San Jose Mercury News Posted at 1:10 a.m. PDT Sunday, July 30, 2000 Forging a course of her own Condoleezza Rice, former Stanford provost, moves in GOP's inner circle BY JIM PUZZANGHERA Mercury News Washington Bureau BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Condoleezza Rice's résumé stretches into four single-spaced pages, plenty of room to sketch a stunning career but offering only a hint of perhaps her most significant accomplishment. That she grew up black here when this city was the epicenter of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, emerging unscathed and inspired, is all but lost amid an avalanche of achievements. A college graduate at 19. A master's degree by 20, with a doctorate to follow. A Stanford University professor, then its provost. The top Soviet adviser to former President George Bush. Chief foreign-policy adviser to Texas Gov. George W. Bush's presidential campaign. Service on a dozen corporate and academic boards. A host of fellowships, awards and honorary degrees. All at only 45 years old. Should Bush win, Rice will probably add another bullet to her résumé: national security adviser, one of the most important posts in the White House. But to understand this woman who has become so popular and well-regarded in Republican circles that she will give a prime-time address at the party's convention Tuesday night, you need to pause near the top of the résumé. Right where she typed ``Place of Birth: Birmingham, Alabama.'' Rice was profoundly affected by growing up here during the days when segregation kept her from quenching her thirst at certain water fountains, from riding the Ferris wheel at the local fairgrounds or from trying on an Easter bonnet at some stores without first placing tissue paper over her head. ``There's a kind of security that comes from having grown up in a society where race was everything so that you're not constructing a reality about what it means to be black,'' Rice said one recent afternoon in her office at Stanford's Hoover Institution. ``And it also means that it never occurred to me that it was a problem if I wanted to study the Soviet Union instead of do civil rights law. . . . Birmingham was so grounding that then you could do almost anything.'' Unscathed, inspired: Ambitions unfettered by limits of the South As Jim Crow's walls came tumbling down, Birmingham was a dangerous place. Protesters were met by snarling police dogs and thunderous blasts from fire hoses. A bomb exploded so close to Rice's home that she could smell the stench. And as an 8-year-old she was struck by the smallness of the caskets carrying a young friend and three other girls who were killed in the infamous 1963 bombing at the city's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The impact is evident now in many ways. It's there in the work ethic instilled by teachers who constantly told her she had to strive twice as hard to stay even with white students and three times as hard to get ahead. It's there in the confidence, fueled by her parents, that she can do anything. And it's there in her views on race that have helped her find a political home in a party that is largely white. The Republican Party ``has not been very good'' on race, she said. ``I think some of it's been neglect, some of it is there are people who hold attitudes and views that are not very good on race,'' Rice said. ``But I also think that the Republican Party has a lot of people and has some heritage to draw on that is actually quite good on race, and some solutions that look to individual initiative, and to local solutions and to entrepreneurship, that might be more effective at this point in our history as a people than continued efforts to still march in the streets. You know, it's not getting us anywhere.'' Strengthened by her childhood, Rice has marched in her own direction -- always with a deep-rooted desire to be the best. It's evident in the way she has dived into her pastimes. Photo by: Len Vaughn-Lahman Even in her pastimes, Rice excels. An accomplished pianist, she plays with a chamber music group. She's an accomplished pianist who has publicly performed intricate pieces such as Brahms' F minor Piano Quintet and plays with a chamber music group. She stays in shape by working with the Stanford Athletic Department's strength and conditioning coach on the same intensive regimen followed by the university's top athletes. And her love and knowledge of football are so deep that she'd most likely be on the short list of candidates to be the next commissioner of the National Football League, said Carmen Policy, president of the Cleveland Browns and a friend of Rice's from his days with the San Francisco 49ers. Policy was amazed at Rice's grasp of the intricacies of football when they watched games together on several occasions from his box at Candlestick Park. ``She would decipher what was happening as a play was unfolding, and it got to the point after a while she'd start predicting the play that would be called,'' he said. ``And not just calling a pass or a run, I'm talking about a specific play that followed the script of the West Coast offense.'' Like so many who have encountered Rice, her unique mix of Southern warmth, intellectual firepower, quiet assertiveness and eclectic tastes charmed Policy and his wife, Gail. They've been close since meeting at a Stanford dinner in the early 1990s. ``She just swept us off our feet,'' Policy said. They're not alone. President Bush became so enamored with Rice during her two years at the White House that he invites her each summer to vacation at the family's compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. Her unvarnished assessment of Stanford's strengths and weaknesses as part of the university's presidential search in 1992 so impressed Gerhard Casper that he chose Rice as his provost -- even though she was only 39 and had never been a dean or a department head. ``She has charisma,'' said Philip Zelikow, who served with Rice on the National Security Council staff. ``She's kind of a distinct person. Dynamic, youthful, black, attractive, highly intelligent, defining easy stereotyping or characterization.'' As Zelikow noted, race is part of what makes her unique, especially in a foreign-policy universe dominated by gray-haired men. ``She would be outstanding if she were a white male,'' said Brent Scowcroft, President Bush's national security adviser. ``But given who she is, it makes it even more remarkable.'' Rice's views on race are complex, shaped by growing up in the civil rights crucible that was her hometown. Photo by: Len Vaughn-Lahman Rice still has the toy piano given to her by her parents. ``Birmingham could have made me bitter,'' she said of the place she lived until she was 11, when the family moved to Tuscaloosa, and then to Denver. ``Instead, I think it made me and, I know, a lot of my friends, just resilient.'' Much of the credit for that goes to the Rev. John Rice and Angelena Rice. Like many parents here in the neat, black middle-class neighborhood of Titusville, they sought to protect their only child from the emotional and physical perils of those days. ``It was very turbulent and dangerous through those times. A lot of hate,'' recalled Rice's aunt Connie Ray. ``But I don't think Condoleezza's parents taught her to hate.'' The family watched the day's events on the news every night and discussed them. But her parents kept her from getting too close. She wasn't allowed to march with other children in the spring of 1963 when they boycotted school. And she was diverted from the indignity of segregation. To do that, the parents of Titusville tried as best they could to mirror white Birmingham. ``It had the same things, ballet lessons and piano lessons and strong churches and strong families and social clubs and cotillions,'' Rice remembered. ``If you wanted to go and do things like go to the symphony or a restaurant, you couldn't. . . . And I think a lot of black parents' challenge was to not make that seem as if it was somehow a comment on you or to make you feel less.'' More than anything, Rice's parents saw education as the key to surmounting the racial barriers. Both were educators: her mother a science teacher; her father a guidance counselor, then a university administrator. Education was as much a religion in the family as the Presbyterian Church. Summer vacations were a perfect example. Many families visit national parks. The Rices visited college campuses. ``Nobody ever asked, `Do you want to go to college?','' she said. ``It was just, `Where do you want to go to college?' or `What are you going to study?' '' With education so valued, her parents indulged Rice's every intellectual or artistic desire. ``I decided I wanted to play the flute. Flute lessons, like that. I wanted to figure skate. Figure-skating lessons, like that,'' Rice said. ``I marvel at their willingness to entertain just about anything I wanted to try that might make me smarter or better or more talented.'' And Rice was exceptional at almost all of it. She began playing piano at age 3 and soon was accompanying her mother, also a musician, at the Rev. Rice's church services. ``She grew up very talented,'' said her father's cousin Florence Rice. Source of her success: Parents nurtured educational goals Rice attributes her success to her parents -- her mother died in 1985, and her father lives in Palo Alto and is recovering from a serious illness. But friends and colleagues said much of it is due to Rice's own talents. ``She really knows how to learn,'' said George Barth, an associate music professor at Stanford who gives Rice advanced piano lessons. ``One of her habits is sometimes repeating the very end of what you've just said, and it's as if each thing is just, `click, stored.' '' That brainpower served her well as President Bush's top adviser on the Soviet Union. It was a time of tumultuous change from 1989 to 1991, as communism was falling across the former Soviet empire. ``She routinely was called upon to do analytical memos in 45 minutes,'' said Robert Blackwill, who was in charge of European affairs for the National Security Council. ``She is very powerful analytically.'' Rice at age 4 with her mother, Angelena, and father, Rev. John Rice. And the girl who grew up resilient in Birmingham was unruffled by the enormous pressure of those cascading events, he said. ``I never saw her in those two years ever lose her composure,'' Blackwill said. Birmingham had that kind of effect, said Mary Kate Bush, who grew up with Rice in Titusville. ``Experiences like that . . . add wisdom and an ability to sort of maneuver in the world regardless of what happens to you,'' said Bush, who went on to attend college and be appointed to the board of the International Monetary Fund by President Reagan. For many of those middle-class black children growing up in Birmingham, they took the old civil rights spiritual ``We Shall Overcome'' to another level: We Shall Overachieve. Rice remains close to her family and friends from back home. She keeps her personal life private, but reportedly once dated a professional football player. Her high-octane career has in the past had room for serious relationships, but Rice said she's not in one at the moment. A black Republican Democrat became GOP supporter in 1979 Though it initially strikes many people, black and white, as somewhat odd, Rice doesn't find it incongruous that she's a Republican. Her father joined the party in the 1950s simply because it was easier to register to vote with the GOP than with the Democrats, the party that ruled the segregated South. Disenchanted by Watergate, Rice cast her first presidential ballot for a Democrat: fellow Southerner Jimmy Carter in 1976. But after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 she became a Republican, feeling that Carter hadn't grasped ``what an awful, horrible, aggressive goonlike power this was.'' Rice believes that the United States has a special role in the world because of its power. She's very much a Republican when it comes to foreign policy, asserting that the country needs a strong military and should act in its own self-interest. She describes herself as a social moderate, ``mildly pro-choice'' and supportive of gay rights. But she also holds some conservative views on social issues. Referring to herself as ``an evangelical Christian,'' she favors voluntary school prayer. And she opposes strict gun control for a very personal reason. When bombs were exploding in black neighborhoods across the city, her father and others grabbed their shotguns and pistols and patrolled Titusville every night. Had those guns been registered, Rice is sure the city's segregationist public-safety commissioner, Eugene ``Bull'' Connor, would have rounded up all the weapons. But perhaps as much as anything, Rice doesn't like the sometimes-subtle suggestion by Democrats that blacks need help to succeed. ``I'm quite uncomfortable with the way that not all Democrats but the party as a whole talks about race,'' she said. ``There's a very fine line between wanting to support and falling over into being patronizing. A very fine line, and sometimes people cross it. Very well-meaning people cross it.'' Her views ruffled some feathers during her tenure as Stanford provost from 1993 to 1999. Faced with a big deficit, Rice had to make deep budget cuts. And she made the campuses' ethnic centers justify their budgets, just like everyone else. At a testy meeting in 1994, one student rose to criticize Rice's commitment to minorities on campus. ``You don't have the standing to question my commitment to minorities and minority issues,'' she shot back. ``I've been black all my life.'' Coit ``Chip'' Blacker, a close friend of Rice's, said the incident still gives him goose bumps. ``She could have been accused of browbeating a student; she didn't care,'' said Blacker, deputy director of Stanford's Institute for International Studies. ``At that moment it was absolutely imperative for her to make sure everybody understood that she was not abandoning her blackness.'' Photo by: Len Vaughn-Lahman Rice follows the same intensive regimen of Stanford University's top athletes. Rice believes she's earned the right to follow her own course as a black woman. ``I think that having been through . . . Birmingham and segregated schools and watching what my parents struggled through, I don't think anybody has standing to tell me how to succeed at being a black American,'' she said. Rice's views on racism reflect George W. Bush's frequent admonition about the ``soft bigotry of low expectations'' in an education system that doesn't hold inner-city schools accountable for poor achievement by minority students. And as the Texas governor waded into touchy racial territory during the primaries this year, Rice largely was supportive. He was criticized for speaking at Bob Jones University, which had banned interracial dating, and for refusing to call for South Carolina officials to stop flying the Confederate flag over the state's Capitol. Like Bush, Rice believes that South Carolinians needed to decide the flag issue themselves. And she doesn't think Bush was properly briefed about Bob Jones University. ``Since I know him, and know that certainly, by any stretch, he wouldn't hold those views, it didn't matter to me personally,'' she said. Rice said she is proud of her heritage, particularly the struggle that took place in Birmingham. It wasn't so much her struggle, she said, as her parents' struggle -- to raise a child who could believe her horizons were limitless in a place where segregation placed mountainous limits everywhere. ``Since the face of racism was so clear in Birmingham, I think I have pretty good antennae about the difference between racism and all kinds of other behavior that a lot of people attribute to race,'' she said. ``And so I try very hard to give people the benefit of the doubt about whether they're reacting to me in a way that's off-putting that maybe it has something to do with other than race. I think that that maybe comes also from a kind of security about the fact that blacks can do just fine. Just fine.'' © 2000 Mercury Center. The information you receive online from Mercury Center is protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The copyright laws prohibit any copying, redistributing, retransmitting, or repurposing of any copyright-protected material. 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