Condi’s clout as a Washington veteran gave her more visibility in the media, new stature in the Republican Party, and entrée into some of the nation’s top foreign policy organizations. In 1991, for example, her television appearances as a consultant on Soviet affairs for ABC News offered a hint of the media star she would become. In 1992, she gave an address at the Republican National Convention in Houston, where President George Bush was nominated for re-election, and shared the stage with Pat Buchanan and leaders who introduced the new Party agenda as the “Contract for America.”
Her foreign policy affiliations expanded to membership in the Lincoln Club of North California, the American Political Science Association, and the Aspen Institute, where she participated in the Aspen Strategy Group from 1991 to 1995. Aspen conducts nonpartisan policy programs for public- and private-sector leaders, and the Aspen Strategy Group focuses specifically on “the role of the U.S. in the post-cold war world, the U.S.-Russian relationship, and the Strategic Defense Initiative.” Her former boss at the White House, Brent Scowcroft, has been co-chairman of the Aspen Strategy Group since 1984.
At Stanford, she jumped back into administrative duties by serving on search committees for the Stanford football coach, dean of admissions, and president of the university, all in 1991. The following year, she joined the Provost’s Committee on the Status of Women in the University and the University Policy and Planning Board.
A major development in Condi’s life—the result of her White House service and new Republican contacts—was her launch onto several corporate boards. Directors are chosen on the basis of their expertise and also because they are identified as professionals who will have a positive reflection on the company and will act harmoniously with the rest of the board.
Those who leave posts in government are attracted to corporate boards as a way of staying connected to the national scene and utilizing their Washington connections. Like the majority of women on corporate boards, Condi came to Chevron, TransAmerica, Hewlett Packard, and other companies with a background very different from that of the white males who served as directors. Albert A. Cannella, Jr., Associate Professor of Management at Texas A&M University’s College of Business, has analyzed the difference between the routes women and minorities take to become members of corporate boards and the routes taken by white men. The white-male path has traditionally been a series of advancements from within the company, while the glass ceiling prevents the same for women executives. “White men prove themselves in the industry and get promoted,” he explained, “but women and minorities don’t tend to get promoted. Rather, the prominent routes for them are law, government service, and academics—having a Ph.D.” With a background in both the White House and academia, Condi had the perfect resume for obtaining directorships and maintaining the high-profile contacts she made in Washington. “She’s very well connected,” said Dr. Cannella. “She knows a lot of people in government, and that’s something a corporation is always looking for. In particular, those with a background in government service are in demand on boards of industries where there is a lot of government regulation and oversight.”
In his published study about the differing routes men and women take to become corporate directors, Dr. Cannella explained that corporations seek out board members from outside the company who are “business experts, support specialists, and community influentials.” Condi fits into the third category, people who provide the board with “non-business perspectives on issues, problems, and ideas, as well as expertise about and influence with powerful groups in the community.” These members are often politicians, academics, clergy, or other social leaders. While the first category, business experts, is made up primarily of white males who have worked their way up the business ladder, the other two categories include more women and minorities who came via the academic or political-experience route. Of those, a large number hold doctoral degrees—56 percent of the black women in the study held Ph.D.s as opposed to only 19 percent of white male directors. (Chevron’s current CEO, David J. O’Reilly, holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, for example.)
Another pattern observed in Cannella’s study is the fact that women and racial minorities tend to sit on several boards at once, unlike the white male majority who serve on fewer at one time. This is true of both Condoleezza and her fellow Chevron board member, Carla Hills. Like Condi, Carla came to the board with a background in government service, having served in the senior Bush administration as U.S. trade representative (while Condi was serving on the National Security Council). During the Ford administration, she was secretary of housing and urban development, and prior to that, she was an assistant district attorney in Los Angeles.
Condi joined the Board of Directors of Chevron Corporation, a multinational with oil operations in twenty-five countries, immediately upon returning to Stanford in 1991. Her expertise on the states that made up the former Soviet Union made her a valuable asset for Chevron’s oil interests in Kazakhstan. She worked extensively on those deals, including their plan to help build a pipeline from the Tengiz oil field across southern Russia to a Russian port on the Black Sea.
Like her Hoover Institution colleague, George Shultz, who served as a director of Chevron before she arrived at the company, Condi supplemented her Stanford income with fees from Chevron that included a $35,000-per-year retainer and $1,500 for each board and committee meeting attended. By her tenth year with the company, she held over 3,000 shares of Chevron stock worth $241,000. Also like Shultz, she had a supertanker named after her—the 136,000-deadweight-ton SS Condoleezza Rice.
Condi’s work on Chevron’s oil projects in Kazakhstan formed part of one of the United State’s largest overseas energy investments. Construction on the 935-mile Kazakhstan pipeline, a group effort by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), began in 1999 and the first barrels of oil from the Tengiz oil field flowed into a waiting tanker at the Russian port of Novorossiysk in November 2001. According to a White House press release that month, the CPC “is the largest, single United States investment in Russia,” and American oil companies, primarily Chevron and Exxon, paid for approximately half of the pipeline’s $2.6 billion price tag.
Condi’s decade-long affiliation with Chevron would raise flags when she joined the George W. Bush administration. Not only did the oil company’s holdings in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa pose conflict-of-interest issues, Chevron was the subject of a lawsuit involving human rights abuses in Nigeria. The corporation was charged with aiding Nigeria’s military police in crushing public demonstrations against the exploitation of the nation’s delta region, where most of the oil reserves are found.
Condi served on and chaired Chevron’s public policy committee, which was responsible for identifying social, political, and environmental issues that concerned the corporation at home and abroad. When Condi’s affiliation with Chevron came up during the presidential campaign of 2000, one television news show asked her about George W.’s relationship with “big oil” and how that would affect his administration. “American oil companies are important to our security,” she answered, “in that they give us the ability to explore abroad. They give us the ability to explore here in the United States and to protect the energy security of the United States.”
The issue of Chevron quelling protests by environmental activists in Africa did not come up in the broadcast, but Condi praised Chevron’s environmental policies in the United States. “Oil companies have come a long way in their environmental policies,” she said, “actually going so far as to fund environmental projects around the country. They are good citizens. We can’t live without oil. And we have to have American oil companies doing it. I’m proud of my association with Chevron . . . and I think we should be very proud of the job that American oil companies are doing in exploration abroad, in exploration at home, and in making certain that we have a safe energy supply.”
Condi resigned from the Chevron board on January 15, 2001, after bein
g named Bush’s national security advisor. Three months later, in the midst of California’s energy crisis, Chevron renamed the tanker that bore her name. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, the ship was “one of the most visible reminders of the Bush administration’s ties to big oil” and “the White House had faced questions over the appropriateness of the tanker’s name.” Chevron did not comment on whether or not the White House requested the name change, but a company spokesman, Fred Gorell, said, “We made the change to eliminate the unnecessary attention caused by the vessel’s original name.” The ship is now called Altair Voyager.
Condi’s background at Chevron put her in the company of many government officials—women as well as men—criticized for having alliances with corporations that may create conflicts of interest or harbor controversial business practices. When Hillary Clinton was running for Senate, for example, stories emerged about her history with Wal-Mart, Arkansas’s largest corporation. As first lady of Arkansas, she served on the company’s board of directors, and the press pointed out that Wal-Mart’s non-union employment policy contrasted with Hillary’s support of the Teamsters and other unions during her campaign and that their “Buy American” slogan smacked of irony, as Wal-Mart imports more foreign goods than any other company in the United States.
Chevron was the first of several corporate boards Condi joined in the 1990s. In 1991, she became a director at TransAmerica, the insurance giant based in San Francisco housed in the famous pyramid-shaped skyscraper that bears its name. (In May 2002, as national security advisor, Condi would list the TransAmerica Building as a possible terrorist target along with the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building.) Concurrent with her work at Chevron, she served on TransAmerica’s board of directors for ten years. TransAmerica was the sixth largest life insurance company in the United States and also offered financial and real estate services. In 1999, when Condi left the board, TransAmerica was bought by the Dutch company Aegon N.V. She stayed in the financial services world, however, by joining the Charles Schwab Corporation’s board of directors that same year. Once again, she came to the business on the heels of George Shultz, who had joined the brokerage house two years previously. She and Shultz both served on the compensation and customer quality assurance committees at Schwab.
In 1995, Condi joined another financial company, J. P. Morgan, the 140-year-old investment banking institution whose clients included 30 million individuals as well as corporations, institutions, and governments. She became a member of the International Advisory Council, a group of business and government leaders—chaired by Shultz—that met every eight months to advise the corporation. This post introduced her to many international figures, from a senior Singapore government official to a former Saudi finance minister and chief executives of corporations from South Africa, Brazil, Japan, and Mexico.
The Hewlett-Packard Corporation, headquartered next door to Stanford in Palo Alto and founded by two Stanford engineering graduates, was part of the Silicon Valley explosion of new technology. Condi joined the Board of Directors in 1991 and served for two years, becoming an insider in this very Stanford-friendly corporation.
In addition to corporate boards, Condi obtained director positions in large foundations and research policy research groups. From 1994 to 1997, she was a trustee at the Carnegie Corporation, one of the country’s oldest philanthropic organizations that focuses on education and international security among other areas. During her term at Carnegie, she served on an advisory council for its Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, joining a list of world leaders including Jimmy Carter, Robert S. McNamara, Desmond Tutu, and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Commission itself consisted of sixteen members whose tasks included studying methods for obtaining full disclosure of nuclear weapons. Their report, “Comprehensive Disclosure of Fissionable Materials: A Suggested Initiative,” was released in 1995. As a member of the advisory council, Condi offered her expertise on the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the former Soviet Union.
This was not her first experience with the Carnegie organization. In 1988 and 1989, she had served on the board of trustees at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the research organization that describes itself as “the oldest international affairs think tank in the country.” The Endowment studies “relations among governments, business, international organizations and civil society,” and, through its Carnegie Moscow Center, focuses on relations between Russia and the United States.
From 1992 to 1997, Condi served on the Board of Directors of the RAND Corporation, the research association where she had served as a summer intern as a college student. The first organization in the country to be called a “think tank,” RAND has expanded its original focus on military technology to include education, health care, international economics, and other issues. Brent Scowcroft was also on the board at RAND during Condi’s term.
In 1997, she joined the board of directors of the Hewlett Foundation, a separate entity from the Hewlett-Packard Corporation she had worked for previously. The foundation gives $120 million in grants to organizations that, according to its mission, “make positive contributions to society.” As a member of the board, Condi helped set the budget, made investment decisions, and reviewed the work of many of the institutions receiving financial support from the foundation. Another task of the board during her term was selecting a president, and Paul Brest was the candidate chosen by the selection committee. As both the dean of the Stanford Law School and the president of the Hewlett Foundation, Paul Brest became one of Condi’s close friends and colleagues. “Condi’s greatest expertise was on the international side of the foundation,” said Paul. “She was particularly interested and helpful to the foundation in those areas, but like other directors she had to deal with all the issues. The board meets four times a year.”
At the National Endowment for the Humanities, the federal agency that provides grants to cultural institutions and scholars, Condi served on the Board of Trustees from 1991 to 1993. She also became part of San Francisco’s cultural leadership as a member of the San Francisco Symphony’s Board of Governors.
Starting in 1994, Condi returned to Notre Dame three times a year to serve on the Board of Trustees, the primary administrative arm of the university. She was elected to the fifty-three-person board after having served on the advisory council for the university’s College of Arts and Letters. A survey by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education published in 2000 found that Notre Dame had more black trustees than any major university in its study, with seven black members, including Condi, on the board. In 1995, the university recognized her prominence as an educator by giving her an honorary doctorate and inviting her to give the commencement address to that year’s graduating class. Two years later, she was honored by Notre Dame once again, named a National Exemplar of service to education in America. This recognition was given during a major fund-raising campaign in which the university produced a film, Generations: A Celebration of Notre Dame, that was broadcast to alumni groups throughout the country. The film highlighted four Notre Dame graduates who had contributed to education, the church, and society.
In addition to the honorary doctorate from Notre Dame, Condi was named an honorary doctor of laws at Morehouse College in 1991 and a doctor of humane letters at the University of Alabama in 1994. Morehouse, founded in Atlanta two years after the Civil War, is the nation’s oldest black, all-male college with alumni including Martin Luther King, Jr., Olympic track champion Edwin Moses, film director Spike Lee, and actor Samuel L. Jackson. Recognition from the University of Alabama must have served as a personal measure of how far the nation had come, for the university was segregated when John and Angelena Rice wanted to pursue graduate work in the early 1960s.
Condi’s prominence in academia was further recognized in the spring of 1997 when she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This honor is given to those who have made “distinguished contributions to science, scholarship, public
affairs and the arts,” and she was among eleven professors named to the Academy that year. The following year she was named one of forty Young Leaders of American Academia by Change magazine, the journal of the American Association for Higher Education. At Stanford, she re-entered the Hoover Institution with a three-year research fellowship that supported new research projects while she continued teaching classes in political science.
From the boardrooms of multinational corporations and policy centers to the academic lecture circuit, Condi grew in stature in the business, academic, and cultural worlds upon her return from the Bush Senior White House. She was promoted to full professor at Stanford in May 1993 at age thirty-eight. Unknown to her, a committee was meeting at the same time to discuss an important new opening at the university, one of the top jobs that traditionally led to the presidency at any number of major universities.
One month after her upgrade to full professor she received a call from Gerhard Casper, president of Stanford. Over the years they had talked frequently about the development of the university and shared a common interest in the political science department, as Gerhard’s career included two years as an assistant professor of political science before becoming dean of the University of Chicago Law School. They had met the previous year when Condi traveled to Chicago with the presidential search committee to meet him as a candidate for the position. At that time he was provost of the University of Chicago, the second most powerful position at the institution. As provost, he was the principal budget and academic officer, reporting directly to the president. At that first meeting, Gerhard found Condi to be one of the most exceptional academics he had ever met. “I was greatly impressed by her academic values, her intellectual range, her eloquence,” he recalled.
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