U of M students showing Film about Dr Rice this Thurs. 4/10 at 7pm (Condi Rice biographer at event)

[annm4peace]

3. "10 Percent Intellectual": The Mind of Condoleezza Rice

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2008/05/7327/10-percent-intellectual-mind-condoleezza-rice


interesting article.. http://www.prwatch.org/news/2008/05/7327/10-percent-intellectual-mind-condoleezza-rice
just a snip...

Born in the USA

The insulated setting of Rice's deep-South youth, a home-based environment controlled by her doting parents, was an important factor in making it difficult for her, even as an adult, to think creatively beyond the frontiers (or mindset) of the United States. Her upbringing did not include much domestic travel, let alone visits to foreign countries. (She did, however, make it to Coney Island on one occasion with her parents.) Sequestered Titusville, her native neighborhood, was her sheltered bubble for the early years of her life. In the words of Mabry, Rice spent "the most formative years of her life willing away realities she did not want to see."

When Condo, as her pastor father called her, was in her mid-teens, the Rices moved to Denver, Colorado, far away from the "Bombingham," of Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor, the Ku Klux Klan 1960s Public Safety Commissioner who was responsible for so much of the violence there. (Rice would later say that Connor "fascinated" her "because he was kind of the personification of evil.&quot In the mile-high city, Rice went to a then-minor heartland learnery, the University of Denver. ("Very few people go from a doctorate at the University of Denver to a first class research university ," said Donald Kennedy, Stanford president from 1980 to 1992.) It was not until her late years in college that her intellectual interests, until then limited to ice skating and piano playing, were expanded to the field of foreign affairs. As she mentioned recently at the State Department:

I was in college at the University of Denver trying to figure out my way in life and coming to the realization that if I stayed a music major I would end up playing at Nordstrom or perhaps at a piano bar -- (laughter) -- and I tried courses in English literature, and State and local government. And I hated them all. And then one day, I walked into a course in international politics taught by a Soviet specialist, a Czech émigré, a man named Josef Korbel, Secretary Albright's father.

"Before Korbel's class," Mabry points out, "Condoleezza had only glimpsed the world of international power and intrigue while sitting with her father watching the nightly news, worrying about Castro's missiles." Korbel was a defender, according to Mabry, of the Stalin-Hitler pact, which the Central European-born professor saw "as another example of Stalin's strategic genius and his success in building the Soviet state." According to Elizabeth Bumiller, when Rice heard him lecture, she

fell in love" -- the phrase she has used in virtually every interview she has given about this moment in her life. ...

The lecture that so transfixed Rice was about the ruthless maneuvering and consolidation of power that allowed Stalin to propel himself from general secretary of the Communist Party to effective dictator of the Soviet Union. ... Terry Karl, a Stanford political science professor who later taught with Rice, ... "Like some political scientists of the time, she was impressed with the efficiency and effectiveness of how the Communist parties exercised power."

A Stanford faculty member quoted by Mabry noticed that when Rice became the university's provost in the 1990s, communicating with her "was like talking to a brick wall. You'd try to say something, and she would say , 'No, no, no!' All I could think of was Khrushchev banging the shoe at the UN ... She was a Sovietologist; she learned her lesson well from her subjects."