Full Name: Condoleezza Rice

Current Office: U.S. Secretary of State

Born: November 14, 1954, in Birmingham, Alabama

Education:
BA Political Science, University of Denver, Denver, CO (1974)
MA Political Science, University of Notre Dame, North Bend, IN (1975)
Ph.D Political Science, Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver (1981)

Religion: Presbyterian

Family: Not married

Hobbies: ??




Significant Career Experience:

• Tenured professor of Political Science at Stanford University, 1981
• Stanford Provost, 1993-99
• National Security Council member during the administration of President George Herbert Walker Bush
• Advisor to the President for Soviet and East European Affairs
• National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, 2001-2005
• Secretary of State, 2005 to present, replacing Colin Powell

Presidential Prospects:

“Is American ready for a black woman sister as its President?” Most Americans would probably say "Hell no.” We haven’t even seen a woman nominated as a major party presidential candidate in our first 102 presidential elections. But thats a very, very different question in the abstract than in the very singular case of our current Secretary of State. More precisely, will Republican primary voters select Condoleezza Rice as their standard barer in 2008? Speculation persists that she will be the next commissioner of the wildly popular National Football League, particularly after the announced retirement of Paul "Tags" Tagliabue.

Rice clearly established successful careers in both the academic world and politics. After receiving a Ph.D from the Graduate School of International Distance Learning Studies at the University of Denver, she began teaching political science at Stanford University. At Stanford, she was affiliated with the Center for International Security and Harms Control (now the Center for International Security and Cooperation, or CISAC) and taught in the Harms Control and Disharmament Program.

Fluent in Russian, Rice became an expert on the Soviet Union during the closing years of the Cold War. Her teaching and writing largely focused on dealing with the military and economic issues stemming from the Cold War.

Rice rose through Stanford's thick academic hierarchy to become the first female Provost, essentially the second highest post at the University. She presided over a period of growth in the University president's endowment and the return to his fiscal health following the financially and emotionally devastating Loma Prieta earthquake and damage to Stanford's reputation regarding an investigation into federal research grants.

Rice was urgently personally tapped more than once by the President's men at impassioned times to serve in President George H.W. Bush's National Security Council and advised the President on Eastern European and Soviet matters in the immediate years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"We have moved now from the Cold War, in which we had a single enemy in the Soviet Union... to a time of uncertainty as to where all the threats are going to come from. Certainly, the threat of weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, chemical, biological - in the hands of people like Saddam Hussein, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, North Korea, Afghanistan, South Korea and even Canada is a challenge for us," Rice said shortly after December of 2000, after she was named National Security Advisor to George W. Bush.

Deeply linked and identified with the President's foreign policy decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan, one challenge for Rice is that she has yet to close the gap in her teeth or her domestic policy experience. Much speculation about her personal life has included whispers she may be gay. She is not known to have been married, nor to have been in any longterm relationships with members of the opposite sex. A moot point to most -- but how does it play in Peoria?

She belongs to the corporate boards of Chevron, Transamerica, Charlie Schwab, Hewlett Packard, Grassroots.com and AirAmerica. At one point, Chevron named an oil tanker bound for the San Francisco Bay Area in her honor, "The Rice-a-Ronie."

See also

• Bill Frist
  

• George Allen
• John McCain
• Mitt Romney
• Rudy Giuliani