104 Facts About Condoleezza Rice

Condoleezza "Condi" Rice is an American diplomat and political scientist serving since 2020 as the 8th director of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

At the time of her appointment as Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice was the highest-ranking woman in the history of the United States to be in the presidential line of succession.

Condoleezza Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up while the South was racially segregated.

Condoleezza Rice obtained her bachelor's degree from the University of Denver and her master's degree from the University of Notre Dame, both in political science.

Condoleezza Rice later pursued an academic fellowship at Stanford University, where she later served as provost from 1993 to 1999.

In March 2009, Condoleezza Rice returned to Stanford University as a political science professor and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.

In January 2020, it was announced that Rice would succeed Thomas W Gilligan as the next director of the Hoover Institution on September 1,2020.

Condoleezza Rice is on the Board of Directors of Dropbox and Makena Capital Management, LLC.

Condoleezza Rice began to learn French, music, figure skating and ballet at the age of three.

Condoleezza Rice attended St Mary's Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Cherry Hills Village, Colorado, and graduated at age 16 in 1971.

Condoleezza Rice enrolled at the University of Denver, where her father worked at the time.

Condoleezza Rice initially majored in music, and after her sophomore year, she went to the Aspen Music Festival and School.

Condoleezza Rice attended an International Politics course taught by Josef Korbel, which sparked her interest in the Soviet Union and international relations.

Condoleezza Rice later described Korbel, as a central figure in her life.

Condoleezza Rice first worked in the State Department in 1977, during the Carter administration, as an intern in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Condoleezza Rice studied Russian at Moscow State University in the summer of 1979, and interned with the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

Condoleezza Rice's dissertation centered on military policy and politics in what was then the communist state of Czechoslovakia.

Condoleezza Rice was a Democrat until 1982, when she changed her political affiliation to Republican, in part because she disagreed with the foreign policy of Democratic President Jimmy Carter, and because of the influence of her father, who was Republican.

Condoleezza Rice was hired by Stanford University as an assistant professor of political science.

Condoleezza Rice was promoted to associate professor in 1987, a post she held until 1993.

Condoleezza Rice was a specialist on the Soviet Union and gave lectures on the subject for the Berkeley-Stanford joint program led by UC Berkeley professor George W Breslauer in the mid-1980s.

At a 1985 meeting of arms control experts at Stanford, Condoleezza Rice's performance drew the attention of Brent Scowcroft, who had served as National Security Advisor under Gerald Ford.

Bush, Scowcroft returned to the White House as National Security Adviser in 1989, and he asked Condoleezza Rice to become his Soviet expert on the United States National Security Council.

Condoleezza Rice was taken under the wing of George Shultz, who was a fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Chevron was pursuing a $10 billion development project in Kazakhstan and, as a Soviet specialist, Condoleezza Rice knew the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Condoleezza Rice traveled to Kazakhstan on Chevron's behalf and, in honor of her work, in 1993, Chevron named a 129,000-ton supertanker SS Condoleezza Rice.

At Stanford, in 1992, Condoleezza Rice volunteered to serve on the search committee to replace outgoing president Donald Kennedy.

Condoleezza Rice was the first female, first African-American, and youngest provost in Stanford's history.

Condoleezza Rice was named a senior fellow of the Institute for International Studies, and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution.

Condoleezza Rice drew protests when, as the provost, she departed from the practice of applying affirmative action to tenure decisions and unsuccessfully sought to consolidate the university's ethnic community centers.

Condoleezza Rice returned to Stanford as a political science professor and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution on March 1,2009.

Condoleezza Rice is currently the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business; the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution; and a professor of political science at Stanford University.

In 1986, Condoleezza Rice was appointed special assistant to the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to work on nuclear strategic planning as part of a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship.

Condoleezza Rice played an important role in trying to stop the nuclear threat from North Korea and Iran.

Condoleezza Rice played a key role in the idea of "six-party talks" that brought China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea into discussion with North Korea and the United States.

In 2007, Condoleezza Rice was involved in another nuclear agreement with North Korea.

Condoleezza Rice has served as an instructor at MIT Seminar XXI.

Condoleezza Rice served on the board of directors for the Carnegie Corporation, the Charles Schwab Corporation, the Chevron Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, the Rand Corporation, the Transamerica Corporation, and other organizations.

In 1992, Condoleezza Rice founded the Center for New Generation, an after-school program created to raise the high school graduation numbers of East Palo Alto and eastern Menlo Park, California.

In 2014, Condoleezza Rice joined the Ban Bossy campaign as a spokesperson advocating leadership roles for girls.

On July 11,2022, the Denver Broncos announced that Rice had joined the Walton-Penner ownership group, which recently agreed to buy the NFL team for $4.65 billion.

In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Condoleezza Rice served as special assistant to the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Condoleezza Rice helped develop Bush's and Secretary of State James Baker's policies in favor of German reunification.

In 1991, Condoleezza Rice returned to her teaching position at Stanford, although she continued to serve as a consultant on the former Soviet Bloc for numerous clients in both the public and private sectors.

On December 16,2000, Condoleezza Rice was named as National Security Advisor, upon which she stepped down from her position at Stanford.

Condoleezza Rice was the first woman to occupy the post.

Condoleezza Rice earned the nickname of "Warrior Princess", reflecting strong nerve and delicate manners.

On January 18,2003, The Washington Post reported that Condoleezza Rice was involved in crafting Bush's position on race-based preferences.

Condoleezza Rice has stated that "while race-neutral means are preferable", race can be taken into account as "one factor among others" in university admissions policies.

On July 10,2001, Condoleezza Rice met with Tenet in what he referred to as an "emergency meeting" held at the White House at Tenet's request to brief Condoleezza Rice and the NSC staff about the potential threat of an impending al Qaeda attack.

Condoleezza Rice responded by asking Tenet to give a presentation on the matter to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Condoleezza Rice characterized the August 6,2001, President's Daily Brief Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US as historical information.

In 2003, Condoleezza Rice received the US Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.

In March 2004, Condoleezza Rice declined to testify before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

On November 16,2004, Bush nominated Condoleezza Rice to be Secretary of State.

Condoleezza Rice reformed and restructured the department, as well as US diplomacy as a whole.

Condoleezza Rice's diplomacy relied on strong presidential support and is considered to be the continuation of style defined by former Republican secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and James Baker.

In October 2010, Condoleezza Rice met with President Obama for a discussion on national security issues.

Two years later, Condoleezza Rice introduced world leaders such as Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar at the center's dedication ceremony.

In May 2012, Condoleezza Rice served as the keynote speaker at the Southern Methodist University commencement ceremony.

Condoleezza Rice delivered a speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

On January 26,2017, Condoleezza Rice participated in a talk with the University of San Francisco, where she opined that the United States had entered "uncharted territory" with President Donald Trump due to his lack of government experience and that the new president should be given time to realize the limitations of his powers.

Condoleezza Rice supported the Trump administration "painting a very bleak picture for the Chinese", opining that the cabinet saw the region as the only country with leverage over North Korea.

In 2018, Condoleezza Rice called decisions by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to make overtures to the South Koreans "clever" and expressed that he was more isolated and reckless than his father.

In February 2009, it was announced that Condoleezza Rice had signed a three-book deal with Crown Publishers worth at least $2.5 million.

In 2017, Condoleezza Rice released Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom, a book in which she makes the case for democracy over totalitarianism or authoritarianism.

In October 2013, Condoleezza Rice was selected to be one of the thirteen inaugural members of the College Football Playoff selection committee.

Condoleezza Rice's appointment caused a minor controversy in the sport.

On November 18,2018 ESPN's Adam Schefter reported that a league source had told him that Condoleezza Rice was being considered as a candidate in the Cleveland Browns' head coach search.

Republican strategist Dan Senor said on ABC's This Week on April 6,2008, that "Condi Condoleezza Rice has been actively, actually in recent weeks, campaigning for" the vice presidential nomination.

Condoleezza Rice based this assessment on her attendance of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform conservative leader's meeting on March 26,2008.

In early December 2008, Condoleezza Rice praised President-elect Barack Obama's selection of New York senator Hillary Clinton to succeed her as Secretary of State, saying "she's terrific".

Condoleezza Rice, who spoke to Clinton after her selection, said Clinton "is someone of intelligence and she'll do a great job".

Condoleezza Rice campaigned for the Romney-Ryan ticket in the general election.

Condoleezza Rice is often described as a centrist or moderate Republican.

Condoleezza Rice takes both liberal and conservative positions; she is pro-choice on abortion, supports gun rights, opposes same-sex marriage but supports civil unions, and supports building oil pipelines such as the Keystone XL pipeline.

Condoleezza Rice has promoted the idea that counterterrorism involves not only confronting the governments and organizations that promote and condone terrorism, but the ideologies that fuel terrorism.

In January 2005, during Bush's second inaugural ceremonies, Condoleezza Rice first used the term "outposts of tyranny" to refer to countries Condoleezza Rice thought to threaten world peace and human rights.

Condoleezza Rice identified six such "outposts" in which she said the United States has a duty to foster freedom: Cuba, Zimbabwe, Burma and Belarus, as well as Iran and North Korea.

Condoleezza Rice said she believes President Bush "has been in exactly the right place" on abortion, "which is we have to respect the culture of life and we have to try and bring people to have respect for it and make this as rare a circumstance as possible".

Condoleezza Rice has taken a centrist approach to "race and gender preferences" in affirmative action policies.

Condoleezza Rice described affirmative action as being "still needed," but she does not support quotas.

In March 2014, Condoleezza Rice joined and appeared in video spots for the Ban Bossy campaign, a television and social media campaign designed to ban the word "bossy" from general use because of its harmful effect on young girls.

Condoleezza Rice supported the comprehensive immigration plan backed by the Bush administration and shared that it was among her regrets that it did not pass through Congress.

In 2014, Condoleezza Rice criticized the Obama administration from seeking to approve immigration reforms through executive action.

In February 2017 Condoleezza Rice publicly announced her opposition to the Trump administration's travel ban.

In May 2017, Condoleezza Rice said she opposes the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials or the renaming of buildings named after Confederate generals.

Condoleezza Rice experienced firsthand the injustices of Birmingham's discriminatory laws and attitudes.

Condoleezza Rice was instructed by her parents to walk proudly in public and to use the facilities at home rather than subject herself to the indignity of "colored" facilities in town.

Also, while Condoleezza Rice was mostly kept by her parents from areas where she might face discrimination, she was very aware of the civil rights struggle and the problems of Jim Crow laws in Birmingham.

Reverend Condoleezza Rice instilled in his daughter and students that black people would have to prove themselves worthy of advancement, and would simply have to be "twice as good" to overcome injustices built into the system.

Condoleezza Rice was eight when her schoolmate Denise McNair, aged 11, was murdered in the bombing of the primarily black Sixteenth Street Baptist Church by white supremacists on September 15,1963.

Condoleezza Rice has appeared four times on the Time 100, Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people.

Condoleezza Rice "came into my office, sat down in the chair next to my desk, and tearfully admitted I had been right," Cheney wrote.

Condoleezza Rice's ratings decreased following a heated battle for her confirmation as Secretary of State and following Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

From 2003 to 2017, Condoleezza Rice co-owned a house in Palo Alto, California with a woman, Randy Bean.

Condoleezza Rice has described her faith as Presbyterian, being a noted member of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church.

Condoleezza Rice has been a member at Westminster Presbyterian Church USA in Alabama.

At the age of 15, Condoleezza Rice played a Mozart Piano Concerto with the Denver Symphony Orchestra, her prize for winning a student music competition.

Condoleezza Rice accompanied cellist Yo-Yo Ma in playing Johannes Brahms' Violin Sonata in D minor at Constitution Hall in April 2002 for the National Medal of Arts Awards.

Condoleezza Rice has performed at diplomatic events at embassies, including a performance for Queen Elizabeth II, and she has performed in public with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and singer Aretha Franklin.

In 2005, Condoleezza Rice accompanied Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick, a 21-year-old soprano, for a benefit concert for the Pulmonary Hypertension Association at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

Condoleezza Rice performed briefly during her cameo appearance in the "Everything Sunny All the Time Always" episode of 30 Rock.

Condoleezza Rice has received several honorary degrees from various American universities, including:.