Condi

by Antonia Felix

  The counselor’s analysis did not appear to reach the teachers; at least it did not diminish their respect for her as one of the school’s brightest students. “She was very self-possessed and mature,” recalled Sister Pautler, Condi’s religion teacher. “A lot of adolescent girls go through a tortured time, whether from lack of self-confidence or not being able to understand their maturation process or their family. But she didn’t have any of that baggage; no self-doubt or confusion about growing up or about her family dynamics.”

  Therese Saracino, another of Condi’s teachers, described the orderly and high-scholastic environment of St. Mary’s, qualities that made it attractive to parents who were trying to shield their children from some of the chaos of the 1960s. “The Sisters of Loretto were an outstanding teaching order. They were the first order of sisters founded in America, and from day one their mission was to teach young Catholic women. St. Mary’s was a wonderful environment. All of the Catholic schools had a reputation for good academics and strong discipline. The smallness of the school was an important draw for parents, and the fact that it was a safe place during the unrest of the ’60s and fears of drugs and changing values.”

  Therese recalled that Condi’s maturity made her unique among the girls at the school. “I was her math teacher, but I know that her interests went far more toward the verbal—English, social studies, history, and that sort of thing,” she said. “Any of us who have raised children know that certain qualities are either there or not there. In the first place she was very, very poised. And she was beautiful even then, and charming, and her manners were impeccable, which is unusual for a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old. I cannot think of any instance that I was in contact with her that she wasn’t a perfect lady. There was a core of her that revealed she knew what she wanted and was willing to make the sacrifices. I think in her mind they were not sacrifices, but things to do that were necessary to keep with her goals.”

  Condi continued her mission to be twice-as-good by taking on new challenges in Denver—primarily in sports. In addition to continued private piano study, she took up tennis and figure skating and entered both fields competitively. Her weekday routine now included getting up at 4:30 in the morning to go to the rink and practice her footwork, spins, edges, lunges, crossovers, toe loops, combination moves, and pair skating.

  For all of her hours on the ice, piano still took center stage in Condi’s life. She practiced as late as possible at the academy and was also able to use the university’s practice rooms from time to time, but the Rices didn’t want her to be out and about at all hours of the night. They solved the problem by taking out a loan to buy her a used Steinway grand so that she could practice at home as late as she wanted. Condi was awed by her parents’ gesture. “That was a lot of money back then,” said Condi’s friend, Deborah Carson. “I remember her talking about it years later, the amazement still on her face when she told me that ‘they paid thirteen thousand dollars for it.’” Every time she looked at it, the piano reminded Condi of the investment her parents were making in her music.

  Condi breezed through her classes at St. Mary’s and by the start of her senior year had already finished all the requirements for graduation. Her parents felt she should waste no time and leave the academy to start working on a bachelor’s degree at the University of Denver. But the idea of abandoning high school, even for the best of reasons, did not sit well with Condoleezza. She couldn’t bear the idea of not having a high school diploma, and she wanted to take part in graduation with her class. “It was the first time I ever really fought my parents on anything,” she said, “I just had a sense that socially you’re supposed to finish high school.” So the Rice family formed a compromise: Condi would start college part-time while finishing up her senior year at St. Mary’s. This created a grueling schedule in which she got up before sunrise to take figure skating lessons, then attended two morning classes at the university, followed by a full afternoon at St. Mary’s.

  It didn’t take long for Condi to feel she’d moved light years beyond high school and that returning to the cozy grounds of St. Mary’s was more of a nuisance than a necessity. She would much rather have stayed on campus all day and delved into activities with her new sorority sisters, but she kept to the plan anyway. She made heads turn at her senior prom when she waltzed into St. Mary’s Academy on the arm of a college hockey player. Her date was something of a fish out of water among the high school kids. “Poor guy,” she said. “He felt sort of out of place.”

  Attending high school and college at the same time is almost a footnote to the musical accomplishments Condi made at age fifteen. She entered a young artist’s competition and won, which allowed her to perform Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D Minor with the Denver Symphony Orchestra.

  Condi was sixteen when she got her diploma from St. Mary’s and was thriving as a piano performance major at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music. During her dual year as high school and college student, she studied the bulletins of many colleges and was certain that she would transfer to a different university after she was free of St. Mary’s. One of her top choices was Juilliard, but her father did not want her to limit herself to a conservatory education. By putting all her resources into a performance-oriented degree, there would be little chance of going back to school to learn another profession if she changed her mind about a musical career down the road. “My father was fundamentally against it,” Condi said. The issue didn’t come up again because after two semesters at the University of Denver she was hooked and decided to stay for her entire bachelor’s program. “At first I planned to attend for one year only and then transfer,” she said in a university brochure in 1974. “But I stayed because I found that DU is small enough for people to care about what happens to you—yet not small enough to limit the scope of what you might want to study.” She praised the school for giving opportunities to “all students—regardless of race or sex,” but added that “when you’re black and female you have to work twice as hard.” She felt respected, validated, and challenged as a pianist at the university, and dreams of Juilliard faded beneath the heaps of dog-eared scores she rifled through every night at the family Steinway.

  Condi’s excellent grades and high school record paid off when she started at the university. She was awarded an honors scholarship, which was renewed each year of her undergraduate program.

  Condi would not find the university to be an oasis of unbiased thought, however. In one of her first classes she found herself in an immense lecture auditorium, one of a handful of blacks in a crowd of 250 students, listening to a professor preach about white superiority. The topic was William Shockley’s theory of dysgenics, which stated that human evolution is on a backward track because populations with low IQs, namely black Americans, are reproducing more quickly than whites. Shockley’s highly controversial ideas had gained national attention by the late 1960s, even though the majority of his scientific colleagues ridiculed and dismissed them. The widespread attention brought to his theories was due to his distinguished background as a Nobel-winning scientist who co-invented the transistor and spearheaded the invention of semiconductors and the computer age. Condi entered the university just as Shockley’s ideas were being hotly debated on campuses throughout the country.

  Shockley believed that art, literature, technology, linguistics—all the treasures of Western civilization—are products of the superior white intellect. What went through Condi’s mind as the professor described and appeared to support Shockley’s view of blacks as “genetically disadvantaged”? Rather than crouch down in her seat to avoid the onslaught, she sprang out of her chair and defended herself. “I’m the one who speaks French!” she said to the professor. “I’m the one who plays Beethoven. I’m better at your culture than you are. This can be taught!”

  Not only was fifteen-year-old Condoleezza Rice living proof that radical social theorists like Shockley were wrong, she had the self-assurance to say so in front of hundreds of
white students and her professor. She has not remarked on the professor’s response, but has said that as she left the class she understood her parents’ strategy for the first time. The Rices recognized that whites expected blacks to be intellectually inferior, and in order to offset that stereotype one had to be far above average. Their goal, from Condi’s birth, was to ensure that she would be able to hold her own in every circumstance. “That had been my mother and father’s strategy,” she said. “You had to be better at their culture than they were. Recognize that you’re always going to be judged more harshly. They made certain I was never going to be found wanting.”

  Undaunted by the freshman lecture, Condi continued her twice-as-good strategy and enrolled in honors courses, wrote for the school paper, worked four hours on her skating every morning, and practiced piano every night. She has admitted that she was less-than-perfect when it came to studying. “The truth is that I was a terrible procrastinator,” she said, “so a lot of times I wasn’t all that well prepared.” Years after she was out of college she advised her own students to not do as she had done—cram for a test rather than gradually ingest the material over the semester. She told them about how she had handled one of her freshman classes at the University of Denver, “Great Religions of the World,” and how she came to regret her negligence. “I did the reading at the last minute, passed the test, and immediately forgot everything,” she said. “Fifteen years later I was in Japan, wandering around the temples, thinking, ‘I once read something about this. I wish I could remember what it was.’”

  Her long-held goal of becoming a professional pianist provided a laser-like focus upon which everything else neatly revolved. But between her sophomore and junior year at the university, this well-constructed plan suddenly fell apart. That summer she attended the famous Aspen Musical Festival and ran into the stiffest competition she had ever faced. “I met eleven-year-olds who could play from sight what had taken me all year to learn” she said, “and I thought I’m maybe going to end up playing piano bar or playing at Nordstrom, but I’m not going to end up playing Carnegie Hall.” If she could not be a career performer—appearing with symphony orchestras and playing Mozart and Beethoven on the world’s eminent recital stages—she would not stay with the program. This change of heart had been coming for a time, but the Aspen experience clinched it for her.

  “We both became disillusioned with piano,” said Darcy Taylor, who studied at the Lamont School of Music with Condi. “Condi was extremely talented, but she decided it wasn’t for her. We were all very good, but there are people who are just brilliant. There are not many people who get selected for concert work; there aren’t that many positions. We had to realize that we’d be going into the teaching end of it, or the church music end of it, to be a choir director, for example; and we had to face up to the fact that we weren’t good enough to cut it in the concert world. Like Condi, I wasn’t willing to be second fiddle.”

  Darcy and Condi sometimes commiserated about the hard, cold reality of the music world. They found nothing glamorous about round after round of competing in front of distracted music professors. “We all entered several contests a year and had several major performances per year,” Darcy said. “We all had to learn Beethoven, Bach and Chopin—Condi really liked Chopin—and these contests taught us a lot about the life a musician has lead. We talked about that a lot. You would work hard and then, during a jury or audition, the professors would rattle paper and talk to each other and interrupt you in the middle of your performance. Their comment to us was that this is what it’s like in the real world, so get used to it. I didn’t like that, and Condi felt the same way.”

  Condi could not envision herself teaching piano for the rest of her life, helping kids “murder Beethoven,” as she put it. “I decided there had to be more to life than that,” she said. She decided to drop her performance major. This change of plans was a painful dose of reality that went against much of what she had come to believe about herself. Her identity, which from earliest memory had been wrapped up in music, had been challenged at Aspen, and she was compelled to find another field that was equally challenging yet not as competitive. Some young people who lose their professional artistic dreams, such as ballet dancers who mature into un-ballerina-like figures, struggle for years with depression and feel too inadequate—or disinterested—to start over in something else. But Condi did not approach it that way. She resigned herself to the fact that she was “pretty good but not great,” and immediately began to nose around for a new major. “Technically,” she explained years later, “I can play most anything. But I’ll never play it the way the truly great pianists do.”

  At this halfway point in her undergraduate program, Condi had to tell her parents that everything had changed. “I went on a mad search for a major,” she said. “I went to my parents, who had spent a fortune and all of their time turning me into a pianist, and said, ‘Mom and Dad, I’m changing my major.’” She couldn’t tell them what it was; all she knew was that she no longer wanted to be a pianist. The three of them made one agreement—regardless of what her new major would be, she would still finish her B.A. in four years. During fall semester of her junior year she changed her major to “undeclared” and explored a few options like English and Government. She scratched English Literature because it was too conceptual—in her words, “squishy”—and not rigorous enough. She actually hated it, which is not surprising for someone whose early exposure to books was under the glaring light of a speed-reading machine.

  Government studies also proved wanting. Classes in local and state administration, voting behavior, political parties, and the structure of government did not appear compelling or demanding enough to pique her interest. But at the start of spring semester she walked into a class that changed everything. The course was “Introduction to International Politics,” the topic that day was Stalin, and the professor was Josef Korbel, former Central European diplomat and father of Madeleine Albright.

  “It just clicked,” she said. “I remember thinking, Russia is a place I want to know more about. It was like love. . . . I can’t explain it—there was just an attraction.” The challenge and mystique of Soviet studies was exactly the kind of challenge Condi was looking for. It was a specialized path in academia that fit her perfectly, requiring tough scholastic discipline and an aptitude for foreign languages. It was totally new territory that felt oddly familiar, and it ignited a passion that she had not felt for anything outside of music. She recalled feeling a hint of that engaging interest back in 1968, when she watched the news story of the Soviets invading Czechoslovakia. It hit her hard. “I can still feel the strong sense I had of remorse and regret that a brave people had been subdued,” she said.

  Dr. Korbel was impressed by her brightness and enthusiasm, and encouraged her to join the university’s school of international relations, which he had founded. “I really adored him,” she said. “I loved his course, and I loved him. He sort of picked me out as someone who might do this well.” Condi immediately turned her sights onto the Soviet Union, immersing herself in “Soviet politics, Soviet everything.”

  With that introductory course, Condi knew she had found her place. Her parents were very surprised at her choice, but supported it. “Condi is the kind of person who is very sure of herself and makes excellent decisions,” said her father. “But political science? Here’s the time for fainting. Blacks didn’t do political science.”

  Condi’s fellow piano refugee, Darcy, ventured into business classes and at nineteen started up her own landscape design firm in Denver. Today her company is very successful, and she believes that both she and Condi found new ways to direct their creative energy. “Design is a way to have a create outlet and still use the expressive gifts I used in music,” she said. “Condi, in taking all those foreign languages, is also using the brain power she needed as a musician, and the decision-making she does is also creative.” Darcy remains grateful to Condi’s father for all his guidance and support
in helping her get scholarships at the university. “John Rice was friendly and outgoing, but also demanding at the same time,” she recalled. “If he was going to stick his neck out for you, he wanted to make sure you really wanted it, worked hard for it, and didn’t take it from someone else who also deserved it and needed it as much. He gave, but he also expected a lot. I thought that was wise. If you’re going into college and trying to figure out what to do with your life, it’s nice to have someone to prompt you to think and grow from what you’re doing. He was a very smart man.”

  Condi signed up for political science and Russian language courses, but she did not close the door on music. Even though she was no longer working toward a career in piano, she remained a serious student of the instrument. “I found my passion in the study of Russia but, in fact, I continued to be passionate about music,” she said. “I continued to work at it and to study for quite a long time.” This aspect of her background puts her in the ranks of a small group of prominent government officials who started their college careers in music. Edward Heath, prime minister of Great Britain from 1970 to 1974 (while Condoleezza was an undergraduate), was an organist and choir director while a student at Oxford, and after he retired from politics, he spent much of his time conducting orchestras throughout Europe. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, started out as a wood-wind player at Juilliard. He studied clarinet and saxophone and played in jazz bands before transferring to New York University to pursue a degree in economics. “I don’t regret giving up the music career,” said Condi in 2001. “The great thing about music is that you can love it all of your life,” Condi said, “you can pick it up at different phases.”