Bush Advisor Provides a Quiet Force for Unity

It was 5 a.m., but the phone didn’t awaken Condoleezza Rice. Fresh off the treadmill, sweaty in a Stanford University T-shirt, she sat down to talk to President Bush, who was calling about the standoff with China.

Rice’s workout, a morning ritual, was wedged in between a few hours’ sleep and a phone call from Bush the previous night, just after he talked with Secretary of State Colin Powell about efforts to secure the release of the 24 Navy plane crew members.

America’s first female national security advisor clearly has the president’s ear.

“My job, really, is to help make sure the government is speaking with one voice,” Rice said last week during a brief telephone interview aboard Air Force One as it nosed toward Milwaukee, where Bush was throwing out the first pitch of the Brewers’ home opener. By midnight, Rice was being whisked away on Marine One for a weekend at Camp David.

“It’s a great job. I’m actually having fun,” said Rice, who is 46. For someone who does what I do in international relations, every day is exciting.”

On typical workdays, Rice heads to work from her Watergate apartment as the sun rises. By 7:15 a.m., she is having a conference call with Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. While Rice did not aggrandize her role alongside the two Cabinet secretaries, it is obvious that Bush has done most of his talking about China to her.

“I’ll see the president several times during the day, just to keep him updated,” Rice said. “I just walk down to the Oval.”

Sandy Berger, national security advisor under President Clinton, said Rice plays a very important role: The cooler head that prevails.

“When you have a national security team with personalities as strong as Powell’s and Rumsfeld’s, it’s important that there be someone in the middle that coordinates and makes sure everyone is on the same page,” Berger said. “I don’t think she is going to be anybody’s second fiddle. . . . (Bush) clearly believes she is committed to advancing his agenda and doesn’t have her own agenda.”

Rice is a fixture at Bush’s side in strategy sessions and meetings with other heads of state. Last week, as Bush fielded reporters’ questions on Russia and the Middle East, Rice watched intently from her seat nearby but said nothing. The barest hint of a smile played across her face.

“She’s in constant communication with the secretary of state and the secretary of defense. She takes their views, makes sure the president is fully aware of their views,” said Karen Hughes, White House communications director and, like Rice, a member of Bush’s trusted inner circle. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard her raise her voice. Yet it is very clear where she stands. She has definite opinions, and she makes her points in a very strong, very gracious way.”

“I’ll bet people listen to her because of that,” said Sheila Tate, former spokeswoman for first lady Nancy Reagan and the elder President Bush’s 1988 campaign. “You don’t have to have the loudest voice. You just have to say the most intelligent words.”

Because she is so quiet, there is a tendency in Washington to discount Rice, an Alabama native and daughter of a Presbyterian minister. In fact, many of Rice’s supporters were aghast over a campy spoof of her last month at the Gridiron Club dinner, a popular annual journalists’ event, in which she was described, to the tune of the Nat King Cole classic “Mona Lisa,” as “just another lovely, token work of art.”

University of Virginia historian Philip Zelikow, who worked with Rice in the first Bush White House and coauthored a book with her, described Rice’s style as “self-assured but not flamboyant” and dismissed critics who say she is a token because she is black and female.

“Believe me, she was hired on the merits,” Zelikow said. “This is not the kind of job where you can afford to make token hires. This has to be a person the president trusts.”

Rice--”Condi” to her friends -- is a sports fan (football and ice hockey are her favorites), plays classical piano and regularly goes to pianists’ retreats, usually in the summertime. Rice said she tries not to let her job consume her life, even though it leaves precious little room for certain routines, like church and lunches with friends.

“I’m not a workaholic,” Rice said. “I try to get my exercise in, and see friends. My piano just arrived. And it needs to be tuned.”

Rice graduated from college at 19. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the Soviet and Czech militaries. She speaks fluent Russian. “She is, really, in many ways, a renaissance woman,” Hughes said.

In 1989, Rice joined the National Security Council of former President George Bush, where she helped shape U.S. policy as the Soviet Union began to collapse. She met her boss’ son, then the governor of Texas, in 1995.