FIVE
“Culture is something you can adopt, and I have a great affinity for Russia. . . . There is something about certain cultures that you just take to . . . .It’s like love—you can’t explain why you fall in love.”
—Condoleezza Rice
ONCE upon a time in Old Russia, a beautiful young Princess was turned into a frog by her father, a wizard, who was jealous of her powers. One day Tsarevna Lyagushka (the Frog Princess) sees an arrow falling from the sky and catches it in her mouth. A prince steps out from the woods looking for his arrow. Prince Ivan has been instructed that it will lead him to his bride, so he marries the frog.
When the couple return to the kingdom, the king announces a contest in which he hopes to find the most talented, capable, and creative woman in the land, a woman everyone can admire. The first task in his competition is to sew a shirt. Prince Ivan walks home very unhappy, but his frog bride tells him not to worry. That night she hops outside and turns into a beautiful princess, Vasilia the Wise. She summons her mystical sisters to help her make a fine shirt of gold and silver threads. In the morning, the prince brings the shirt to the king, who proclaims that it far surpasses any shirt he has ever seen. The frog continues to astound the king with each new task, while others scoff and grow angry at her cleverness. No one, not even her dear Prince Ivan, knows that she is a royal being in disguise.
When the king invites everyone to a grand ball, Prince Ivan is once again sad because he knows that everyone will laugh at him and his frog bride. The Frog Princess tells him not to worry and to wait for her at the palace table. That night she arrives as Vasilia the Wise in all her glory. After the prince successfully overcomes a difficult set of tasks himself, the spell is broken and Vasilia the Wise upholds her true form forever.
In both undergraduate and graduate school, Condoleezza Rice’s academic accomplishments in her chosen field gave her a kinship with Tsarevna Lyagushka. In newly desegregated America, it was still considered exceptional for a black woman to attend graduate school, excel in foreign languages, and become a leading scholar in any field. At times Condi has winced over the assumption that because she is black these accomplishments are somehow more exceptional. She has used a fairy tale-like term to describe this reaction—the “Condi in Wonder-land” phenomenon. She feels that those who consider it a rare and extraordinary feat for a black woman to excel in the way she has cast her as a larger-than-life, wondrous figure. But, as she explains—and as the Russian story says—amazing things can come in all kinds of packages. “I’m five-foot-eight, black and female,” she said. “I can’t go back and repackage myself. I can’t do an experiment to figure out whether any of this would have happened to me had I been white and male, or white and female, or black and male. So I spend no time worrying about it.”
Condi’s attraction to Russia, the Russian language, and the Soviet Union had blossomed into an obsession by the time she entered graduate school. She couldn’t explain why she felt such a strong attraction to that part of the world; she simply followed her bliss. Years later, she would meet others in foreign policy who, like her, had devoted themselves to Soviet history and the Russian language without having an ancestral background that could explain their interest.
Choosing a graduate school wasn’t difficult as John and Angelena Rice were virtual encyclopedias of information about post-secondary education. Since Condi’s birth, her parents had discussed which colleges could provide her with the best opportunities, and the family tours of college campuses during their summer road trips had also filled them with facts that they had filed away for future use. John Rice’s dual careers in the church and academia allowed him to become acquainted with prominent people in both areas who could make recommendations about college choices. One such figure was Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame. The Rices knew that Notre Dame was one of America’s most competitive private universities, but John’s conversations with Father Hesburgh gave him a closer view of the school’s conservative, value-oriented philosophy.
From the date of its formation by a Roman Catholic priest in 1842, Notre Dame’s mission has been to provide an education “that addresses questions of value and meaning.” Although a large percentage of Notre Dame’s students are not Catholic, part of the university’s mission is to encourage students to partake in community service and approach life as a way to “experience the invisible God” who works through “persons, events and material things.” Another tenet of the school’s Roman Catholic framework is that “God’s grace prompts human activity to assist the world in creating justice grounded in love.”
This view—spiritual development on a par with scholarly work—was very attractive to Reverend Rice, a man who had devoted himself to guiding young people to develop their faith as well as their minds. He thought it would be the ideal place for Condi to pursue her graduate studies.
Condi’s new mentor at Notre Dame, George Brinkley, recalled that she shared her father’s conservative outlook and his attraction to the school’s ideals. “Condoleezza came to Notre Dame in part, I think, because of its conservative reputation,” he said. “She’s a very complicated person and it’s hard to say that this is the reason she came—she’s very much her own person. But I think she also liked it because it was a relatively small university with a commitment to values and philosophy and fundamental ideas as well as practical programs and training. I liked it for that reason, although I’m not Catholic, and neither is Condi . . . The faculty is about one-half non-Catholic. The graduate programs in particular have always been much broader and tend to draw students of all backgrounds.”
In addition to her father’s endorsement and the small class sizes, Condi had another excellent reason to apply to Notre Dame’s political science program. The Department of Government and International Studies contained one of the country’s top Soviet studies centers, launched by another European émigré who, like Korbel at Denver, was recruited to help the American effort in catching up on Russian and Soviet history. Stephen D. Kertesz, a Hungarian diplomat who fled his country when the communists took power in 1947, was invited to help set up the program on the recommendation of Philip Mosely, head of Columbia University’s Russian Institute (now the Harriman Institute). Notre Dame had been consulting with Mosely about forming its own program, as his directorship of the Russian Institute at Columbia gave him access to many of the political émigrés from Europe.
Philip Mosely’s Russian Institute—the nation’s first Soviet/Russian studies program—spawned a host of programs like the international studies department Condi entered at Notre Dame. As the nuclear superpower rivalry between the United States and the USSR continued through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, these programs attracted students who sought government and academic careers. “The government gathered all those it could collect to inform and guide our wartime relations and our planning for the postwar period,” wrote Mark L. von Hagen, director of the Harriman Institute. “Most graduates of these institutes found jobs waiting for them, with government almost a guaranteed employer.”
Stephen Kertesz, slated to head up Notre Dame’s program, had been an official in Hungary’s foreign ministry, including one post as first secretary of the Hungarian legation in Bucharest where he was responsible for the Hungarian minority population in southern Transylvania. He wrote extensively on Eastern European politics after he joined the faculty at Notre Dame.
Among the new scholars at the Russian Institute was George Brinkley, who completed the institute’s certificate program and also earned a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia. As part of the second generation of Soviet scholars from that institute, he chose the academic route and joined Kertesz and the rest of the Notre Dame faculty in 1958. Brinkley became one of the distinguished draws to the Notre Dame program and launched a distinguished publishing career with early papers such as “Leninism: What It Was and What It Was Not,” “The ‘Withering’ of the State under Khrushchev,” and “The Soviet Union and the United Nations: The Changing Role of the Developing Countries.” One of his first books, The Volunteer Army and the Revolution in South Russia, was awarded the American History Association’s George Louis Beer Prize.
Notre Dame’s government and international studies department became an important center for study of Russia and the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. Scholarship in these areas was very focused, and academics had the luxury of studying one nation, unlike the demands on scholars in other departments to cover an entire region. Soviet studies captivated those who wanted to get inside the Cold War and do some of the most cutting-edge research in history and politics. Those who came to Notre Dame’s department could look forward to careers in foreign policy or international relations or use it as groundwork for further graduate work in law or academia. Condi had not decided which route to take when she entered Notre Dame, but she felt that her job options were better than they had been when she was a music major. When asked what she was going to do with degrees in her new area, she responded, “Well, the job market’s a lot better in Russian history than it is in concert piano.”
Condi was accepted into the graduate school at Notre Dame and began a specialized master’s program under George Brinkley. He was flexible about Condi’s program, and helped the department carefully construct a degree plan that drew upon her strengths and interests. He recalled that Condi, like many students in the department, arrived without extensive previous work in Soviet studies. “Most students had little background,” he said, “so we had to teach them basics [like] history and background so they would understand the Soviet Union and communism.”
Condi stood out, however, due to the extra reading she had done while immersing herself in the topic during her junior and senior years at Denver. She had read extensively about World War II and about military conflicts in general, and also delved into Russia’s novelists including Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. “He understood the dark side of Russia better than anyone else,” she said of Solzhenitsyn. “Like most Russian [novelists], it was tragedy without redemption.” In addition to the history books and novels, Condi’s Russian language lessons provided insight into Russian literature and culture. Ever since her first course with Korbel, she had devoured the topic and considered her expanding reading list an adventure, an ardent labor of love.
Brinkley immediately recognized that she was a quick study and very gifted. “Our graduate program in Soviet and East European studies has a base of required courses,” he said. “But she was extremely bright, so she came better prepared than most students.” As he got to know her over the course of the year, he came to understand her parents’ role in developing her remarkable confidence and academic abilities. “She was one of those self-driven students,” he said. “Since she was a small child she has had a sense of self worth that comes out of a certain kind of experience. Her father motivated her with the idea that regardless of what life held during her childhood, there were very important things like education that enabled her to do what she wanted and be a success in whatever she wanted to go into.”
Brinkley also remarked on Condi’s knack for the Russian language. “She had some Russian before she came to Notre Dame,” he said, “but my impression was that she learned very quickly and just had a talent. Where it was extremely difficult for me, she picked it up quite readily.”
The department set out to create a specialized program for Condi, one that would give her the challenge she desired. “It was clear from the beginning that we couldn’t put her in a fixed set of requirements,” said Brinkley. “I could see that she was someone who was so highly motivated, and who had also read a tremendous amount, that she would benefit from a lot of opportunities to work on her own. And she wanted to do that.” Brinkley organized her graduate work to include some regular courses plus a great deal of independent work through a course of study called directed readings. Condi did far more independent study work than any of the other students in the program. In that arrangement, she worked directly with Professor Brinkley, first settling on a topic, then creating a reading list and conducting research. Through the year she had frequent tutoring sessions with Brinkley, which created an enormously focused, highly individualized experience. She had been attracted to Notre Dame for its small graduate class sizes, but what she actually received was much more: a virtual one-on-one, expert guide to the Soviet Union with one of the leading scholars in the field.
At Denver, Condi had become interested in the balance-of-power aspects of international relations and had launched her foray into political studies by reading the work of Hans Morgenthau. She found an affinity for Morgenthau’s political realism. “I read early on and was influenced by Hans Morgenthau,” she said, adding that Zbigniew Brzezinski and John Erickson were also major influences.” Realism, or realpolitik/ power politics, was a dominant theme in the study of international relations being conducted in Soviet studies programs at Columbia, Notre Dame, the University of Denver, and elsewhere during the Cold War. The view described in the pages of Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations would come to shape Condi’s foreign policy outlook throughout her career.
She was drawn to the pragmatic approach of realism, which asserts that the actions of nation-states are based on basic human nature—like a person, a nation will fight to protect its own self-interest. “Power is the control of man over man,” wrote Morgenthau, who explained that each nation must act in its national interest. Power struggles, including wars, ensue when other nations threaten this interest. Idealism, or liberal politics, on the other hand, contends that war marks a failure in international relations and that the best chances for peace lie in cooperation and the formation of a higher organization such as the UN or the European Union. Idealists are motivated by morality issues and ideologies whereas realists concern themselves with what Morgenthau calls the “rational, objective and unemotional” outlook the nation must assume to ensure its survival. Condi agreed with the notion that the nation’s best interest was not served by trying to enforce ideological causes throughout the world.
To the realist, military force is the nation’s most significant power resource and shifts in relative power among nations often result in war. Realism is not devoid of ethics, however—any post-war social scientist had to address the moral issues of nations facing potential nuclear devastation. “Realists insisted that the national interest could and should be an expression of American values,” wrote Joel H. Rosenthal. Among those values he listed prudence, humility, the preservation of freedom and a “good-faith effort to balance ideals and self-interests.”
Condi describes herself as a realpolitiker and explains that from the beginning she was “attracted to the Byzantine nature of Soviet politics and by power: how it operates, how it’s used.” She also upholds the moral component that Americans traditionally bring to the table. “I am a realist,” she said. “Power matters. But there can be no absence of moral content in American foreign policy and, furthermore, the American people wouldn’t accept such an absence.” As summarized by Ann Reilly Dowd in a Rice profile for Georgemagazine, “Condi came to see the cold war not as a war of ideas between communism and democracy but as something more primordial—a raw contest between two great competing powers with conflicting national interests.”
Condi’s interest in military strategy became the focus of her graduate work. “While she was at Notre Dame, Condi developed a very strong interest in the Soviet military and in the problems of arms control and Soviet-American relations,” said Professor Brinkley. “She did her master’s work with some focus on the study of the Soviet military.”
Condi’s year of study at Notre Dame culminated in a research paper on that topic, which she continued to work on with Brinkley as she developed it into a doctoral dissertation at the University of Denver. “She and I worked to develop her proposal for her doctoral dissertation, and even after she went to Denver, we corresponded and talked on the telephone to get started on the doctoral research program,” he said.
Looking back on Condi’s career in academia and politics, Brinkley sees a logical progression that begins with her research at Notre Dame. Her research paper led to her doctoral dissertation, her first professorship, her work at the Pentagon, and her National Security Council posts at the White House. Her attraction for Soviet studies, ignited at Denver, became focused and cohesive for the first time at Notre Dame. She honed her research skills and gained detailed insights from a new mentor who continued to play a vital role in her graduate studies after she returned to the University of Denver.
The autumn of 1974 to the spring of 1975 was a challenging and productive time, but it wasn’t all work. Condi socialized with her new friends in South Bend and, being the type of student who can get more done in a few hours than many do in a week, she could afford to stay out late from time to time. A night out didn’t compromise her next day at school because she rarely had to attend morning classes. And she was living away from her parents for the first time, so her leisure time felt more freeing than it had in Denver. Disco had just hit the dance floors in 1974 and college towns everywhere were pounding out tunes like “The Hustle,” “Get Down Tonight,” and the new sounds of ABBA and Elton John. Condi may have been bred on Brahms and Mozart, but she also loved pop music like any other twenty-year-old. “She partied quite a bit there,” said one of her long-time friends, Deborah Carson. “She and her friends used to hang out all the time and sometimes stay out on the town until five o’clock in the morning.”
During her year at Notre Dame, Condi thought seriously about entering law school after finishing her M.A. degree. Her second cousin Connie Rice was just starting her undergraduate degree at Harvard and was interested in the profession; a few years later, she would enter the New York University School of Law. Condi applied to and was accepted into several law schools throughout the country, including the one at the University of Denver. But when Condi discussed her plans with her former professor Josef Korbel, he convinced her otherwise. “You are very talented,” he told her, “you have to become a professor.” Before that conversation, the idea of a life in academia had never entered her mind. “When I think back on that moment,” Condi said, “I don’t know if it was a subliminal message, but I had such respect and admiration for him that I took the idea seriously for the first time.”
Condi put off law school and spent the next year taking courses at the University of Denver’s Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS) in the hope that she would discover exactly what she wanted to do. Her parents had instilled in her an interest in world affairs, and as she matured, she felt it was important to become involved in the larger issues, not only as a black person, but as a well-informed, concerned American. “Thinking broadly about the whole world out there has been one of the most important things in my life,” she said. “It has been crucial to me to learn about issues which seem far removed, yet are important in all our lives.”
The courses she took that year made her realize how much she enjoyed analyzing the big issues and seeing how this analysis is put into practice to literally change the world. In her modest way, she explained that this year of search and study led her into the Graduate School of International Studies at Denver. “I realized that I liked political science more than law,” she said, “and I sort of stumbled into a Ph.D. program.” With Korbel’s encouragement, she decided to continue graduate work in political science and enrolled in his program. “He was nothing but supportive and insistent, even pushy, about me going into this field,” she said.
Condi received her master of arts degree in government from Notre Dame on August 8, 1975, and moved back to Denver. She would return to Notre Dame several years later as one of the university’s leaders—a member of the board of trustees.
When Condi returned to Denver, she moved back into her parents’ house and slipped comfortably into her old activities—singing in the Montview Presbyterian choir, practicing and giving piano lessons to keep up her technique, and watching as much football as humanly possible. Many weekends she would have a few friends over to watch games at her house, and her colleagues soon learned that she was much more than an ordinary fan. “She is one of the few people I have ever met who knows as much about the sport as I do,” said Robby Laitos, a GSIS student who first met Condi at a football party. Laitos, who now directs an international consulting company out of Denver, describes himself as a football fanatic who takes the sport “very, very seriously.” In his first year at the school, he and other new graduate students were invited to a cabin in the mountains outside of Denver one Saturday afternoon for a day of “food, music, and good company,” he said.
“That day there was a particularly exciting college football game on, I believe it was Oklahoma-Ohio State, and the game had just ended when I arrived,” said Laitos. “I was discussing the game with someone else when Condi walked up and joined the conversation. This was the first time I had met her. It was immediately apparent that she knew football, and was not just faking it. That started a two-year ‘football relationship’ between us. We never talked about Russia or school, we just talked about football.” Laitos also recalled going over to the Rices’ on Sunday afternoons to watch football and enjoy Angelena’s famous gumbo. “I remember her mother made us all gumbo soup,” he said, “and we all thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon of football and gumbo and good cheer.”
The doctoral program that Condi entered at the University of Denver had a distinguished history in both its faculty and its curriculum. Denver’s Graduate School of International Studies differed from the East Coast Soviet programs in that its curriculum has always been broad-based. Columbia’s Russian Institute, for example, had a “predominant intellectual orientation on regime studies, rather than social, economic, and cultural processes,” said its current director, Mark von Hagen. The East Coast institutes were keenly focused on the Moscow infrastructure and Cold War strategies, and after the Soviet Union dismantled they were compelled to expand dramatically to encompass cultural, economic, and social aspects of the region. Denver, on the other hand, included those themes in its curriculum from the start. “Looking back,” said GSIS professor Karen Feste, “the school doesn’t seem a lot different today than it was in the beginning because we were never caught up in the Cold War politics that some of the East Coast schools were. Broader coverage was a matter of routine for us. We had always been interested in social development and human justice in addition to the East-West divide. As a result, when the Cold War ended, our curriculum had less dramatic changes than our sister schools.”
This program, exploring several aspects of the Soviet/ Russian experience, was very attractive to Condi when she enrolled in 1976. Josef Korbel had not always welcomed women to the department—when he founded GSIS, he opposed the idea of bringing in female students and faculty because he doubted the graduates would go out and get high-ranking positions that could contribute to the stature of the department. When Karen Feste joined the department in the early 1970s, for example, Korbel voted against her appointment to the faculty. The majority voted for Feste, however, and she was brought in as a professor of international politics and research methodology. She remained the only woman on the faculty for many years, but she witnessed Korbel’s view change over time. His initial reluctance was ironic in that he strongly supported his daughter’s academic track in political science. In the 1960s, Madeleine Albright pursued her master’s and doctoral degrees in Columbia’s Department of Public Law and Government and also completed the university’s Russian Institute program. When Condi began taking classes in international studies at Denver in 1975, after returning from Notre Dame, Madeleine was running Senator Edwin Muskie’s national fund-raising campaign.
Karen Feste, one of Condi’s professors and academic advisors, became a good friend of Korbel within the first two years of her appointment, and she observed a dramatic transformation in his view about women in the program. “He and I were close,” she said. “He was the oldest one on the faculty, I was youngest; he was Old World in his approach, I was modern; and we seemed to click.” By the time Condi arrived at Denver he had thoroughly changed his outlook. He was interested in attracting the best and the brightest and, as Feste observed, “gender factors were not important.”
Karen Feste had earned her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota before joining the faculty at Denver and, in addition to teaching, has worked as a political consultant throughout the world for organizations such as Egypt’s Institute of National Planning and Kuwait University. Another of Condi’s professors, Jonathan Adelman, had received his Ph.D. in political science at Columbia (as had Brinkley, her Notre Dame professor). Since joining the faculty at GSIS, Adelman has been a visiting scholar at universities in Beijing and Moscow and has traveled extensively on speaking tours for the State Department. A prominent member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he was a member of the Allied Jewish Federation’s mission to Israel in 2002.
At GSIS, Condi also studied with Catherine Kelleher, a professor who has become one the world’s foremost experts on security issues and whose career has encompassed both academia and government. She worked at the Pentagon as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, and later served as defense advisor and personal representative of the secretary of defense at NATO. She was also the director of the Aspen Institute Berlin, the German office of the organization that conducts policy seminars for American and European leaders. In the spring of 2002, she was awarded the Bundeswehr Golden Cross of Honor, Germany’s highest military decoration, for her “contributions to transatlantic relations, especially the promotion of political dialogue between European and American decision-makers.” She is currently a professor at the Naval War College in New-port, Rhode Island.
The 1970s and 1980s were an extremely exciting time to be studying international relations and the Soviet Union. Major Cold War events that coincided with Condi’s college years included the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) signed by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972. By the time Condi started graduate school the talks had reached an impasse and India had developed nuclear weapons. In 1975, the United States and the USSR joined thirty-three other nations at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and included their signatures on the Final Act of the conference, the Helsinki Accords. This pledge to protect human rights also established the borders of Europe as they stood at the end of World War II, recognizing the Soviet Union’s domination over the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Another episode for Condi to follow as she developed her Russian reading skills in the pages of Pravda was the sale of U.S. grain to the Soviet Union in 1975. Near-famine conditions in the USSR compelled the nation to sign a long-term contract for U.S. grain. A less dour motivation for U.S.-Soviet relations also occurred that year—the spacelink of the U.S. Apollo and the Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. In the six years since the Apollo moon-walk, NASA administrators had been working to convert the Apollo mission into a program of American-Soviet cooperation. “As with so many aspects of American national policy, NASA’s programs had always reflected the current environment of foreign affairs,” stated a NASA article on the Apollo-Soyuz spacelink. “The joint flight could be seen as a part of détente, but the people at NASA saw it as much more.”
The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) kept NASA in the manned space mission, kept the flight team working, and paved the way for the international space cooperation that was essential for the next phase of space technology. The spacelink was covered on TV, which provided images of U.S.-Soviet cooperation that were painfully absent in the arms race. Statements by the astronauts and cosmonauts described the unity of the world as seen from space, a refreshing change from political stories that stressed the tensions between the superpowers. “Dear American TV people,” said cosmonaut Valeriy Kubasov during one televised spot, “It would be wrong to ask which country’s more beautiful. It would be right to say there is nothing more beautiful than our blue planet.”
In 1976, the year Condi began her Ph.D. program, she registered as a Democrat and voted for Jimmy Carter in the election. Carter’s handling of the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979, however, changed her mind about him and the Democratic party. The president called the invasion “a deliberate effort by a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people” and warned that a “Soviet-occupied Afghanistan threatens both Iran and Pakistan and is a steppingstone to their possible control over much of the world’s oil supplies.” He also said that he was shocked and saddened by the attack and that his “opinion of the Russians has changed most drastically in the last week [more] than even in the previous two and one-half years before that.” In response, he issued an embargo on grain and technology, cut back Soviet fishing privileges in American waters, postponed discussion and ratification of the SALT II treaty that he and Brezhnev had hammered out earlier that year, and called for a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. Condi thought that Carter’s shock and surprise were naive and his actions too weak. “I remember thinking, What did you think you were dealing with?” she said. “This is a horrible government—of course they invaded some foreign country! I thought it was time to have a tougher policy toward this repressive regime.”
Had it not been for Carter’s treatment of the Soviets during that crisis, Condi would probably still be a Democrat. “I was a registered Democrat and might never have changed parties were it not for what I thought was our mishandling of the Cold War,” she said in 2000. “I thought the Soviets were aggressive and playing us like a violin. I thought Carter didn’t understand the true nature of the Soviet Union, which was pretty dark.”
Condi was so passionate in her criticism of the U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union that her attitude overpowered her high regard for the Democratic party’s support of the Civil Rights movement. During the presidential campaign of 1980, she registered as a Republican and voted for Ronald Reagan. “I admired what Lyndon Johnson did for civil rights in 1964,” she said. “But by 1980 I just thought the U.S. was not pursuing an effective foreign policy, and I was attracted to Reagan’s strength. Then my political views developed in favor of smaller government.”
Condi’s Democratic beginnings are still evident in her moderate social views, such as her pro-choice stance. This makes her a self-described “all-over-the-map Republican” who is “‘very conservative’ in foreign policy, ‘ultra-conservative’ in other areas, ‘almost shockingly libertarian’ on some issues, ‘moderate’ on others, and ‘liberal’ on probably nothing.”
Many Americans who were introduced to Condi for the first time through her speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention got the impression that she became a Republican in the footsteps of her father who had been rejected by the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama. But Condi had her own reasons. “It was the constitution and foreign policy, not social issues, that drew me to the Republican party,” she said. Condi takes a ribbing from her black friends for being a Republican, but she is firm and confident in her position. “I’m in the GOP for the right reasons,” she said. “I like our foreign policy stance better. I really am a smaller government person. I don’t think every solution is in Washington.”
In the final year of Condi’s doctoral program, Polish shipyard worker Lech Walesa was named the official chairman of his non-communist trade union, Solidarity. After years of daring, illegal strikes, Walesa had gained rights for Polish workers and brought international attention to Poland’s struggles under communist rule. Not even the closest followers of these events dreamed that they signaled the beginning of the end of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Following world events like these fueled Condi’s passion for Soviet studies. Unlike the other subjects she had explored as an undergraduate, this field had powerful, real-world immediacy that impacted the way nations behaved, the way people lived, and the way history unfolded.
To Josef Korbel, Condi stood out among her fellow students at GSIS because she possessed the complete package—academic brilliance, self-motivation, and a Russian-language background. “Korbel liked Condi because she was smart, she was quick, she was energetic and she knew Russian,” said Feste. “Those are factors that mattered to him.” Foreign language was a crucial part of the program in Korbel’s view, and he demanded that students start working on a Slavic language before entering the program. “Korbel told students who wanted to study East or Central Europe or the former Soviet Union that they better have a language before they came to study with him,” said Feste. “Condi was a perfect candidate because she did have a background in Russian. Others didn’t; they had followed the politics but hadn’t studied a language. He told them to come back after they had studied one of the languages such as Czech, Polish, or Russian.”
Condi not only continued her Russian lessons but also began studying Czech, as her Russian professor Libor Brom was Czech and encouraged her to pursue it. Today, her professional resume states that she is fluent in Russian and has “research ability” in Czech and French.
Korbel was known for being extremely gracious with those he liked and severe with those who did not measure up to his standards. “He expected a lot out of people,” said Feste. “He gravitated toward people who he thought were very intelligent.” Condi got along very well with him, and he pushed her relentlessly to aim high in the field. Korbel’s support and enthusiasm for Condi’s career echoed the support he gave his daughter, and this attention made him a new father figure. “He was as proud of [Madeleine], and as aggressive about her prospects, as he was about me,” Condi said. His faith in her talent proved to be well justified.
One of Korbel’s themes that would come to light in Condi’s work with George W. Bush was his insistence that students learn to translate policy into clear, concise language. “It was Josef Korbel who taught her that a leader must articulate foreign policy in ways ordinary people can understand,” wrote Ann Blackman in her biography of Madeleine Albright, “that in times of crisis, citizens will not rally to the cause if they do not understand the impact it will have on their daily lives.” Condi took this lesson to heart and developed a reputation as someone who can bring the most complex policy issues down to earth. That ability made her George W.’s first choice as foreign policy tutor during the presidential campaign, and it is a central part of her job as national security advisor.
Although Korbel was Condi’s mentor and favorite teacher, they did not always agree. She said he was “probably more liberal on domestic politics than I was,” but added, “he was a wonderful storyteller and very attentive to his students. It was that attentiveness, plus his ability to weave larger conceptual issues around very interesting stories, that made him such a powerful teacher.”
The large amount of independent study work that Condi did at Notre Dame prepared her well for the rigorous process at GSIS. “Our program works best for students who work autonomously,” said Feste, “and she was one of those people. She was willing to seek out help when she needed it and just do the work; that was Condi’s approach.” Coursework in the program included topics such as military history, Soviet foreign policy, Soviet and Russian history, communism, international politics, and Soviet and Russian culture. She narrowed her research for her dissertation to comparative military regimes, working closely with Jonathan Adelman who co-chaired her dissertation committee and with George Brinkley, her former professor at Notre Dame. Her study analyzed the Czech military and its effects upon the nation’s society and politics. It was pioneering research that resulted in a unique contribution to the field. “There wasn’t a lot written about the subject,” said Adelman. “There wasn’t a lot of information out there, [but] that didn’t stop her. She rolled up her sleeves.” To Adelman, her eagerness to meet this challenge revealed a lot about her character. “People might see her as contained,” he said. “But she can be quite daring, flexible, and innovative.”
Her study included a seven-week trip to the Soviet Union with a brief stop in Poland. In Moscow, she was forced to be unusually creative in her research methods due to the scarcity of documented information. Her relatively brief visit put a real face on the research topics she pursued in the libraries at the University of Denver. “The General Staff [of the USSR] was my life for five years,” she said. “I would go to Moscow and count the windows in the Ministry of Defense General Staff building to figure out how many people worked there because the data was never published.” Later, when she was working in Bush Senior’s administration, she discussed the subject with Sergei Akhromoyev, who had been the leader of the Soviet General Staff for many years. She had estimated that there were about 5,000 members of the staff, and when she asked him for the figure, he said, “About 5,000.” Her creative research methods had worked.
On her research trip, Condi finally had the opportunity to experience the culture that had enthralled her for years. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, she could visit the concert halls in which Tchaikovsky conducted his symphonies, Rubinstein poured out Chopin, and young Rachmaninov conducted opera. She saw firsthand how the solid authority of the state manifested itself in the imposing walls surrounding the Kremlin, the sprawling memorials to the nation’s heroes, and the majestic architecture of the subway system. She was surrounded by the beauty of the Russian language, which swirled through the steamy coffeehouses and which by now she could speak and read with confidence.
Very few black individuals lived in Moscow, and although Condi had grown accustomed to predominantly white classrooms, she was a minority as both a black person and an American in the USSR capital. According to one Russian native, this would have made her a very popular character. Dmitri Gerasamenko, a native of St. Petersburg and graduate of the St. Petersburg State Theatre Arts Academy, noted the extraordinary phase in which foreigners, including black people, first trickled into the Soviet Union. “The majority of Soviets didn’t have the opportunity to interact with blacks before 1957, the year of the International Students Festival in Moscow,” he said. “The Iron Curtain had been up for forty years and suddenly people from all over the world were coming to Moscow for the first time. The visitors were astounded by the wonderful energy in Moscow, although the people were so poor, they were proud to share whatever they had, to have some room in their communal apartments to entertain.
“Foreigners saw that the people were generous and cheerful in spite of their poverty,” he added. “After that, foreigners began to visit the city, and many Moscow people saw blacks for the first time. In the 1960s you could see black people being followed down the street by curious Russians who would touch them to be sure they were real; they couldn’t believe their eyes. This was done with a sense of innocent curiosity. We students in the 1970s and 1980s were so hungry for another culture that we went out of our way to talk to foreigners, to try to make them feel comfortable in our culture and to learn about their lives and where they came from. The capitalist countries were of real interest to people. Our people didn’t know anything about life in America or other democratic countries.”
Reflecting on the five-year period in the late 1970s and early 1980s in which Condi traveled to Moscow for her dissertation research, Gerasamenko said, “A black student from a prestigious American university who could speak Russian would have been treated with much hospitality and respect,” he said. “In the first place, the Russians were so grateful to meet people who spoke Russian, even if it was just ‘Hi’ or ‘How are you,’ any attempt was met with great delight. I would assume that Rice’s knowledge and unique American experience must have been fascinating to the Russians who met her during those years.”
In the summer of 1977, Condi went on a domestic trip as part of her research, which gave her a glimpse into the U.S. military complex for the first time. She went to Washington to work as an intern at the Department of State, spending weeks inside the Pentagon. Later in her program she took on another summer internship at the Rand Corporation, the policy research organization that had been founded by the military airpower supplier, Douglas Aircraft, after World War II. Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, and Arlington, Virginia, Rand was a perfect fit for a student focusing on international security. Its research areas include world political, military, and economic trends; sources of potential regional conflict; and emerging threats to U.S. security.
Back home in Denver, Condi’s social life continued to revolve around football—but with an added dimension. During those years she dated a member of the Denver Broncos and their romance turned into a very serious relationship. Condi’s boyfriend was a “very major player,” according to her friend Deborah Carson, and the couple got engaged. Condi socialized with NFL wives, sat in the good seats at games with them and became a well-loved member of that intimate inner circle of the NFL. She picked out her wedding gown and started to work with her mother on all the arrangements, but the couple broke up before the wedding. “She was seriously going to marry him,” said Carson, “and I really don’t know what happened. It wasn’t anything like a major blowup; I think they just got to the point where they didn’t get along.”
When Condi finished her doctoral program at Denver, she was twenty-six years old. She would date more football players, as well as men in other lines of work, but she did not get engaged again (up to the time of this writing in 2002).
The final product of Condi’s work was a dissertation entitled The Politics of Client Command: The Case of Czechoslovakia 1948-1975. This would become the basis for her first book, Uncertain Alliance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1963, which was published by Princeton University Press in 1984.
On the morning of August 14, 1981, she joined her graduating colleagues in the outdoor commencement ceremony on the University of Denver’s Margery Reed Quadrangle. With a Ph.D. in international studies and a post-doctoral position at Stanford in the wings, twenty-six-year-old Condi was set to embark upon a distinguished academic career. Although her parents and other family members stood proudly by, the absence of one person made the day bittersweet. Josef Korbel had died of cancer in 1977. He did not live to see his star pupil or his daughter become prominent world figures. “He died of stomach cancer, and he had a tough time at the end,” said Karen Feste, “but he was active to the last minute.” On his sickbed, Korbel continued working on a new manuscript about Czech soldiers in World War I.
From the mentoring she received from Korbel to the stimulating challenges of her research topic, Condi’s experience at Denver was extremely positive, and she remembers it warmly. “Because of the small, interactive faculty in the GSIS, I received solid training in political philosophy and methodology,” she said. “I liked the interdisciplinary curriculum and unrestricted choices.” Receiving her diploma that summer morning, Condi completed her college years in a field that she had not even heard of when she first began taking undergraduate music courses at the university. Later, she would recommend her students to make an active search for a field that ignites their passion, as she did. “I tell students, ‘If you don’t know what you want, start exploring. Find a class you like and a professor with whom you have a rapport. ’” The life-altering switch from music to Soviet studies had taught her a lesson in flexibility, in the virtues of not limiting yourself with a rigid plan. “[For years] I structured my life to be a concert musician,” she said. “That was all I wanted to do. And it fell apart on me. I’m never going to do that again.” This realization appeared to affect her career significantly—from that point on, she committed herself to working diligently on the job at hand while staying open to whatever might come.
The GSIS faculty attending commencement that day knew that they would hear much more from Condoleezza Rice. “I think we all knew that she was going to do something quite superior to the average student,” said Arthur Gilbert, another professor who reviewed Condi’s dissertation. Karen Feste echoed that prediction. “We always thought Condi would be successful,” recalled Karen Feste. “Over the years we have had some excellent students in our program who stand out during their time at Denver, and with each of them we know it’s going to happen—we don’t know when, but we know it’s going to happen.” With Condi, it all began to happen in California.