stanford if she had been
absent for more than two years, she returned to Stanford in 1991. She
was taken under the wing of George P. Shultz (Ronald Reagan's Secretary
of State from 1982–1989), who was a fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Shultz included Rice in a "luncheon club" of intellectuals who met every
few weeks to discuss foreign affairs. In 1992, Shultz, who was a board
member of Chevron Corporation, recommended Rice for a spot on the
Chevron board. Chevron was pursuing a $10 billion development project in
Kazakhstan and, as a Soviet specialist, Rice knew the President of
Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev. She traveled to Kazakhstan on
Chevron's behalf and, in honor of her work, in 1993, Chevron named a
129,000-ton supertanker SS Condoleezza Rice. During this period, Rice
was also appointed to the boards of Transamerica Corporation (1991) and
Hewlett-Packard (1992).
At
Stanford, in 1992, Rice volunteered to serve on the search committee to
replace outgoing president Donald Kennedy. The committee ultimately
recommended Gerhard Casper, the Provost of the University of Chicago.
Casper met Rice during this search, and was so impressed that in 1993,
he appointed her as Stanford's Provost, the chief budget and academic
officer of the university in 1993 and she also was granted tenure and
became full professor. Rice was the first female, first minority, and
youngest Provost in Stanford history. She was also named a senior fellow
of the Institute for International Studies, and a senior fellow (by
courtesy) of the Hoover Institution.
Provost promotion
Former
Stanford President Gerhard Casper said the university was "most
fortunate in persuading someone of Professor Rice's exceptional talents
and proven ability in critical situations to take on this task.
Everything she has done, she has done well; I have every confidence that
she will continue that record as provost." Acknowledging Rice's unique
character, Casper told the New Yorker in 2002 that it "would be
disingenuous for me to say that the fact that she was a woman, the fact
that she was black and the fact that she was young weren't in my mind."
Balancing school budget
As
Stanford's Provost, Rice was responsible for managing the university's
multi-billion dollar budget. The school at that time was running a
deficit of $20 million. When Rice took office, she promised that the
budget deficit would be balanced within "two years." Coit Blacker,
Stanford's deputy director of the Institute for International Studies,
said there "was a sort of conventional wisdom that said it couldn't be
done... that [the deficit] was structural, that we just had to live with
it." Two years later, Rice announced that the deficit had been
eliminated and the university was holding a record surplus of over $14.5
million.
Special interest issues
Rice
drew protests when, as provost, she departed from the practice of
applying affirmative action to tenure decisions and unsuccessfully
sought to consolidate the university's ethnic community centers.
Return to Stanford
During
a farewell interview in early December 2008, Rice indicated she would
return to Stanford and the Hoover Institution, "back west of the
Mississippi where I belong," but beyond writing and teaching did not
specify what her role would be. Rice's plans for a return to campus were
elaborated in an interview with the Stanford Report in January 2009.
She returned to Stanford as a political science professor and senior
fellow at the Hoover Institution on March 1, 2009.
Music
 |
| Yo-Yo Ma with Rice after performing together at the 2001 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal Awards, April 22, 2002. |
Rice
is an accomplished pianist and has performed in public since she was a
young girl. At the age of 15, she played Mozart with the Denver
Symphony, and to this day she plays regularly with a chamber music group
in Washington. She does not play professionally, but has performed at
diplomatic events at embassies, including a performance for Queen
Elizabeth II, and she has performed in public with cellist Yo-Yo Ma. In
2005, Rice accompanied Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick, a 21 year-old
soprano for a benefit concert for the Pulmonary Hypertension Association
at the Kennedy Center in Washington. She has stated that her favorite
composer is Johannes Brahms, because she thinks Brahms's music is
"passionate but not sentimental." On a complementary note, on Friday,
April 10, 2009 on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, she stated that her
favorite band is Led Zeppelin.
Private sector
Rice
headed Chevron's committee on public policy until she resigned on
January 15, 2001, to become National Security Advisor to President
George W. Bush. Chevron, for unspecified reasons, honored Rice by naming
an oil tanker Condoleezza Rice after her, but controversy led to its
being renamed Altair Voyager.
She
also served on the board of directors for the Carnegie Corporation, the
Charles Schwab Corporation, the Chevron Corporation, Hewlett Packard,
the Rand Corporation, the Transamerica Corporation, and other
organizations.
In
1992, Rice founded the Center for New Generation, an after-school
program created to raise the high school graduation numbers of East Palo
Alto and eastern Menlo Park, California. After her tenure as secretary
of state, Rice was approached in February 2009 to fill an open position
as a Pac-10 Commissioner, but chose instead to return to Stanford
University as a political science professor and the Thomas and Barbara
Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.
Early political career
In
1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign
Relations, Rice served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff.
From
1989 through March 1991 (the period of the fall of Berlin Wall and the
final days of the Soviet Union), she served in President George H.W.
Bush's administration as Director, and then Senior Director, of Soviet
and East European Affairs in the National Security Council, and a
Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. In
this position, Rice helped develop Bush's and Secretary of State James
Baker's policies in favor of German reunification. She impressed Bush,
who later introduced her to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as the one
who "tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union."
In
1991, Rice returned to her teaching position at Stanford, although she
continued to serve as a consultant on the former Soviet Bloc for
numerous clients in both the public and private sectors. Late that year,
California Governor Pete Wilson appointed her to a bipartisan committee
that had been formed to draw new state legislative and congressional
districts in the state.
In 1997, she sat on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender-Integrated Training in the Military.
During
George W. Bush's 2000 presidential election campaign, Rice took a
one-year leave of absence from Stanford University to help work as his
foreign policy advisor. The group of advisors she led called itself The
Vulcans in honor of the monumental Vulcan statue, which sits on a hill
overlooking her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. Rice would later go on
to give a noteworthy speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention.
The speech asserted that "...America's armed forces are not a global
police force. They are not the world's 911."
National Security Advisor (2001–2005)
 |
| Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld listen to President George W. Bush speak about the Middle East on June 24, 2002 |
On
December 17, 2000, Rice was named as National Security Advisor and
stepped down from her position at Stanford. She was the first woman to
occupy the post. Rice earned the nickname of "Warrior Princess,"
reflecting strong nerve and delicate manners.
On
January 18, 2003, the Washington Post reported that Rice was involved
in crafting Bush's position on race-based preferences. Rice has stated
that "while race-neutral means are preferable," race can be taken into
account as "one factor among others" in university admissions policies.
Terrorism
During
the summer of 2001, Rice met with CIA Director George Tenet to discuss
the possibilities and prevention of terrorist attacks on American
targets. On July 10, 2001, Rice met with Tenet in what he referred to as
an "emergency meeting" held at the White House at Tenet's request to
brief Rice and the NSC staff about the potential threat of an impending
al Qaeda attack. Rice responded by asking Tenet to give a presentation
on the matter to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John
Ashcroft.
When
asked about the meeting in 2006, Rice asserted she did not recall the
specific meeting, commenting that she had met repeatedly with Tenet that
summer about terrorist threats. Moreover, she stated that it was
"incomprehensible” to her that she had ignored terrorist threats two
months before the September 11 attacks.
In
August, 2010, Rice received the U.S. Air Force Academy’s 2009 Thomas D.
White National Defense Award for contributions to the defense and
security of the United States.
Subpoenas
In
March 2004, Rice declined to testify before the National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission). The
White House claimed executive privilege under constitutional separation
of powers and cited past tradition. Under pressure, Bush agreed to allow
her to testify so long as it did not create a precedent of presidential
staff being required to appear before United States Congress when so
requested. Her appearance before the commission on April 8, 2004, was
accepted by the Bush administration in part because she was not
appearing directly before Congress. She thus became the first sitting
National Security Advisor to testify on matters of policy.
In
April 2007, Rice rejected, on grounds of executive privilege, a House
subpoena regarding the prewar claim that Iraq sought yellowcake uranium
from Niger.
Iraq
Rice
was a proponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. After Iraq delivered its
declaration of weapons of mass destruction to the United Nations on
December 8, 2002, Rice wrote an editorial for The New York Times
entitled "Why We Know Iraq Is Lying".
In
October 2003, Rice was named to run the Iraq Stabilization Group, to
“quell violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and to speed the reconstruction
of both countries.” By May 2004, the Washington Post reported that the
council had become virtually nonexistent.
Leading
up to the 2004 presidential election, Rice became the first National
Security Advisor to campaign for an incumbent president. She stated that
while: "Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the actual attacks on
America, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a part of the Middle East that was
festering and unstable, [and] was part of the circumstances that created
the problem on September 11."
Weapons of mass destruction
In
a January 10, 2003 interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Rice made
headlines by stating regarding Iraqi WMD: "The problem here is that
there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire
nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom
cloud."
After
the invasion, when it became clear that Iraq did not have nuclear WMD
capability, critics called Rice's claims a "hoax," "deception" and
"demagogic scare tactic." "Either she missed or overlooked numerous
warnings from intelligence agencies seeking to put caveats on claims
about Iraq's nuclear weapons program, or she made public claims that she
knew to be false," wrote Dana Milbank and Mike Allen in the Washington
Post.
Rice
characterized the August 6, 2001 President's Daily Brief Bin Ladin
Determined To Strike in US as historical information. Rice indicated "It
was information based on old reporting." Sean Wilentz of Salon magazine
suggested that the PDB contained current information based on
continuing investigations, including that Bin Laden wanted to "bring the
fighting to America."
Role in authorizing use of torture techniques
A
Senate Intelligence Committee reported that on July 17, 2002, Rice met
with CIA director George Tenet to personally convey the Bush
administration's approval of the proposed waterboarding of alleged Al
Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah. "Days after Dr Rice gave Mr Tenet her
approval, the Justice Department approved the use of waterboarding in a
top secret August 1 memo." Waterboarding is considered to be torture by a
wide range of authorities, including legal experts, war veterans,
intelligence officials, military judges, human rights organizations, the
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, and many senior politicians,
including U.S. President Barack Obama.
In
2003 Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General John
Ashcroft met with the CIA again and were briefed on the use of
waterboarding and other methods including week-long sleep deprivation,
forced nudity and the use of stress positions. The Senate report says
that the Bush administration officials "reaffirmed that the CIA program
was lawful and reflected administration policy".
The
Senate report also "suggests Miss Rice played a more significant role
than she acknowledged in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services
Committee submitted in the autumn."[53] At that time, she had
acknowledged attending meetings to discuss the CIA interrogations, but
she claimed that she could not recall the details, and she "omitted her
direct role in approving the programme in her written statement to the
committee."
In
a conversation with a student at Stanford University in April 2009,
Rice stated that she did not authorize the CIA to use the enhanced
interrogation techniques. Said Rice, "I didn't authorize anything. I
conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency that they
had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department's
clearance. That's what I did." She added, “We were told, nothing that
violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so,
by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate
our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture.”
Secretary of State (2005–2009)
On
November 16, 2004, Bush nominated Rice to be Secretary of State. On
January 26, 2005, the Senate confirmed her nomination by a vote of
85-13. The negative votes, the most cast against any nomination for
Secretary of State since 1825, came from Senators who, according to
Senator Barbara Boxer, wanted "to hold Dr. Rice and the Bush
administration accountable for their failures in Iraq and in the war on
terrorism." Their reasoning was that Rice had acted irresponsibly in
equating Saddam's regime with Islamist terrorism and some could not
accept her previous record. Senator Robert Byrd voted against Rice’s
appointment, indicating that she "has asserted that the President holds
far more of the war power than the Constitution grants him."
As
Secretary of State, Rice championed the expansion of democratic
governments. Rice stated that the September 11 attacks in 2001 were
rooted in "oppression and despair" and so, the US must advance
democratic reform and support basic rights throughout the greater Middle
East.Rice also reformed and restructured the department, as well as US
diplomacy as a whole. "Transformational Diplomacy" is the goal that Rice
describes as "work[ing] with our many partners around the world...
[and] build[ing] and sustain[ing] democratic, well-governed states that
will respond to the needs of their people and conduct themselves
responsibly in the international system."
As
Secretary of State, Rice traveled widely and initiated many diplomatic
efforts on behalf of the Bush administration. Her diplomacy relied on
strong presidential support and is considered to be the continuation of
style defined by former Republican secretaries of state Henry Kissinger
and James Baker.
Speculation on 2008 presidential campaign, views on successor
There
had been previous speculation that Rice would run for the Republican
nomination in the 2008 primaries, which she ruled out on Meet the Press.
On February 22, 2008, Rice played down any suggestion that she may be
on the Republican vice presidential ticket, saying, "I have always said
that the one thing that I have not seen myself doing is running for
elected office in the United States." During an interview with the
editorial board of the Washington Times on March 27, 2008, Rice said she
was "not interested" in running for vice president. In a Gallup poll
from March 24 to 27, 2008, Rice was mentioned by eight percent of
Republican respondents to be their first choice to be Senator John
McCain's Republican Vice-Presidential running mate, slightly behind Mike
Huckabee and Mitt Romney.
Republican
strategist Dan Senor said on ABC's This Week on April 6, 2008, that
"Condi Rice has been actively, actually in recent weeks, campaigning
for" the vice presidential nomination. He based this assessment on her
attendance of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform conservative
leader's meeting on March 26, 2008. In response to Senor's comments,
Rice's spokesperson denied that Rice is seeking the vice presidential
nomination, saying, "If she is actively seeking the vice presidency,
then she's the last one to know about it."
In
August 2008, the speculation about a potential McCain-Rice ticket
finally ended when then-Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska was selected as
McCain's running-mate.
In
early December 2008, Rice praised President-elect Barack Obama's
selection of New York Senator Hillary Clinton to succeed her as
Secretary of State, saying "she's terrific". Rice, who has spoken to
Clinton since her selection, said Clinton "is someone of intelligence
and she'll do a great job".
Political positions
Terrorism
Rice's
policy as Secretary of State viewed counter-terrorism as a matter of
being preventative, and not merely punitive. In an interview on December
18, 2005, Rice stated: "We have to remember that in this war on
terrorism, we're not talking about criminal activity where you can allow
somebody to commit the crime and then you go back and you arrest them
and you question them. If they succeed in committing their crime, then
hundreds or indeed thousands of people die. That's why you have to
prevent, and intelligence is the long pole in the tent in preventing
attacks."
Rice meets with Afghan Foreign Minister Spanta to discuss anti-terrorism efforts
Rice
has also been a frequent critic of the intelligence community's
inability to cooperate and share information, which she believes is an
integral part of preventing terrorism. In 2000, one year after Osama bin
Laden told Time “[h]ostility toward America is a religious duty,” and a
year before the September 11 terrorist attacks, Rice warned on WJR
Detroit: "You really have to get the intelligence agencies better
organized to deal with the terrorist threat to the United States itself.
One of the problems that we have is a kind of split responsibility, of
course, between the CIA and foreign intelligence and the FBI and
domestic intelligence." She then added: "There needs to be better
cooperation because we don't want to wake up one day and find out that
Osama bin Laden has been successful on our own territory."
Rice
also has promoted the idea that counterterrorism involves not only
confronting the governments and organizations that promote and condone
terrorism, but also the ideologies that fuel terrorism. In a speech
given on July 29, 2005, Rice asserted that "[s]ecuring America from
terrorist attack is more than a matter of law enforcement. We must also
confront the ideology of hatred in foreign societies by supporting the
universal hope of liberty and the inherent appeal of democracy."
In
January 2005, during Bush's second inaugural ceremonies, Rice first
used the term "outposts of tyranny" to refer to countries felt to
threaten world peace and human rights. This term has been called a
descendant of Bush's phrase, "Axis of Evil", used to describe Iraq, Iran
and North Korea. She identified six such "outposts" in which she said
the United States has a duty to foster freedom: Cuba, Zimbabwe, Burma
and Belarus, as well as Iran and North Korea.
Abortion
Rice
said "If you go back to 2000 when I helped the president in the
campaign. I said that I was, in effect, kind of libertarian on this
issue. And meaning by that, that I have been concerned about a
government role in this issue. I am a strong proponent of parental
choice - of parental notification. I am a strong proponent of a ban on
late-term abortion. These are all things that I think unite people and I
think that that's where we should be. I've called myself at times
mildly pro-choice." She would not want the federal government "forcing
its views on one side or the other."
Rice
said she believes President Bush "has been in exactly the right place"
on abortion, "which is we have to respect the culture of life and we
have to try and bring people to have respect for it and make this as
rare a circumstance as possible" However, she added that she has been
"concerned about a government role" but has "tended to agree with those
who do not favor federal funding for abortion, because I believe that
those who hold a strong moral view on the other side should not be
forced to fund" the procedure.
Discrimination
Rice
experienced firsthand the injustices of Birmingham's discriminatory
laws and attitudes. She was instructed to walk proudly in public and to
use the facilities at home rather than subject herself to the indignity
of "colored" facilities in town. As Rice recalls of her parents and
their peers, "they refused to allow the limits and injustices of their
time to limit our horizons."
However,
Rice recalls various times in which she suffered discrimination on
account of her race, which included being relegated to a storage room at
a department store instead of a regular dressing room, being barred
from going to the circus or the local amusement park, being denied hotel
rooms, and even being given bad food at restaurants. Also, while Rice
was mostly kept by her parents from areas where she might face
discrimination, she was very aware of the civil rights struggle and the
problems of Jim Crow laws in Birmingham. A neighbor, Juliemma Smith,
described how "[Condi] used to call me and say things like, 'Did you see
what Bull Connor did today?' 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."Rice herself said of
the segregation era: "Those terrible events burned into my
consciousness. I missed many days at my segregated school because of the
frequent bomb threats."
During
the violent days of the Civil Rights Movement, Reverend Rice armed
himself and kept guard over the house while Condoleezza practiced the
piano inside. According to J.L. Chestnut, Reverend Rice called local
civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth and his followers "uneducated,
misguided Negroes." Also, Reverend Rice instilled in his daughter and
students that black people would have to prove themselves worthy of
advancement, and would simply have to be "twice as good" to overcome
injustices built into the system. Rice said “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 armored somehow from racism. I would be able to confront white
society on its own terms.” While the Rices supported the goals of the
civil rights movement, they did not agree with the idea of putting their
child in harm's way.
Rice
was eight when her schoolmate Denise McNair, aged 11, was killed in the
bombing of the primarily black Sixteenth Street Baptist Church by white
supremacists on September 15, 1963. Rice has commented upon that moment
in her life:
I
remember the bombing of that Sunday School at 16th Street Baptist
Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it
happen, and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father’s
church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever
reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of four young girls,
including my friend and playmate, Denise McNair. The crime was
calculated to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations.
But those fears were not propelled forward, those terrorists failed.
– Condoleezza Rice, Commencement 2004, Vanderbilt University, May 13, 2004
Rice
states that growing up during racial segregation taught her
determination against adversity, and the need to be "twice as good" as
non-minorities. Segregation also hardened her stance on the right to
bear arms; Rice has said in interviews that if gun registration had been
mandatory, her father's weapons would have been confiscated, leaving
them defenseless against Ku Klux Klan nightriders.
Public perception and criticisms
Rice makes an appearance at Boston College, where she is greeted by Father William Leahy.
Rice
has been criticized both in the U.S. and abroad for her involvement in
the George W. Bush administration. Protesters have sought to exclude her
from appearing at schools such as Princeton University and Boston
College, which prompted the resignation of an adjunct professor at
Boston College. There has also been an effort to protest her public
speeches abroad.
Time and Forbes magazines
Rice
has appeared on the Time 100, Time magazine's list of the world's 100
most influential people, four times. Rice is one of only nine people in
the world whose influence has been considered enduring enough to have
made the list—first compiled in 1999 as a retrospective of the twentieth
century and made an annual feature in 2004—so frequently. However, the
list contains people who have the influence to change for better or for
worse, and Time has also accused her of squandering her influence,
stating on February 1, 2007, that her "accomplishments as Secretary of
State have been modest, and even those have begun to fade" and that she
"has been slow to recognize the extent to which the U.S.'s prestige has
declined." In its March 19, 2007 issue it followed up stating that Rice
was "executing an unmistakable course correction in U.S. foreign
policy."
In
2004 and 2005, she was ranked as the most powerful woman in the world
by Forbes magazine and number two in 2006 (following the Chancellor of
Germany, Angela Merkel).
Criticisms from Senator Barbara Boxer
California
Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer has also criticized Rice in relation
to the war in Iraq: "I personally believe — this is my personal view —
that your loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell the war,
overwhelmed your respect for the truth."
On
January 11, 2007, Boxer, in a debate over the war in Iraq, said, "Now,
the issue is who pays the price, who pays the price? I’m not going to
pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too
young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it,
within immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military
and their families, and I just want to bring us back to that fact.”
The
New York Post and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow called Boxer's
statement an attack on Rice's status as a single, childless female and
referred to Boxer's comments as "a great leap backward for feminism.
Rice later echoed Snow's remarks, saying "I thought it was okay to not
have children, and I thought you could still make good decisions on
behalf of the country if you were single and didn’t have children."
Boxer responded to the controversy by saying "They’re getting this off
on a non-existent thing that I didn’t say. I’m saying, she’s like me, we
do not have families who are in the military."
Criticisms from John R. Bolton
According
to the Washington Post in late July 2008, former Undersecretary of
State and U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton was referring to Rice and her
allies in the Bush Administration who he believes have abandoned earlier
hard-line principles when he said: "Once the collapse begins,
adversaries have a real opportunity to gain advantage. In terms of the
Bush presidency, this many reversals this close to the end destroys
credibility... It appears there is no depth to which this administration
will not sink in its last days."
Other criticism
Rice
has also been criticized by other conservatives. Stephen Hayes of the
Weekly Standard accused her of jettisoning the Bush Doctrine. Other
conservatives criticized her for her approach to Russia policy and other
issues. Many criticize Rice in particular for her opposition to the
change of strategy in Iraq and surge in U.S. forces that began in 2007.
Controversy over Palestinian refugees
In
2011, leaked documents showing that Rice in 2008 had proposed
resettling all Palestinian refugees to a new homeland in South America
drew widespread outcry.
Views within the black community
Rice's approval ratings from January 2005 to September 2006
Rice's
ratings decreased following a heated battle for her confirmation as
Secretary of State and following Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.
Rice's rise within the George W. Bush administration initially drew a
largely positive response from many in the black community. In a 2002
survey, then National Security Advisor Rice was viewed favorably by 41%
of black respondents, but another 40% did not know Rice well enough to
rate her and her profile remained comparatively obscure. As her role
increased, some black commentators began to express doubts concerning
Rice's stances and statements on various issues. In 2005, Washington
Post columnist Eugene Robinson asked, "How did [Rice] come to a
worldview so radically different from that of most black Americans?"
Rice
and Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer participate in a news
conference at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley,
California, May 23, 2007.
Other
writers have also noted what they perceive to be a distance between
Rice and the black community. The Black Commentator magazine described
sentiments given in a speech by Rice at a black gathering as "more than
strange — they were evidence of profound personal disorientation. A
black woman who doesn’t know how to talk to black people is of limited
political use to an administration that has few black allies." When Rice
invoked the civil rights movement to clarify her position on the
invasion of Iraq, Margaret Kimberley, another writer for The Black
Commentator, felt that her use of the rhetoric was "offensive." Stan
Correy, an interviewer from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation,
characterized many blacks involved with civil rights and politics as
viewing this rhetoric as "cynical." Rice was also described by Bill
Fletcher, Jr., the former leader of the TransAfrica Forum, a foreign
policy lobbying organization in Washington, D.C., as "very cold and
distant and only black by accident." In August 2005, American musician,
actor, and social activist Harry Belafonte, who serves on the Board of
TransAfrica, referred to blacks in the Bush administration as "black
tyrants." Belafonte's comments received mixed reactions.
Rice
has defended herself from such criticisms on several occasions. During a
September 14, 2005 interview, she said, "Why would I worry about
something like that? ... The fact of the matter is I've been black all
my life. Nobody needs to tell me how to be black."
Notable
black commentators have defended Rice, including Mike Espy, Andrew
Young, C. Delores Tucker (chair of the National Congress of Black
Women),Clarence Page, Colbert King,] Dorothy Height (chair and president
emerita of the National Council of Negro Women) and Kweisi Mfume
(former Congressman and former CEO of the NAACP).
Family and personal life
Her
mother, Angelena Rice, died of breast cancer in August 1985, aged 61.
In July 1989, Condoleezza's father, John Wesley Rice, married Clara
Bailey, to whom he remained married until his death, in December 2000,
aged 77. He was a football and basketball coach throughout his life.
Rice has never married, and has no children.
Cultural references
A
caricature of Condoleezza Rice appeared in episodes of the cartoon
series South Park, titled "Mystery of the Urinal Deuce", "Cartoon Wars
Part I" and "A Ladder to Heaven".
Singer-songwriter
Steve Earle wrote and recorded a mock love song to Rice titled "Condi,
Condi," which appeared on his 2004 album The Revolution Starts Now.
A
child version of her, known as "Lil' Condi", was a regular character in
the animated series, Lil' Bush; she is voiced by Ann Villella in Season
1 and Kari Wahlgren in Season 2.
In
the Family Guy animated DVD movie Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, she
appears in a 1970's flashback as a student at the University of Denver.
In
the NBC series 30 Rock, Rice was portrayed as having a brief affair
with fictional character Jack Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin).
Rice appeared as a character in the 2008 Oliver Stone film W. and was portrayed by British actress Thandie Newton.
She was portrayed by actress Penny Johnson in the ABC mini-series DC 9/11: Time of Crisis (2003) and The Path to 9/11 (2006).
Rice is featured as a character in David Hare's play Stuff Happens.
Against Me!'s song "From Her Lips To God's Ears" is written about her role in the Bush Administration.
As
part of a skit entitled "The Racial Draft" on Chappelle's Show, the
black race "trades" Rice and Colin Powell to the white race in exchange
for O. J. Simpson.
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