Condi

by Antonia Felix

  Condi worked with George about ten hours a week while she was preparing to do the Brahms with the Muir Quartet. Whether she was rehearsing for a performance or simply working on new repertoire, she considered her lessons a “sacred” time and would not allow any interruptions. This wasn’t an easy feat for the person with the number-two job at the university. “If she got a call from the office she’d say, ‘I’m doing Brahms now,’ and she told them to wait. She wanted them to know that this was her time to do music.”

  George recalled that the Brahms Piano Quintet performance, although in an informal setting, was an exhilarating event. “She played it very well,” he said. “I was amazed at her tempo in the scherzo; it was very exciting.” From the beginning of that November evening, her friendship with the Muir Quartet came through. “They began to play,” said George, “and Condi noticed a funny look on the string players’ faces. The opening lines turned into ‘Happy Birthday’ because it was her birthday. They played it through while everyone in the house sang along. Then they started over for real.”

  George prefers to work with people like Condi, non-music majors who have a unique commitment to their art. “Most of my students are neurobiologists and geologists who go on to incredible careers in other fields and happen to be great players,” he said. “I’m interested in how far amateurs can go, and I’ve taught some amazing pianists. When I find, for example, someone in physics who has very difficult work to do but has time for piano, I know he’s going to put in the work. A student like this will tell his lab, ‘I’m playing in a chamber competition this week, I won’t be in.’ These are not amateurs in the sense of just messing around, they’re really serious. As a political scientist and provost, Condi was definitely in that group.”

  Regularly scheduled faculty talent shows at Stanford revealed just how skilled many of the engineers and math professors really were. Condi appeared on one of these programs with George after mastering another Brahms piece, the two-piano version of his Variations on a Theme by Haydn. “We worked on that and performed it at a faculty talent show,” said George. “It was really fun performing with her. At faculty performances you find all these amazing people crawling out of the woodwork, people who are renowned in other fields and who are also great musicians.” George recalled that Condi later performed the Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes, a collection of joyful, short pieces scored for two pianos and chorus.

  Condi’s connection with the Muir String Quartet prompted her and her Stanford string player friends to attend Muir’s summer music workshops. They have traveled to Utah to study at the Advanced Quartet Program at the Institute at Deer Valley, making music against the glorious backdrop of the Wasatch Mountains. George Barth came along for two summers to coach them on some of the piano quartet repertoire. Condi has also followed the Muir Quartet to Montana for summer retreats, where she reads through music with them and practices some of her favorite chamber music repertoire. “I now play almost exclusively chamber music,” she said in 2001, “and I have to be selective. I don’t have that much time to practice. And I do like the social aspects of playing chamber music.” Before she began playing with Paul Brest and the other members of the quartet at Stanford, she had only worked on solo piano music. Chamber music opened a new world to her, one that she continues to explore and enjoy. Given the choice, she would prefer playing with a string quartet or giving a solo recital rather than performing a concerto with an orchestra. “I played with orchestras a couple of times,” she said, “and always found it overwhelming.”

  George Barth noted that Condi’s skills as a chamber musician—being a good listener and collaborator—were just an extension of her personality. In departmental meetings, Condi the provost was equally attentive. “She would pay attention to everyone and find ways of incorporating everyone,” he said. “That is something one would expect to see reflected in her chamber playing, and I think that is why she’s always taken to this kind of playing. I think she enjoys both things. I also know that her friendships at Stanford are important to her and doing chamber music is one of the best ways to pursue friendships.” George saw first-hand how much dedication Condi put into her music; in spite of her heavy schedule of teaching, researching, and administering the university, she made music a priority and therefore kept a balance of work, art, and soul in her life. “Condi is very self-disciplined,” he said. “She finds time to do things that matter. This is one way that she tries to not let go of things that matter to her.”

  Another high priority in Condi’s lifestyle was her commitment to exercise. Stanford had an excellent strength-training department, and she is proud to claim that she worked with Karen Branick, who was Tiger Woods’ strength coach when he was a student at Stanford. After Branick left, Condi trained regularly with Mark Wateska, who developed a rigorous program for her.

  Twice a week she put on her sweats, went to the varsity weight room, and began a one-hour workout with ten minutes on the treadmill and fifteen minutes of stretching. She then proceeded to the weights and performed bicep curls, shoulder and leg presses, isolateral pull-downs, abdominal crunches, and many other routines, capped off by a cooldown on the treadmill and more stretching. “I put her through the same regimes I did with any athlete at Stanford,” said Mark. “She felt that her workouts kept her sharp physically as well as mentally.”

  Condi, who is five-foot-eight and weighs 140 pounds, trained in order to develop more quickness and agility in her tennis game, to control the stress of her job, and to just see how far she could push herself. She also liked the fact that her regime allowed her to eat whatever she wanted without gaining weight. Photos of Condi in sleeveless gowns, such as the one she wore to the televised NAACP Image Awards in February 2002, reveal her well-toned arms. Condi described her workouts as a crucial break from her work, one of the few activities that get her away from her desk and her meetings. She explained that, unlike people who have children, she has to find another outlet that takes her away from work. “If you don’t have children who are a break on working all the time, you can work all the time,” she said. She also uses her stints on the treadmill to focus on pressing issues, plugging in either rock or classical music, depending on her mood. “I do some of my best thinking on the treadmill,” she said. This is the only time she uses music as an accompaniment to whatever she’s doing. “I get very caught up in what’s going on with the music,” she said, “so only when I’m exercising can I have music as background music.” She often times her treadmill workout to familiar music rather than the clock. “I have to do something to get my mind off that fact that I’m droning on a treadmill for 30 minutes and I usually play on the CD pieces that I know, usually pieces that I’ve played, because I can kind of time my workout to the start of a Scherzo, to know that I ought to run to the end of the Scherzo, or something like that.”

  “She’s very goal-oriented, very driven, very competitive,” said Mark. “I would not want to come up against her in any situation.” Each year on her birthday, Mark’s “present” was to coach her through one repetition for each year of her life on the 100-pound leg press. “I don’t think she liked receiving gifts from me,” said Mark, “but that was the challenge—you’re one year better. That’s the approach we took. Age was not something that held you back.”

  Mark was impressed with Condi’s self-discipline as well as her unassuming personality. “As a strength coach, I guess I was the low man on the totem poll in the scheme of things, but she never acted like the provost; she didn’t want special treatment, she wanted me to kick her butt. So I never felt intimidated by her position; I felt comfortable being myself and doing my job. That made for a good relationship.” Mark attended one of Condi’s informal performances at Stanford and was astounded by the physicality that her playing required. “He said, ‘You know, that’s every bit as physical playing that piece as anything that I watch with the Stanford football team,’” said Condi. “Pianists don’t often get enough credit for the physical side of playing so
mething like Brahms, which can be quite physically demanding.”

  In her first years as provost and professor, Condi had no desire to go back into government service. She was fulfilled in teaching, advising freshman, and guiding the academic course of her graduate students, and she did not miss the pace of Washington. She spent quality time trying to convince her undergraduate students to go for a career in academia, outlining the many perks that had enriched her life—including travel. “I . . . tell them that I’ve been to Europe thirty times or so now, and I’ve never paid my own way,” she said in 1993. Such arguments may also have served to convince herself that she was better off as a professor than as a foreign policy official in Washington.

  “I don’t suffer from Potomac fever in the way it afflicts many people who have worked in Washington and spend the rest of their lives wanting to go back,” she said in 1995. “I can say in all honesty that I don’t spend a waking moment thinking about whether to go. I had a chance to finish so much in those two years that I have no thirst to try to do it again.” But by the end of 1998, she had changed her tune.

  Five years had passed since she left the Bush administration, and she sorely missed the hands-on foreign policy world. The former president’s son, George W., was seeking her advice on foreign affairs, and these meetings pulled her further toward the practicalities of her field. It appeared to be time for a change, and Condi decided to leave Stanford. “The most important thing became to get back to what I do, which is international politics,” she said in March 1999. “I haven’t been to Russia in two and a half years. For me, going to Russia is like breathing.”

  She planned on entering the business world to apply her international relations background in that area. “I’m going to take a leave from the university to pursue opportunities in the private sector that will give me practical experience in economic and political reform,” she said. She hoped to get the most experience in witnessing “the impact of globalization on international financial and political institutions.” She added that she planned to return to Stanford one day, but that “it’s time to get back to my passion: international relations and politics.”

  In his remarks at Condi’s farewell celebration, Gerhard Casper joked that no one really believed she was leaving to pursue international politics. “We all know her real passion,” he said, “and the fact that NFL training camps open in only a few weeks.” He also thanked her “for investing as much talent and energy into consolidating the Stanford budget as into unifying Germany. The former may have been a tougher task than the latter and ended up taking more time.”

  The ceremony turned poignant when Brenda Sepolen sang two of Condi’s favorite gospel songs, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and “I Need Thee Every Hour.” Most of the more than 100 people in the room, including Condi, were moved to tears. Later, Gerhard presented Condi with a pricey gift he had acquired with the help of an entire group of Condi well-wishers. She opened the package to find, much to her amazement, a rare, six-volume first edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Inside, the dedication read:To Condoleezza Rice

  May War be the fiction,

  And Peace the reality

  With the greatest appreciation and deep gratitude

  for her service as Stanford’s 9th Provost.

  At the final meeting of the Faculty Senate for that academic year, Condi’s colleague Brad Efron talked about the “warm grace and tough-love honesty” Condi displayed as provost and professor. He also reminded her, during the champagne toast, that her job as a tenured professor at Stanford would not be going anywhere. “It’s like the Mafia,” he told her. “It’s not just something you quit.”

  When Condi officially stepped down as provost on July 1, 1999, she declared a one-year leave of absence from the university and re-entered the Hoover Institution as a senior fellow. As an expert in the states of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, she brought years of both academic and government service experience to the Stanford-based research organization, which is dedicated to studying a wide range of contemporary policy issues.

  John Raisian, director of the Hoover Institution, remarked that her connections are as impressive as her background. “She has this incredible reputation even though her experiences are somewhat limited by the mere fact of her age,” he said. John described her ability to maintain a power network of Washington contacts by drawing a comparison to another Hoover member, George Shultz, who has been a distinguished fellow at the institution since 1989. “George has this star quality appeal,” he said. “He left the Reagan Administration in 1989 and over the last more than a decade he continues to be very popular and very in touch with significant people around the world. At a junior level, Condi has the same kind of appeal. When she established friendships and associations some ten years ago with people like Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, she’s maintained them. She’s always had her finger in lots of foreign policy issues even while she was out here on the West Coast.”

  John also pointed out Condi’s publishing history and background in various public service organizations. “She has had other sort of advisory interests and capacities, and these are things that matter a lot to a place like Hoover,” she said. “What we’re trying to do is generate ideas that will make the world a little better place, a safer place. We comment on ideas that are in the world of policy and educate people about the facts underlying policies in the United States. This is right up her alley and what she does.” In the Hoover newsletter, John added that “Condi is one of the brightest people I have ever met. She has a wealth of experience, and her enthusiasm is highly contagious. She will become an integral part of Hoover’s foreign policy outlook.”

  Two weeks after her entry into the Hoover Institution, Condi was named the recipient of a new endowment donated by philanthropists Thomas and Barbara Stephenson. They created the fund to support a Hoover fellow who has “achieved stature as one of the most outstanding scholars in his or her field with a demonstrated commitment to research of public policy.” The benefactors added, “We are thrilled by this opportunity to support both an institution and an individual who can have a significant, positive impact on an emerging new world.”

  One year after Condi became provost of Stanford, she was listed among Time magazine’s “50 Young Leaders to Watch.” They based their selections on people age forty and under who had made “civic and social impact” and whom they thought would “make a difference.” The article predicted that for some of the honorees “solving one problem will inevitably lead to another and another: until, eventually, the new leaders will be ministering not to a neighborhood but to a nation, perhaps to the world. Assuming that we will let them.”

  In the article’s brief biographical sketch of Condi, Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University predicted that “she has the ability to have a Cabinet-level job—she could be Secretary of State.” This was five years before Condi joined George W.’s presidential campaign as his foreign policy advisor, six years before she was named his national security advisor. At forty, she had already become a major figure in her field and those who followed her career anticipated that she would one day appear on the national political stage. She would not disappoint.

  When her friend George W. Bush began pulling together his presidential campaign, she was invited to put her expertise to work for him. She became head tutor among the candidate’s foreign policy experts, head writer of the nuclear strategy speech, and front-and-center figure in the “W is for Women” campaign. By the time it was all over, George W. went a step further. He asked her to stay at his side as his national security advisor. He pulled her all the way into the West Wing, just around the corner and down the hall from the Oval Office.

  NINE

  Portals of Power: Bush II

  “If there is any lesson from history, it is that small powers with everything to lose are often more stubborn than big powers. . . . The lesson, too, is that if it is worth fighting for, you had better be prepared t
o win.”

  —Condoleezza Rice, 2000

  THE morning of September 11, 2001, Condi arrived at her office, as usual, at 6:30. She anticipated another typical, long day, in which she would not go home until 9:00 that night. Her job involved a certain amount of repetitiveness, such as scheduled daily briefings, but working in national security is never routine. About two hours into her day, an unusual message signaled that this day would be no exception.

  Her secretary appeared at the door at 8:45 A.M. to say that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. What a strange accident, Condi thought. She called President Bush, who was in Florida speaking about his education agenda, and gave him the news. “What a weird accident,” he said. A short time later, Condi was in a staff meeting when her secretary walked in and handed her a note. A second plane had struck the other tower. In a flash, she realized it was a terrorist attack.

  Her second thought was to call a meeting of the top members of the National Security Council. She went downstairs to the Situation Room, the military command center located in the basement of the West Wing, and got on the phone. Besides the president, the principal members of the NSC have historically been the vice president (Dick Cheney), secretary of state (Colin Powell), and secretary of defense (Donald Rumsfeld). Another cabinet member in the council is the secretary of the treasury (Paul O’Neill), and the top military and intelligence advisors are the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Henry Shelton) and CIA director (George Tenet).