Condoleezza Rice

Condoleezza Rice: The Pianist Who Ran the War Room

In September 1963, an eight-year-old girl in Birmingham, Alabama, stood in the crowd outside the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church at a funeral. One of the four children being buried, Denise McNair, was her friend. Thirty-eight years later, Condoleezza Rice was sitting in the West Wing as the first woman ever to serve as National Security Adviser to a President of the United States, on the morning the towers came down. Almost nothing in between was accidental.

Birmingham

She was born on 14 November 1954 in Birmingham, to a Presbyterian minister and a teacher. Her parents built a deliberate wall around her: by the Encyclopedia of Alabama's account she was "largely unaware of segregation and the larger civil rights struggle" until 1963, "raised in a sheltered environment," and kept home from school that year because her parents feared for her safety amid the city's civil rights confrontations. The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church broke through the wall.

The regime her parents ran was academic and musical in equal parts — a strict schedule of schoolwork and piano practice, with her mother, a science teacher, giving the first lessons. It produced results early. When the family moved to Tuscaloosa in 1966, Rice entered the eighth grade at Druid High School at eleven, having skipped the seventh.

The Piano, and the Detour

She arrived at the University of Denver intending a career in concert music, and changed course to political science. The pivot was decisive. At Denver she encountered Josef Korbel, the Czech-born diplomat and scholar who taught her the Soviet Union, and she took her bachelor's degree in 1974, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, at nineteen.

A master's from Notre Dame followed in 1975, and a doctorate from the University of Denver's Graduate School of International Studies in 1981, when she was twenty-six. Her subject was the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe — specifically, the relationship between communist parties and their armed forces, an unglamorous specialism that turned out to be exactly the right one.

Stanford

Stanford hired her onto the political science faculty in 1981, and she proved to be a formidable teacher. She won the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1984 and the School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1993 — two of the highest teaching honours the university awards.

The scholarship arrived alongside it. *Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army* appeared in 1984, *The Gorbachev Era* in 1986, and *Germany Unified and Europe Transformed* in 1995. The last of these had unusual authority behind it, because she had been in the room. Rice served on the National Security Council under George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1991, working on Soviet affairs and German reunification at the precise moment the Eastern bloc dissolved — the hardest diplomatic problem of the era, handled without a war.

The Provost's Ledger

From 1993 to 1999 she was Stanford's provost, the first woman and the first African American to hold the post. It is worth being specific about what the job entailed: responsibility for a $1.5 billion annual budget, an academic programme covering 1,400 faculty and 14,000 students. She was thirty-eight when she took it. This is the part of her career that best demonstrates her actual competence — running a large, complicated, argumentative institution and balancing its books.

The First Woman in the Chair

In 2001 George W. Bush made her National Security Adviser, the first woman to hold the office and the first Black woman in the role. The job is not to have opinions but to run the process — to convene the departments, force their disagreements into the open, and test the assumptions underneath a decision before the President acts on one.

Eight months in came 11 September 2001, and after it, Afghanistan and Iraq. Rice was central to both. Her defence of the Iraq decision has been consistent for two decades: "The intelligence was as clear as any intelligence I've ever seen and I've been in this business a long time," she said in 2011, before conceding the obvious: "The problem is, the intelligence wasn't right."

Foggy Bottom

Bush nominated her as Secretary of State on 14 November 2004 — her fiftieth birthday. She took office on 26 January 2005, succeeding Colin Powell, and served until 20 January 2009, when Hillary Rodham Clinton replaced her. She was the sixty-sixth Secretary of State, the second woman and the first Black woman to hold the office.

Her programme was what she called Transformational Diplomacy: the expansion of democratic government as a first-order American objective. In practice the four years were consumed by Middle Eastern conflict, the nuclear programmes of North Korea and Iran, and a civil nuclear agreement with India.

Since leaving office she has returned to Stanford, where she directs the Hoover Institution and holds the Denning Professorship at the Graduate School of Business, and co-founded the consultancy Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel. She has written *No Higher Honor* (2011), *Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom* (2017) and *To Build a Better World* (2019). She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, holds honorary doctorates from six institutions, and in 2012, with Darla Moore, became one of the first two women admitted to the Augusta National Golf Club. In 2022 she became a part-owner of the Denver Broncos.

Why Condoleezza Is Called a Genius

Of the people the word gets attached to, Rice has among the most conventional evidence for it — and among the clearest demonstrations of its limits.

The evidence is real and measurable. She skipped a school year and entered high school at eleven; she took a bachelor's degree at nineteen and a doctorate at twenty-six; she won two of Stanford's highest teaching prizes and wrote three serious scholarly books; she was provost of a major research university at thirty-eight, running a $1.5 billion budget. She trained to concert standard as a pianist. Her particular cognitive gift appears to be depth in a narrow, technical domain — the internal machinery of communist states — combined with the ability to explain it, which is why she was so unusually useful on the NSC in 1989 and why *Germany Unified and Europe Transformed* has lasted.

The counter-case is severe and comes from the record rather than from her critics' rhetoric. Assessments of her career, including the Encyclopedia of Alabama's, credit her teaching and her diplomacy while faulting her for inadequate preparation against the pre-9/11 terrorist threat and for promoting the invasion of Iraq on flawed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. That is a precise indictment of the job she held. The National Security Adviser's function is to interrogate exactly the kind of claim that turned out to be wrong; her own defence — that the intelligence was clear and simply wasn't right — concedes the process failed without accounting for why she did not catch it. Her expertise was the Soviet Union; the crises she governed were jihadist terrorism and Iraq. Nobody serious calls her a genius. What she was, unambiguously, was one of the best-credentialled minds ever to hold the office, which is why the failure is instructive rather than dismissible.

Legacy

Rice's life is a straight line drawn from a segregated city to the top of American foreign policy, and the line is genuinely remarkable — a child who buried a friend at eight and advised a president through the collapse of the Soviet bloc at thirty-five. Her policy legacy is contested and will stay that way. Her institutional one is not: she remains at Stanford, running the Hoover Institution, still doing the thing she was demonstrably best at, which was always the university rather than the war.

Achievements

• Affiliated with Stanford University
• Educated at University of Denver, University of Notre Dame and Josef Korbel School of International Studies
• Worked as politician, writer and political scientist