Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (13 page)

During her year at Notre Dame, Condi thought seriously about entering law school after finishing her M.A. degree. Her second cousin Connie Rice was just starting her undergraduate degree at Harvard and was interested in the profession; a few years later, she would enter the New York University School of Law. Condi applied to and was accepted into several law schools throughout the country, including the one at the University of Denver. But when Condi discussed her plans with her former professor Josef Korbel, he convinced her otherwise. “You are very talented,” he told her, “you have to become a professor.” Before that conversation, the idea of a life in academia had never entered her mind. “When I think back on that moment,” Condi said, “I don’t know if it was a subliminal message, but I had such respect and admiration for him that I took the idea seriously for the first time.”

Condi put off law school and spent the next year taking courses at the University of Denver’s Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS) in the hope that she would discover exactly what she wanted to do. Her parents had instilled in her an interest in world affairs, and as she matured, she felt it was important to become involved in the larger issues, not only as a black person, but as a well-informed, concerned American. “Thinking broadly about the whole world out there has been one of the most important things in my life,” she said. “It has been crucial to me to learn about issues which seem far removed, yet are important in all our lives.”

The courses she took that year made her realize how much she enjoyed analyzing the big issues and seeing how this analysis is put into practice to literally change the world. In her modest way, she explained that this year of search and study led her into the Graduate School of International Studies at Denver. “I realized that I liked political science more than law,” she said, “and I sort of stumbled into a Ph.D. program.” With Korbel’s encouragement, she decided to continue graduate work in political science and enrolled in his program. “He was nothing but supportive and insistent, even pushy, about me going into this field,” she said.

Condi received her master of arts degree in government from Notre Dame on August 8, 1975, and moved back to Denver. She would return to Notre Dame several years later as one of the university’s leaders—a member of the board of trustees.

When Condi returned to Denver, she moved back into her parents’ house and slipped comfortably into her old activities—singing in the Montview Presbyterian choir, practicing and giving piano lessons to keep up her technique, and watching as much football as humanly possible. Many weekends she would have a few friends over to watch games at her house, and her colleagues soon learned that she was much more than an ordinary fan. “She is one of the few people I have ever met who knows as much about the sport as I do,” said Robby Laitos, a GSIS student who first met Condi at a football party. Laitos, who now directs an international consulting company out of Denver, describes himself as a football fanatic who takes the sport “very, very seriously.” In his first year at the school, he and other new graduate students were invited to a cabin in the mountains outside of Denver one Saturday afternoon for a day of “food, music, and good company,” he said.

“That day there was a particularly exciting college football game on, I believe it was Oklahoma-Ohio State, and the game had just ended when I arrived,” said Laitos. “I was discussing the game with someone else when Condi walked up and joined the conversation. This was the first time I had met her. It was immediately apparent that she
knew
football, and was not just faking it. That started a two-year ‘football relationship’ between us. We never talked about Russia or school, we just talked about football.” Laitos also recalled going over to the Rices’ on Sunday afternoons to watch football and enjoy Angelena’s famous gumbo. “I remember her mother made us all gumbo soup,” he said, “and we all thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon of football and gumbo and good cheer.”

The doctoral program that Condi entered at the University of Denver had a distinguished history in both its faculty and its curriculum. Denver’s Graduate School of International Studies differed from the East Coast Soviet programs in that its curriculum has always been broad-based. Columbia’s Russian Institute, for example, had a “predominant intellectual orientation on regime studies, rather than social, economic, and cultural processes,” said its current director, Mark von Hagen. The East Coast institutes were keenly focused on the Moscow infrastructure and Cold War strategies, and after the Soviet Union dismantled they were compelled to expand dramatically to encompass cultural, economic, and social aspects of the region. Denver, on the other hand, included those themes in its curriculum from the start. “Looking back,” said GSIS professor Karen Feste, “the school doesn’t seem a lot different today than it was in the beginning because we were never caught up in the Cold War politics that some of the East Coast schools were. Broader coverage was a matter of routine for us. We had always been interested in social development and human justice in addition to the East-West divide. As a result, when the Cold War ended, our curriculum had less dramatic changes than our sister schools.”

This program, exploring several aspects of the Soviet/ Russian experience, was very attractive to Condi when she enrolled in 1976. Josef Korbel had not always welcomed women to the department—when he founded GSIS, he opposed the idea of bringing in female students and faculty because he doubted the graduates would go out and get high-ranking positions that could contribute to the stature of the department. When Karen Feste joined the department in the early 1970s, for example, Korbel voted against her appointment to the faculty. The majority voted for Feste, however, and she was brought in as a professor of international politics and research methodology. She remained the only woman on the faculty for many years, but she witnessed Korbel’s view change over time. His initial reluctance was ironic in that he strongly supported his daughter’s academic track in political science. In the 1960s, Madeleine Albright pursued her master’s and doctoral degrees in Columbia’s Department of Public Law and Government and also completed the university’s Russian Institute program. When Condi began taking classes in international studies at Denver in 1975, after returning from Notre Dame, Madeleine was running Senator Edwin Muskie’s national fund-raising campaign.

Karen Feste, one of Condi’s professors and academic advisors, became a good friend of Korbel within the first two years of her appointment, and she observed a dramatic transformation in his view about women in the program. “He and I were close,” she said. “He was the oldest one on the faculty, I was youngest; he was Old World in his approach, I was modern; and we seemed to click.” By the time Condi arrived at Denver he had thoroughly changed his outlook. He was interested in attracting the best and the brightest and, as Feste observed, “gender factors were not important.”

Karen Feste had earned her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota before joining the faculty at Denver and, in addition to teaching, has worked as a political consultant throughout the world for organizations such as Egypt’s Institute of National Planning and Kuwait University. Another of Condi’s professors, Jonathan Adelman, had received his Ph.D. in political science at Columbia (as had Brinkley, her Notre Dame professor). Since joining the faculty at GSIS, Adelman has been a visiting scholar at universities in Beijing and Moscow and has traveled extensively on speaking tours for the State Department. A prominent member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he was a member of the Allied Jewish Federation’s mission to Israel in 2002.

At GSIS, Condi also studied with Catherine Kelleher, a professor who has become one the world’s foremost experts on security issues and whose career has encompassed both academia and government. She worked at the Pentagon as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, and later served as defense advisor and personal representative of the secretary of defense at NATO. She was also the director of the Aspen Institute Berlin, the German office of the organization that conducts policy seminars for American and European leaders. In the spring of 2002, she was awarded the Bundeswehr Golden Cross of Honor, Germany’s highest military decoration, for her “contributions to transatlantic relations, especially the promotion of political dialogue between European and American decision-makers.” She is currently a professor at the Naval War College in New-port, Rhode Island.

The 1970s and 1980s were an extremely exciting time to be studying international relations and the Soviet Union. Major Cold War events that coincided with Condi’s college years included the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) signed by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972. By the time Condi started graduate school the talks had reached an impasse and India had developed nuclear weapons. In 1975, the United States and the USSR joined thirty-three other nations at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and included their signatures on the Final Act of the conference, the Helsinki Accords. This pledge to protect human rights also established the borders of Europe as they stood at the end of World War II, recognizing the Soviet Union’s domination over the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Another episode for Condi to follow as she developed her Russian reading skills in the pages of
Pravda
was the sale of U.S. grain to the Soviet Union in 1975. Near-famine conditions in the USSR compelled the nation to sign a long-term contract for U.S. grain. A less dour motivation for U.S.-Soviet relations also occurred that year—the spacelink of the U.S.
Apollo
and the Soviet
Soyuz
spacecraft. In the six years since the
Apollo
moon-walk, NASA administrators had been working to convert the
Apollo
mission into a program of American-Soviet cooperation. “As with so many aspects of American national policy, NASA’s programs had always reflected the current environment of foreign affairs,” stated a NASA article on the
Apollo-Soyuz
spacelink. “The joint flight could be seen as a part of détente, but the people at NASA saw it as much more.”

The
Apollo-Soyuz
Test Project (ASTP) kept NASA in the manned space mission, kept the flight team working, and paved the way for the international space cooperation that was essential for the next phase of space technology. The spacelink was covered on TV, which provided images of U.S.-Soviet cooperation that were painfully absent in the arms race. Statements by the astronauts and cosmonauts described the unity of the world as seen from space, a refreshing change from political stories that stressed the tensions between the superpowers. “Dear American TV people,” said cosmonaut Valeriy Kubasov during one televised spot, “It would be wrong to ask which country’s more beautiful. It would be right to say there is nothing more beautiful than our blue planet.”

In 1976, the year Condi began her Ph.D. program, she registered as a Democrat and voted for Jimmy Carter in the election. Carter’s handling of the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979, however, changed her mind about him and the Democratic party. The president called the invasion “a deliberate effort by a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people” and warned that a “Soviet-occupied Afghanistan threatens both Iran and Pakistan and is a steppingstone to their possible control over much of the world’s oil supplies.” He also said that he was shocked and saddened by the attack and that his “opinion of the Russians has changed most drastically in the last week [more] than even in the previous two and one-half years before that.” In response, he issued an embargo on grain and technology, cut back Soviet fishing privileges in American waters, postponed discussion and ratification of the SALT II treaty that he and Brezhnev had hammered out earlier that year, and called for a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. Condi thought that Carter’s shock and surprise were naive and his actions too weak. “I remember thinking, What did you think you were dealing with?” she said. “This is a horrible government—of course they invaded some foreign country! I thought it was time to have a tougher policy toward this repressive regime.”

Had it not been for Carter’s treatment of the Soviets during that crisis, Condi would probably still be a Democrat. “I was a registered Democrat and might never have changed parties were it not for what I thought was our mishandling of the Cold War,” she said in 2000. “I thought the Soviets were aggressive and playing us like a violin. I thought Carter didn’t understand the true nature of the Soviet Union, which was pretty dark.”

Condi was so passionate in her criticism of the U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union that her attitude overpowered her high regard for the Democratic party’s support of the Civil Rights movement. During the presidential campaign of 1980, she registered as a Republican and voted for Ronald Reagan. “I admired what Lyndon Johnson did for civil rights in 1964,” she said. “But by 1980 I just thought the U.S. was not pursuing an effective foreign policy, and I was attracted to Reagan’s strength. Then my political views developed in favor of smaller government.”

Condi’s Democratic beginnings are still evident in her moderate social views, such as her pro-choice stance. This makes her a self-described “all-over-the-map Republican” who is “‘very conservative’ in foreign policy, ‘ultra-conservative’ in other areas, ‘almost shockingly libertarian’ on some issues, ‘moderate’ on others, and ‘liberal’ on probably nothing.”

Many Americans who were introduced to Condi for the first time through her speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention got the impression that she became a Republican in the footsteps of her father who had been rejected by the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama. But Condi had her own reasons. “It was the constitution and foreign policy, not social issues, that drew me to the Republican party,” she said. Condi takes a ribbing from her black friends for being a Republican, but she is firm and confident in her position. “I’m in the GOP for the right reasons,” she said. “I like our foreign policy stance better. I really am a smaller government person. I don’t think every solution is in Washington.”