Condi

by Antonia Felix

  Condoleezza has often remarked that Josef Korbel is the reason she entered international politics. Few matched his stature in the field, and his experiences in Europe before, during, and after World War II made him a fascinating mentor to young people eager to understand international relations. He was an Old World figure who had always attracted artistic types to his inner circle. “Korbel had a way of encouraging talented people,” said one long-time friend of the family, “He was not an artist, but he attracted artists to him.” A student like Condi—multi-lingual, classically trained musician, and extremely bright, poised, and selfreliant—was precisely the type to gravitate to him and to gain his admiration. Korbel immediately took Condi under his wing.

  Josef Korbel was born in Czechoslovakia in 1909 and studied in Paris before receiving his law degree from Charles University in Prague. His first position in the Czech government was with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in 1937 he became the press attaché at the Czech Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He learned to speak Serbian, and made close friends with Yugoslav journalists, contacts who would become very important to him and his family when Hitler entered Czechoslovakia. Nazi troops enter Prague in March 1939, and Korbel, a Jew, was on a list of those to be arrested. Like several other Jewish families in Czechoslovakia, the Korbels had abandoned their ancestral ties. Whenever Josef had to fill out documents that asked for his religious affiliation, he wrote, “None.” “Korbel was one of the very, very few Jews who succeeded in getting into the Foreign Ministry before the war,” said one of his Czech colleagues in Michael Dobbs’ biography of Madeleine Albright. “He did so by not giving any signs of his Jewishness.” For weeks, Josef had been working on an escape plan to get his family to Yugoslavia, and thanks to official letters from two Belgrade newspapers who hired him as a foreign press correspondent, he obtained exit visas for himself, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter, Madeleine. They spent a few weeks in Belgrade, then moved to London where the leaders of the Czech government were living in exile.

  Korbel worked as a personal secretary to the Czech foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, then became the chief of the Czech broadcasting service. During the family’s stay in London, Hitler’s blitzkrieg pounded their neighborhood, and back at home, more than twenty members of their family were killed in the Holocaust. Three of Madeleine’s grandparents, two aunts, one uncle, a first cousin, and nineteen others died at Auschwitz or Terezín, the concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

  After the war the Korbels returned to Prague, and Josef remained a top official in the Czech government. Madeleine was eight years old, and the family lived in a luxurious apartment near the presidential palace. Korbel was part of the Czech delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1946 where the new world order was established. Following the conference, at age thirty-six, he was appointed Czech ambassador to Yugoslavia. He traveled back and forth between Prague and Belgrade, where Madeleine lived a pampered existence in the ambassador’s residence. The Korbels hired private tutors for Madeleine so that she would not be exposed to communist propaganda at the local schools, and when she was ten, they sent her to a private boarding school in Switzerland. The growing tension between the communists and democrats in Czechoslovakia hung over the family like a dark cloud, and when the communists seized control of the Czech government in 1948, the family fled to the United States. Before leaving Prague, Korbel had been appointed to a United Nations Commission on India and Pakistan and began serving in that post at UN headquarters in New York City. Pressure from the new regime in Prague forced him to leave the job in 1949.

  After World War II, several intensive programs in international politics were launched on U.S. campuses. As a new player on the world stage, America was in need of expert instruction on the centuries of history leading up to the formation of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc. These new college programs sought out European experts who had immigrated to the United States, and the University of Denver found their expert in Josef Korbel. After leaving the UN, Korbel was hired by the university as professor in international relations. In 1959, he became dean of the Graduate School of International Studies and director of the Social Science Foundation. Throughout his career he was considered an extraordinary teacher; attentive, warm, and generous with his time. He was in demand throughout the world and acted as a visiting professor at Oxford, Harvard, Columbia, MIT and other colleges. He published six books and countless articles that focused on Eastern Europe and the Cold War.

  Korbel became the second most important man in Condi’s life, next to her father. John Rice had sparked Condi’s interest in world affairs and politics when she was very young, spending time with her to discuss the news of the day. She would pattern her life after him in many ways. She has described Josef Korbel as the “intellectual father” she shared with Madeleine Albright who, like Condi, was very much her father’s daughter. “There is no doubt that Madeleine was the object of her parents’ hopes and dreams from an early age,” wrote Dobbs. “She was the oldest, the brightest, the most driven.” Madeleine described her father as strict but “very loving” and supportive.

  An integral part of Condi’s new major in political science was learning Russian. Sometimes called a “ten-year language” because of the difficulty of learning its Cyrillic alphabet and grasping its complexity, this is a formidable challenge for many students. But Condi’s early lessons in French, Spanish, and German had given her an affinity for language study that helped her proceed quickly. Previous language experience gave her a solid grounding in the grammatical terms that many English students quickly forget, but are the keys to learning a new language. “It helps to have another foreign language under your belt,” said Jason Galie, a Russian instructor and Ph.D. student at Columbia, “because you use a lot of grammatical terms in the beginning, which, if you don’t remember from English grammar, makes it more difficult.” He explained that the Russian alphabet is a challenge, but not the most demanding part. “Russian is much more difficult than the Romance languages,” he said, “in part because of the alphabet. You start writing English letters instead of Russian at first. But even more difficult is understanding the role that the words are playing, which, unlike English, isn’t determined by the placement of the words in the sentence but by the endings of the words themselves. For some students that’s very difficult to grasp.”

  Month by month, Condi’s increasing grasp of the language gave her a more intimate connection to the land that would become central to her life and work. With only two years to go before graduation, she did not have time to take a large group of courses in her major, but she satisfied all the requirements and did an extensive amount of reading on her own.

  When the Rices moved to Denver, John became an associate pastor of Montview Presbyterian Church, and Condi spent every Thursday evening at choir practice with the church’s eighty-voice, semi-professional choir. Montview played an important role in helping Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood integrate during the 1960s. Park Hill embraced integration during the Civil Rights era and formed successful action committees similar to those that helped integrate Hyde Park in Chicago. Montview Presbyterian teamed up with Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church and Park Hill Methodist to found the Parkview Action Committee. This organization successfully curbed white flight from the neighborhood when black families began moving in. “The membership of these churches got together and said, ‘We’re not going to have that happen in our community,’” said Russ Wehner, a long-time member of Montview Presbyterian who knew the Rices, “and together we created an economically, socially, and racially integrated community.” According to the church’s biography, The Spirit of Montview: 1902-2002, “church members were asked to sign a nondiscriminatory two-way pledge when buying or selling real estate. Montview joined other churches . . . in working to make Park Hill Denver’s first racially integrated community, indeed one of the first in the United States.”

  In the 1960s, Montview’s senior pastor Arthur Miller invited bla
ck leaders to speak at the church before most everyone else. “He got Martin Luther King, Jr., to come to Denver and preach at Montview during the height of the Civil Rights movement,” said Wehner, “and it took an enormous amount of courage on his part because this was before it was an acceptable thing to do.” In 1969, Montview invited Duke Ellington to perform his “Second Sacred Service” at the church. The production included the Montview choir and members of the Denver Symphony Orchestra, and it was a widely attended, sensational event in the history of the church and the community.

  As one of four associate pastors, John Rice preached about once every month, worked as a counselor, and directed an adult education program called the 49ers. The study group derived its name from the Colorado Gold Rush and was also scheduled to last forty-nine minutes. “Under Rice’s direction, the popular 49ers Contemporary Forum flourished,” states the church’s biography. Most of John’s work at the church involved pastoral duties such as visiting shut-ins and sick parishioners in the hospitals. His position as a dean and instructor at the university prevented him from being a full-time clergyman. Wehner recalled that Reverend Rice was a prominent figure in the community and a highly respected member of the clergy. “He brought an enormous amount of prestige to the church because of his affiliation with the university and because he was an African-American person who was very well respected,” he said.

  Just as he did with his students at the university, John helped his fellow parishioners at Montview look at things from a new perspective. “When John came on the staff he worked with a group we had organized called The Integration of Montview,” said former pastor Richard Hutchison. “He was very helpful and gave us all a real revelation at one meeting. We were talking about how we could attract more black members, and he said, ‘Well, do all of you agree with integration?’ We answered that of course we did, and he then asked us where the nearest black Presbyterian church was located. We told him there was one just a couple of miles away. Then he asked, ‘Why don’t some of you join it?’ We realized that we believed in integration, but we put the burden of doing it onto blacks.

  “John was always forthright, honest, and challenging,” Richard continued, “a very interesting man. He was so honest and secure in his selfhood that he didn’t get defensive or angry. Condi inherited some of that from him.”

  The classical music tradition at Montview was very appealing to Condi. They sang masterworks from all periods of the sacred repertoire, and were known as one of the best choirs in the city. “She had a beautiful voice,” said fellow choir member Margaret Wehner. “She also gave a piano recital at the church, and that’s why I felt at that time she was going on in music. I remember her very outgoing, bubbly personality—she was a talented and lovely young lady.” Some of the pieces performed by the choir made a deep and lasting impression on Condi. “We performed . . . the Beethoven Christ on the Mount of Olives,” she recalled in an interview on public radio, “and I fell in love with the piece; it isn’t a very oft-performed oratorio. And for me, one of the great moments was when I was in Israel for the first time in August of 2000 standing on the Mount of Olives. And as often happens in memory, this great oratorio just comes flooding back and puts it all together for me.”

  In addition to his work as a university dean, an educator, and a pastor, John Rice also served in Denver city government and made trips to Washington, D.C., to serve as a counselor on the Foreign Service Generalist Selection Board. In 1978, he was appointed by Mayor W.H. McNichols, Jr., to the Denver Urban Renewal Authority. He was a member of various organizations, such as the Kiwanis Club and Optimist Club, that put him in touch with city businessmen and leaders, and at the university he was a member of the Phi Delta Kappa and Alpha Phi Alpha fraternities.

  Condi was no less ambitious or busy. Skating had become very important to her, and she looks back at her training on the rink as a vital part of shaping her into the person she is today. “I believe that sports has a place,” she said in 1999. “I myself was an athlete, and I believe I may have learned more from my failed figure-skating career than I did from anything else. Athletics gives you a kind of toughness and discipline that nothing else really does.” This was another life lesson inherited from her father.

  Condi was very pleased that she choose to stay at the university for her entire undergraduate program. “The University of Denver is a gem of a school,” she said several years later, “and I have tremendous affection for the place.” She graduated with a B.A. in political science at age nineteen in 1974, and was one of the most honored cum laude graduates of the year. She graduated with honors, having completed a special sequence of courses in addition to getting excellent grades in the regularly assigned coursework. She was one of ten to win the Political Science Honors Award for “outstanding accomplishment and promise in the field of political science.” In the commencement bulletin she was also listed as a member of the Mortar Board, a women’s senior honorary organization. Her excellent grades and breadth of coursework earned her entry into Phi Beta Kappa, the honorary scholastic society. The Greek letters of this organization make a fitting motto for the entire Rice-Ray family line: “Love of wisdom, the guide of life.”

  Each of these honors distinguished Condi as a top student, but another even more prominent award announced at graduation drew wide attention to her outstanding achievements: Outstanding Senior Woman. The university describes this as “the highest honor granted to the female member of the senior class whose personal scholarship, responsibilities, achievements and contributions to the University throughout her University career deserve recognition.” Condoleezza Rice, once described as “not college material,” was the most highly honored undergraduate woman of the 1974 class.

  The commencement speech that year was given by Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, who stressed that each of the students were personally responsible for helping the nation recover from the constitutional chaos that the Watergate scandal revealed. Condi was overwhelmed by the weight of that calling. “Since he didn’t tell me precisely how I was going to do that,” she recalled, “I wasn’t sure that the one course I’d had in American politics had prepared me for that, and I started to think maybe I should just stay in college or get a nine-to-five job and forget all of those challenges that everyone’s giving me because I don’t have a chance.” That speech helped her refine her approach to problem-solving, and when she became a professor, she would advise her students to tackle the big problems of the world with whatever contributions they were prepared to offer, however small.

  Leaving the university with such distinction gave her smooth entrée into graduate-level work, a highly anticipated labor of love in which she could pursue Russian and Soviet studies in-depth. She chose to begin at one of the best international politics departments in the country, and packed her bags for Notre Dame, Indiana.

  FIVE

  The Scholar

  “Culture is something you can adopt, and I have a great affinity for Russia. . . . There is something about certain cultures that you just take to . . . .It’s like love—you can’t explain why you fall in love.”

  —Condoleezza Rice

  ONCE upon a time in Old Russia, a beautiful young Princess was turned into a frog by her father, a wizard, who was jealous of her powers. One day Tsarevna Lyagushka (the Frog Princess) sees an arrow falling from the sky and catches it in her mouth. A prince steps out from the woods looking for his arrow. Prince Ivan has been instructed that it will lead him to his bride, so he marries the frog.

  When the couple return to the kingdom, the king announces a contest in which he hopes to find the most talented, capable, and creative woman in the land, a woman everyone can admire. The first task in his competition is to sew a shirt. Prince Ivan walks home very unhappy, but his frog bride tells him not to worry. That night she hops outside and turns into a beautiful princess, Vasilia the Wise. She summons her mystical sisters to help her make a fine shirt of gold and silver threads. In the morning, the prince b
rings the shirt to the king, who proclaims that it far surpasses any shirt he has ever seen. The frog continues to astound the king with each new task, while others scoff and grow angry at her cleverness. No one, not even her dear Prince Ivan, knows that she is a royal being in disguise.

  When the king invites everyone to a grand ball, Prince Ivan is once again sad because he knows that everyone will laugh at him and his frog bride. The Frog Princess tells him not to worry and to wait for her at the palace table. That night she arrives as Vasilia the Wise in all her glory. After the prince successfully overcomes a difficult set of tasks himself, the spell is broken and Vasilia the Wise upholds her true form forever.

  In both undergraduate and graduate school, Condoleezza Rice’s academic accomplishments in her chosen field gave her a kinship with Tsarevna Lyagushka. In newly desegregated America, it was still considered exceptional for a black woman to attend graduate school, excel in foreign languages, and become a leading scholar in any field. At times Condi has winced over the assumption that because she is black these accomplishments are somehow more exceptional. She has used a fairy tale-like term to describe this reaction—the “Condi in Wonder-land” phenomenon. She feels that those who consider it a rare and extraordinary feat for a black woman to excel in the way she has cast her as a larger-than-life, wondrous figure. But, as she explains—and as the Russian story says—amazing things can come in all kinds of packages. “I’m five-foot-eight, black and female,” she said. “I can’t go back and repackage myself. I can’t do an experiment to figure out whether any of this would have happened to me had I been white and male, or white and female, or black and male. So I spend no time worrying about it.”