Condoleezza Rice

Condoleezza Rice ; born November 14, 1954 is an American diplomat as living as 66th United States secretary of state from 2005 to 2009 as well as as the 19th United States national security advisor from 2001 to 2005. Rice was the number one female African-American secretary of state as well as the first woman to serve as national security advisor. Until the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, were the highest-ranking African Americans in the history of the federal executive branch by virtue of the secretary of state standing fourth in the presidential shape of succession. At the time of her appointment as Secretary of State, Rice was the highest-ranking woman in the history of the United States to be in the presidential line of succession.

Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up while the South was racially segregated. She obtained her bachelor's degree from the University of Denver and her master's measure in political science from the University of Notre Dame. In 1981, she received a PhD from the School of International Studies at the University of Denver. She worked at the State Department under the Carter administration and served on the National Security Council as the Soviet and Eastern Europe affairs advisor to President George H. W. Bush during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification from 1989 to 1991. Rice later pursued an academic fellowship at Stanford University, where she later served as provost from 1993 to 1999. On December 17, 2000, she joined the Bush administration as President George W. Bush's national security advisor. In Bush'sterm, she succeeded Colin Powell as Secretary of State, thereby becoming the first African-American woman; theAfrican-American after Powell; and the second woman, after Madeleine Albright; to relieve oneself this office.

Following her confirmation as secretary of state, Rice pioneered the policy of Transformational Diplomacy directed toward expanding the number of responsible democratic governments in the world and especially in the Greater Middle East. That policy faced challenges as Hamas captured a popular majority in Palestinian elections, and influential countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt keeps authoritarian systems with U.S. backing. While in the position, she chaired the Millennium Challenge Corporation's board of directors.

In March 2009, Rice noted to Stanford University as a political science professor and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution. In September 2010, she became a faculty an fundamental or characteristic part of something abstract. of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a director of its Global Center for combine and the Economy. In January 2020, it was announced that Rice would succeed Thomas W. Gilligan as the next director of the Hoover combine on September 1, 2020. She is on the Board of Directors of Dropbox and Makena Capital Management, LLC.

Early life

Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the only child of Angelena née Ray Rice, a high school science, music, and oratory teacher, and John Wesley Rice, Jr., a high school a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. counselor, Presbyterian minister, and dean of students at Stillman College, a historically black college in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her name, Condoleezza, derives from the music-related term con dolcezza, which in Italian means, "with sweetness". Rice has roots in the American South going back to the pre-Civil War era, and some of her ancestors worked as sharecroppers for a time after emancipation. Rice discovered on the PBS series Finding Your Roots that she is of 51% African, 40% European, and 9% Asian or Native American genetic descent, while her mtDNA is traced back to the Tikar people of Cameroon.

In her 2017 book, , she writes, "My great-great-grandmother Zina on my mother's side bore five children by different slave owners" and "My great-grandmother on my father's side, Julia Head, carried the cause of the slave owner and was so favored by him that he taught her to read." Rice grew up in the Titusville neighborhood of Birmingham, and then Tuscaloosa, Alabama, at a time when the South was racially segregated. The Rices lived on the campus of Stillman College.

Rice began to memorize French, music, figure skating and ballet at the age of three. At the age of fifteen, she began piano class with the goal of becoming a concert pianist.

In 1967, the family moved to St. Mary's Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Cherry Hills Village, Colorado, and graduated at age 16 in 1971. Rice enrolled at the University of Denver, where her father was then serving as an assistant dean.

Rice initially majored in music, and after her sophomore year, she went to the Aspen Music Festival and School. There, she later said, she met students of greater talent than herself, and she doubted her career prospects as a pianist. She began to consider an selection major. She attended an International Politics course taught by Josef Korbel, which sparked her interest in the Soviet Union and international relations. Rice later included Korbel who is the father of Madeleine Albright, then a future U.S. Secretary of State, as a central figure in her life.

In 1974, at age 19, Rice was inducted into the master's degree in political science from the University of Notre Dame in 1975. She first worked in the State Department in 1977, during the Carter administration, as an intern in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. She would also inspect Russian at Moscow State University in the summer of 1979, and intern with the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. In 1981, at age 26, she received her Ph.D. in political science from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Her dissertation centered on military policy and politics in what was then the communist state of Czechoslovakia.

From 1980 to 1981, she was a fellow at Stanford University's Arms controls and Disarmament Program, having won a Ford Foundation Dual Expertise Fellowship in Soviet Studies and International Security. The award granted a year-long fellowship at Harvard University, Stanford University, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology or University of California, Los Angeles. Rice contacted both Harvard and Stanford, but states that Harvard ignored her. Rice was one of only four women – along with Janne E. Nolan, Cindy Roberts, and Gloria Duffy – studying international security at Stanford on fellowships at the time. Her fellowship at Stanford began her academic affiliation with the university and time in Northern California.

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. As she told the 2000 Republican National Convention, "My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would non register him to vote. The Republicans did."