The Condi Doctrine

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Rice didn't plan for this role. As she neared her 50th birthday last November, friends say, Rice had decided to leave Washington and return to Stanford. "She made it pretty clear to us that she was planning on coming home after four years," says a former Stanford colleague and close friend. But shortly after Bush won re-election, he told Rice he would promote her to Secretary of State. "She went from default mode to return home to a much more active determination to stay," says the friend. "She said, 'I think there are some interesting things to be done. We're moving into an interesting phase.'"

By many accounts, Rice's tenure as National Security Adviser was an unhappy one, a period marked by the White House's use of faulty intelligence to hype the threat posed by Iraq's weapons program and the failure to plan for a postwar insurgency. In the run-up to the war, she was often overwhelmed by the combined duo of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who ignored her attempts at control. In his recently published history of the National Security Council (NSC), David Rothkopf, a former Clinton Administration official, writes that Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage believed that under Rice's NSC, "the President was not being well prepared" for the foreign policy challenges that faced him after 9/11.

A friend describes Rice's transition from the White House to the State Department as "liberating." "She now has a department to manage. She has duties to perform," says former Secretary of State George Shultz, one of her mentors. "That's what she really enjoys and likes." Rice's forward-leaning approach leaves little space for formalities. She doesn't e-mail because it is impersonal and indelible, communicating mainly through person-to-person calls. If she has a bone to pick with a U.S. or foreign official, she will order everyone out of the room and remonstrate in private. "She's not afraid to pick up the phone and trust her own instincts," says Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns. Whereas Rice is not a born diplomat--her mannered speaking style can verge on monotony--she has soothed much of the public friction that developed between the U.S. and its allies during Bush's first term. "From the first moment she took over," says a European diplomat, "we've got the impression that this Administration is more willing to work alongside Europeans, rather than just leading whether Europeans like it or not."