Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (12 page)

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
George
magazine, “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.”