MADAME VICE-PRESIDENT

The Unflappable Condi Rice: Why the world's most powerful woman asks God for help. (Sheryl Henderson Blunt, 08/22/2003, Christianity Today)

Admirers have called her one of the country's best and brightest and the President's secret weapon. At a June 4 meeting with Jordanian, Palestinian Authority, and Israeli leaders, President Bush called her "my personal representative" and said she would work closely with the parties to help bring about peace. Her significance in shaping American foreign policy is hard to overstate.

Known affectionately inside the White House as the Warrior Princess, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice often speaks for the President on foreign policy and is one of his closest confidants. From her northwest corner office of the West Wing, she is responsible for sharpening and presenting the arguments of the administration's often rambunctious National Security Council.

Before her current stint, she had overseen decisions in corporate boardrooms, managed a multimillion-dollar budget at Stanford University, and negotiated key deals for the first President Bush.

Rice's keen intellect, steely unflappability, and Southern charm have served her well. Those qualities, her family and friends told Christianity Today, arise from something deep within her. "Her faith is absolutely fundamental to who she is," says Randy Bean, executive producer of special television projects at Stanford and a longtime friend. "It's part of her fiber." [...]

Rice enrolled in a course on international politics. The instructor was Josef Korbel. The former Czech diplomat and political refugee fascinated Rice. She would later describe Korbel as "one of the most central figures in my life, next to my parents." Korbel and his family, whose Jewish background came to light much later, escaped both Nazis and communists. The U.S. government granted Korbel political asylum, and the University of Denver hired him to start an international politics program.

Rice and Korbel's daughter, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, are probably that program's most famous alumni. Both Rice and Albright, despite their differences, acquired Korbel's unshakable commitment to the American ideals of freedom and democracy. Rice, like many foreign policy experts of the Cold War era, was attracted to the views of scholar Hans Morgenthau, a leading advocate of balance-of-power realism in relations between nations.

But in time, Rice's own view would shift toward the values-driven model that the Bush White House embraces. "Power matters," Rice told National Review in 1999. "But there can be no absence of moral content in American foreign policy, and, furthermore, the American people wouldn't accept such an absence. Europeans giggle at this and say we're naïve and so on, but we're not Europeans, we're Americans-and we have different principles."

This may be the first administration since the '20s to realize that we are not like they.

MORE:
Hard Line on the Road Map: Can Rice put pressure on the nation she admires? (Sheryl Henderson Blunt, 08/22/2003, Christianity Today) Posted by Orrin Judd at August 22, 2003 6:01 PM