Condoleezza Rice

U.S. National Security Advisor

(New York Times - 18/12/00; Stanford Online Report - 06/09/99; ABC News.com - Profile: Condoleezza Rice; Hoover Institution)

Condoleezza Rice, 46, the U.S. National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, is a widely respected expert on Russian and Eastern European affairs who most recently was a political science professor and provost at Stanford University.

Rice was born on 14 November 1954 in a segregated neighbourhood in Birmingham, Alabama, the only child of two educators. Her father, the Rev. John W. Rice, ran the Westminster Presbyterian Church, which her grandfather had founded. Her mother, Angela Ray, was a teacher at an Afro-American high school in Birmingham. Rice was an exceptional student. She entered eighth grade at the age of 11. In just one year she completed both her senior year of high school and freshman year of college.

In 1974 at the age 19 she earned a bachelor's degree (Phi Beta Kappa) in political science at the University of Denver. Rice's mentor, Josef Korbel, father of former Secretary of State Madeline K. Albright, inspired her to abandon her aspirations to become a concert pianist and to pursue instead a specialization in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. "I was saved from a music major by Russia," she said in an interview.

Rice earned a master's degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1975 and a doctorate from the University of Denver in 1981. Upon graduation she joined the Stanford political science faculty as a fellow in the arms control and disarmament program. Five years later she went to Washington on a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship to work on nuclear strategic planning under Adm. William Crowe at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She returned to Washington for a second time in 1989 to work under Brent Scowcroft at the National Security Council as director of Soviet and Eastern European affairs. Under President George Bush she was also appointed special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Soviet affairs at the National Security Council. In these positions she helped bring democratic reforms to Poland and played a key role in the formation of many of the Bush administration's policies with the former Soviet Union.

In 1993, Rice, who loves sports, became the youngest, first female and first non-white provost at Stanford University. A former Standford colleague called her " a steel magnolia." Coit Blacker, now deputy director of Stanford's Institute for International Studies, said Rice "has a wonderful kind of Southern affect in the positive sense, a kind of graciousness. But mixed with this is a very steely inner core. She always knows what she wants and is extremely disciplined, both at personal and professional levels."