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Condoleeza Rice, Former Secretary of State: Luncheon, 10/15
DC Wharton Club members & their guests are invited to
Luncheon at National Press Club with
Condoleeza Rice, America’s 66th Secretary of State,
Author of new book, EXTRAORDINARY, ORDINARY PEOPLE: A Memoir of Family
Event Date: Friday, October 15th, 2010 at 12:30pm
What:
Condoleezza Rice, an American professor, politician, diplomat and author, who served as the 66th United States Secretary of State, will speak at a National Press Club luncheon on Friday, October 15, 2010.
Her appearance will coincide with the publication of her new book about her childhood in racially segregated Birmingham, Alabama.
The book, “EXTRAORDINARY, ORDINARY PEOPLE: A Memoir of Family,² focuses on Dr. Rice’s life up to the 2000 election of George W. Bush. Dr. Rice chronicles her parents, Rev. John and Angelena Rice — educational evangelists who helped shape her life and the lives of others through their unconditional love, unwavering support, and eternal optimism that anything was possible, even in the turbulent time of America¹s civil rights struggle.
Rice served as national security adviser to President Bush during his first administration and then was secretary of state from 2005 to 2009.
(From Wikipedia.org):
Condoleezza Rice (pronounced /k?nd??li?z?/; born November 14, 1954) is an American professor, politician, diplomat and author. She served as the 66th United States Secretary of State, and was the second to hold that office in the administration of President George W. Bush. Rice was the first African-American woman secretary of state, as well as the second African American (after Colin Powell), and the second woman (after Madeleine Albright). Rice was President Bush’s National Security Advisor during his first term. Before joining the Bush administration, she was a professor of political science at Stanford University where she served as Provost from 1993 to 1999. Rice served as the Soviet and East European Affairs Advisor to President George H.W. Bush during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification.
When beginning as Secretary of State, Rice pioneered a policy of Transformational Diplomacy, with a focus on democracy in the greater Middle East. Her emphasis on supporting democratically elected governments faced challenges as Hamas captured a popular majority in Palestinian elections yet supported Islamist militants, and influential countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt maintained authoritarian systems with U.S. support. While Secretary of State, she chaired the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s board of directors.
In March 2009, Rice returned to Stanford University as a political science professor and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.
Abortion
Rice said “If you go back to 2000 when I helped the president in the campaign. I said that I was, in effect, kind of libertarian on this issue. And meaning by that, that I have been concerned about a government role in this issue. I am a strong proponent of parental choice – of parental notification. I am a strong proponent of a ban on late-term abortion. These are all things that I think unite people and I think that that’s where we should be. I’ve called myself at times mildly pro-choice.”[84] She would not want the federal government “forcing its views on one side or the other.”[85]
Rice said she believes President Bush “has been in exactly the right place” on abortion, “which is we have to respect the culture of life and we have to try and bring people to have respect for it and make this as rare a circumstance as possible” However, she added that she has been “concerned about a government role” but has “tended to agree with those who do not favor federal funding for abortion, because I believe that those who hold a strong moral view on the other side should not be forced to fund” the procedure.[85]
Discrimination
Rice experienced firsthand the injustices of Birmingham’s discriminatory laws and attitudes. She was instructed to walk proudly in public and to use the facilities at home rather than subject herself to the indignity of “colored” facilities in town. As Rice recalls of her parents and their peers, “they refused to allow the limits and injustices of their time to limit our horizons.”[86]
However, Rice recalls various times in which she suffered discrimination on account of her race, which included being relegated to a storage room at a department store instead of a regular dressing room, being barred from going to the circus or the local amusement park, being denied hotel rooms, and even being given bad food at restaurants.[4] Also, while Rice was mostly kept by her parents from areas where she might face discrimination, she was very aware of the civil rights struggle and the problems of Jim Crow laws in Birmingham. A neighbor, Juliemma Smith, described how “[Condi] used to call me and say things like, ‘Did you see what Bull Connor did today?’ She was just a little girl and she did that all the time. I would have to read the newspaper thoroughly because I wouldn’t know what she was going to talk about.”[4] Rice herself said of the segregation era: “Those terrible events burned into my consciousness. I missed many days at my segregated school because of the frequent bomb threats.”[4]
During the violent days of the Civil Rights Movement, Reverend Rice armed himself and kept guard over the house while Condoleezza practiced the piano inside. According to J.L. Chestnut, Reverend Rice called local civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth and his followers “uneducated, misguided Negroes.”[87][88] Also, Reverend Rice instilled in his daughter and students that black people would have to prove themselves worthy of advancement, and would simply have to be “twice as good” to overcome injustices built into the system.[89] Rice said “My parents were very strategic, I was going to be so well prepared, and I was going to do all of these things that were revered in white society so well, that I would be armored somehow from racism. I would be able to confront white society on its own terms.”[90] While the Rices supported the goals of the civil rights movement, they did not agree with the idea of putting their child in harm’s way.[4]
Rice was eight when her schoolmate Denise McNair, aged 11, was killed in the bombing of the primarily black Sixteenth Street Baptist Church by white supremacists on September 15, 1963. Rice has commented upon that moment in her life:
I remember the bombing of that Sunday School at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it happen, and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father’s church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of four young girls, including my friend and playmate, Denise McNair. The crime was calculated to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations. But those fears were not propelled forward, those terrorists failed.[91]
– Condoleezza Rice, Commencement 2004, Vanderbilt University, May 13, 2004
Rice states that growing up during racial segregation taught her determination against adversity, and the need to be “twice as good” as non-minorities.[92] Segregation also hardened her stance on the right to bear arms; Rice has said in interviews that if gun registration had been mandatory, her father’s weapons would have been confiscated, leaving them defenseless against Ku Klux Klan nightriders.[4]
[edit] Public perception and criticisms
Rice makes an appearance at Boston College, where she is greeted by Father William Leahy.
Rice has been criticized for her involvement in the George W. Bush administration both in the United States and abroad. Protesters have sought to exclude her from appearing at schools such as Princeton University[93] and Boston College,[94] which prompted the resignation of an adjunct professor at Boston. There has also been an effort to protest her public speeches abroad.[95]
Time and Forbes magazines
Rice has appeared on the Time 100, Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people, four times. Rice is one of only nine people in the world whose influence has been considered enduring enough to have made the list—first compiled in 1999 as a retrospective of the twentieth century and made an annual feature in 2004—so frequently. However, the list contains people who have the influence to change for better or for worse, and Time has also accused her of squandering her influence, stating in February 1, 2007, that her “accomplishments as Secretary of State have been modest, and even those have begun to fade” and that she “has been slow to recognize the extent to which the U.S.’s prestige has declined.”[96] In its March 19, 2007 issue it followed up stating that Rice was “executing an unmistakable course correction in U.S. foreign policy.”[97]
In 2004 and 2005, she was ranked as the most powerful woman in the world by Forbes magazine and number two in 2006 (following the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel).[98]
[edit] Criticisms from Senator Barbara Boxer
California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer has also criticized Rice in relation to the war in Iraq: “I personally believe — this is my personal view — that your loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell the war, overwhelmed your respect for the truth.”[99]
On January 11, 2007, Boxer, in a debate over the war in Iraq, said, “Now, the issue is who pays the price, who pays the price? I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, within immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families, and I just want to bring us back to that fact.”
The New York Post and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow considered this an attack on Rice’s status as a single, childless female and referred to Boxer’s comments as “a great leap backward for feminism.”[100] Rice later echoed Snow’s remarks, saying “I thought it was okay to not have children, and I thought you could still make good decisions on behalf of the country if you were single and didn’t have children.” Boxer responded to the controversy by saying “They’re getting this off on a non-existent thing that I didn’t say. I’m saying, she’s like me, we do not have families who are in the military.”[101]
[edit] Criticisms from John R. Bolton
According to the Washington Post in late July 2008, former Undersecretary of State and U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton was referring to Rice and her allies in the Bush Administration who he believes have abandoned earlier hard-line principles when he said: “Once the collapse begins, adversaries have a real opportunity to gain advantage. In terms of the Bush presidency, this many reversals this close to the end destroys credibility… It appears there is no depth to which this administration will not sink in its last days.”[102]
[edit] Other criticism
Rice has also been criticized by other conservatives. Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard accused her of jettisoning the Bush Doctrine.[103] Other conservatives criticized her for her approach to Russia policy and other issues.[104] Many criticize Rice in particular for her opposition to the change of strategy in Iraq and surge in U.S. forces that began in 2007.[105]
[edit] Views within the black community
Rice’s approval ratings from January 2005 to September 2006
Rice’s ratings decreased following a heated battle for her confirmation as Secretary of State and following Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Rice’s rise within the George W. Bush administration initially drew a largely positive response from many in the black community. In a 2002 survey, then National Security Advisor Rice was viewed favorably by 41% of black respondents, but another 40% did not know Rice well enough to rate her and her profile remained comparatively obscure.[106] As her role increased, some black commentators began to express doubts concerning Rice’s stances and statements on various issues. In 2005, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson asked, “How did [Rice] come to a worldview so radically different from that of most black Americans?”[107]
Rice and Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer participate in a news conference at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, May 23, 2007.
Other writers have also noted what they perceive to be a distance between Rice and the black community. The Black Commentator magazine described sentiments given in a speech by Rice at a black gathering as “more than strange — they were evidence of profound personal disorientation. A black woman who doesn’t know how to talk to black people is of limited political use to an administration that has few black allies.”[108] When Rice invoked the civil rights movement to clarify her position on the invasion of Iraq, Margaret Kimberley, another writer for The Black Commentator, felt that her use of the rhetoric was “offensive.” Stan Correy, an interviewer from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, characterized many blacks involved with civil rights and politics as viewing this rhetoric as “cynical.”[109] Rice was also described by Bill Fletcher, Jr., the former leader of the TransAfrica Forum, a foreign policy lobbying organization in Washington, D.C., as “very cold and distant and only black by accident.”[106] In August 2005, American musician, actor, and social activist Harry Belafonte, who serves on the Board of TransAfrica, referred to blacks in the Bush administration as “black tyrants.”[110] Belafonte’s comments received mixed reactions.[106]
Rice has defended herself from such criticisms on several occasions. During a September 14, 2005 interview, she said, “Why would I worry about something like that? … The fact of the matter is I’ve been black all my life. Nobody needs to tell me how to be black.”[111]
Notable black commentators have defended Rice from across the aisle, including Mike Espy,[112] Andrew Young, C. Delores Tucker (chair of the National Congress of Black Women),[113] Clarence Page,[114] Colbert King,[115] Dorothy Height (chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women)[115] and Kweisi Mfume (former Congressman and former CEO of the NAACP).[116]
Family and personal life
Her mother, Angelena Rice, died of breast cancer in August 1985, aged 61. In July 1989, Condoleezza’s father, John Wesley Rice, married Clara Bailey,[117] to whom he remained married until his death, in December 2000, aged 77.[5] He was a football and basketball coach throughout his life.[118]
Rice has never married, and has no children.
Rice claims to be a “sports fanatic”, and that she would love to own or manage a team. She was the honorary game captain for Stanford’s 2009 football game against Notre Dame.: