Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (16 page)

When Condi’s three-year trial period was over the university gave her a positive appraisal and renewed her assistant professorship. She had, in fact, become one of the university’s most highly regarded instructors. In 1984 Stanford awarded her the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, the school’s highest honor for teaching. Presenting the award during the commencement ceremonies on June 17, Provost Albert Hastorf praised her “for bringing enthusiasm and insight to her lectures and sparking the sense of curiosity and fascination in her students that she herself feels.” He also remarked that she was renowned for giving “incalculable support, encouragement and inspiration to her undergraduate advisees.”

Condi advised both undergraduates and graduate students, and one of her Ph.D. students is a rising star in foreign policy. Jendayi Frazier was hired to teach at Condi’s alma mater, Denver’s Graduate School of International Studies, after graduating from Stanford in the early 1990s. Her training as an Africa policy expert included a research position at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. Harvard hired her away from Denver, making her an assistant professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government. When Condi became George W.’s national security advisor, she appointed Jendayi to the National Security Council as its Africa expert. Her official title is special assistant to the president and senior director for African affairs.

Josef Korbel’s assessment that Condi had the makings of a talented professor was borne out as she continued to climb the academic ladder at Stanford. In 1987, she was promoted to associate professor and in 1993, at age thirty-eight, became a full professor. That year she received another distinguished honor: the School of Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. The award came with a $5,000 cash prize and a $1,000 increase in salary.

By 1984, Condi had become good friends with fellow professor Coit Blacker, who in the early 1980s worked as an aide to Democrat Senator Gary Hart. They discussed Hart’s presidential campaign and his military reform ideas, which Condi found interesting. Coit introduced Condi to Senator Hart, who was taken by “her intellect and charm—charm in the profound sense, not the silly sense. And I’d add a third dimension: inner strength.” Condi helped him briefly on the campaign as a foreign policy advisor.

Working with Hart gave Condi a glimpse into policy at work, but her first hands-on experience in government took place in 1986 when she was sent to the Pentagon for a year by the Council on Foreign Relations. The mission of this nonpartisan research and membership organization, which publishes the journal
Foreign Policy
, is to increase “America’s understanding of the world and [contribute] ideas to U.S. foreign policy.” Each year the Council awards highly competitive International Affairs Fellowships that allow academic professionals to swap places with government officers. This gives the scholars exposure to government and allows the government personnel to pursue academic interests in their fields. Condi’s Notre Dame professor George Brinkley suggested she apply for the opportunity and helped her obtain one of the twenty fellowships that were given to academics that year. “I was affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations and was one of several who recommended her for that fellowship,” he said.

It was a fascinating time to be in the corridors of military power. Condi’s position as special assistant to the director-Joint Chiefs of Staff brought her to the Pentagon during Reagan’s massive buildup of the military. In his first term, defense spending increased by 7 percent each year. When Condi arrived in the administration, Reagan was gearing up for an arms limitations summit with Gorbachev. The Iceland summit in October 1986 began on a high note with a tentative agreement by both leaders to ban all nuclear ballistic missiles within ten years. They even made progress on a handful of human rights issues. But Gorbachev demanded that Reagan scale down his space-based missile defense program, commonly known as “Star Wars,” and the talks were deadlocked. They met again the following year to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which eliminated all ground-launched missiles (approximately 2,700) with ranges between 300 and 3,500 miles.

Condi studied nuclear planning and reveled in the military culture at the Pentagon. She considered her stint there a “reality check” into the complex workings of the military and gained a deeper respect and admiration for military personnel. She was captivated by the nuclear arms issues that were on the front burner at the time, by the focus of her work, and by her surroundings. She later remarked that the defense and military are “ill understood by the academic community and the civilian community at large,” and she was grateful to get an inside look. “I found them welcoming, happy to have the contact with academics,” she said. In an interview held one year after her return to Stanford from her fellowship, she said that her Pentagon post stood out “as one of the greatest experiences in my life.”

When she moved to California for the Stanford job, Condi had left her parents for the second time. Unlike her Notre Dame year, Stanford was a more long-term move, and she had truly left the nest. Church had always been a family activity, so in that first year on her own, she didn’t attend regularly. One Sunday she found herself chatting with a man at the grocery store who said he needed a piano player for his small church. She said she’d be happy to do it and spent the next six months playing for his congregation. “I realized then the long arm of the Lord reaches all the way to Lucky’s Super Market,” she told a prayer group in Denver in 2000.

Condi became reacquainted with her childhood friend Deborah Carson in Palo Alto, and the two often got together to talk about their dates, have dinner, or go shopping. Shoes are Condi’s biggest shopping obsession, and she quickly came to love an exclusive shop on San Francisco’s Union Square that carried all the top-of-the-line brands. Deborah remembered one trip in which Condi loaded up her arms with eight pair of Ferragamos. A few months later, she and Deborah showed up at the store again, and the salespeople literally fell all over themselves. “We walked in the door,” said Deborah, “and a salesman from the back of the store started jumping over the benches to get at Condi! We were laughing so hard, and I said, ‘Condi, you’re going to kill them!’ They must have told each other the previous time that when this person comes back, that’s a
good
day.”

Condi kept to a vigorous workout routine which included strength training with personal trainers in Stanford’s athletic department. Her friends fixed her up on blind dates from time to time, but she had better luck finding interesting men on her own. She dated a university coach, a visiting professional from a Fortune 500 company in the East who was taking a Stanford seminar, and others. Football continued to be her favorite theme for romance, however, and one of her more long-term boyfriends at Stanford was San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Gene Washington. A graduate of Stanford, he played with the San Francisco team from 1969 to 1977. Washington, the superstar, appeared in cameo roles as himself in movies and television shows such as a 1972 episode of “Banacek.” He and Condi had two major connections: they both loved football and they both came from Birmingham. “They were a real couple for a while,” said Deborah Carson, “and even after they stopped dating they remained friends. They still attend social events together from time to time.” Gene is now one of the top officials of the NFL as its director of football operations.

Football took up a healthy percentage of Condi’s time, and she once remarked that if it weren’t for all the coverage on TV she would be much more published. In truth, she hit the ground running as soon she got to Stanford with articles appearing in major journals and compilations. She wrote three books during her Stanford years, beginning with
Uncertain Alliance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army,
which, as mentioned in the previous chapter, was an extension of her doctoral dissertation. Next came
The Gorbachev Era
, a collection of articles on Russian and Soviet history, which she co-edited with Alexander Dallin. A leading scholar in Soviet and East European studies, Dallin was a professor in international history at Stanford. Their book was published by the Stanford Alumni Press Service in 1986.

She co-authored her third book,
Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft,
with Philip Zelikow, with whom she served in Bush Senior’s administration during the period of German reunification. The book, published by Harvard University Press in 1995, won critical acclaim and is considered the definitive insiders’ look into Germany’s reunification process. Both authors drew upon their own experiences during that landmark time in history as well as upon thousands of classified government documents. Following is an excerpt from the book’s compelling narrative about the day the Berlin Wall crumbled:

The opening of the Berlin Wall was as electrifying and emotional an event as the world had seen in many years. Although the wall’s collapse immediately called into question the postwar order and Germany’s future, those were hardly the concerns that dominated the moment. Rather, there were, first and foremost, the scenes of Germany overcoming its division in the most human of terms as families were reunited after years of separation. There were the expressions of giddy East German citizens encountering the casual prosperity most West Germans took for granted, the bewildering array of material goods that had been nothing more than an image on West German television. And there were the feelings of nationhood that welled up in Germans on both sides of the divide. . . . About 9 million East Germans visited the West during that first week.

This book was one of three awarded the Akira Iriye International History Book Award for 1994-1995, an honor given by the Foundation for Pacific Quest to recognize excellence in scholarship in international history.
Germany Unified
was also named a co-winner of the 1996 Book of Distinction on American Diplomacy by the American Academy of Diplomacy, and awarded a Citation for Excellence for nonfiction foreign affairs by the Overseas Press Club of America.

Condi found her passions in Soviet studies and teaching, and her life at Stanford was rich on many levels. She juggled classes, advising, research, writing, playing the piano, weight training, exercising, dating, and gluing herself to the television for twelve-hour football-watching marathons. Her academic career would take two dramatic turns in the 1990s, however. First, she answered the call to Washington for a post at the White House. Second, she made a quantum leap up the academic ladder.

SEVEN

Bush I

“Condi was brilliant. . . . She has a manner and presence that disarms the biggest of the big shots. Why? Because they know she knows what she is talking about.”

—Former President George H. W. Bush

IN
her fourth year at Stanford, Condi was invited to address the graduates on Senior Class Day. At thirty, the assistant professor looked as young as the twenty-two-year-old students, but her words of advice revealed a good deal of worldly experience. She talked to them about tackling the problems of the Cold War world without becoming overwhelmed, suggesting that any contribution to a solution, however small, was valuable. “All you have to do with the large, huge, and very frightening problems that we face is to make a contribution,” she said. “If you focus too much on solving that problem, rather than just making a contribution to its solution, I’m afraid that you will become paralyzed at the enormity of the task and unable to do anything at all. People say that time is running out for us. Well, maybe. . . . All that we can do is hope that we have the time and to work consistently to make sure that we make good use of that time.”

For Condi, making good use of her time included public service. Growing up in Birmingham, she had watched her parents devote their lives to children, outside the classroom as much as in. Their strategy for combating civil injustice was to arm the youth with confidence, education, and opportunity, constantly and patiently preparing them to thrive in an unfair world. This sense of responsibility and commitment was ingrained in Condi, and she hoped to channel her knowledge into making a contribution to the decision-making processes that shaped national security.

Her year-long job at the Pentagon gave her a hint of how policy was transformed into action, and she was eager to have a hand in the process. Even though she was not interested in partisan politics, she had devoted her academic career to the study of conflict resolution and military strategy and she hoped to one day have the opportunity to put her expertise to use in Washington. In the meantime, she became involved in problem-solving in her own community of Stanford, California.