Oriental Rugs the O'Connell Notes

Notes on Dr. Condoleezza Rice

Note the carpet; a few years ago I did an article on the carpet collection at State Department in Notes on State Department Carpets .

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talks with wire service reporters at her outer office at the State Department in Washington, February 1, 2005. Rice, working her first full week as Secretary of State, talked to reporters about a wide range of issues topping the State Department agenda. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Rice is shaping up to be a splendid Secretary of State. She just does not get it about Iran but over all she appears to be solid and dependable. She is what President Bush desperately needs, an independent patriotic advisor. It has taken me years to get to this point but I feel she is a loyal American who places America first. If we cannot have Ambassador Wendy Sherman as Secretary then Rice is a good substitute.

Dr. Rice is one of President Bush's closest advisors on foreign affairs. The President appears to waffle between the the defeatist peace at any cost appeasement crowd like his father and Brent Scowcroft, the Realists in the center such as Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, and the radical Likudniks such as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. President Bush then turns to a handful of most trusted advisors. In Foreign Policy Dr. Condoleezza Rice seems to be the swing vote.

Dr. Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor at New
York Foreign Press Center Briefing on "U.S. Foreign Policy."
Detail of http://fpc.state.gov/fpc/25785.htm

White House Bio

"Biography of Dr. Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor

Dr. Condoleezza Rice became the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, commonly referred to as the National Security Advisor, on January 22, 2001.

In June 1999, she completed a six year tenure as Stanford University's Provost, during which she was the institution's chief budget and academic officer. As Provost she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and the academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students.

As professor of political science, Dr. Rice has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and has won two of the highest teaching honors -- the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

At Stanford, she has been a member of the Center for International Security and Arms Control, a Senior Fellow of the Institute for International Studies, and a Fellow (by courtesy) of the Hoover Institution. Her books include Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (1995) with Philip Zelikow, The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin, and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984). She also has written numerous articles on Soviet and East European foreign and defense policy, and has addressed audiences in settings ranging from the U.S. Ambassador's Residence in Moscow to the Commonwealth Club to the 1992 and 2000 Republican National Conventions.

From 1989 through March 1991, the period of German reunification and the final days of the Soviet Union, she served in the Bush Administration as Director, and then Senior Director, of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council, and a Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, she served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1997, she served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender -- Integrated Training in the Military.

She was a member of the boards of directors for the Chevron Corporation, the Charles Schwab Corporation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the University of Notre Dame, the International Advisory Council of J.P. Morgan and the San Francisco Symphony Board of Governors. She was a Founding Board member of the Center for a New Generation, an educational support fund for schools in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, California and was Vice President of the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula. In addition, her past board service has encompassed such organizations as Transamerica Corporation, Hewlett Packard, the Carnegie Corporation, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Rand Corporation, the National Council for Soviet and East European Studies, the Mid-Peninsula Urban Coalition and KQED, public broadcasting for San Francisco.

Born November 14, 1954 in Birmingham, Alabama, she earned her bachelor's degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver in 1974; her master's from the University of Notre Dame in 1975; and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Morehouse College in 1991, the University of Alabama in 1994, the University of Notre Dame in 1995, the Mississippi College School of Law in 2003, the University of Louisville and Michigan State University in 2004. She resides in Washington, D.C.

May 2004" Biography of Dr. Condoleezza Rice