Rice’s Soaring Career Hits a New High

Condoleezza Rice has spent her whole life--46 years so far--as the youngest and smartest person in almost any room.

Now, as President-elect George W. Bush’s choice for White House national security advisor, Rice faces what may be the toughest challenge of her meteoric career: managing the foreign policy agenda of the world’s only remaining superpower at a time of rapid global change.

“I think she will do a great job,” said Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor in the administration of Bush’s father. “She has the personality for it. She has the background for it. She starts off with a very powerful set of credentials.”

Rice was senior director for Soviet and Eastern European Affairs on Scowcroft’s National Security Council staff from 1989 to 1991, working closely with then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, now vice president-elect, and Gen. Colin L. Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and now Bush’s choice for secretary of State.

While the president-elect may be best known for mangling the names of foreign leaders and displaying an uncertain grasp of global issues, the trio of Cheney, Powell and Rice gives the incoming administration a substantial core of foreign policy expertise.

There is really no way to be sure how Rice, Powell and Cheney will split up the task of shaping U.S. foreign policy. On paper, the national security advisor runs what amounts to a private White House think tank, while the secretary of State runs the agency charged with carrying out policy. In some previous administrations, the security advisor has been paramount, while in others it has been the secretary of State. Sometimes they work cooperatively. Sometimes they are obvious rivals. Henry A. Kissinger held both jobs simultaneously for a time.

Like Kissinger, who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Rice brings to the White House a reputation for intellectual brilliance that far outshines the public’s perception of the president’s brain power.

“It is not my sense that George W. is uncomfortable with people who are smarter than he is,” Scowcroft said in a telephone interview. “He is quite ready to use the talents of people and not worry about things like that.”

Rice was a piano prodigy at 3, a college graduate at 19, a college professor at 26, a senior White House advisor at 34 and provost--a combination of chief operating officer and chief financial officer--of Stanford University at 36.

“She has a nice combination of three kinds of experience: scholarly intellectual knowledge, real experience working in government and responsibility for administering a large institution,” said Philip Zelikow, director of the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. He worked with Rice at the White House and wrote with her a book on the reunification of Germany.

Kissinger had academic credentials when he became national security advisor but no government or managerial experience, Zelikow noted. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor in the Carter administration, had both academic and government experience but no managerial expertise.

“This is an unusual combination,” Zelikow said of Rice.

Zelikow dismissed suggestions that Rice may suffer from hubris, the intellectual arrogance that has brought down generations of “best and brightest” government officials.

“She is pretty level-headed,” he said. “She never displayed an overly large ego, elbowing people out of the way. She never had that kind of reputation at all.”

Rice prides herself on a hard-headed, pragmatic approach to foreign issues. She told interviewers earlier this year that she considered herself a Democrat until 1979, when Carter confessed that he was shocked and saddened by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. For Rice, a young professor specializing in the Soviet Union, it was a damaging admission of ill-informed sentimentality in foreign affairs.

Rice has made it clear that she expects the U.S. government to put its own national interests first in setting any plan of action. For instance, as Bush’s chief campaign advisor on foreign policy, Rice said that the United States should not be deterred by overseas criticism from developing an antimissile system. She said she hopes that Russia will agree to modify the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, signed in 1972 by the United States and the Soviet Union, to allow the missile defense program to proceed. But if Moscow balks, she said, Washington should be ready to repudiate the pact unilaterally.

Missile Defense Provokes Allies

To be sure, promoting an antimissile program was popular campaign rhetoric. It is now up to Bush and his advisors to determine whether the system is technologically feasible and worth the high cost, both in budgetary dollars and in diplomatic friction. Foreign governments on both sides of the Cold War divide have objected strongly to any U.S. action that would undermine the ABM treaty, which has been the cornerstone of arms control efforts for almost 30 years.

Rice sparked a controversy in October when she said in an interview with the New York Times that a George W. Bush administration would pull U.S. peacekeepers out of the Balkans. That task should be left to European armies, she said, while the United States concentrates on preparing to fight wars.

The suggestion produced a wave of anxiety among North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies. A little more than a week later, NATO Secretary-General Lord Robinson said he had been assured that Bush would not withdraw American peacekeepers unilaterally.

Rice was born Nov. 14, 1954, in Birmingham, Ala., the daughter of a college administrator father and music teacher mother, a family that was a fixture of the rigidly segregated city’s black middle class. There can be no doubt that the mid-century Alabama of segregated water fountains, segregated amusement parks and, of course, segregated schools had an effect on the young African American girl.

She was 9 years old when a bomb exploded at a Baptist church a few miles from Westminster Presbyterian Church, where the Rice family attended. Four black girls were killed, one of them a kindergarten classmate of Rice.

Since the election, Rice has declined interview requests. But last summer, in advance of her high-profile speech to the Republican National Convention, she told interviewers that her father became a Republican in 1952 in reaction to the racial policies of the Democrats in the one-party South of that era. For Condi, as she was called, surviving the racial climate of the time only strengthened her determination to excel in a world that was not defined by race.

The Rice family moved to Denver in 1967. Two years later, at age 15, Rice enrolled at the University of Denver as a music major, intending to prepare for a career as a concert pianist. But music, which had dominated her life from birth, when her mother named her for a musical term meaning to play with sweetness, was pushed aside by a new love: international politics.

Rice’s new career was shaped by her professor of international relations, Josef Korbel, a former Czech diplomat, refugee from communism and the father of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. And, like the outgoing secretary of State, Rice’s area of specialization has long been eastern and central Europe--the Soviet bloc of the Cold War.

After receiving a doctorate from the University of Denver in 1981, Rice joined the faculty at Stanford, where her class became one of the most popular on campus among undergraduate students. In 1986, she was a Council on Foreign Relations fellow at the Pentagon and, from 1989 to 1991, she was the top Soviet expert in the White House. From 1993 through 1999, Rice was provost of Stanford, ranking just below the university president on the operational chart.

It is the sort of career pattern that usually generates envy and not a small amount of animosity. But in Rice’s case, even rivals seem a bit in awe.

Dimitri K. Simes, director of the Nixon Center, a Washington think tank, and a rival of Rice’s in the esoteric world of expert Kremlin watchers, began an interview by asserting that, unlike most people in Rice’s orbit, “I am not a close personal friend.”

Nevertheless, Simes said, “I talk to people at Stanford who do not agree with her politics and are jealous about her rise. They all say she was an impressive provost.”

Rice’s specialization in European affairs has caused some government watchers to suggest that there may be holes in her knowledge of such crucial regions as the Middle East. But Simes dismisses that.

“I am sure she knows more about some regions than others,” he said. “But it is more dangerous to think you know something and have it wrong than to realize there are gaps in your information. As long as she realizes that she is stronger in some areas than in others, and I am told she realizes it, that is as good as you can get.”