The Condi Doctrine

When visitors arrive to see Condoleezza Rice on the seventh floor of the State Department, they are seated down the corridor from Rice's office, in a drawing room decorated with patterned carpets, Georgian furniture and a grandfather clock. Above one sofa hangs a framed, four-page document, typewritten and signed with the initials "GM." It is the original copy of the most famous speech ever made by a U.S. Secretary of State: George Marshall's commencement address at Harvard in 1947, the speech that led to the passage of the European Recovery Act, later known as the Marshall Plan. By today's standards, the speech is notable both for its brevity--you can get through most of it if Rice is running late--and its ambition. "Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine," Marshall said, "but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos." Hanging outside the Secretary's door, the document is meant to remind guests of a moment when America's top diplomat managed to change the world.

Rice believes this is her moment. In pep talks to State Department colleagues, she compares the Administration's drive to implant democracy in the Middle East to the policies devised by Marshall's generation to combat communism in Europe after World War II. She delivers major speeches on university campuses, rather than in ministerial chancelleries, and seeks out audiences receptive to her declarations of moral purpose. "Our greatest achievements are yet to come," she told French students in Paris. "We must provide greater prosperity to people all over the world," she said in Tokyo. "We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people," she announced at the American University in Cairo. She is on her way to becoming the most traveled Secretary of State ever: she has visited 38 countries and logged 170,390 miles, according to her staff, which tallies such numbers like baseball stats. When she met TIME at the State Department for an interview, Rice didn't hide her confidence about making history--in part because she knows she already has. "If somebody had looked at the United States in 1789--or for that matter 1864, or for that matter 1954," she says, her smile widening, "and said the Secretary of State will be a black woman--and by the way, that will be after the last Secretary of State was a black man and the Secretary of State before that was a woman--people would have said, 'No, really--are you kidding me?'"