Extraordinary, Ordinary People

by Condoleezza Rice

  But there was no one like Dr. Korbel, and in the immediate aftermath of his death, I lost focus for the better part of a year. I made little progress toward choosing a dissertation topic, let alone working on it. My dedication to my academic work diminished significantly. Cris and I were feeling the same loss of Dr. Korbel and found comfort in each other’s company. Almost every day, after a few—very few—hours at the library we’d go to a long lunch, which would soon roll right into dinner.

  When I wasn’t goofing off with Cris, I found time to play my new sport, tennis. I had finally decided that figure skating was not a sport for adults—after all, you couldn’t really invite someone to go skating with you and then whirl away while the other person struggled to find some sort of balance on the ice. I joined a fancy tennis club, which I could barely afford, but I loved playing club and league tennis with my doubles partners Linda Tinney and Charlene Reynolds. We won our share of matches due to big serves and power games. Once in a while we met up with opponents who just kept the ball in play. We usually lost those matches since we weren’t the most patient players.

  Nonetheless, I loved playing competitively and realized that tennis should have been my sport. I’d always struggled with jumping leverage in skating, but in tennis, my height was an asset. When I asked my father why he’d not introduced me earlier to this wonderful game, which he himself had played, he reminded me that he’d tried. When I was eight we’d gone out on the red clay courts of Alabama in the 98 percent humidity and ninety-degree heat. I’d lasted about fifteen minutes and, with my little socks caked with clay, begged to go home. Tennis was more fun in the cool, dry climate of Colorado.

  Life was full of interesting diversions, but I was twenty-four, living at home, still teaching piano, and making little progress toward getting out of school. Every time I went to register for a new quarter, the longtime registrar, who’d known me since my freshman days, would say, “Are you still here?”

  Adding to my vague frustration was the difficulty I faced in being an adult child in my parents’ house. For example, there was the expectation that I should account for my whereabouts. One evening I stayed out late—really late—with Cris and some friends. When I got home, my parents were worried and furious. “Why didn’t you at least call?” I responded that I was an adult and didn’t have to call. But a few weeks later when my parents went to an anniversary party and didn’t call me, not returning home until one in the morning, I understood their point. After that, we agreed to keep each other informed so that no one worried.

  By the beginning of 1979, I was increasingly frustrated and so were my parents. My father asked pointedly when I planned to finish. But, as was typical of my parents, rather than criticize me, they asked if there was anything holding me back. I explained that I needed to find a way to improve my Russian and wanted to study in Moscow. The problem was that in the 1970s most of the exchange programs would not take students who were studying modern Soviet politics. I was a budding Soviet specialist who had never been to the Soviet Union. Somehow my parents came up with the money themselves to send me to the Soviet Union in July of that year. The idea was for me to attend a major political science conference and then work on my Russian at Moscow State University.

  My first exposure to Moscow had an enduring impact on me. The first time I saw Red Square and the Kremlin I somehow knew that I had made the right decision in choosing to study the Soviet Union. While life was not easy—fresh food was hard to find and the rooms were basic at best—I learned so much. I loved riding the elaborate subways, exploring Moscow and Leningrad, and spending time with Russian students. My linguistic skills improved considerably as I moved from using the language in the classroom to using it in real life.

  One incident illustrated the point. When Cris, Lisa, and I first arrived, we found to our horror that our rooms were infested with roaches. I was deputized to go and tell our hall lady about the problem. She was a strict elderly woman who never smiled. I approached her gingerly and said in my best Russian, “Y nas y’est klopi,” or “We have bugs.” At least that is what I thought I had said. But the word for “roach” is actually tarakan. I had unwittingly told the woman that we had lice. She recoiled, undoubtedly thinking that this was exactly what she expected of Americans. After consulting my dictionary and realizing my mistake, I corrected myself. It didn’t matter. She did nothing about the roaches, which we learned to kill when we could and live with when we could not.

  I came back from Moscow in the fall refreshed and ready to sprint to the finish line. My mother had begun teaching in the Denver public schools and came home one day with a story about one of her students. She explained that the little girl had come to class with a note that said, I don’t speak English. Mother had asked the school principal, “What language does she speak?” Russian, she was told. Mother asked if I might be able to help Alla and her family at the upcoming parents’ night event. I went to the school and befriended the family, offering to help with medical appointments and basic necessities such as grocery shopping. In time, I took a part-time job helping the Jewish Community Center, which had sponsored Alla’s family, to take care of Russian Jewish immigrants who’d relocated in Denver. It was a wonderful experience and my Russian improved immeasurably, though most of my vocabulary concerned various medical and dental ailments.

  I was finally making progress on my dissertation as well, having decided to study civil-military relations in Eastern Europe. I chose to work on the case of Czechoslovakia. The Russian professor at Denver, Libor Brom, was Czech, and I convinced him to start a class in the language. I talked five other students into joining me, though to this day I am puzzled as to why they agreed. Nonetheless, I learned Czech well enough to conduct research in it.

  That fall I also applied for and received a coveted internship for the summer of 1980 at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where I worked on projects related to my interest in the Soviet Union’s military alliance, the Warsaw Pact. The research opportunity at RAND propelled me toward the completion of my dissertation.

  When I returned from RAND, I felt that I’d broken through. Denver wasn’t among the first rank of schools of international relations in those days. The Kennedy School at Harvard and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton were the incubators for those who would eventually populate the foreign policy elite. But I was beginning to collect experiences that would get me past the gatekeepers to the next level. RAND introduced me to some of the best-known security specialists in the country, such as A. Ross Johnson. And while in Moscow I’d met Alexander George, a giant in the field of political science who was teaching at Stanford.

  Throughout my life, however, something has always come along to shake things up just when I am feeling settled. Maybe this is the fate of a striver, someone always trying to be “twice as good,” so that just good is never enough. The RAND internship had come on the heels of an even more fundamental turning point in my life.

  At the start of the 1980s, everyone was worried about the security environment and growing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979 had put an end to hopes for prolonged détente between the superpowers. I myself had been deeply affected. I’d registered as a Democrat and voted for President Carter in my first presidential election in 1976. I had this narrative in my head about reconciliation of the North and South; he was going to be the first southern president. Now I watched him say that he had learned more about the Soviet Union from this Afghanistan invasion than he had ever known. “Whom did you think you were dealing with?” I asked the television set. When Carter decided that the best response to the invasion was to boycott the Olympics, he lost me. I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980, and a few years later I joined the Republican Party.

  The security situation convinced the Ford Foundation that there was a need for people who were expert both in Soviet affairs and in hard-core, bombs-and-bullets security policy. Catherine Kelleher insis
ted that Cris and I apply for the inelegantly named Dual Expertise Fellowship in Soviet Studies and International Security.

  Just a few weeks before leaving for RAND, I received the news that I’d won the fellowship. I can remember getting out of the car with my letter in hand. Cris was getting out of her car waving her letter too. I looked at her and we had the same reaction: if we deep-sixed these letters, would anyone ever know that we’d received them? We knew that the fellowships meant the end of our comfortable lives as big fish in Denver’s small pond. Cris would go to MIT. There were four other choices: Harvard, UCLA, Columbia, and Stanford.

  I eliminated UCLA. I’d liked RAND but didn’t really want to return to southern California. I sent inquiries to the other three. Harvard didn’t answer my letter. My colleagues there dispute this now, but trust me, I didn’t get an answer. My father eliminated Columbia, saying that he didn’t want me to live in such a dangerous neighborhood in New York. Fortunately, Stanford answered. I received a lovely letter from the assistant director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Program, Coit “Chip” Blacker. Stanford would be delighted to have me as a postdoctoral fellow. Chip added that Alexander George had told him more than a year before to keep an eye out for me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Senator Stanford’s Farm

  THE NEWS that I would be accepting the fellowship and leaving for Stanford in the fall of 1980 was greeted with a mixture of pride and sadness by my parents. Several months before leaving for RAND, I had also been offered a part-time job at Science Applications Incorporated (SAIC) when I returned. SAIC had a small unit in Denver working on game-theoretic approaches to understanding Soviet military policy. John Battilega, the chief of the unit, liked my academic work and wanted to hire me full-time when I finished my degree.

  When I told Daddy about SAIC, he said that he had been waiting for that moment for as long as he could remember. My parents had finally bought and settled into a very nice house about a year earlier. The two of us sat in the den making plans for me to find my own place to live. “You’re welcome to stay,” Daddy said, “but you are probably tired of living with us.” We both laughed and agreed to tell my mother together. Those plans would now be placed on hold since I was off to California. Despite the fact that the Stanford fellowship was for only one year, Daddy sensed that I would never return to Denver, and that made him very sad.

  In fact, my father’s life had taken a turn for the worse, and my departure was coming at a bad time. Daddy was increasingly active and well regarded as a community leader. He was asked, for instance, by Mayor Bill McNichols to serve on the very important Denver Urban Renewal Authority. That body oversaw the successful remaking of downtown Denver, and Daddy was heavily involved. A plaque at the Tabor Center commemorating the project even bears my father’s name.

  But things were changing at the university. Chancellor Mitchell, who’d been Daddy’s strong mentor and friend, had retired in the spring of 1978. John Blackburn, Daddy’s good and faithful friend, competed for the chancellorship but wasn’t selected. He decided to leave the university and returned to Alabama. Ross Pritchard, the new chancellor, saw my father as “Mitch’s guy.” It didn’t help their relationship when one of my father’s former students, now an administrator at the university, passed on to the new chancellor an offhand comment my father had made about Pritchard’s “lack of vision.” For the first time in my memory, Daddy felt professionally vulnerable. He told me that he was living on borrowed time at the university because under Pritchard the finances of the school were worsening. Daddy knew that without tenure he was vulnerable. He sought out other employment opportunities. But though he knew a lot of people in Denver and was well regarded, no one wanted to hire a man in his late fifties.

  Daddy’s health was also a growing concern. Like many former athletes, my father had very bad knees, and as he got older he stopped exercising and gained weight. At the age of fifty-four he was diagnosed with both high blood pressure and diabetes. His father had died of a heart attack. Yet Daddy simply couldn’t muster the willpower to lose weight. The two of us clashed regularly about his eating habits, but he just couldn’t give up the fried food—pork chops, in particular—of his southern upbringing.

  Nonetheless, we both knew that I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to go to Stanford. I decided to defer until the winter quarter. I took the part-time job at SAIC in order to make a little more money before I left for the fellowship, which didn’t pay as well. I also wanted to give my parents—and, frankly, myself—a little more time to get used to the idea of a departure that might be permanent.

  I called Stanford to tell the director of the arms control program, John Lewis, that I would come in January. John said that it would be no problem to defer but invited me out to Palo Alto for a November conference so that I could get acquainted with everyone.

  When I arrived at Stanford, I was overwhelmed by its beauty and unnerved by its reputation. Stanford’s 8,180 acres, set against the foothills of northern California, were once the farm of Senator Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford. In 1885, the Stanfords donated the land for a university that would honor their only child, who’d died of typhoid fever at sixteen. The university is thus colloquially called “the Farm.” It was a good regional university until the mid-1950s, when its reputation skyrocketed, particularly in the sciences and engineering. Now, in 1980, it was an elite university whose only real peers resided in the Ivy League.

  That first morning I walked from the Faculty Club, where I was staying, to Galvez House, where the arms control program was located. As I made my way along the long colonnade flanked with sandstone columns, I felt a level of insecurity that I’d never felt before and have never felt since. I’d been slowly climbing out of the obscurity of the University of Denver, but I couldn’t quite believe that I was about to become a doctoral fellow at Stanford. A part of me wondered if the university had made a mistake.

  Galvez House was a dumpy one-story sandstone building that had once been a dormitory for university laborers. The other fellows, including three women, greeted me. It seems that the Stanford arms control program had never had a woman fellow before 1980. Now it had four. Janne Nolan was tall, blond, and fluent in French, and she had already held an important post in the State Department. Gloria Duffy was tall and swarthy with a can-do western spirit that led her, among other feats, to change the oil in her own car. That same spirit allowed her some years later after the collapse of the Soviet Union to negotiate the return of all nuclear weapons to Russia from the newly independent states such as Kazakhstan. The third fellow was Cynthia Roberts, a short, fast-talking New Yorker who was also a Soviet specialist and a fluent Russian-speaker. We were an odd bunch—the “fellowettes.” There was a subtle competitiveness among us but also a sense of shared sisterhood as we talked about building careers in the male-dominated field of national security policy. Together with our “godfather,” the smart, elegant, and really good-looking assistant director, Chip Blacker, we’d form a tight bond. Already that night, after a bottle or two of wine at dinner, I knew that when I returned in the winter, I’d feel right at home.

  THE TIME until my departure for Palo Alto went by swiftly. I continued to work on my dissertation, trying to finish as much as I could before departing. There were also a lot of farewells to my friends. But as January approached, I could hardly wait to go.

  Two days after the New Year, I came home to find Mother lying on the sofa, clearly in distress. She explained that she was experiencing horrendous stomach pain, and then she went up to bed. In the middle of the night, my father came into my room and said that Mother’s temperature had spiked to 103 degrees. He was going to take her to the emergency room. I didn’t want to delay them and said that I’d meet him at the hospital.

  Sitting in the waiting room, my father and I prayed. My mother was a cancer survivor, and both of us immediately worried that this illness might somehow be related. Those fears were reinforced when my mother�
�s physician, Dr. Hamilton, came out to say that the imaging showed a large unidentifiable mass in her abdomen. “I don’t know what it is,” he said, “but I’m going to get it out. Now!”

  “Dr. Hamilton, could it be related to her cancer?” I asked.

  “I just don’t know,” he replied and rushed off down the hall to prep my mom for surgery.

  Waiting rooms outside of surgical units are, to my mind, the most unpleasant places on earth. You sit and read magazines, the substance of which you care nothing about and of which you remember nothing. My father and I sat together watching the hands move glacially on the black-rimmed clock on the wall.

  Several times that morning I asked the “pink lady” at the desk if she could call to see how things were going. Each time the poor lady tried but could only get a, “They’re still operating.” It wasn’t her fault but I wanted to yell at her, “Thanks for the penetrating glimpse into the obvious.”

  Finally Dr. Hamilton came out. I could see the relief on his face immediately. Mother had suffered a burst appendix several days before. He explained that this was causing toxins to spread through her system, setting off a raging infection and thus the high temperature. The appendix had actually broken into two parts, resulting in the weird image that he’d seen on the ultrasound. “She’ll be fine, but she is going to be pretty sick for a while,” he said.

  I was scheduled to leave for Palo Alto a few days later. Mother, still weak and very frail, insisted that I go. When I boarded the plane, she was out of intensive care but still very sick. It wasn’t the way that I wanted to start my new life in Palo Alto. But each time I called she sounded better. I was relieved when she was finally home, and I resolved to go back to Denver within a couple of months—just to see for myself.