SIX
“The understanding of arms control, the respective views and needs of all the nations, is fundamental to our very existence. Blacks should be part of this understanding, as they should be in every other field of American thought and progress. It would be a shame to leave such a vital national concern in the hands of white males over forty!”
—Condoleezza Rice, 1983
ON the morning of December 1, 1989, a light rain put a sheen on the deck of the USS Belknap, a guided-missile cruiser docked with the Sixth Fleet in Valletta Harbor at Malta. The weather outlook for the Mediterranean islands was not good that week, and by nightfall gale force winds created sixteen-foot swells that jerked the massive ship up and down like a toy. President Bush settled into the comfortable admiral’s quarters and tried to get some rest before the momentous conference to come. At the Malta Summit the president would meet Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and present U.S. positions on several issues as well as express support for Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms. The Malta summit—dubbed by the press as the “seasick summit”—was the first superpower meeting ever held on a ship, and the opening talks had to be postponed for a day because of the choppy waters.
The U.S. delegation to the summit included Secretary of State James A. Baker III, White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. Joining Scowcroft was the National Security Council’s Soviet expert, thirty-five-year-old Condoleezza Rice. When Bush introduced Rice to Gorbachev, he described her as the woman who “tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union.” Others in the room watched as Gorbachev, looking surprised and skeptical, turned to Condi and said, “I hope you know a lot.”
One of the reasons Condi had become a Soviet expert was the fact that it was a hands-on, ever-changing field in which history was being rewritten every day. As an undergraduate taking her first courses in international relations, little did she know that one day she would be front-and-center at one of the most historic scenes in modern political history—the end of the Cold War. The first day of talks took place in a book-lined room of the Soviet cruiser Maxim Gorky, the only ship in the harbor heavy enough to withstand the rolling waves. In eight hours of talks held over two days, Bush and Gorbachev discussed arms control, trade policies, Soviet emigration laws, military conventional forces in Europe, and other issues. The most profound outcome was the two leaders’ agreement that the old rivalry between their nations was history. “[The] characteristics of the Cold War should be abandoned,” said Gorbachev at the end of the Malta Summit. “The arms race, mistrust, psychological and ideological struggle, all these things should be of the past.” President Bush agreed, stating that the world was on the “threshold of a brand new era of U.S.-Soviet relations.” At Malta, Bush and Gorbachev opened up a new age of cooperation between the superpowers. And Condi Rice was there.
Condi’s career as both an academic and a policy maker had begun eight years previously at Stanford University. Following graduation at Denver at age twenty-six, she received a post-doctorate fellowship to continue her research at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Arms Control, part of the university’s Institute for International Studies. Stanford, about thirty-five miles south of San Francisco, boasted a renowned faculty of Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners and offered one of the most beautiful campuses in the country. The cluster of California Mission-style buildings with their red-tiled roofs, surrounded by thousands of oak, palm, and eucalyptus trees, formed the oldest section of the colossal campus situated on 8,000 acres of land in sight of San Francisco Bay.
The fellowship gave Condi a stipend of about $30,000, an office, and access to all of Stanford’s libraries, research facilities, and department faculty. As a Soviet scholar, she joined policymakers, business people, security specialists, and other experts at the Center to study contemporary issues of international security. It was the only department to offer “a fully disciplinary course in arms control in the whole nation,” and students who took its courses were training to become arms control and security specialists. Most graduates went on to hold a variety of government arms-control positions. (The department is now called the Center for International Security and Cooperation.)
The fellowship was to last for one academic year, but a few months after she arrived, Condi made such a big impression at a talk she presented to the political science department that she was asked to join the faculty. The department was seeking qualified minorities and Condi fit the bill for affirmative action not only as a black person, but also as a woman in a field dominated by men. Once she got in, however, there would be no guarantees that her position would be renewed unless she proved herself worthy of the job. “They didn’t need another Soviet specialist,” said Condi, “but they asked themselves, ‘How often does a black female who could diversify our ranks come along?’” The department chair explained his position: “We have a three-year period here,” he told her, “and then you have to be renewed. And nobody’s going to look at race, nobody’s going to look at gender; and you don’t get any special breaks; and you surely don’t get any special breaks when you come up for tenure.” Condi thought, “Well, yeah, that seems perfectly fair.”
In the fall of 1981 Condi began the semester as an assistant professor of political science. She was also named assistant director of the Center for International Security and Arms Control. At twenty-six, her scholarship, knack for teaching, and personality stood out and earned her respect from faculty and students. “I think what struck people at the time was a combination of all the personal stuff—charm and very gracious personality . . . a kind of intellectual agility mixed with velvet-glove forcefulness,” said Coit Blacker, one of her fellow professors. “She’s a steel magnolia,” he continued, adding that her Southern graciousness is mixed with “a very steely inner core” and extreme self-discipline.
John Ferejohn, who joined Stanford’s political science department as a professor in 1983, recalled that Condi was the only black person on the faculty at the time. He recognized her qualities of leadership and persuasiveness—traits that she has carried throughout her career. “She got along well with everybody,” he said, “and even when she was just an assistant professor she exhibited a lot of what you see now—a very effective leader, decisive, clear-headed. Even when you disagree with her about something, she has good reasons. She’s effective when she’s opposing you—she often wins.”
Over the next decade she taught several classes, most of which she called “applied” political science that dealt with the military, national security, and foreign policy. Her courses included:
“Soviet Bloc and the Third World”: an exploration of the political, military, and economic activities of the Soviet Union and its allies in the Third World.
“The Role of the Military in Politics”: a survey of the interaction between military and political leaders in three types of governments: Western-industrial, communist, and that of developing countries. Condi used examples of leaders in the United States, the USSR, China, Brazil, and Nigeria.
“The Politics of Alliances”: this class examined NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and other nineteenth and twentieth century military-political alliances in the international system.
“Political Elites”: a seminar on the recruitment and behavior of political decision-makers in the legislative, administrative, executive, and military departments of government.
“U.S. and Soviet National Security Policies: The Responsibilities of Empire in the Nuclear Age”: a comparison of how the two superpowers balance domestic and international responsibilities with a close look at their national security systems
“The Institutions of Violence”: a seminar on revolutionary change, the role of the military and the police.
“The Transformation of Europe”: explored through the eyes of decision-makers in Washington, Bonn, Moscow, Paris, and London, this course discussed the changes in Europe between 1989 and 1990.
One of her favorite teaching methods was to have her students re-create major foreign policy decisions in a series of role-playing sessions. After the students researched and wrote papers about the event, they were each assigned to play a particular figure. She felt that this gave the students a broader understanding of what actually goes on in decision-making situations and provided more insight than simply reading a text. “It is increasingly difficult to generate in students a sense of the complexity involved in foreign policy with the methods available in the literature of political science and history,” she said. She felt that role-playing helped students grasp the importance of the key players’ personalities and emotional reactions as well as the roles played by members of Congress, the press, bureaucrats, and special interest groups. She explained that the “orderly, post hoc recreations that we teach” in textbooks leave out many important aspects of the story. While re-enacting an event, students were often shocked at their own behavior. “It’s interesting to watch students come to terms with how they behave,” said Condi. “They will say, ‘I never thought I could behave that way.’”
One student, Troy Eid, recalled the drama of a role-playing session in which he played a Soviet defense minister, complete with a Russian Army officer’s coat. The reenactment lasted an entire week, and at one point he fell asleep, exhausted, in Condi’s office. She woke him up and gave him coffee so he could keep with the program. “It is still the most intense week I’ve ever had,” he said, which is saying a lot from a man who went on to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School, become chief counsel to Colorado Governor Bill Owens, and subsequently CEO of a large Internet systems development company.
As a Republican, Condi did not fit the traditionally liberal mold of academia. And she did not try to keep her conservative views under wraps. One student recalled that she was known as “Condi the Hawk,” and John Ferejohn stated that her Republican Party affiliation “wasn’t a surprise, it was commonly known about her. She was active in the community. She doesn’t hide her light under a bushel. She’s very straightforward.”
In her classes on military topics, Condi often opened her first lecture with a football analogy. Anyone who knew her understood that one of her favorite topics was the comparison of football to war. Paul Brest, former dean of Stanford Law School and current president of the Hewlett Foundation, recalled going to a Stanford Cardinal’s game with Condi. He had scheduled an event at the law school for the head of the San Francisco 49ers. “Condi heard about it,” he said, “and told me, ‘I’m not going to let you embarrass the university because I know you don’t know anything about football, so I’m going to take you to a Stanford football game.” She sat down between Paul and his wife and gave them a crash course in the game. “The first thing she said was, ‘Football is like war, it’s about taking territory,’” Paul said.
Condi is not the first to make this analogy. Stephen Crane, author of the Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895), was asked how he could write so convincingly about a war that he had not experienced. “I believe that I got my sense of the rage of the conflict on the football field,” he answered. Teddy Roosevelt once said, “In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard.” And Walter Camp (1859-1925), the man who created American football, described a “remarkable and interesting likeness between the theories which underlie great battles and the miniature contests of the gridiron.”
Many football players and other jocks attended Condi’s large survey classes and connected with the analogy. One female student commented that she felt a bit alienated by the approach, however. She took a freshman class from Condi just as war was breaking out in Bosnia in 1992. “It was a large lecture class that focused on military action and intervention,” she said, “and it was very interesting because it was going on just as the Yugoslav crisis was happening. Dr. Rice started out the class by giving a football analogy, comparing football strategies to turf battles between nations. It struck me to hear this because she was a woman; it had a kind of stereotypically male bent to it. I think that for impressionistic students it’s a tool and it works, but unfortunately it’s sort of dangerous when you have a lot of football players in your class who are out there playing the game every day. I think that it brings war down to the football level rather than vice versa. To me it was an unappealing analogy for that reason. But that didn’t make her a bad teacher; the class was very interesting and I learned a ton.”
One of Condi’s colleagues remarked that the passion she brought to teaching was obvious even after she left the classroom. “Anyone who has had the good fortune to have a meeting with Professor Rice immediately after one of her lectures can sense the excitement she brings to the classroom,” he said. “Just by the way she talks about the lecture she has just given, it is obvious that she is still completely engaged in her subject and in her students to a truly extraordinary degree.” Students who had Condi as an academic advisor knew that she was seriously committed to them. “I will always remember the fifty-five-minute phone conversation in the middle of the day to get back to me on a draft of my dissertation proposal,” said one graduate student. Another graduate student described her as “a marvelous facilitator, a teacher in an ancient Socratic sense. Her command for guiding our discussions and ensuring our eventual arrival at major conceptual understandings was outstanding among the teachers I had at Stanford.” Condi left a lasting impression as a role model on a group of students who attended one of her seminar courses. “She . . . treated us all like we were her favorite students,” she said. “By the end of the seminar, several of the students were wistfully thinking about how much we wanted to be like her. This was not idle hero-worship. She seemed to be the embodiment of everything we admired about academia. She was knowledgeable without being close-minded, prestigious without being pompous, and her lectures were complex without being dry.”
When Condi’s three-year trial period was over the university gave her a positive appraisal and renewed her assistant professorship. She had, in fact, become one of the university’s most highly regarded instructors. In 1984 Stanford awarded her the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, the school’s highest honor for teaching. Presenting the award during the commencement ceremonies on June 17, Provost Albert Hastorf praised her “for bringing enthusiasm and insight to her lectures and sparking the sense of curiosity and fascination in her students that she herself feels.” He also remarked that she was renowned for giving “incalculable support, encouragement and inspiration to her undergraduate advisees.”
Condi advised both undergraduates and graduate students, and one of her Ph.D. students is a rising star in foreign policy. Jendayi Frazier was hired to teach at Condi’s alma mater, Denver’s Graduate School of International Studies, after graduating from Stanford in the early 1990s. Her training as an Africa policy expert included a research position at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. Harvard hired her away from Denver, making her an assistant professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government. When Condi became George W.’s national security advisor, she appointed Jendayi to the National Security Council as its Africa expert. Her official title is special assistant to the president and senior director for African affairs.
Josef Korbel’s assessment that Condi had the makings of a talented professor was borne out as she continued to climb the academic ladder at Stanford. In 1987, she was promoted to associate professor and in 1993, at age thirty-eight, became a full professor. That year she received another distinguished honor: the School of Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. The award came with a $5,000 cash prize and a $1,000 increase in salary.
By 1984, Condi had become good friends with fellow professor Coit Blacker, who in the early 1980s worked as an aide to Democrat Senator Gary Hart. They discussed Hart’s presidential campaign and his military reform ideas, which Condi found interesting. Coit introduced Condi to Senator Hart, who was taken by “her intellect and charm—charm in the profound sense, not the silly sense. And I’d add a third dimension: inner strength.” Condi helped him briefly on the campaign as a foreign policy advisor.
Working with Hart gave Condi a glimpse into policy at work, but her first hands-on experience in government took place in 1986 when she was sent to the Pentagon for a year by the Council on Foreign Relations. The mission of this nonpartisan research and membership organization, which publishes the journal Foreign Policy, is to increase “America’s understanding of the world and [contribute] ideas to U.S. foreign policy.” Each year the Council awards highly competitive International Affairs Fellowships that allow academic professionals to swap places with government officers. This gives the scholars exposure to government and allows the government personnel to pursue academic interests in their fields. Condi’s Notre Dame professor George Brinkley suggested she apply for the opportunity and helped her obtain one of the twenty fellowships that were given to academics that year. “I was affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations and was one of several who recommended her for that fellowship,” he said.
It was a fascinating time to be in the corridors of military power. Condi’s position as special assistant to the director-Joint Chiefs of Staff brought her to the Pentagon during Reagan’s massive buildup of the military. In his first term, defense spending increased by 7 percent each year. When Condi arrived in the administration, Reagan was gearing up for an arms limitations summit with Gorbachev. The Iceland summit in October 1986 began on a high note with a tentative agreement by both leaders to ban all nuclear ballistic missiles within ten years. They even made progress on a handful of human rights issues. But Gorbachev demanded that Reagan scale down his space-based missile defense program, commonly known as “Star Wars,” and the talks were deadlocked. They met again the following year to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which eliminated all ground-launched missiles (approximately 2,700) with ranges between 300 and 3,500 miles.
Condi studied nuclear planning and reveled in the military culture at the Pentagon. She considered her stint there a “reality check” into the complex workings of the military and gained a deeper respect and admiration for military personnel. She was captivated by the nuclear arms issues that were on the front burner at the time, by the focus of her work, and by her surroundings. She later remarked that the defense and military are “ill understood by the academic community and the civilian community at large,” and she was grateful to get an inside look. “I found them welcoming, happy to have the contact with academics,” she said. In an interview held one year after her return to Stanford from her fellowship, she said that her Pentagon post stood out “as one of the greatest experiences in my life.”
When she moved to California for the Stanford job, Condi had left her parents for the second time. Unlike her Notre Dame year, Stanford was a more long-term move, and she had truly left the nest. Church had always been a family activity, so in that first year on her own, she didn’t attend regularly. One Sunday she found herself chatting with a man at the grocery store who said he needed a piano player for his small church. She said she’d be happy to do it and spent the next six months playing for his congregation. “I realized then the long arm of the Lord reaches all the way to Lucky’s Super Market,” she told a prayer group in Denver in 2000.
Condi became reacquainted with her childhood friend Deborah Carson in Palo Alto, and the two often got together to talk about their dates, have dinner, or go shopping. Shoes are Condi’s biggest shopping obsession, and she quickly came to love an exclusive shop on San Francisco’s Union Square that carried all the top-of-the-line brands. Deborah remembered one trip in which Condi loaded up her arms with eight pair of Ferragamos. A few months later, she and Deborah showed up at the store again, and the salespeople literally fell all over themselves. “We walked in the door,” said Deborah, “and a salesman from the back of the store started jumping over the benches to get at Condi! We were laughing so hard, and I said, ‘Condi, you’re going to kill them!’ They must have told each other the previous time that when this person comes back, that’s a good day.”
Condi kept to a vigorous workout routine which included strength training with personal trainers in Stanford’s athletic department. Her friends fixed her up on blind dates from time to time, but she had better luck finding interesting men on her own. She dated a university coach, a visiting professional from a Fortune 500 company in the East who was taking a Stanford seminar, and others. Football continued to be her favorite theme for romance, however, and one of her more long-term boyfriends at Stanford was San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Gene Washington. A graduate of Stanford, he played with the San Francisco team from 1969 to 1977. Washington, the superstar, appeared in cameo roles as himself in movies and television shows such as a 1972 episode of “Banacek.” He and Condi had two major connections: they both loved football and they both came from Birmingham. “They were a real couple for a while,” said Deborah Carson, “and even after they stopped dating they remained friends. They still attend social events together from time to time.” Gene is now one of the top officials of the NFL as its director of football operations.
Football took up a healthy percentage of Condi’s time, and she once remarked that if it weren’t for all the coverage on TV she would be much more published. In truth, she hit the ground running as soon she got to Stanford with articles appearing in major journals and compilations. She wrote three books during her Stanford years, beginning with Uncertain Alliance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, which, as mentioned in the previous chapter, was an extension of her doctoral dissertation. Next came The Gorbachev Era, a collection of articles on Russian and Soviet history, which she co-edited with Alexander Dallin. A leading scholar in Soviet and East European studies, Dallin was a professor in international history at Stanford. Their book was published by the Stanford Alumni Press Service in 1986.
She co-authored her third book, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft, with Philip Zelikow, with whom she served in Bush Senior’s administration during the period of German reunification. The book, published by Harvard University Press in 1995, won critical acclaim and is considered the definitive insiders’ look into Germany’s reunification process. Both authors drew upon their own experiences during that landmark time in history as well as upon thousands of classified government documents. Following is an excerpt from the book’s compelling narrative about the day the Berlin Wall crumbled:
The opening of the Berlin Wall was as electrifying and emotional an event as the world had seen in many years. Although the wall’s collapse immediately called into question the postwar order and Germany’s future, those were hardly the concerns that dominated the moment. Rather, there were, first and foremost, the scenes of Germany overcoming its division in the most human of terms as families were reunited after years of separation. There were the expressions of giddy East German citizens encountering the casual prosperity most West Germans took for granted, the bewildering array of material goods that had been nothing more than an image on West German television. And there were the feelings of nationhood that welled up in Germans on both sides of the divide. . . . About 9 million East Germans visited the West during that first week.
This book was one of three awarded the Akira Iriye International History Book Award for 1994-1995, an honor given by the Foundation for Pacific Quest to recognize excellence in scholarship in international history. Germany Unified was also named a co-winner of the 1996 Book of Distinction on American Diplomacy by the American Academy of Diplomacy, and awarded a Citation for Excellence for nonfiction foreign affairs by the Overseas Press Club of America.
Condi found her passions in Soviet studies and teaching, and her life at Stanford was rich on many levels. She juggled classes, advising, research, writing, playing the piano, weight training, exercising, dating, and gluing herself to the television for twelve-hour football-watching marathons. Her academic career would take two dramatic turns in the 1990s, however. First, she answered the call to Washington for a post at the White House. Second, she made a quantum leap up the academic ladder.