Condoleezza Rice trained to be a concert pianist before switching to Soviet studies
Condoleezza Rice began French, music, figure skating and ballet at three, and took up serious piano at 15 aiming for the concert stage. At the Aspen music festival she met students more gifted than herself, reconsidered, and wandered into a course on international politics. It set her on a path to becoming secretary of state.
She was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1954, the only child of a teacher and a minister, and grew up in the segregated South. Her first name comes from the musical direction con dolcezza, meaning with sweetness. The family moved to Denver in 1967, and she finished high school at 16. At the University of Denver her new direction came from Josef Korbel, a professor whose daughter was Madeleine Albright, and who sparked her fascination with the Soviet Union.
The academic climb was fast. She graduated at 19, earned a master's at Notre Dame, studied Russian in Moscow, and completed a doctorate at 26 on military politics in communist Czechoslovakia. Stanford hired her, and a performance at a 1985 arms control meeting caught the eye of Brent Scowcroft, who later brought her onto the National Security Council as its Soviet expert during German reunification and the Soviet break-up. Back at Stanford, George Shultz recommended her for Chevron's board; the oil company thanked her for work in Kazakhstan by naming a 129,000-ton supertanker after her.
In 1993 she became Stanford's provost, the first woman, first African American and youngest person in the job. Facing a 20 million dollar deficit many considered permanent, she promised balance within two years and delivered a surplus of more than 14.5 million, though some of her decisions drew protests.
She became national security adviser in 2001, the first woman in that role, then in 2005 the first African-American woman to serve as secretary of state. She had switched from the Democrats to the Republicans in 1982, citing her father, whom Alabama's Democrats had refused to register to vote. Since 2020 she has directed Stanford's Hoover Institution.
Source: Condoleezza Rice
