Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (22 page)

She was also grateful for the people with whom she practiced that statecraft. “My colleagues were the smartest people I had ever met, and we all hit the ground together with resolution of the issues that I had been taught were the most important in the international policy field on the table,” she said in 1995. “I ask myself if I would ever have that constellation of forces, events and personalities again . . . [including] a president I adored . . . George Bush, for whom the great issues at the end of the Cold War were priority number one.”

Overall, working with her immediate boss stood out as the personal highlight of the job. “The most personally satisfying was working with Brent Scowcroft,” she said.

Condi knew she had been spoiled by working in Washington during one of the most eventful periods in political history—and having such a vital role in the process—and she didn’t expect to return to the White House any time soon. In a speech given several years later, President Bush reiterated his admiration for his staff during that turbulent and exciting time, a staff that included his good friend Condoleezza Rice:

Excellence describes the people that I had at my side, and it was a joy, a blessing to work with each of them.

Make no mistake, they were good and decent people, but they were tough, too, with strong views, and they were mature men and women who understood that power had a purpose. And moreover, seeing them work together it was clear that they respected one another.

As we debated one issue or another, they would often argue views very forcefully. But once the decision, once the President made the decision, we closed up the ranks. That’s the way it ought to be.

EIGHT

Room at the Top

“I tell my students, ‘If you find yourself in the company of people who agree with you, you’re in the wrong company.’”

—Condoleezza Rice, 1993

BY
the spring of 1991, when German unification was complete, Condi had proven herself to Scowcroft and he asked her to continue in her post. The Gulf War ended on March 1, closing another chapter in the Bush administration, and Condi decided it was time to leave Washington and return to academic life. She didn’t want to reach burnout in what she called an “all-consuming” job, and according to Scowcroft, she was listening to her biological clock. At thirty-six, she wanted to settle down and have a family. Condi did not confirm this explanation, but said rather that her teaching career took precedence over everything. “It wasn’t an easy decision,” she said. “I felt that it’s hard to keep an academic career intact if you don’t come back in about two years.” She recognized the importance of her senior-level job with the National Security Council, but she felt she needed to put academics and public service in balance. “We’re fortunate in the U.S. that we can go in and out,” she said. “But I think of myself as an academic first. That means that you want to keep some coherence and integrity in your career.” The fact that she had not been available to her upper-level students for two years ground away at her conscience. “I tried to keep up with my graduate students but it was hard,” she said. “You can’t be away from that for too long.”

The prospect of staying on at the NSC for another two years conjured up images of seemingly endless fourteen-hour days and no time for the small, normal things that make up a balanced lifestyle. “I wanted a life,” she said. She felt she had been extremely fortunate in being in the NSC during one of the most amazing, transforming periods in European political history, and it was time to return to the pleasures and routines of teaching, doing research, playing the piano, and going to the grocery store. She had worked hard to achieve her academic status and didn’t think it was necessary to risk it all for one job, no matter how prestigious. “When the time came and I was asked to stay,” she said, “I thought if I stayed, I should stay to the end of the term and I didn’t think I was prepared to do that. I was getting tired—it is a very demanding job. The real stress of White House jobs is that it’s a really small staff—forty people in the whole NSC staff. It’s a burn-out job.”

Condi moved out of Watergate and returned to the West Coast, eager to leap into academia and share her experiences with her students. Her recent experience gave her much more to offer, especially regarding the “story behind the story” element of world events. In her classes she had always stressed the importance of the personal element in international relations—the attitudes and emotions and relationships that underlie the bigger story—and now she could bring some of that information to her classes through first-hand experience. “I’ve always tried to teach some of the decision-making aspects of politics,” she said upon her return to Stanford. “I think I have a better sense for that now. It’s important to understand what people were really thinking . . . I think I can bring some perspective on what it was like to go through those events from that vantage point.”

When she left Washington in March 1991, Condi had no idea that the events in the Soviet Union would proceed so quickly. In her first weeks back at Stanford she said, “The events in the Soviet Union will unfold over a period of time. It was not likely that by being in Washington I would have been able to see the Soviet Union’s problems through this period.” Like everyone else, she was surprised when the entire system fell apart before the end of the year. In a public speech in December, she expressed the magnitude of change that had swept the world since she was a political science neophyte at the University of Denver. “All the assumptions that I started out with as a student of international studies have simply been blown away,” she said. “The old assumption—that Europe was permanently divided, that the East-West conflict was a permanent fixture of the international system, that Soviet forces would remain deep in Eastern Europe . . . no longer hold. A great power—the USSR—has collapsed.”

Once she got resettled, Condi delved back into publishing and wrote an article that appeared in
Time
magazine in September 1991. Four weeks earlier a group of Communist hard-liners had staged a coup in Moscow, trying to oust Gorbachev who was about to sign an agreement giving the republics more freedom. But enormous public opposition coupled with the reluctance of the armed forces to support the coup caused the hard-liners to back down. Condi’s article, “A New Army for a New State,” discussed the military’s role in the coup and Gorbachev’s arsenal as the leader of a new, non-Communist nation. “The Soviet Army still has as chance to find a place in a stable and democratic successor the communist Soviet Union,” she wrote. “If that is to happen, personnel changes are not enough. A stable democracy needs sturdy institutions, not just charismatic personalities.”

She reached another national audience three months later with her second appearance at the Commonwealth Club, where she gave a speech entitled “End of the Cold War: Challenge for U.S. Policy.” Like her previous speech for the Club, this one was broadcast live over the radio and was part of the Friday Luncheon Program. In this speech, given at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on December 13, 1991, Condi discussed the formidable challenges facing the former Soviet Union, from its struggle to initiate a market economy to its political instability. She shared insider perceptions gleaned from her two years in the Bush administration, including a vivid portrayal of Gorbachev’s reputation among his people. One question from the floor after her speech asked her to explain the difference between the world’s view of Gorbachev as the great redeemer who brought down Communism and that of the Soviet people, who blamed him for making things worse. She responded:

People in the Soviet Union associate Gorbachev with the domestic disintegration of the country. If they’re now standing in lines three or four times longer than they used to, then it’s because of Gorbachev. What is missing in that analysis is that it was the years of stagnation under Brezhnev that led to these problems. Gorbachev didn’t understand the economic problems very well when he came to power. He sort of messed around at the edges, trying to squeeze productivity, and then one day just realized that the whole system was rotten. He tried to break it up, but didn’t have the courage to leap into a market system and therefore probably worsened the transition. His lack of popularity comes from the association of
perestroika
with the disintegration of the Soviet economy. Yet if you probe, Russians will say that they understand that he was the father of something important. They blame him simply in the manner of: what’s he done for us lately?

In her first eight years at Stanford, Condi wrote fifteen articles that appeared either in journals or in foreign policy/Soviet history book compilations. In the six years following her return from Washington, she published five more articles and co-wrote her third book,
Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft
.

She also resumed public service work, including a stint on the governor’s advisory panel of redistricting California in 1991. She was well acquainted with newly elected Republican Governor Pete Wilson who, after his election in 1990, had put Condi on his short list of appointees for the U.S. Senate seat that he would be vacating that year. Deep into her Washington job at the time, Condi told him she wasn’t interested and later told the press that she didn’t think she would have received the appointment anyway. Wilson appointed California State Senator John Seymour to the Senate seat. As part of Wilson’s advisory panel in 1991, Condi contributed ideas for redrawing the state’s assembly, state senate, and Congressional district boundaries.

Another government service appointment took Condi away on short trips over a period of several weeks but kept her involved in military policy. In 1997, she was appointed to the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender Integrated Training in the Military, a committee set up by Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen. The 11-member civilian group, which included one retired admiral and three retired generals, met with hundreds of military personnel in an effort to “assess the current training programs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps and to determine how best to train our gender-integrated, all-volunteer force to ensure that they are disciplined, effective and ready.” The committee delivered a long list of recommendations included improving the training of drill sergeants, revamping recruiting policies, toughening basic training, expanding sexual harassment instruction, providing separate barracks for men and women, and hiring more women trainers.

Utilizing her background in military systems was gratifying, but Condi’s pet project was the Center for a New Generation, an after-school enrichment program she cofounded for children of the impoverished Ravenswood School District in East Palo Alto. The idea came out of a dinner table conversation Condi had with her father, who had moved to California after Angelena’s death and his retirement from the University of Denver in 1982, and his new wife, Clara Bailey Rice. “I was a principal at Menlo Oaks Middle School,” said Clara, “and Condi had come to speak for my middle school’s ‘graduation’ ceremony. They were about to enter high school and they organized a little program. I asked Condi to speak for their graduation services, and she was impressed with how they carried the whole service by themselves and did such a beautiful job with so few resources. She asked me what sort of support the district had for these kids to be successful.”

John was doing some consulting at Stanford and volunteering in Clara’s school district. Like Condi, he was concerned about the students at Menlo Oaks school. He was working at improving the quality of East Palo Alto education as well as its environment. “He really didn’t like the way the grounds looked or the areas where the kids played,” said Clara, “so he got people to go over and redo the lawns and playing fields.” Clara, seventeen years his junior, met John through his volunteer work in the schools and they soon learned they had many common friends back in Birmingham. Before becoming a principal, Clara had been a middle school science and math teacher. They were married in July 1989.

Although John was retired, he did not slow down very much in California. His public service work included an appointment to the Board of Governors of California Community Colleges, made by Governor Pete Wilson. His long academic career had been honored in 1995 when he received the National Alliance of Black School Educators’ Living Legend Award. That year he also received an honorary doctorate from Daniel Hale University in Chicago, which prompted some friends and family to begin calling him Dr. Rice.

Condi learned that the Ravenswood School District had a well-funded program for below-average readers, but nothing beyond that to help students qualify for college. No students from the school district had ever gone to Stanford, which was only five minutes away. That seemed to clinch it. “The three of us—John, Condi and I—came up with the idea for an after-school center at the dinner table one night,” said Clara.