The former secretary of state describes the world and family that made her who she is today. Excerpt from the program on October 18, 2010.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, Former U.S. Secretary of State; Professor of Business and Political Science, Stanford University; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution; Author, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

In conversation with MARY CRANSTON, Senior Partner, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP

 

CRANSTON: Could you talk a little bit about your parents? They were really exceptional.

RICE: They were, in many ways, quite ordinary people. My mother was a schoolteacher, first an English teacher. By the way, one of her early students was Willie Mays. Later, [she] was a science teacher. My father was a football coach when I was born, then later a high school guidance counselor, Presbyterian minister, and ultimately a university administrator. So in that sense, they were quite ordinary people, and I doubt that they ever made more than $60,000 between them.

But what made them extraordinary was that, first of all, they were growing up themselves and ultimately raising a family in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, a quite extraordinary place. I’ve called Birmingham the most segregated big city in America, a place where you couldn’t go to a restaurant, where you couldn’t stay in a hotel, and yet, within this place with very limited horizons, they somehow had their little girl convinced that she might not be able to have a hamburger at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, but if she wanted to be president of the United States, that was perfectly fine and she was capable of doing it. In that sense, they were extraordinary.

CRANSTON: In the book, you almost describe a parallel universe that you were in, and that your parents, your extended family and your friends really were sheltering the younger generation to some extent. Could you describe that a little bit?

RICE: Yes, I was fortunate to live in a little enclave, really a little suburb of Birmingham, though downtown Birmingham was just maybe 10 minutes away. It was called Titusville, and it had a long heritage as a little black, middle-class enclave, where I think there was one lawyer, one doctor and everybody else taught school. This was a place where education was everything. I’ve always believed that for my parents and their friends, education was a kind of talisman against everything bad. It was a kind of armor against the harshness of racism. So if you could speak English perfectly, you could play the piano, and you were a good student, then they – which is what the white man was called in a kind of depersonalized way – may not like you but they had to respect you. It might mean you had to be twice as good, which we were told all the time. So this little enclave gave us ballet lessons, French lessons, and etiquette lessons – in fact, etiquette lessons I was very glad I had when I went to those White House dinners; I knew which fork to use, and so forth.

CRANSTON: Your paternal grandfather was also a well-known pastor and influential in your life.

RICE: We all have our heroes from our families. One of our most important ones was John Wesley Rice Sr. [He] was actually a sharecropper’s son in Eutaw, Alabama, and he decided when he was about 19 years old that he wanted to get book-learning in a college. So he asked how a colored man could go to college, and they told him about Stillman College, which was a little Presbyterian school 30 minutes from where he lived. He went off to college, sold his cotton to pay for college, and after one year, they asked him, How are you going to pay for your second year? He said, Well, I’m out of cotton and out of money. They said, Then you’re out of luck. Thinking quickly, he said, How are those boys going to college? They said, They have what’s called a scholarship, and if you wanted to be a Presbyterian minister, then you could have a scholarship, too. My grandfather said, That is exactly what I had in mind. And my family has been college educated – and Presbyterian – ever since.

He was really the first to be college educated. He went on to educate my father, who ended up as a university administrator, and my aunt, Theresa, who was one of the first black women to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, in 1952, in Victorian literature. She wrote books on Dickens, of all things. So that side of my family was educated. My grandfather was a kind of educational evangelist. He would found a church and then next door he would found a school, and after a while he would move along and found another church and another school. He would go door to door in these communities and say to the parents, Your daughter is smart, or, Your son is smart, and I’m going to get your son or daughter a scholarship at Tuskegee, or Alabama State. I want you to send your daughter or son to college. Scores and scores and scores of people got educated thanks to his efforts.

He died two months before I was born. He died September 14, 1954; I was born November 14, 1954. He still remained in our family this giant of a figure. He was such an intellectual that at the height of the Great Depression, he bought nine leather-bound, gold-embossed books. When my grandmother, who had been struggling to make ends meet, said to him, How much did you pay for these books? He said, Don’t worry, they cost $90. Height of the Great Depression. He said, But we can buy them on time; we only have to pay $3 a month for the next three years. Well, my grandmother was not thrilled. She tried to get him to take these books back. He wouldn’t. Fortunately, he didn’t, because the day I was going to receive my Ph.D., my father gave me the five remaining leather-bound gold-embossed books: the works of Dumas, the works of William Shakespeare, the works of Victor Hugo. My grandfather believed education was everything.

CRANSTON: Your father was very similar to his father. He wasn’t on the spot forced into becoming a Presbyterian minister, but he did become a Republican under similar kinds of circumstances.

RICE: Yes. My father and my mother went to register to vote in 1952. They were not yet married but they went down together to register to vote. They had in those days poll tests; someone would actually ask black voters questions before you could register to vote. The poll tester asked my mother – who was a light-skinned, beautiful woman – So, who was the first president of the United States? She said, George Washington. He said, Fine, you go register. Then he turned to my father and said, How many beans are in that jar? There were hundreds of beans in that jar. My father said, I don’t know. [The poll tester said,] You don’t pass the test. So my father went back to his church. He was very upset. An elderly man named Mr. Frank Hunter said, You know, Reverend, I’ll show you how to get registered; you go down there and there’s one of those clerks who is a Republican, and she’s trying to build the party. Now, you didn’t register by party affiliation, but this woman clearly would ask people, What are you? And if you said a Republican, she would just register you, and then kind of expect you to join the party, which my father then did. He registered, he became a Republican, he was a lifelong Republican after that.

CRANSTON: The black population in America tends to vote Democratic, yet you have remained Republican. What are your feelings about the Democrats, and why have you stayed in the Republican side?

RICE: Well, actually I started as a Democrat. I couldn’t vote in ’74; I wasn’t old enough. Then in ’76, when Jimmy Carter ran for office, he for me meant reconciliation of North and South; I voted for Jimmy Carter. But it was actually foreign policy that led me to become a Republican. I was very unhappy after the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, that the best we could do was to boycott the Olympics. I was therefore attracted to Ronald Reagan’s somewhat tougher stance toward the Soviet Union. I became a Republican a couple of years later, and I’m comfortable in the Republican Party. Look, I don’t like everything in the Republican Party. It certainly has a lot to, in my point of view, atone for [regarding] the Southern Strategy. In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act passed, the Republican Party tried to capitalize on that by going to Southerners who were unhappy about desegregation. The Republican Party has a lot to atone for on that. But frankly I think that the emphasis on the individual rather than the group [is better] – I’m not very fond of identity politics. I know there are challenges from being female, there are challenges from being black, but one should not say the group, the blacks, the minorities, the women; let’s see how the individuals respond to their circumstances.

If there’s one thing I really learned from my parents, it’s that you may not be able to control your circumstances, but you can control how you respond to them.

CRANSTON: You were in Birmingham during the violence in the final breakthrough to integration down there. You had friends who were killed. How has that shaped your career and how did it impact your attitude about violence?

RICE: In Birmingham, this little parallel society that I have described, in ’62 and ’63, it wasn’t possible any longer really to shield the children of Birmingham. Birmingham became known as Bombingham; bombs were going off in neighborhoods almost every night. One went off in our neighborhood. I’ll never forget driving home and hearing the thud, and my father immediately turning the car around, and my mother saying, Where are you going? He said, I’m going to go to the police. She said, They probably set it off. You didn’t feel safe at all.

In September of 1963, we were at church. We’d gone early, because my mother was the choirmaster and my father was the minister. And there was a loud thud. Everybody in Birmingham knew that that was a bomb. But we didn’t know where, until a woman came in. They’d received a phone call: 16th Street Baptist Church had been bombed. They were worried that there might be coordinated bombings across many churches. So we were watching to see if bombs were going to be going off across the city. We heard pretty soon that indeed this bomb had gone off in the basement where little girls had been getting ready for Sunday School. The names became known, and one of them was Denise McNair, who had been my kindergarten classmate. There is a picture in the book of this little girl being given a certificate of graduation from kindergarten by my father. So that’s how close we were to those little girls.

At that point you know that the police were not going to protect you. My father, along with other men in the community, formed shotgun brigades. They would literally go to the head of the community and scare off [Ku Klux Klan] night riders. They never shot anybody, but they did shoot into the air quite a lot.

CRANSTON: [When you were] 12, your father took an administrative position at the University of Denver, and you left Birmingham. What was that transition like, going into a mostly white community?

RICE: It’s funny; I don’t remember thinking terribly much about it. I was just glad that we were moving to Denver where I could skate year-round. My parents and I started going to Denver in the summers. Back in 1960, my Dad had decided he wanted to go into university work, and he needed to get a master’s degree in something called student personnel administration; the University of Denver had a very good program. So we would pack up the family car every summer, as soon as school ended. We would drive to Denver, and then it was a question of what to do with me.

One day I saw the figure skaters in their little short skirts, and I had watched [Olympic skating champion] Tenley Albright, and I said, I want to go skating. So it became high-priced childcare. You could drop me off at the rink, and my parents could go to school. I just loved to skate. My dad kept going; he finally decided he was never going to finish just going in the summers, so he took a year’s leave from Stillman College, where he was now dean of students. The family moved for what was to be a temporary year to Denver. When my dad finished his degree, a man named Maurice Mitchell [chancellor of the University of Denver], had been standing in the parking lot with my father through all those skating hours because Maurice Mitchell’s daughter Debbie was a skater with me – shows you how coincidences happen. [Mitchell] offered [my father] a job at the University of Denver. We moved. From my point of view, this was the best possible news, because now I could skate year-round. When I went back to Alabama before, I’d practice skating on the floor, but you can only get so good skating on the floor.

CRANSTON: Madeleine Albright was here two years ago, and I asked her what she thought of your career as secretary of state. She said she really didn’t like talking about sitting secretaries of state. But she said she had the utmost respect for you and that you shared a father – she was talking about her biological father and your academic father. You write about Josef Korbel in the book. Maybe you could talk a little bit about him.

RICE: I have to set this story up a little bit. I had studied piano from the age of three; I was going to be a concert pianist, no doubt about it. In the summer after my sophomore year, I went to the Aspen Music Festival’s school to study, and I met prodigies who could play from sight what it had taken me all year to learn. I was 17, they were 12. These kids could play better than I could ever play. I thought, I’m about to end up teaching 13-year-olds to murder Beethoven, or maybe play at a piano bar, or maybe I’ll play at Nordstrom, but there is no chance that I am going to play at Carnegie Hall. So I went back home and said to my parents, I’m changing my major. My father said, What are you changing your major to? I said, I don’t know. He said, You don’t know what you’re going to do with your life? I said, That’s right, it’s my life. He said, That’s right, it’s our money, so find a major.

I went back to college in desperate search of a major. After trying English literature – didn’t work – state and local government – didn’t work – I wandered into a course taught by Josef Korbel, in international politics. It was like finding love. All of a sudden I had found what I wanted to do; I wanted to be a Soviet specialist. He was a Soviet specialist. So I told my parents, I’m going to be a Soviet specialist. Fortunately, they didn’t say, What’s a nice black girl from Birmingham talking about being a Soviet specialist? They sort of said, Go for it. And I did. But without Dr. Korbel I would never probably have entered the field.

CRANSTON: Then you graduated from college at obviously a fairly young age and by, I’m sure, competence and luck, you had some good opportunities, including a fellowship at Stanford. You’ve often said you were an affirmative-action hire. I’d be interested both in your experiences at Stanford and also what is your attitude to affirmative action generally.

RICE: I went to Stanford on a fellowship at the arms control and disarmament program – that shows you how long ago it was. Gloria Duffy, the CEO of The Commonwealth Club, was one of the other fellows in that program. In fact, the Stanford program had never had a female fellow, and all of a sudden there were four of us. I found myself finishing my dissertation at Stanford and studying details of international security policy.

Stanford came to me through the political science department – they’d heard me give a talk – and said, Would you be interested in a faculty position? It was going to be what was called a term position at the time; you stay three years and then you’re done. Pretty soon, it kept going, and now it was going to be a regular tenure-line position. I didn’t know the ins and outs of universities at the time. It finally occurred to me what Stanford was doing. Stanford had found a black woman Soviet specialist that they liked. They didn’t need another Soviet specialist; in fact, they had three at the time. But I think they decided they wanted to diversify the faculty, and here was somebody who could do that. They took, in that sense, a risk, because Stanford did not usually get its faculty from the University of Denver but rather from like-schools, like Harvard and Yale and so forth. But it said to me that this was affirmative action at its best, because it worked out fine for me and it worked out fine for Stanford. In fact, what it was, was broadening the pool of people that you look to, to broaden and diversify the faculty. I don’t personally believe in quotas – in 25 percent of this and 20 percent of that – but I absolutely believe that it is legitimate and smart to look outside of your normal channels and to take a few chances.

Now, they also made it very clear that when we came up for tenure, there would be no special circumstances. I also agree with that, because I think affirmative action ought to be an opportunity for equal access but not a guarantee of outcomes.

CRANSTON: After a couple years at Stanford, you were tapped under the first President Bush to become the director of Soviet and East European affairs at the National Security Council. That was a very interesting time, with the opening of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Could you talk about some of the things you got to see from the front row?

RICE: It was Brent Scrowcroft, who would become national security advisor, who had plucked me out of a crowd in a seminar at Stanford. When he was made national security advisor under President George H.W. Bush, I went back [to Washington, D.C.] with him. I had no idea that as the Soviet specialist in the White House from 1989 to 1991, I would witness everything from the liberation of Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the beginnings of the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. It was an extraordinary time.

But I had to keep reminding myself that we were fortunate. We were at the end of a big historical epic. The Soviet Union was largely a spent force by that time. The good decisions, the tough decisions, had been made in 1946, 1947 and 1948, when Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union were astride Europe, when the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear weapon five years ahead of schedule in 1949. Nobody would have believed that you were going to have the collapse of the Soviet Union December 25, 1991 – the hammer and sickle comes down for the last time – communism, never mind. What it reminded me is that history has a long arc, not a short one. So I was lucky enough to be in the White House on 11/9, when the Berlin Wall fell; and then I was in the White House on 9/11, for the start of another big historical epic.

CRANSTON: Today, what would be your perspective on the future of Russia, as it has transformed since you had that job?

RICE: When people say BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India and China – I think that Russia doesn’t actually fit. Russia is going through a very difficult period. It’s a big oil and gas, extractive-industries economy that’s just fine when oil is $140 a barrel and not so great when it’s $70. It is really in a struggle for what it’s going to become. On the one hand, it’s become quite authoritarian over the last several years. On the other hand, you begin to hear murmurs, particularly from its president, Dmitry Medvedev, that Russia needs to be something different, Russia needs to be a place where the knowledge revolution is led. The Russians will remind you that they have some of the best software engineers in the world. Their problem is that the great majority of them are working in Israel and the United States.

The question is, How do they harness all of that talent to let Russia take its natural and proper place in the international economy? So I’m hoping that there is now room for a different Russia, a Russia that’s not so dominated by authoritarian tendencies, by statist economic policies. Remember that President Medvedev was here in Silicon Valley, trying very much to see how to build the Silicon Valley of Russia. So perhaps that is changing, because Russia is the place where the human potential is great but the human capital is diminishing. It’s a country where 140 million Russians within 25 to 30 years could be 100 million Russians, because of the mortality, morbidity rates and the low birth rates.

CRANSTON: At the 20,000-foot level, how would you assess the Bush presidency?

RICE: I am a big believer that history has a long arc. Those assessments will come long after I’m even gone. But I hope that people will remember, first of all, that if you told me on September 12 that there wasn’t going to be another attack on the United States of America after September 11, I would have said, Not possible. It was not easy to defend the country; we did so thanks to intelligence officers, thanks to Homeland Security people, thanks to the men and women in uniform who volunteer to defend us on the front lines of freedom. I’m very grateful for that.

I’m also grateful that we were able to speak out for the proposition that no man, woman or child should have to live in tyranny. The United States of America has to speak for that. The moral case for democracy should be very clear, but there’s also a practical case. [Referring to protestors:] We’ve been witnessing democracy at its noisiest. But let’s remember something: Democracy at its noisiest is preferable to the silence of authoritarianism.

CRANSTON: One comment you made in the press this week was that you even today would say that [Saddam] Hussein had to be taken out of power, but you might have had a different approach to the rebuilding of Iraq. Could you address that, and maybe what should have been done with respect to Iran in those years?

RICE: With respect to Iran, I actually think we put into place the machinery that is still being used and ultimately might solve the Iranian problem. This was to bring together the P-5 Plus 1, which is the permanent members of the Security Council – Russia, China, the UK, France, and the United States – with Germany, which had been negotiating on behalf of the European Union, and try to get Security Council sanctions that would force the Iranian regime to make different choices than it had been making. The Iranian economy is now struggling from the twin hits of the sanctions and the fact that [Iranian President] Ahmadinejad made very bad economic decisions. Plus the fact that that regime is quite weak internally – you can keep a skeleton in place a long time with coercion, but that regime has no legitimacy with its own people.

As to Iraq, what I’ve said is [that] we very much tried to build Iraq from Baghdad-out. In retrospect, the strength of building it from the outside-in would have meant that you were building provinces that were capable of defending themselves, like Al Anbar turned out to be capable of defending itself, you would have had construction projects that were smaller in scale, probably easier to manage, probably less subject to the kinds of attacks that the big projects had, and the governance might have been easier from the outside-in.

I understand, let me be very clear: The lives lost there – whether Iraqi or American or other coalition – can never be brought back. I understand that fully. And the sacrifice is something that I have to live with. I also know that nothing of value is ever won without sacrifice. I know that the conversation today about Iraq is not the conversation that it was in 1998 or 1999 or 2000 – What is Saddam Hussein doing? Is he going to use weapons of mass destruction again, as he had twice? When is he next going to invade his neighbors, as he did twice? When is he finally going to get lucky and shoot down an American aircraft patrolling his [airspace], which would have eventually happened? How long will it be before oil-for-food is exposed as the complete scandal that it was? That was the conversation about the cancer that was Saddam Hussein, and now the conversation is: Can Sunni and Shia take the results of a free election in Iraq and form a government? That’s a different conversation.

CRANSTON: How do you see Hillary Clinton doing in the job you had?

RICE: She’s doing a fine job. She’s a patriot. She understands the importance of defending American interests. And it’s a hard job. You’re always on a plane to someplace. I flew a million miles as secretary of state. You’re just getting off the plane hoping that you’re not going to say that you’re in a country that you’re not actually in because you’re sometimes not quite sure where you are. [Laughter]

You hear people talk a lot about the decline of American power and the irrelevance of American power. Don’t believe it. Every time there is a major issue – even sometimes extremely minor issues – to be resolved, people come to the American secretary of state and say, We can’t do this without the United States. You say, Surely, you can do this without the United States?

So it’s a difficult job, because it is the address for almost every problem in the world.

CRANSTON: Obviously President Obama belongs to a different party than you do. But how did it make you feel that a black man was elected president of the United States?

RICE: The day of the election I actually went down to the State Department press room just to say how extraordinary it was and how proud it made me as an American, because it said America is everything that it claims to be. We’ve been getting there, we’ve been inching there for a while, I think. First black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – that said yes, the highest-ranking military officer can be black. You had back-to-back black secretaries of state: the highest-ranking diplomat of the United States of America can be black. And then another tremendous leap, the president of the United States. I think it says that perhaps while we’re never going to be colorblind as a country – I think that’s asking too much of a country that has the deep racial wounds that we have, that has the birth defect of slavery – we are perhaps less quick to think we know what that person can be by looking at their color.

It said one other thing that I’ve carried forward with me, not only from that experience but as secretary of state: The great thing about democratic institutions – constitutions and the like – is that while they may not at the very beginning really be true for a people, they do stand there as the ought, as George Shultz called it. They stand there as what it is supposed to be. So whether it was Frederick Douglass, or Martin Luther King, or Rosa Parks, they did not have to tell the United States of America that it ought to be something different. They simply had to say that the United States of America ought to be what it said that it was.