The Democracy Promoter: Condoleezza Rice
CONDOLEEZZA “Condi” RICE, the 66th U.S. Secretary of State, was born in 1954, and spent her first 12 years in the “Negro” part of segregated Birmingham, Alabama. She overcame great odds to become the first black female national security adviser, and then the first black female U.S. Secretary of State. She was a player in President George W. Bush’s foreign-policy team, if a rather distant second to Dick Cheney. And as time went on, her star rose in the administration, as the President became somewhat disenchanted with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Condi Rice has also been a Stanford University professor and provost.
Rice’s parents were highly ambitious for their only child. They wanted her to get good grades, but also to show poise and have proper deportment. They gave her piano lessons and expected her to appreciate music at a high level. To teach her to walk and carry herself with dignity and grace, they gave her ballet and figure skating lessons.
They also expected her to be tough. Her father, John Wesley Rice, Jr., was a Presbyterian minister and a guidance counselor but also a football coach. He had tried to register to vote in Alabama in 1952, had been turned away, and held a grudge against the Democratic Party. Condi’s mother, Angelena Ray Rice, was a high school teacher and a skilled piano player. Both were college-educated, a rare achievement for black southerners of that generation.
There was some Italian ancestry on Condi Rice’s mother’s side of the family, and the name “Condoleezza” was a creative use of “con dolcezza” Italian for “with sweetness.” The name is not very apt. Without a sibling, with so many organized activities and lessons to attend to and little “down” time, Condi Rice grew up a precise, very smart, ambitious and private girl. She was not particularly sweet, especially to those who tried to belittle her, or get in her way. Condi was always a little impatient, skipping grades in school, hurrying to her next appointment.
The civil rights movement was raging from the time she was 10 years old and that struggle had great meaning for her. It meant that America was at last living up to its promise. But this period of civil rights progress was a tumultuous, dangerous time for a black girl. Denise McNair, one of the four black girls killed in Sunday school by a white racist’s bomb in 1963, was one of Condi’s playmates.
In 1967, at the age of 12, Condi Rice and her family left Alabama for Denver, Colorado. Her father became an administrator for the University of Denver. Condi went to a local Catholic girls school, and graduated at 16, in 1971.
A year later, Rice attended a special summer camp for the musically gifted. There, surrounded by prodigies, she sensed for the first time that she wasn’t cut out to be a concert pianist. Where then should she focus that high intelligence and great energy?
Condi took a course at the University of Denver in international politics. Her professor was Josef Korbel, a brilliant teacher, and the father of another future Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. Condi Rice deeply impressed Professor Korbel. His wife said later that of all the students he ever had, Condi was his favorite. She got her undergraduate degree in 1974, at age 19, and, in 1981, got a PhD in International Studies from the University of Denver.
Stanford University hired her to teach political science. She didn’t publish much or establish herself as a heavyweight in academic terms. But she worked hard, and cultivated powerful people at Stanford. Her dark skin had been a great impediment in Birmingham and as a professor she still suffered from certain people’s racist assumptions. But on the Stanford campus, being an African-American woman helped her career. Like all elite universities, Stanford was eager to show it was not racist or sexist.
Like many Americans, Rice was disturbed by President Jimmy Carter’s weakness in foreign affairs, especially his surprise at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and his failure to rescue the 52 American hostages in Iran. In 1982, she left the Democratic Party for the Republicans. When old friends told her she’d changed politically, she replied: “I never changed. The threat did.”
But she was quiet about it. In 1984, when Madeleine Albright was rounding up experts to advise Michael Dukakis on foreign policy for his presidential campaign, she thought Condi would be perfect: a Soviet expert who was not one of the usual white male Washington insiders. Albright called Rice, offered her the position and was stunned when Rice replied “Madeleine, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m a Republican.”
“Condi,” said Albright. “How can that be? We had the same father.”
In 1985, at a meeting at Stanford of arms control experts, Rice impressed Brent Scowcroft and they kept in touch. And in 1989 when George Bush, Sr. was elected President and made Scowcroft his National Security Adviser, Scowcroft asked Rice to advise President Bush on Soviet and Eastern European Affairs. It was a fascinating time to be a Soviet expert; the Soviet Union was dissolving, and no one knew what would happen next.
Stanford has a rule that faculty seeking tenure can’t take leaves of absence of more than two years. Since Rice wanted tenure at Stanford, in 1991 she returned and worked with former Secretary of State George Shultz. He, too, was impressed by her, and helped Rice get on the board of trustees of the Chevron Corporation.
President Casper was impressed with Condoleezza Rice during the talent search that led to his being president, and in 1993 asked her to serve as university provost. In that job from 1993–1999, she was told to cut $25 million from the budget. Defining the job narrowly and clearly, she cut the $25 million. Many people on the campus disliked Rice’s manner. She couldn’t tolerate long, emotional debates about vulnerable programs. In her view, that kind of fuzzy thinking was what had led to this budget mess.
During the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, 1992–2000, Condi Rice was not in politics. Wanting to get back in, she hitched her star to George W. Bush. Having served his father was not a major asset; Bush the younger wanted to distinguish himself from his father, and having a lot of the same advisers would only make that harder.
But when George W. Bush met Condoleezza Rice, he liked her right away. Professors often made him feel ignorant but Condi was different. She knew a lot but spoke in a way that was easy to follow. She told Bush that he asked good questions. He liked that she talked easily about sports, was personally modest — but didn’t back down when her beliefs were challenged. George W. Bush liked strong women, didn’t know many black people, and here was a black woman who was well-prepared, thorough and likable. He made her his National Security Adviser.
Both Bush and Rice loved the idea of America delivering nations from tyranny, introducing democracy to millions of people mutely yearning for it. Both President Bush and National Security Adviser Rice saw ‘democracy promotion’ as a key part of a President’s mission — helpful to America, helpful to world stability, and crucial to the happiness of misgoverned or enslaved people around the world. They never seem to have wondered why, if democracy is so clearly the best kind of government, so many parts of the world have never tried it.
The job of National Security Adviser was a poor fit for Condi Rice. She was an academic whose specialty was the Soviet Union during the Cold War — not very relevant now, when so much in Russia had changed. She was a naturally private person, and coming to maturity with so much white racism around her, she’d learned as a girl to honor the beliefs of those closest to her — and to shut out the criticism of those she didn’t know well. This was a very functional pose for an ambitious young African-American girl in Alabama in the 1960's.
But as national security adviser charged with informing the president of things he needed to know but might not want to know, this guarded quality of Condi Rice hurt her badly. Far too often, Rice shut out what her boss didn’t want to hear. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the neoconservatives had a lot of access, reinforcing the president’s view that certain nations were “evil,” that it was virtuous to preemptively attack evildoers, intervening in the political life of sovereign nations to bring them democracy. Officials in the State Department, the Pentagon and the Treasury Department who felt otherwise had remarkably little access or influence with the President. Rice should have helped them get in to see the president, but she did not.
President Bush and the First Lady took Condi along on many of their vacations. Her friendship deepened with the President and his wife, and she probably spent more time with him than any other adviser except Chief of Staff Andrew Card. She made her friendship with the President and First Lady central to who she was, and how she acted. She did not see her job as coordinating the views of a range of experts and agencies, and presenting them to the President. She was passive about the threat of domestic terrorism and professed to be unconcerned that the FBI and CIA did not share information. Before 9/11, Rice downgraded anti-terrorism work.
After 9/11, she did almost nothing to usefully critique the Iraq War being bungled by her boss. She told an incurious President what he wanted to hear rather than what he needed to know. When people came to her with opinions or suggestions which differed from the official line, she often cut them short, saying once a decision has been made, further debate is a waste of time.
She also spent vey little time on the Arab-Israeli problem which was fueling much of the world’s anti-American feeling and thus its terrorism. In 2004, after Colin Powell resigned as Secretary of State, President Bush placed Condoleezza Rice in Powell’s place. In 2006, Rice pushed the Palestinians to hold elections, and pushed the Israelis to support the process. Israel told her that Hamas would win the election and Hamas would then have the gift of American prestige. Rice rejected the idea that the Palestinian people would choose Hamas in a free and fair election — but that’s exactly what happened.
After the George W. Bush administration ended in early 2009, Rice wrote a well-received memoir about her childhood, and began teaching at Stanford Business School. An impressive, accomplished woman, at that point she might have ridden off into the sunset.
But in 2017 she published a major book called “Democracy: Stories From the Long Road to Freedom.” In it, she powerfully tied her advocacy for democracy to her childhood witnessing of the civil rights revolution. She wrote: “I have watched as people in Africa, Asia and Latin America have insisted on freedom… As a child, I was a part of another great awakening: the second founding of America, as the civil rights movement unfolded in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama and finally expanded the meaning of ‘We the people’ to encompass people like me… There is no more thrilling moment than when people finally seize their rights and their liberty.”
Rice admitted her mistake in underestimating Hamas in 2006. She bluntly accepted blame for the abuse of foreign prisoners and the way that abuse hurt the cause of democracy in the Arab world. Ukraine, Egypt, Turkey, Libya… she noted the recent failures of democracy in each of those places.
But she still would not concede that the premise of ‘democracy promotion’ is flawed. Her faith in this process looks foolish to some, beautiful to others. Birthing a democracy is something she calls “hard — really, really hard.” She reminds us that it is “a long road.” Yet she insists that we have a moral duty and a national security need to keep doing it — and she points to Colombia, to Kenya, to Tunisia and Ghana as nations rarely covered in the U.S media, who have been traveling that long hard road, moving ever closer to democracy.