Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (11 page)

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.

FIVE

The Scholar

“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.