Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (23 page)

The Center for a New Generation, held at Clara’s school, was open to children in the third through eighth grades with good potential who had at least a C+ average and were recommended by their teachers. At the Center, they received first-time exposure to foreign languages, computer training, and tutoring in math and science—given by Stanford students whom John Rice enlisted for the job. “He was retired,” said Clara, “and he put all kinds of energy into the Center, so it would have the resources it needed.” John organized a band as part of the musical arts program and found funding for instruments and uniforms. He also arranged a bus schedule with the school district for transportation to and from the Center and found vendors to donate food and snacks.

Condi officially cofounded the Center with Susan Ford, a well-known philanthropist active in the business and medical community and director of the Sand Hill Foundation. The program enrolled from 100 to 120 students during the school year and about 150 during the summer. They established a formal relationship with Stanford, which contributed student volunteers as well as education professionals who helped form the curriculum. John organized a group of school counselors to follow up with the students once they entered high school and make sure they had the support and encouragement they needed to graduate.

John had taught Condi how effective this type of program could be through his own youth fellowship back in Birmingham. The Center for a New Generation was enormously successful, and within a few years, two of its graduates were accepted at Stanford, and more went to other colleges and universities. In 1996, when Condi’s duties at Stanford prevented her from spending as much time at the Center as she felt it deserved, she met with the Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula to talk about a merger. The administration agreed to adopt the Center and took control of its operation. To keep a hand in the program, Condi became a vice president of the Boys & Girls Club. In 1998, Condi and Susan Ford were honored by the organization for their “extraordinary support of children and youth” at a Leading Citizens Dinner. Condi’s father gave the invocation that evening, and the band from the Center for a New Generation played for the guests.

The kids at the Center became Condi’s extended family and her work there was extremely important to her. She once told her father, “Those are sort of my kids, all 125 of them.” Giving children in disadvantaged circumstances a few breaks became Condi’s cause. “Ever since I’ve been out of school,” she said, “most of my efforts outside work have dealt with trying to give kids an opportunity.” Her aunt Connie Ray said that Condi’s devotion stems from her philosophy of life. “Condoleezza has always felt that to be a complete person you had to be devoted to a cause,” she said.

Condi’s work with children in East Palo Alto has led some to call her a role model for minority children, and although she doesn’t mind that recognition, she hopes that kids will disregard race and gender and simply look at the work their models do. “I have never accepted this notion that you have to see somebody who looks like you doing it to make it possible,” she said. At the 2000 Republican National Convention, the “Profiles in Compassion” video series included a film about the Center for a New Generation.

Another California group that identified Condi as a role model was that state’s Women Legislator’s Caucus. In 1992, they named Condi “Woman of the Year,” recognizing her work in the Bush administration and the national status she had achieved. “Dr. Rice has participated in the making of history,” said State Senator Becky Morgan, who named her that year’s recipient of the award. “Condoleezza exemplifies everything that a woman can be: intelligent, articulate, capable and highly respected. She is an excellent role model for younger women.”

Condi’s clout as a Washington veteran gave her more visibility in the media, new stature in the Republican Party, and entrée into some of the nation’s top foreign policy organizations. In 1991, for example, her television appearances as a consultant on Soviet affairs for ABC News offered a hint of the media star she would become. In 1992, she gave an address at the Republican National Convention in Houston, where President George Bush was nominated for re-election, and shared the stage with Pat Buchanan and leaders who introduced the new Party agenda as the “Contract for America.”

Her foreign policy affiliations expanded to membership in the Lincoln Club of North California, the American Political Science Association, and the Aspen Institute, where she participated in the Aspen Strategy Group from 1991 to 1995. Aspen conducts nonpartisan policy programs for public- and private-sector leaders, and the Aspen Strategy Group focuses specifically on “the role of the U.S. in the post-cold war world, the U.S.-Russian relationship, and the Strategic Defense Initiative.” Her former boss at the White House, Brent Scowcroft, has been co-chairman of the Aspen Strategy Group since 1984.

At Stanford, she jumped back into administrative duties by serving on search committees for the Stanford football coach, dean of admissions, and president of the university, all in 1991. The following year, she joined the Provost’s Committee on the Status of Women in the University and the University Policy and Planning Board.

A major development in Condi’s life—the result of her White House service and new Republican contacts—was her launch onto several corporate boards. Directors are chosen on the basis of their expertise and also because they are identified as professionals who will have a positive reflection on the company and will act harmoniously with the rest of the board.

Those who leave posts in government are attracted to corporate boards as a way of staying connected to the national scene and utilizing their Washington connections. Like the majority of women on corporate boards, Condi came to Chevron, TransAmerica, Hewlett Packard, and other companies with a background very different from that of the white males who served as directors. Albert A. Cannella, Jr., Associate Professor of Management at Texas A&M University’s College of Business, has analyzed the difference between the routes women and minorities take to become members of corporate boards and the routes taken by white men. The white-male path has traditionally been a series of advancements from within the company, while the glass ceiling prevents the same for women executives. “White men prove themselves in the industry and get promoted,” he explained, “but women and minorities don’t tend to get promoted. Rather, the prominent routes for them are law, government service, and academics—having a Ph.D.” With a background in both the White House and academia, Condi had the perfect resume for obtaining directorships and maintaining the high-profile contacts she made in Washington. “She’s very well connected,” said Dr. Cannella. “She knows a lot of people in government, and that’s something a corporation is always looking for. In particular, those with a background in government service are in demand on boards of industries where there is a lot of government regulation and oversight.”

In his published study about the differing routes men and women take to become corporate directors, Dr. Cannella explained that corporations seek out board members from outside the company who are “business experts, support specialists, and community influentials.” Condi fits into the third category, people who provide the board with “non-business perspectives on issues, problems, and ideas, as well as expertise about and influence with powerful groups in the community.” These members are often politicians, academics, clergy, or other social leaders. While the first category, business experts, is made up primarily of white males who have worked their way up the business ladder, the other two categories include more women and minorities who came via the academic or political-experience route. Of those, a large number hold doctoral degrees—56 percent of the black women in the study held Ph.D.s as opposed to only 19 percent of white male directors. (Chevron’s current CEO, David J. O’Reilly, holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, for example.)

Another pattern observed in Cannella’s study is the fact that women and racial minorities tend to sit on several boards at once, unlike the white male majority who serve on fewer at one time. This is true of both Condoleezza and her fellow Chevron board member, Carla Hills. Like Condi, Carla came to the board with a background in government service, having served in the senior Bush administration as U.S. trade representative (while Condi was serving on the National Security Council). During the Ford administration, she was secretary of housing and urban development, and prior to that, she was an assistant district attorney in Los Angeles.

Condi joined the Board of Directors of Chevron Corporation, a multinational with oil operations in twenty-five countries, immediately upon returning to Stanford in 1991. Her expertise on the states that made up the former Soviet Union made her a valuable asset for Chevron’s oil interests in Kazakhstan. She worked extensively on those deals, including their plan to help build a pipeline from the Tengiz oil field across southern Russia to a Russian port on the Black Sea.

Like her Hoover Institution colleague, George Shultz, who served as a director of Chevron before she arrived at the company, Condi supplemented her Stanford income with fees from Chevron that included a $35,000-per-year retainer and $1,500 for each board and committee meeting attended. By her tenth year with the company, she held over 3,000 shares of Chevron stock worth $241,000. Also like Shultz, she had a supertanker named after her—the 136,000-deadweight-ton SS
Condoleezza Rice
.

Condi’s work on Chevron’s oil projects in Kazakhstan formed part of one of the United State’s largest overseas energy investments. Construction on the 935-mile Kazakhstan pipeline, a group effort by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), began in 1999 and the first barrels of oil from the Tengiz oil field flowed into a waiting tanker at the Russian port of Novorossiysk in November 2001. According to a White House press release that month, the CPC “is the largest, single United States investment in Russia,” and American oil companies, primarily Chevron and Exxon, paid for approximately half of the pipeline’s $2.6 billion price tag.

Condi’s decade-long affiliation with Chevron would raise flags when she joined the George W. Bush administration. Not only did the oil company’s holdings in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa pose conflict-of-interest issues, Chevron was the subject of a lawsuit involving human rights abuses in Nigeria. The corporation was charged with aiding Nigeria’s military police in crushing public demonstrations against the exploitation of the nation’s delta region, where most of the oil reserves are found.

Condi served on and chaired Chevron’s public policy committee, which was responsible for identifying social, political, and environmental issues that concerned the corporation at home and abroad. When Condi’s affiliation with Chevron came up during the presidential campaign of 2000, one television news show asked her about George W.’s relationship with “big oil” and how that would affect his administration. “American oil companies are important to our security,” she answered, “in that they give us the ability to explore abroad. They give us the ability to explore here in the United States and to protect the energy security of the United States.”

The issue of Chevron quelling protests by environmental activists in Africa did not come up in the broadcast, but Condi praised Chevron’s environmental policies in the United States. “Oil companies have come a long way in their environmental policies,” she said, “actually going so far as to fund environmental projects around the country. They are good citizens. We can’t live without oil. And we have to have American oil companies doing it. I’m proud of my association with Chevron . . . and I think we should be very proud of the job that American oil companies are doing in exploration abroad, in exploration at home, and in making certain that we have a safe energy supply.”

Condi resigned from the Chevron board on January 15, 2001, after being named Bush’s national security advisor. Three months later, in the midst of California’s energy crisis, Chevron renamed the tanker that bore her name. As reported in the
San Francisco Chronicle,
the ship was “one of the most visible reminders of the Bush administration’s ties to big oil” and “the White House had faced questions over the appropriateness of the tanker’s name.” Chevron did not comment on whether or not the White House requested the name change, but a company spokesman, Fred Gorell, said, “We made the change to eliminate the unnecessary attention caused by the vessel’s original name.” The ship is now called
Altair Voyager
.

Condi’s background at Chevron put her in the company of many government officials—women as well as men—criticized for having alliances with corporations that may create conflicts of interest or harbor controversial business practices. When Hillary Clinton was running for Senate, for example, stories emerged about her history with Wal-Mart, Arkansas’s largest corporation. As first lady of Arkansas, she served on the company’s board of directors, and the press pointed out that Wal-Mart’s non-union employment policy contrasted with Hillary’s support of the Teamsters and other unions during her campaign and that their “Buy American” slogan smacked of irony, as Wal-Mart imports more foreign goods than any other company in the United States.

Chevron was the first of several corporate boards Condi joined in the 1990s. In 1991, she became a director at TransAmerica, the insurance giant based in San Francisco housed in the famous pyramid-shaped skyscraper that bears its name. (In May 2002, as national security advisor, Condi would list the TransAmerica Building as a possible terrorist target along with the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building.) Concurrent with her work at Chevron, she served on TransAmerica’s board of directors for ten years. TransAmerica was the sixth largest life insurance company in the United States and also offered financial and real estate services. In 1999, when Condi left the board, TransAmerica was bought by the Dutch company Aegon N.V. She stayed in the financial services world, however, by joining the Charles Schwab Corporation’s board of directors that same year. Once again, she came to the business on the heels of George Shultz, who had joined the brokerage house two years previously. She and Shultz both served on the compensation and customer quality assurance committees at Schwab.