FOUR
“I don’t ever remember thinking I was an exceptional student. I did think I was a good pianist.”
—Condoleezza Rice
AFTER working at Stillman College for three years, John Rice received a new job offer that involved a much bigger move for the family. This time the change of locale would have a greater impact on Condi’s life than the family’s initial move out of Birmingham, for not only did they leave their family and friends in Alabama, they left the South entirely. John’s new job came about after he completed his summer graduate courses at the University of Denver and received a master of arts in education on June 10, 1969. That year the university offered him a position as assistant director of admissions, and he soon began teaching as well.
From the start, John Rice worked in the academic as well as the administrative halls of the university. He began to coordinate and teach a class entitled “Black Experience in America,” and over the years expanded the scope of the course to include notable figures who held sessions with students and gave formal presentations that were open to the public. The class discussed the black vote, the role of blacks in politics, and various cultural topics, and John invited national-level speakers to speak, including Howard Robinson, executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Reverend Channing Phillips, the first black person to be nominated for the presidency of the United States. One seminar focused on blacks in popular culture and featured Gordon Parks, director and producer of Shaft and Shaft’s Big Score, who led a discussion on “The Black Man in the Movies.”
Condi recalled another speaker invited to the class, Fannie Lou Hamer, an icon of the Civil Rights movement known as the woman who was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Fannie Lou first learned that she had the right to vote when she was forty-four years old. Volunteers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were visiting her Mississippi town and encouraging blacks to register for the vote. Fannie Lou and a few others volunteered to go to the courthouse and register, but when they arrived, they were arrested, jailed, and severely beaten. Even though she continued to receive death threats after she returned home, Fannie Lou committed herself to the SNCC and traveled throughout the country speaking about the cause and helping people register. She eventually cofounded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and alerted millions of Americans to the South’s voting abuses via televised coverage of the Democratic National Convention in 1964.
“I will never forget meeting . . . Fannie Lou Hamer when I was a teenager,” she said in her speech to the Stanford graduating class of 2002. “She was not sophisticated in the way we think of it, yet so compelling that I remember the power of her message even today. In 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer refused to listen to those who told her that a sharecropper with a sixth-grade education could not, or should not, launch a challenge that would dismantle the racist infrastructure of Mississippi’s Democratic party. She did it anyway.”
In 1974, after five years of teaching, John Rice’s position was upgraded from instructor to adjunct history professor. Although this title still did not carry the perks of an assistant professorship, such as insurance benefits, a higher pay scale, or the opportunity to move toward a tenure-track position, it did not impede John’s ability to do well for his family. He was covered by a benefits package through his administrative positions and, for him, the bonus of the teaching job was his ability to make an impact on the black studies program at the university. For the first time, he taught at the college level about issues that he had encountered first hand, from the segregation laws of the Jim Crow South to the demonstrations in Birmingham to the impact of education on forming black leaders. The day-to-day, frontline work he had done as a minister, counselor, and teacher in Birmingham became the material for teaching a new generation about what it meant to grow up black in the South.
John Rice held a variety of administrative positions at the university during the thirteen years he worked there. In addition to his job as assistant director of admissions, he became the assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1969 and was promoted to associate dean in 1973. He served a brief stint as assistant vice chancellor for student affairs and in 1974 became vice chancellor of university resources.
As associate dean, John Rice helped turn the university into a black intellectual center. “DU is more aware of minority problems and is seemingly striving to do more about them than ever before,” he said in 1972. “I feel we really have the ball rolling . . . toward making this school one of the few ones with real sense of the pluralism in American life.” He announced a new dedication to finding additional black instructors and encouraging more black student participation in campus organizations. “I feel there is a total awareness of black culture on campus now,” he continued, “and I hope to create a deeper understanding of it throughout the coming year.”
Even more than the job security or the teaching opportunities, John and Angelena felt that the most attractive aspect of the university was its location. The move to Denver was a fundamentally positive change for their daughter.
For a black high school student like Condi in 1969, the 1,300-mile stretch between Tuscaloosa and Denver was nothing compared to the qualitative distance between them. Even the dramatic contrast in climate, from the wet and humid tropics of Alabama to the airy heights of Denver that receive an average of sixty inches of snow each year, was a milder shift than the change of overall sensibility between Tuscaloosa and Englewood, the cozy Denver suburb where Condi began high school. Englewood bordered South Denver, the neighborhood in which the Rices bought their house when they moved to the city. Condi enrolled in St. Mary’s Academy, a private Catholic school and vastly different than any school she had attended in Alabama. At thirteen, she was in an integrated school for the first time.
St. Mary’s Academy took pride in its rigorous academics, and as a sophomore, Condi was surrounded by older students who shared her sense of competitiveness. The school had been founded by the Sisters of Loretto in the mid-1800s to bring an education to frontier girls whose families had moved west in the gold rush. This religious order, among the first founded in America, was dedicated to educating children in the new territories. In 1864, three nuns from a Sisters of Loretto convent in Santa Fe were chosen to found the school and made the trip to Denver in a mule-drawn stagecoach. They set up St. Mary’s in a large, two-story house, and in 1875, graduated its first high school senior, Miss Jessi Forshee—granting the first high school diploma west of the Mississippi. Since then both Catholic and non-Catholic families have sent their daughters there to receive a high-quality education and “polish” focusing on the arts and foreign languages, as well as standard academic subjects.
St. Mary’s was just a few blocks away from the University of Denver, along the same boulevard, and over the years, it formed a tradition of educating daughters of university deans. Word spread that there was an excellent private school nearby that many university administrators had chosen for their daughters, and John Rice was no exception. “That seems to be how a lot of people found the school,” said a former principal, “not by realtors but through people at the university. We had a tradition of bringing DU daughters down the street.” Being Catholic was not a requirement, and the school drew girls of all faiths and creeds. Integration was slow in coming to the city, recalled the academy’s Sister Sylvia Pautler. “In the 1940s a friend of mine, a nun who was the principal of an elementary school here, accepted an African-American student only to discover that the Archdiocese had a fit over it. For some reason, the student never enrolled. That was typical of the 1940s. But by the time Condi came, there was a whole bevy of black students.”
When Condi entered St. Mary’s in 1969, the school had recently completed its new high school building, Bonfils Hall. The lower-grade schools were co-educational and the secondary level was an all-girls high school. Although integrated, St. Mary’s—like schools all over Colorado—was primarily white. Of the seventy students in her class, Condi was one of just three blacks. Another dramatically new aspect that Condi had to digest in her first weeks was the fact that her academic prospects were called into question for the first time. During her first term, a school counselor told the Rices that Condi’s standardized test scores showed that she was not college material—never mind her straight-A record or her long list of academic, musical, and athletic accomplishments. Condi was stunned, but her parents—immune to talk of limitation or failure—didn’t flinch. They assured her that the assessment was wrong and that she should just ignore it. Not an easy task for a young woman with a vulnerable ego, accustomed to being on the top of the heap. But Condi trusted her parents and was distracted by the many good things about her new life in Denver. That combination helped her field the blow and move on. “All that I remember is focusing on the fact that I was going to wear a uniform for the first time,” she said. “I probably was so excited to get to Denver, where I could skate year-round.”
In the words of her second cousin Connie Rice, there was more to it than that. There was no space in Condi’s psyche for negative influences to take hold. “Now once you got out into the larger world and you were hit with the first messages from the dominant culture . . . that you could not fly, that in fact you were stupid and you shouldn’t be able to achieve, by that time it’s too late, because you’ve got a fourteen-year-old who believes that she can be anything she wants to be.” That belief was instilled by John and Angelena Rice, parents who set their child’s self-esteem, self-respect, and self-confidence above all else. Looking back, Condi once remarked that a child without enormously supportive parents like hers might not have fared as well after an episode like the one she had in that counselor’s office. A less secure child might have let the message get under her skin and begun to lower her sights. But Condi never for a moment forgot that she is a Rice and a Ray. Three generations of empowerment could not be squelched by one lone voice on one sparkling, autumn day at the start of a new school year when a bright student’s hopes are highest.
The counselor’s analysis did not appear to reach the teachers; at least it did not diminish their respect for her as one of the school’s brightest students. “She was very self-possessed and mature,” recalled Sister Pautler, Condi’s religion teacher. “A lot of adolescent girls go through a tortured time, whether from lack of self-confidence or not being able to understand their maturation process or their family. But she didn’t have any of that baggage; no self-doubt or confusion about growing up or about her family dynamics.”
Therese Saracino, another of Condi’s teachers, described the orderly and high-scholastic environment of St. Mary’s, qualities that made it attractive to parents who were trying to shield their children from some of the chaos of the 1960s. “The Sisters of Loretto were an outstanding teaching order. They were the first order of sisters founded in America, and from day one their mission was to teach young Catholic women. St. Mary’s was a wonderful environment. All of the Catholic schools had a reputation for good academics and strong discipline. The smallness of the school was an important draw for parents, and the fact that it was a safe place during the unrest of the ’60s and fears of drugs and changing values.”
Therese recalled that Condi’s maturity made her unique among the girls at the school. “I was her math teacher, but I know that her interests went far more toward the verbal—English, social studies, history, and that sort of thing,” she said. “Any of us who have raised children know that certain qualities are either there or not there. In the first place she was very, very poised. And she was beautiful even then, and charming, and her manners were impeccable, which is unusual for a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old. I cannot think of any instance that I was in contact with her that she wasn’t a perfect lady. There was a core of her that revealed she knew what she wanted and was willing to make the sacrifices. I think in her mind they were not sacrifices, but things to do that were necessary to keep with her goals.”
Condi continued her mission to be twice-as-good by taking on new challenges in Denver—primarily in sports. In addition to continued private piano study, she took up tennis and figure skating and entered both fields competitively. Her weekday routine now included getting up at 4:30 in the morning to go to the rink and practice her footwork, spins, edges, lunges, crossovers, toe loops, combination moves, and pair skating.
For all of her hours on the ice, piano still took center stage in Condi’s life. She practiced as late as possible at the academy and was also able to use the university’s practice rooms from time to time, but the Rices didn’t want her to be out and about at all hours of the night. They solved the problem by taking out a loan to buy her a used Steinway grand so that she could practice at home as late as she wanted. Condi was awed by her parents’ gesture. “That was a lot of money back then,” said Condi’s friend, Deborah Carson. “I remember her talking about it years later, the amazement still on her face when she told me that ‘they paid thirteen thousand dollars for it.’” Every time she looked at it, the piano reminded Condi of the investment her parents were making in her music.
Condi breezed through her classes at St. Mary’s and by the start of her senior year had already finished all the requirements for graduation. Her parents felt she should waste no time and leave the academy to start working on a bachelor’s degree at the University of Denver. But the idea of abandoning high school, even for the best of reasons, did not sit well with Condoleezza. She couldn’t bear the idea of not having a high school diploma, and she wanted to take part in graduation with her class. “It was the first time I ever really fought my parents on anything,” she said, “I just had a sense that socially you’re supposed to finish high school.” So the Rice family formed a compromise: Condi would start college part-time while finishing up her senior year at St. Mary’s. This created a grueling schedule in which she got up before sunrise to take figure skating lessons, then attended two morning classes at the university, followed by a full afternoon at St. Mary’s.
It didn’t take long for Condi to feel she’d moved light years beyond high school and that returning to the cozy grounds of St. Mary’s was more of a nuisance than a necessity. She would much rather have stayed on campus all day and delved into activities with her new sorority sisters, but she kept to the plan anyway. She made heads turn at her senior prom when she waltzed into St. Mary’s Academy on the arm of a college hockey player. Her date was something of a fish out of water among the high school kids. “Poor guy,” she said. “He felt sort of out of place.”
Attending high school and college at the same time is almost a footnote to the musical accomplishments Condi made at age fifteen. She entered a young artist’s competition and won, which allowed her to perform Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D Minor with the Denver Symphony Orchestra.
Condi was sixteen when she got her diploma from St. Mary’s and was thriving as a piano performance major at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music. During her dual year as high school and college student, she studied the bulletins of many colleges and was certain that she would transfer to a different university after she was free of St. Mary’s. One of her top choices was Juilliard, but her father did not want her to limit herself to a conservatory education. By putting all her resources into a performance-oriented degree, there would be little chance of going back to school to learn another profession if she changed her mind about a musical career down the road. “My father was fundamentally against it,” Condi said. The issue didn’t come up again because after two semesters at the University of Denver she was hooked and decided to stay for her entire bachelor’s program. “At first I planned to attend for one year only and then transfer,” she said in a university brochure in 1974. “But I stayed because I found that DU is small enough for people to care about what happens to you—yet not small enough to limit the scope of what you might want to study.” She praised the school for giving opportunities to “all students—regardless of race or sex,” but added that “when you’re black and female you have to work twice as hard.” She felt respected, validated, and challenged as a pianist at the university, and dreams of Juilliard faded beneath the heaps of dog-eared scores she rifled through every night at the family Steinway.
Condi’s excellent grades and high school record paid off when she started at the university. She was awarded an honors scholarship, which was renewed each year of her undergraduate program.
Condi would not find the university to be an oasis of unbiased thought, however. In one of her first classes she found herself in an immense lecture auditorium, one of a handful of blacks in a crowd of 250 students, listening to a professor preach about white superiority. The topic was William Shockley’s theory of dysgenics, which stated that human evolution is on a backward track because populations with low IQs, namely black Americans, are reproducing more quickly than whites. Shockley’s highly controversial ideas had gained national attention by the late 1960s, even though the majority of his scientific colleagues ridiculed and dismissed them. The widespread attention brought to his theories was due to his distinguished background as a Nobel-winning scientist who co-invented the transistor and spearheaded the invention of semiconductors and the computer age. Condi entered the university just as Shockley’s ideas were being hotly debated on campuses throughout the country.
Shockley believed that art, literature, technology, linguistics—all the treasures of Western civilization—are products of the superior white intellect. What went through Condi’s mind as the professor described and appeared to support Shockley’s view of blacks as “genetically disadvantaged”? Rather than crouch down in her seat to avoid the onslaught, she sprang out of her chair and defended herself. “I’m the one who speaks French!” she said to the professor. “I’m the one who plays Beethoven. I’m better at your culture than you are. This can be taught!”
Not only was fifteen-year-old Condoleezza Rice living proof that radical social theorists like Shockley were wrong, she had the self-assurance to say so in front of hundreds of white students and her professor. She has not remarked on the professor’s response, but has said that as she left the class she understood her parents’ strategy for the first time. The Rices recognized that whites expected blacks to be intellectually inferior, and in order to offset that stereotype one had to be far above average. Their goal, from Condi’s birth, was to ensure that she would be able to hold her own in every circumstance. “That had been my mother and father’s strategy,” she said. “You had to be better at their culture than they were. Recognize that you’re always going to be judged more harshly. They made certain I was never going to be found wanting.”
Undaunted by the freshman lecture, Condi continued her twice-as-good strategy and enrolled in honors courses, wrote for the school paper, worked four hours on her skating every morning, and practiced piano every night. She has admitted that she was less-than-perfect when it came to studying. “The truth is that I was a terrible procrastinator,” she said, “so a lot of times I wasn’t all that well prepared.” Years after she was out of college she advised her own students to not do as she had done—cram for a test rather than gradually ingest the material over the semester. She told them about how she had handled one of her freshman classes at the University of Denver, “Great Religions of the World,” and how she came to regret her negligence. “I did the reading at the last minute, passed the test, and immediately forgot everything,” she said. “Fifteen years later I was in Japan, wandering around the temples, thinking, ‘I once read something about this. I wish I could remember what it was.’”
Her long-held goal of becoming a professional pianist provided a laser-like focus upon which everything else neatly revolved. But between her sophomore and junior year at the university, this well-constructed plan suddenly fell apart. That summer she attended the famous Aspen Musical Festival and ran into the stiffest competition she had ever faced. “I met eleven-year-olds who could play from sight what had taken me all year to learn” she said, “and I thought I’m maybe going to end up playing piano bar or playing at Nordstrom, but I’m not going to end up playing Carnegie Hall.” If she could not be a career performer—appearing with symphony orchestras and playing Mozart and Beethoven on the world’s eminent recital stages—she would not stay with the program. This change of heart had been coming for a time, but the Aspen experience clinched it for her.
“We both became disillusioned with piano,” said Darcy Taylor, who studied at the Lamont School of Music with Condi. “Condi was extremely talented, but she decided it wasn’t for her. We were all very good, but there are people who are just brilliant. There are not many people who get selected for concert work; there aren’t that many positions. We had to realize that we’d be going into the teaching end of it, or the church music end of it, to be a choir director, for example; and we had to face up to the fact that we weren’t good enough to cut it in the concert world. Like Condi, I wasn’t willing to be second fiddle.”
Darcy and Condi sometimes commiserated about the hard, cold reality of the music world. They found nothing glamorous about round after round of competing in front of distracted music professors. “We all entered several contests a year and had several major performances per year,” Darcy said. “We all had to learn Beethoven, Bach and Chopin—Condi really liked Chopin—and these contests taught us a lot about the life a musician has lead. We talked about that a lot. You would work hard and then, during a jury or audition, the professors would rattle paper and talk to each other and interrupt you in the middle of your performance. Their comment to us was that this is what it’s like in the real world, so get used to it. I didn’t like that, and Condi felt the same way.”
Condi could not envision herself teaching piano for the rest of her life, helping kids “murder Beethoven,” as she put it. “I decided there had to be more to life than that,” she said. She decided to drop her performance major. This change of plans was a painful dose of reality that went against much of what she had come to believe about herself. Her identity, which from earliest memory had been wrapped up in music, had been challenged at Aspen, and she was compelled to find another field that was equally challenging yet not as competitive. Some young people who lose their professional artistic dreams, such as ballet dancers who mature into un-ballerina-like figures, struggle for years with depression and feel too inadequate—or disinterested—to start over in something else. But Condi did not approach it that way. She resigned herself to the fact that she was “pretty good but not great,” and immediately began to nose around for a new major. “Technically,” she explained years later, “I can play most anything. But I’ll never play it the way the truly great pianists do.”
At this halfway point in her undergraduate program, Condi had to tell her parents that everything had changed. “I went on a mad search for a major,” she said. “I went to my parents, who had spent a fortune and all of their time turning me into a pianist, and said, ‘Mom and Dad, I’m changing my major.’” She couldn’t tell them what it was; all she knew was that she no longer wanted to be a pianist. The three of them made one agreement—regardless of what her new major would be, she would still finish her B.A. in four years. During fall semester of her junior year she changed her major to “undeclared” and explored a few options like English and Government. She scratched English Literature because it was too conceptual—in her words, “squishy”—and not rigorous enough. She actually hated it, which is not surprising for someone whose early exposure to books was under the glaring light of a speed-reading machine.
Government studies also proved wanting. Classes in local and state administration, voting behavior, political parties, and the structure of government did not appear compelling or demanding enough to pique her interest. But at the start of spring semester she walked into a class that changed everything. The course was “Introduction to International Politics,” the topic that day was Stalin, and the professor was Josef Korbel, former Central European diplomat and father of Madeleine Albright.
“It just clicked,” she said. “I remember thinking, Russia is a place I want to know more about. It was like love. . . . I can’t explain it—there was just an attraction.” The challenge and mystique of Soviet studies was exactly the kind of challenge Condi was looking for. It was a specialized path in academia that fit her perfectly, requiring tough scholastic discipline and an aptitude for foreign languages. It was totally new territory that felt oddly familiar, and it ignited a passion that she had not felt for anything outside of music. She recalled feeling a hint of that engaging interest back in 1968, when she watched the news story of the Soviets invading Czechoslovakia. It hit her hard. “I can still feel the strong sense I had of remorse and regret that a brave people had been subdued,” she said.
Dr. Korbel was impressed by her brightness and enthusiasm, and encouraged her to join the university’s school of international relations, which he had founded. “I really adored him,” she said. “I loved his course, and I loved him. He sort of picked me out as someone who might do this well.” Condi immediately turned her sights onto the Soviet Union, immersing herself in “Soviet politics, Soviet everything.”
With that introductory course, Condi knew she had found her place. Her parents were very surprised at her choice, but supported it. “Condi is the kind of person who is very sure of herself and makes excellent decisions,” said her father. “But political science? Here’s the time for fainting. Blacks didn’t do political science.”
Condi’s fellow piano refugee, Darcy, ventured into business classes and at nineteen started up her own landscape design firm in Denver. Today her company is very successful, and she believes that both she and Condi found new ways to direct their creative energy. “Design is a way to have a create outlet and still use the expressive gifts I used in music,” she said. “Condi, in taking all those foreign languages, is also using the brain power she needed as a musician, and the decision-making she does is also creative.” Darcy remains grateful to Condi’s father for all his guidance and support in helping her get scholarships at the university. “John Rice was friendly and outgoing, but also demanding at the same time,” she recalled. “If he was going to stick his neck out for you, he wanted to make sure you really wanted it, worked hard for it, and didn’t take it from someone else who also deserved it and needed it as much. He gave, but he also expected a lot. I thought that was wise. If you’re going into college and trying to figure out what to do with your life, it’s nice to have someone to prompt you to think and grow from what you’re doing. He was a very smart man.”
Condi signed up for political science and Russian language courses, but she did not close the door on music. Even though she was no longer working toward a career in piano, she remained a serious student of the instrument. “I found my passion in the study of Russia but, in fact, I continued to be passionate about music,” she said. “I continued to work at it and to study for quite a long time.” This aspect of her background puts her in the ranks of a small group of prominent government officials who started their college careers in music. Edward Heath, prime minister of Great Britain from 1970 to 1974 (while Condoleezza was an undergraduate), was an organist and choir director while a student at Oxford, and after he retired from politics, he spent much of his time conducting orchestras throughout Europe. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, started out as a wood-wind player at Juilliard. He studied clarinet and saxophone and played in jazz bands before transferring to New York University to pursue a degree in economics. “I don’t regret giving up the music career,” said Condi in 2001. “The great thing about music is that you can love it all of your life,” Condi said, “you can pick it up at different phases.”
Condoleezza has often remarked that Josef Korbel is the reason she entered international politics. Few matched his stature in the field, and his experiences in Europe before, during, and after World War II made him a fascinating mentor to young people eager to understand international relations. He was an Old World figure who had always attracted artistic types to his inner circle. “Korbel had a way of encouraging talented people,” said one long-time friend of the family, “He was not an artist, but he attracted artists to him.” A student like Condi—multi-lingual, classically trained musician, and extremely bright, poised, and selfreliant—was precisely the type to gravitate to him and to gain his admiration. Korbel immediately took Condi under his wing.
Josef Korbel was born in Czechoslovakia in 1909 and studied in Paris before receiving his law degree from Charles University in Prague. His first position in the Czech government was with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in 1937 he became the press attaché at the Czech Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He learned to speak Serbian, and made close friends with Yugoslav journalists, contacts who would become very important to him and his family when Hitler entered Czechoslovakia. Nazi troops enter Prague in March 1939, and Korbel, a Jew, was on a list of those to be arrested. Like several other Jewish families in Czechoslovakia, the Korbels had abandoned their ancestral ties. Whenever Josef had to fill out documents that asked for his religious affiliation, he wrote, “None.” “Korbel was one of the very, very few Jews who succeeded in getting into the Foreign Ministry before the war,” said one of his Czech colleagues in Michael Dobbs’ biography of Madeleine Albright. “He did so by not giving any signs of his Jewishness.” For weeks, Josef had been working on an escape plan to get his family to Yugoslavia, and thanks to official letters from two Belgrade newspapers who hired him as a foreign press correspondent, he obtained exit visas for himself, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter, Madeleine. They spent a few weeks in Belgrade, then moved to London where the leaders of the Czech government were living in exile.
Korbel worked as a personal secretary to the Czech foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, then became the chief of the Czech broadcasting service. During the family’s stay in London, Hitler’s blitzkrieg pounded their neighborhood, and back at home, more than twenty members of their family were killed in the Holocaust. Three of Madeleine’s grandparents, two aunts, one uncle, a first cousin, and nineteen others died at Auschwitz or Terezín, the concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.
After the war the Korbels returned to Prague, and Josef remained a top official in the Czech government. Madeleine was eight years old, and the family lived in a luxurious apartment near the presidential palace. Korbel was part of the Czech delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1946 where the new world order was established. Following the conference, at age thirty-six, he was appointed Czech ambassador to Yugoslavia. He traveled back and forth between Prague and Belgrade, where Madeleine lived a pampered existence in the ambassador’s residence. The Korbels hired private tutors for Madeleine so that she would not be exposed to communist propaganda at the local schools, and when she was ten, they sent her to a private boarding school in Switzerland. The growing tension between the communists and democrats in Czechoslovakia hung over the family like a dark cloud, and when the communists seized control of the Czech government in 1948, the family fled to the United States. Before leaving Prague, Korbel had been appointed to a United Nations Commission on India and Pakistan and began serving in that post at UN headquarters in New York City. Pressure from the new regime in Prague forced him to leave the job in 1949.
After World War II, several intensive programs in international politics were launched on U.S. campuses. As a new player on the world stage, America was in need of expert instruction on the centuries of history leading up to the formation of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc. These new college programs sought out European experts who had immigrated to the United States, and the University of Denver found their expert in Josef Korbel. After leaving the UN, Korbel was hired by the university as professor in international relations. In 1959, he became dean of the Graduate School of International Studies and director of the Social Science Foundation. Throughout his career he was considered an extraordinary teacher; attentive, warm, and generous with his time. He was in demand throughout the world and acted as a visiting professor at Oxford, Harvard, Columbia, MIT and other colleges. He published six books and countless articles that focused on Eastern Europe and the Cold War.
Korbel became the second most important man in Condi’s life, next to her father. John Rice had sparked Condi’s interest in world affairs and politics when she was very young, spending time with her to discuss the news of the day. She would pattern her life after him in many ways. She has described Josef Korbel as the “intellectual father” she shared with Madeleine Albright who, like Condi, was very much her father’s daughter. “There is no doubt that Madeleine was the object of her parents’ hopes and dreams from an early age,” wrote Dobbs. “She was the oldest, the brightest, the most driven.” Madeleine described her father as strict but “very loving” and supportive.
An integral part of Condi’s new major in political science was learning Russian. Sometimes called a “ten-year language” because of the difficulty of learning its Cyrillic alphabet and grasping its complexity, this is a formidable challenge for many students. But Condi’s early lessons in French, Spanish, and German had given her an affinity for language study that helped her proceed quickly. Previous language experience gave her a solid grounding in the grammatical terms that many English students quickly forget, but are the keys to learning a new language. “It helps to have another foreign language under your belt,” said Jason Galie, a Russian instructor and Ph.D. student at Columbia, “because you use a lot of grammatical terms in the beginning, which, if you don’t remember from English grammar, makes it more difficult.” He explained that the Russian alphabet is a challenge, but not the most demanding part. “Russian is much more difficult than the Romance languages,” he said, “in part because of the alphabet. You start writing English letters instead of Russian at first. But even more difficult is understanding the role that the words are playing, which, unlike English, isn’t determined by the placement of the words in the sentence but by the endings of the words themselves. For some students that’s very difficult to grasp.”
Month by month, Condi’s increasing grasp of the language gave her a more intimate connection to the land that would become central to her life and work. With only two years to go before graduation, she did not have time to take a large group of courses in her major, but she satisfied all the requirements and did an extensive amount of reading on her own.
When the Rices moved to Denver, John became an associate pastor of Montview Presbyterian Church, and Condi spent every Thursday evening at choir practice with the church’s eighty-voice, semi-professional choir. Montview played an important role in helping Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood integrate during the 1960s. Park Hill embraced integration during the Civil Rights era and formed successful action committees similar to those that helped integrate Hyde Park in Chicago. Montview Presbyterian teamed up with Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church and Park Hill Methodist to found the Parkview Action Committee. This organization successfully curbed white flight from the neighborhood when black families began moving in. “The membership of these churches got together and said, ‘We’re not going to have that happen in our community,’” said Russ Wehner, a long-time member of Montview Presbyterian who knew the Rices, “and together we created an economically, socially, and racially integrated community.” According to the church’s biography, The Spirit of Montview: 1902-2002, “church members were asked to sign a nondiscriminatory two-way pledge when buying or selling real estate. Montview joined other churches . . . in working to make Park Hill Denver’s first racially integrated community, indeed one of the first in the United States.”
In the 1960s, Montview’s senior pastor Arthur Miller invited black leaders to speak at the church before most everyone else. “He got Martin Luther King, Jr., to come to Denver and preach at Montview during the height of the Civil Rights movement,” said Wehner, “and it took an enormous amount of courage on his part because this was before it was an acceptable thing to do.” In 1969, Montview invited Duke Ellington to perform his “Second Sacred Service” at the church. The production included the Montview choir and members of the Denver Symphony Orchestra, and it was a widely attended, sensational event in the history of the church and the community.
As one of four associate pastors, John Rice preached about once every month, worked as a counselor, and directed an adult education program called the 49ers. The study group derived its name from the Colorado Gold Rush and was also scheduled to last forty-nine minutes. “Under Rice’s direction, the popular 49ers Contemporary Forum flourished,” states the church’s biography. Most of John’s work at the church involved pastoral duties such as visiting shut-ins and sick parishioners in the hospitals. His position as a dean and instructor at the university prevented him from being a full-time clergyman. Wehner recalled that Reverend Rice was a prominent figure in the community and a highly respected member of the clergy. “He brought an enormous amount of prestige to the church because of his affiliation with the university and because he was an African-American person who was very well respected,” he said.
Just as he did with his students at the university, John helped his fellow parishioners at Montview look at things from a new perspective. “When John came on the staff he worked with a group we had organized called The Integration of Montview,” said former pastor Richard Hutchison. “He was very helpful and gave us all a real revelation at one meeting. We were talking about how we could attract more black members, and he said, ‘Well, do all of you agree with integration?’ We answered that of course we did, and he then asked us where the nearest black Presbyterian church was located. We told him there was one just a couple of miles away. Then he asked, ‘Why don’t some of you join it?’ We realized that we believed in integration, but we put the burden of doing it onto blacks.
“John was always forthright, honest, and challenging,” Richard continued, “a very interesting man. He was so honest and secure in his selfhood that he didn’t get defensive or angry. Condi inherited some of that from him.”
The classical music tradition at Montview was very appealing to Condi. They sang masterworks from all periods of the sacred repertoire, and were known as one of the best choirs in the city. “She had a beautiful voice,” said fellow choir member Margaret Wehner. “She also gave a piano recital at the church, and that’s why I felt at that time she was going on in music. I remember her very outgoing, bubbly personality—she was a talented and lovely young lady.” Some of the pieces performed by the choir made a deep and lasting impression on Condi. “We performed . . . the Beethoven Christ on the Mount of Olives,” she recalled in an interview on public radio, “and I fell in love with the piece; it isn’t a very oft-performed oratorio. And for me, one of the great moments was when I was in Israel for the first time in August of 2000 standing on the Mount of Olives. And as often happens in memory, this great oratorio just comes flooding back and puts it all together for me.”
In addition to his work as a university dean, an educator, and a pastor, John Rice also served in Denver city government and made trips to Washington, D.C., to serve as a counselor on the Foreign Service Generalist Selection Board. In 1978, he was appointed by Mayor W.H. McNichols, Jr., to the Denver Urban Renewal Authority. He was a member of various organizations, such as the Kiwanis Club and Optimist Club, that put him in touch with city businessmen and leaders, and at the university he was a member of the Phi Delta Kappa and Alpha Phi Alpha fraternities.
Condi was no less ambitious or busy. Skating had become very important to her, and she looks back at her training on the rink as a vital part of shaping her into the person she is today. “I believe that sports has a place,” she said in 1999. “I myself was an athlete, and I believe I may have learned more from my failed figure-skating career than I did from anything else. Athletics gives you a kind of toughness and discipline that nothing else really does.” This was another life lesson inherited from her father.
Condi was very pleased that she choose to stay at the university for her entire undergraduate program. “The University of Denver is a gem of a school,” she said several years later, “and I have tremendous affection for the place.” She graduated with a B.A. in political science at age nineteen in 1974, and was one of the most honored cum laude graduates of the year. She graduated with honors, having completed a special sequence of courses in addition to getting excellent grades in the regularly assigned coursework. She was one of ten to win the Political Science Honors Award for “outstanding accomplishment and promise in the field of political science.” In the commencement bulletin she was also listed as a member of the Mortar Board, a women’s senior honorary organization. Her excellent grades and breadth of coursework earned her entry into Phi Beta Kappa, the honorary scholastic society. The Greek letters of this organization make a fitting motto for the entire Rice-Ray family line: “Love of wisdom, the guide of life.”
Each of these honors distinguished Condi as a top student, but another even more prominent award announced at graduation drew wide attention to her outstanding achievements: Outstanding Senior Woman. The university describes this as “the highest honor granted to the female member of the senior class whose personal scholarship, responsibilities, achievements and contributions to the University throughout her University career deserve recognition.” Condoleezza Rice, once described as “not college material,” was the most highly honored undergraduate woman of the 1974 class.
The commencement speech that year was given by Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, who stressed that each of the students were personally responsible for helping the nation recover from the constitutional chaos that the Watergate scandal revealed. Condi was overwhelmed by the weight of that calling. “Since he didn’t tell me precisely how I was going to do that,” she recalled, “I wasn’t sure that the one course I’d had in American politics had prepared me for that, and I started to think maybe I should just stay in college or get a nine-to-five job and forget all of those challenges that everyone’s giving me because I don’t have a chance.” That speech helped her refine her approach to problem-solving, and when she became a professor, she would advise her students to tackle the big problems of the world with whatever contributions they were prepared to offer, however small.
Leaving the university with such distinction gave her smooth entrée into graduate-level work, a highly anticipated labor of love in which she could pursue Russian and Soviet studies in-depth. She chose to begin at one of the best international politics departments in the country, and packed her bags for Notre Dame, Indiana.