Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (15 page)

Professor Rice

“The understanding of arms control, the respective views and needs of all the nations, is fundamental to our very existence. Blacks should be part of this understanding, as they should be in every other field of American thought and progress. It would be a shame to leave such a vital national concern in the hands of white males over forty!”

—Condoleezza Rice, 1983

O
N the morning of December 1, 1989, a light rain put a sheen on the deck of the USS
Belknap
, a guided-missile cruiser docked with the Sixth Fleet in Valletta Harbor at Malta. The weather outlook for the Mediterranean islands was not good that week, and by nightfall gale force winds created sixteen-foot swells that jerked the massive ship up and down like a toy. President Bush settled into the comfortable admiral’s quarters and tried to get some rest before the momentous conference to come. At the Malta Summit the president would meet Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and present U.S. positions on several issues as well as express support for Gorbachev’s
perestroika
reforms. The Malta summit—dubbed by the press as the “seasick summit”—was the first superpower meeting ever held on a ship, and the opening talks had to be postponed for a day because of the choppy waters.

The U.S. delegation to the summit included Secretary of State James A. Baker III, White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. Joining Scowcroft was the National Security Council’s Soviet expert, thirty-five-year-old Condoleezza Rice. When Bush introduced Rice to Gorbachev, he described her as the woman who “tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union.” Others in the room watched as Gorbachev, looking surprised and skeptical, turned to Condi and said, “I hope you know a lot.”

One of the reasons Condi had become a Soviet expert was the fact that it was a hands-on, ever-changing field in which history was being rewritten every day. As an undergraduate taking her first courses in international relations, little did she know that one day she would be front-and-center at one of the most historic scenes in modern political history—the end of the Cold War. The first day of talks took place in a book-lined room of the Soviet cruiser
Maxim Gorky
, the only ship in the harbor heavy enough to withstand the rolling waves. In eight hours of talks held over two days, Bush and Gorbachev discussed arms control, trade policies, Soviet emigration laws, military conventional forces in Europe, and other issues. The most profound outcome was the two leaders’ agreement that the old rivalry between their nations was history. “[The] characteristics of the Cold War should be abandoned,” said Gorbachev at the end of the Malta Summit. “The arms race, mistrust, psychological and ideological struggle, all these things should be of the past.” President Bush agreed, stating that the world was on the “threshold of a brand new era of U.S.-Soviet relations.” At Malta, Bush and Gorbachev opened up a new age of cooperation between the superpowers. And Condi Rice was there.

Condi’s career as both an academic and a policy maker had begun eight years previously at Stanford University. Following graduation at Denver at age twenty-six, she received a post-doctorate fellowship to continue her research at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Arms Control, part of the university’s Institute for International Studies. Stanford, about thirty-five miles south of San Francisco, boasted a renowned faculty of Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners and offered one of the most beautiful campuses in the country. The cluster of California Mission-style buildings with their red-tiled roofs, surrounded by thousands of oak, palm, and eucalyptus trees, formed the oldest section of the colossal campus situated on 8,000 acres of land in sight of San Francisco Bay.

The fellowship gave Condi a stipend of about $30,000, an office, and access to all of Stanford’s libraries, research facilities, and department faculty. As a Soviet scholar, she joined policymakers, business people, security specialists, and other experts at the Center to study contemporary issues of international security. It was the only department to offer “a fully disciplinary course in arms control in the whole nation,” and students who took its courses were training to become arms control and security specialists. Most graduates went on to hold a variety of government arms-control positions. (The department is now called the Center for International Security and Cooperation.)

The fellowship was to last for one academic year, but a few months after she arrived, Condi made such a big impression at a talk she presented to the political science department that she was asked to join the faculty. The department was seeking qualified minorities and Condi fit the bill for affirmative action not only as a black person, but also as a woman in a field dominated by men. Once she got in, however, there would be no guarantees that her position would be renewed unless she proved herself worthy of the job. “They didn’t need another Soviet specialist,” said Condi, “but they asked themselves, ‘How often does a black female who could diversify our ranks come along?’” The department chair explained his position: “We have a three-year period here,” he told her, “and then you have to be renewed. And nobody’s going to look at race, nobody’s going to look at gender; and you don’t get any special breaks; and you surely don’t get any special breaks when you come up for tenure.” Condi thought, “Well, yeah, that seems perfectly fair.”

In the fall of 1981 Condi began the semester as an assistant professor of political science. She was also named assistant director of the Center for International Security and Arms Control. At twenty-six, her scholarship, knack for teaching, and personality stood out and earned her respect from faculty and students. “I think what struck people at the time was a combination of all the personal stuff—charm and very gracious personality . . . a kind of intellectual agility mixed with velvet-glove forcefulness,” said Coit Blacker, one of her fellow professors. “She’s a steel magnolia,” he continued, adding that her Southern graciousness is mixed with “a very steely inner core” and extreme self-discipline.

John Ferejohn, who joined Stanford’s political science department as a professor in 1983, recalled that Condi was the only black person on the faculty at the time. He recognized her qualities of leadership and persuasiveness—traits that she has carried throughout her career. “She got along well with everybody,” he said, “and even when she was just an assistant professor she exhibited a lot of what you see now—a very effective leader, decisive, clear-headed. Even when you disagree with her about something, she has good reasons. She’s effective when she’s opposing you—she often wins.”

Over the next decade she taught several classes, most of which she called “applied” political science that dealt with the military, national security, and foreign policy. Her courses included:

“Soviet Bloc and the Third World”: an exploration of the political, military, and economic activities of the Soviet Union and its allies in the Third World.

“The Role of the Military in Politics”: a survey of the interaction between military and political leaders in three types of governments: Western-industrial, communist, and that of developing countries. Condi used examples of leaders in the United States, the USSR, China, Brazil, and Nigeria.

“The Politics of Alliances”: this class examined NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and other nineteenth and twentieth century military-political alliances in the international system.

“Political Elites”: a seminar on the recruitment and behavior of political decision-makers in the legislative, administrative, executive, and military departments of government.

“U.S. and Soviet National Security Policies: The Responsibilities of Empire in the Nuclear Age”: a comparison of how the two superpowers balance domestic and international responsibilities with a close look at their national security systems

“The Institutions of Violence”: a seminar on revolutionary change, the role of the military and the police.

“The Transformation of Europe”: explored through the eyes of decision-makers in Washington, Bonn, Moscow, Paris, and London, this course discussed the changes in Europe between 1989 and 1990.

One of her favorite teaching methods was to have her students re-create major foreign policy decisions in a series of role-playing sessions. After the students researched and wrote papers about the event, they were each assigned to play a particular figure. She felt that this gave the students a broader understanding of what actually goes on in decision-making situations and provided more insight than simply reading a text. “It is increasingly difficult to generate in students a sense of the complexity involved in foreign policy with the methods available in the literature of political science and history,” she said. She felt that role-playing helped students grasp the importance of the key players’ personalities and emotional reactions as well as the roles played by members of Congress, the press, bureaucrats, and special interest groups. She explained that the “orderly, post hoc recreations that we teach” in textbooks leave out many important aspects of the story. While re-enacting an event, students were often shocked at their own behavior. “It’s interesting to watch students come to terms with how they behave,” said Condi. “They will say, ‘I never thought I could behave that way.’”

One student, Troy Eid, recalled the drama of a role-playing session in which he played a Soviet defense minister, complete with a Russian Army officer’s coat. The reenactment lasted an entire week, and at one point he fell asleep, exhausted, in Condi’s office. She woke him up and gave him coffee so he could keep with the program. “It is still the most intense week I’ve ever had,” he said, which is saying a lot from a man who went on to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School, become chief counsel to Colorado Governor Bill Owens, and subsequently CEO of a large Internet systems development company.

As a Republican, Condi did not fit the traditionally liberal mold of academia. And she did not try to keep her conservative views under wraps. One student recalled that she was known as “Condi the Hawk,” and John Ferejohn stated that her Republican Party affiliation “wasn’t a surprise, it was commonly known about her. She was active in the community. She doesn’t hide her light under a bushel. She’s very straightforward.”

In her classes on military topics, Condi often opened her first lecture with a football analogy. Anyone who knew her understood that one of her favorite topics was the comparison of football to war. Paul Brest, former dean of Stanford Law School and current president of the Hewlett Foundation, recalled going to a Stanford Cardinal’s game with Condi. He had scheduled an event at the law school for the head of the San Francisco 49ers. “Condi heard about it,” he said, “and told me, ‘I’m not going to let you embarrass the university because I know you don’t know anything about football, so I’m going to take you to a Stanford football game.” She sat down between Paul and his wife and gave them a crash course in the game. “The first thing she said was, ‘Football is like war, it’s about taking territory,’” Paul said.

Condi is not the first to make this analogy. Stephen Crane, author of the Civil War novel
The Red Badge of Courage
(1895), was asked how he could write so convincingly about a war that he had not experienced. “I believe that I got my sense of the rage of the conflict on the football field,” he answered. Teddy Roosevelt once said, “In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard.” And Walter Camp (1859-1925), the man who created American football, described a “remarkable and interesting likeness between the theories which underlie great battles and the miniature contests of the gridiron.”

Many football players and other jocks attended Condi’s large survey classes and connected with the analogy. One female student commented that she felt a bit alienated by the approach, however. She took a freshman class from Condi just as war was breaking out in Bosnia in 1992. “It was a large lecture class that focused on military action and intervention,” she said, “and it was very interesting because it was going on just as the Yugoslav crisis was happening. Dr. Rice started out the class by giving a football analogy, comparing football strategies to turf battles between nations. It struck me to hear this because she was a woman; it had a kind of stereotypically male bent to it. I think that for impressionistic students it’s a tool and it works, but unfortunately it’s sort of dangerous when you have a lot of football players in your class who are out there playing the game every day. I think that it brings war down to the football level rather than vice versa. To me it was an unappealing analogy for that reason. But that didn’t make her a bad teacher; the class was very interesting and I learned a ton.”

One of Condi’s colleagues remarked that the passion she brought to teaching was obvious even after she left the classroom. “Anyone who has had the good fortune to have a meeting with Professor Rice immediately after one of her lectures can sense the excitement she brings to the classroom,” he said. “Just by the way she talks about the lecture she has just given, it is obvious that she is still completely engaged in her subject and in her students to a truly extraordinary degree.” Students who had Condi as an academic advisor knew that she was seriously committed to them. “I will always remember the fifty-five-minute phone conversation in the middle of the day to get back to me on a draft of my dissertation proposal,” said one graduate student. Another graduate student described her as “a marvelous facilitator, a teacher in an ancient Socratic sense. Her command for guiding our discussions and ensuring our eventual arrival at major conceptual understandings was outstanding among the teachers I had at Stanford.” Condi left a lasting impression as a role model on a group of students who attended one of her seminar courses. “She . . . treated us all like we were her favorite students,” she said. “By the end of the seminar, several of the students were wistfully thinking about how much we wanted to be like her. This was not idle hero-worship. She seemed to be the embodiment of everything we admired about academia. She was knowledgeable without being close-minded, prestigious without being pompous, and her lectures were complex without being dry.”