Condi Rice Can't Lose

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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.

She mesmerizes colleagues with a mixture of soft-spoken gentility and effusive warmth. But beneath that lies a steely determination. "The roadside is littered with the bodies of those who have underestimated Condi," says Stanford political scientist Coit Blacker, a close friend. Former CIA chief Robert Gates recalls Rice's accosting a Treasury Department official who tried to undermine her authority. "With a smile on her face she sliced and diced him," Gates says. "He was a walking dead man after that." During her bravura six-year tenure as Stanford provost, her aversion to identity politics at times unsettled some faculty and students. Once, when an African-American student complained that Rice was inattentive to campus minorities, she shot back. "You don't have the standing to question my commitment," she said. "I've been black all my life."

Friends say Rice has no burning desire to return to Washington. "She doesn't have to be Secretary of Defense to be happy," Blacker says. That contentment is a product of her faith: a devout Presbyterian, Rice told White House staff members not to page her during Sunday churchgoing hours. "She is ambitious," says Stanford professor Steve Krasner, a close friend. "But she is also a very religious person who believes there is an element of fate beyond her control."

Her advisory role with the younger Bush began when both were vacationing at his father's compound in Kennebunkport, Me., last summer. His education as a statesman has been gradual; initially the priority was simply "to come to terms with who he was in foreign policy." Robert Zoellick, another adviser, says that when he has sent Bush briefing papers, the Governor "wouldn't spend time on the outline. He would go straight to the questions and answers. It's a very interactive style." But even while trying to cast the best light on her pupil last week, Rice could not escape making the tutelage sessions sound somewhat remedial. "If I were sitting down across from the Premier of China," Bush would ask members of his team, "what would be the three top things I would focus on with that Premier?"

Rice dismisses the ridicule of Bush's slips--his referring to the people of Kosovo as Kosovians, or Greeks as Grecians--as a "parlor game" played by elites. "Governor Bush has not spent the last 10 years of his life at Council on Foreign Relations meetings," she says. "He's spent the last 10 years of his life building a business and being Governor of a state." And, she says, "the presidency is not just the President. It's a whole team of people who are going to get things done." But as another quick study from Texas, Lyndon Johnson, once learned, a President will have to do more than scurry to advisers whenever questions about America's interventions in the world arise. One of Rice's big challenges now is to help Bush show that he can answer them on his own.