Condi Rice Can't Lose

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And yet Rice's differences with the Democrats are not rooted in a great ideological clash. The members of the Bush foreign policy brain trust--all of whom worked in the Reagan or Bush White House--belong to a generation that came of age in the twilight of communism. Rice has been a fixture at confabs of the foreign policy establishment, such as the Aspen Institute, where last month she and her Bush Administration mentor Brent Scowcroft engaged in typically elevated and polite debate with Democratic stalwarts such as Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. Rice believes U.S.-Russia relations should be reoriented to focus on security issues like nuclear disarmament rather than political and economic reform; the Administration is already moving in that direction. Although she would halt talk of Russia as a strategic partner, she doesn't seek confrontation. "Sometimes Russia's interests will conflict with ours, and sometimes they will coincide," she says. Nor does she engage in who-lost-Russia attacks. "Russia hasn't been lost."

Indeed, her bipartisan tone leads one former Bush official to note that Rice could have ended up working for a Democratic administration. But Rice would rather see her beloved Stanford football team lose than work for a Democrat. By both upbringing and philosophy, she is a committed Republican realist in the tradition of Kissinger, Scowcroft and Colin Powell. Rice's father, a university administrator, joined the G.O.P. in 1952, at a time when Dixiecrats still ruled the South. In 1960 the six-year-old Rice went into a voting booth and instructed her mother to "pull the elephant." Her mother listened.

Growing up in segregated Birmingham, she recalls hardly knowing that white people existed. Then, in 1963, her friend Denise McNair was killed in the church bombing that helped ignite the civil rights movement. The family moved out of Alabama, eventually relocating to Denver. But living under Jim Crow instilled in Rice an astonishing resilience. "I came out of that not bitter but with a sense of entitlement," she says, "to do whatever I wanted to do, to be whoever I wanted to be."

For most of her youth, she wanted to be a concert pianist; she still practices for an hour a day and gives recitals on the Stanford campus. But after entering the University of Denver at age 15 (she skipped two grades in school), her professional music prospects dimmed, and she began to feel "an inexplicable pull toward the study of Russia and communism and Eastern Europe."

Her mentor at Denver was the Czech refugee Josef Korbel, Madeleine Albright's father. This coincidence serves to highlight her differences with Albright, who has become the foremost proponent of an ideal-driven foreign policy. While Rice says that in foreign policy "America's values are extremely important," she hews closer to the tradition of Korbel and other realists, such as Hans Morgenthau, who place greater weight on defending strategic interests and tending to the balance of power.

In 1981, before she had even completed her Ph.D., she was offered a professorship at Stanford. Scowcroft met her in 1986, at a dreary dinner with various foreign policy graybeards. "Here was this young slip of a girl who would speak up unabashedly," he told TIME. "I determined to get to know her." After he was named Bush's NSC adviser, he placed one of his first recruiting calls to Rice.