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Condoleezza Rice

b. 1954 Tier II

The Birmingham girl who heard the bomb that killed her playmate

Portrait of Condoleezza Rice — Department of State — 2005-02 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Her mother taught high school science, music and oratory and named her from con dolcezza, an Italian marking that means sweetly. Her father preached and counseled students. She started French, piano, ballet and figure skating at three. At eight she was a few blocks away at her father's church when the bomb went off at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killed four girls, one of them her playmate Denise McNair. I did not see it happen, she said later, but I heard it happen, and I felt it happen. She meant to be a concert pianist. At the Aspen festival after her sophomore year at Denver she met players better than she was and changed her major to political science.

Josef Korbel, a Czech exile teaching at Denver and Madeleine Albright's father, turned her into a Soviet specialist. She had a BA at 19 and a doctorate at 26. She changed her registration from Democrat to Republican in 1982. In 1989 she joined the National Security Council as director of Soviet and East European affairs and watched the country she had studied come apart. Stanford made her provost in 1993, the first woman, the first African American and the youngest, and she closed a structural 20-million-dollar deficit inside two years. George W. Bush made her national security adviser in 2001 and secretary of state in 2005, the first woman in the first job and the first Black woman in the second.

On August 6, 2001, the president's daily brief was headed Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US. Rice called it historical rather than current intelligence. On July 17, 2002, a Senate Intelligence Committee report found, she met CIA director George Tenet and conveyed the administration's approval for waterboarding Abu Zubaydah. She has said she authorized nothing and only carried an authorization already given. In January 2003 she told CNN that the trouble with waiting for certainty about Iraq was that we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. There were no weapons. Human Rights Watch asked in 2015 that she be investigated for conspiracy to torture. No investigation followed, and the record stays contested.

She left office in January 2009, went back to Stanford, and has stayed inside institutions rather than running for anything. She became director of the Hoover Institution on September 1, 2020, and in July 2022 joined the group that bought the Denver Broncos for 4.65 billion dollars. George W. Bush said in 2020 that he had once written her in for president and that she told him she would refuse the office. The reputation is not settled. Her confirmation as secretary of state passed 85 to 13, the most votes cast against any nominee for that office since 1825, and the argument that produced them has not ended.

Lifespan

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Condoleezza Rice's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

Notable works

The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army book
Out of the doctoral work she finished at 26 1984
The Gorbachev Era book
Edited with Alexander Dallin 1986
Germany Unified and Europe Transformed book
With Philip Zelikow, on the statecraft of reunification 1995
Extraordinary, Ordinary People book
A memoir of her parents rather than her policies 2010
No Higher Honor book
Her account of the Washington years 2011
Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom book 2017

Life in brief

with age at each point

September 15, 1963 aged 8 The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing kills her playmate Denise McNair Rice was eight, at her father's church a few blocks away.
1971 aged ~17 Graduates from St. Mary's Academy in Colorado at 16
1974 aged ~20 Takes a BA from the University of Denver at 19 She had already given up on a career at the piano.
1981 aged ~27 Earns a doctorate at 26 and joins the Stanford faculty
1989 aged ~35 Joins the National Security Council as its Soviet director Bush told Gorbachev she taught him everything he knew about the Soviet Union.
1993 aged ~39 Becomes provost of Stanford, the first woman and first African American in the job She erased a 20-million-dollar structural deficit in two years.
July 17, 2002 aged 47 Conveys the administration's approval of waterboarding to George Tenet The Senate Intelligence Committee found this. She says she authorized nothing.
January 26, 2005 aged 50 Confirmed as secretary of state, 85 to 13 The most no votes for the office since 1825.
September 1, 2020 aged 65 Becomes director of the Hoover Institution