She graduated at 19 from the University of Denver with a degree in political science.

It was at Denver that Ms Rice first became interested in international relations and the study of the Soviet Union.

Her inspiration came from a course taught by the Czech refugee, Josef Korbel, father to the United States' first woman Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright.

A masters and doctorate followed and, at the age of 26, Ms Rice became a fellow at Stanford University's Centre for International Security and Arms Control.

Uncompromising positions

Ms Rice's influence over the new administration's early foreign policy strategy has been considerable.

She led the tricky negotiations with Russia (her academic specialisation) over missile defence, and is thought to have spearheaded the unilateralist tone of the first months of the Bush presidency.

Her uncompromising positions on missile defence, Russia and the environment won respect but helped build the European caricature of the new president as toxic troglodyte.

She has since admitted that the Kyoto decision could have been handled better.

However, Ms Rice, like many in the administration, thinks of US foreign policy largely in terms of US national and strategic interest, and she is no fan of the US acting as a paternalistic nation-builder.

Josef Korbel's Enduring Foreign Policy Legacy
Professor Mentored Daughter Albright and Student Rice

By Michael Dobbs, The Washington Post, Thursday, December 28, 2000; Page A05

As a junior at the University of Denver, Condoleezza Rice was all set to pursue a career in music, helping children appreciate Mozart and Beethoven. Then the future national security adviser to President-elect Bush took a course in international politics under a professor named Josef Korbel.

Suddenly, almost overnight, she found her vocation. "It was like love at first sight," she recalls. Prodded by Korbel, a refugee from communism, she became fascinated by the Soviet Union, and eventually decided to teach international relations herself. She describes her old professor as "one of the most central figures in my life, next to my parents."

There are few better examples of continuity in American foreign policy than the obscure international relations professor who was at once the mentor of the incoming national security adviser and the father of the outgoing secretary of state. Like Rice, Madeleine K. Albright depicts Korbel, who died in 1977, as the guiding intellectual influence on her life. "A good deal of what I did," she once told an interviewer, "I did because I wanted to be like my father."

On the surface, it is difficult to imagine two more different women than Rice and Albright, the first female national security adviser and the first female secretary of state. Rice is a Republican, Albright a Democrat. Rice is the granddaughter of an Alabama cotton farmer, Albright the granddaughter of a Czech Jewish businessman who died in a Nazi concentration camp. Rice was born in Alabama in 1954, just as the Supreme Court was desegregating American education. Albright was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, shortly before the country's dismemberment by the Nazis.

But although they belong to different generations and different political parties, Rice and Albright seem to share a similar "Korbelian" view of the world. Like their mentor, they see America as a moral beacon to the rest of the world -- "the indispensable country," in Albright's words. At the same time, their ideology is tempered by pragmatism. In a 1998 interview, Rice described Korbel as a "moderate conservative" in foreign policy, a description that could apply to Albright or herself.

Under Korbel's guidance, both Albright and Rice made Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union their principal field of study, almost to the exclusion of other important regions, such as the Middle East and China. Both wrote books inspired by, and dedicated to, Korbel. Albright wrote her doctoral dissertation on the role of the press in Communist-dominated Czechoslovakia; Rice studied the relationship between the Soviet and Czechoslovak armies.

Not the least of Korbel's contradictions was his attitude toward women wanting to make a career in foreign policy. The founder of a graduate school for international studies at the University of Denver, Korbel initially was reluctant to accept female students and professors. Over time, however, he became a champion of women such as Rice, whose father was a member of the university's faculty.

Former associates say that Korbel's attitudes about women reflected the spirit of the times and his own difficulty in adjusting to American egalitarian ideas. According to his former graduate school deputy, Arthur Gilbert, Korbel at first was reluctant to take female graduate students because he thought "the women would not get jobs and it would not redound to the credit of the school he was trying to build." By the late '60s, however, Korbel had changed his mind. "It was like that with everything. He would take stands, and then he adjusted," Gilbert said.

...
Granted U.S. citizenship in 1957, Korbel was fiercely loyal to his adopted country and was reluctant to criticize U.S. foreign policy, even when it was being assailed from all sides. He supported American intervention in Vietnam until the 1968 Tet offensive, when -- together with his daughter Madeleine -- he reluctantly concluded that it was time for U.S. troops to leave.

"He really saw America as a bastion of freedom in the world, in an unvarnished, very patriotic, almost unquestioning way," said Rice. She recalled Korbel's dismay on seeing television images of delegates to the 1976 Republican National Convention walking around with elephant headgear. "That kind of thing was a great embarrassment to him. He thought it beneath the dignity of a great country."

Rice, by contrast, has only praise for her former mentor, although she describes him as "probably more liberal on domestic politics than I was." "He was a wonderful storyteller and very attentive to his students. It was that attentiveness, plus his ability to weave larger conceptual issues around very interesting stories, that made him such a powerful teacher," she said.

Although Korbel never really achieved his ambition of creating a world-class international relations institute in the American West, his influence lives on through his two star pupils, who set out to follow in his footsteps. When Albright arrived at the United Nations as U.S. ambassador, practically the first thing she did was to take out a framed portrait of her father as a member of a U.N. mission to Kashmir in 1948 and set it up on her desk.

As for Rice, she said she might never have pursued a career in international relations had it not been for Korbel. After abandoning her plans to become a concert pianist and earning a master's degree at Notre Dame, she thought about law school. But Korbel took her aside and told her, "You are very talented, you have to become a professor."

"When I think back on that moment, I don't know if it was a subliminal message," she said, "but I had such respect and admiration for him that I took the idea seriously for the first time."

As professor of political science, Dr. Rice has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and has won two of the highest teaching honors -- the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

At Stanford, she has been a member of the Center for International Security and Arms Control, a Senior Fellow of the Institute for International Studies, and a Fellow (by courtesy) of the Hoover Institution. Her books include Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (1995) with Philip Zelikow, The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin, and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984). She also has written numerous articles on Soviet and East European foreign and defense policy, and has addressed audiences in settings ranging from the U.S. Ambassador's Residence in Moscow to the Commonwealth Club to the 1992 and 2000 Republican National Conventions.

From 1989 through March 1991, the period of German reunification and the final days of the Soviet Union, she served in the Bush Administration as Director, and then Senior Director, of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council, and a Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, she served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1997, she served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender -- Integrated Training in the Military.

Born November 14, 1954 in Birmingham, Alabama, she earned her bachelor's degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver in 1974; her master's from the University of Notre Dame in 1975; and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Morehouse College in 1991, the University of Alabama in 1994, the University of Notre Dame in 1995, the Mississippi College School of Law in 2003, the University of Louisville and Michigan State University in 2004. She resides in Washington, D.C.

Indira Ghandi, Albright, and Thatcher, I have to believe it's time that women do take a more prominant role in the agenda of nations, on an international level.

At this point, I have not seen one who has failed to be recognized as having been good for their nations and the world community, at the time of their service.