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Condoleezza Rice was my graduate student, and a woman raised to excel. But she failed the American people because she forgot a higher duty than excellence: Truth.
Apr 9, 2004 | The official story about Condi Rice, supported by her current tête à tête status with President George W. Bush, is that she is a conservative political activist born and bred, raised by a Republican father, whose intellectual development was formed by conservative scholars. There is obviously some truth in this story, because she has indeed joined the right wing. But there's another side to her history. As her former professor, who taught her at the University of Denver between 1975 and 1979, I am familiar with some of it.
As I watched her performance Thursday before the 9/11 commission, I struggled to reconcile the speaker with the thoughtful young student I knew. But then it struck me that perhaps she had not changed at all.
The glamorous outlines of Condi's life are well known. She grew up with a father who told her she was a "little star." She was a concert pianist, a debutante in Denver, and a student of Josef Korbel, the refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia and father of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Condi has always been a dazzling performer. And as her father John Rice predicted, she has risen.
Her intellectual trajectory, however, has not followed the simple, ever-rightward course that the White House myth proclaims. In fact, both Korbel, and especially I, with whom she worked closely, were not only not conservatives, we were quite radical. Korbel was a lawyer and diplomat in the Czech Republic. Unlike many East European émigrés, he grew up a left-wing Social Democrat. Many of his friends were Communists. As Hitler threatened war, he was Czech ambassador to Yugoslavia. From his window, he told me, he would watch working-class marches against Nazism. He feared the workers, he said, but the Communists were the ones who really fought Hitler. He spent World War II in London working for the Czech resistance, writing pro-Stalin press releases: It was, of course, Stalin's armies that inflicted the decisive defeat against Hitler on the Eastern Front.
After the war, Korbel said, his communist friends told him it was all right "to move up the hill." Under Stalin, communist officials received high wages compared to ordinary communists and other workers. He thought -- as did I -- that this practice was corrupt. If communists require special monetary motivation, what is the difference between a communist and a capitalist?
If Jan Masaryk had become president of Czechoslovakia, Josef Korbel would have been secretary of state. The Communist coup of 1948 resulted in his exile. He was the protégé in the United States of the Council on Foreign Relations, who arranged a position at the University of Denver. He then wrote four quite anticommunist books of diplomatic history. But his thoughtfulness and complexity were never far from the surface.
When I came to Denver, Korbel adopted me. After reading my first article in the journal Political Theory, "Salvaging Marx from Avineri," he had lunch with me, and said, "You are in exile, too." He did not know the details. As a leader of the 1969 Harvard strike against the Vietnam War, I had been expelled for two years. Korbel liked the idea that there were always countries of exile one could go to, empires one could escape.
Condi took seminars with me on Marx and Marxism, explanations of Nazism and the resistance to it in World War II, Ancient Political Thought, Justice in War, and the like. In a class Korbel and I co-taught on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and Russia, she spoke up in the discussions, but hardly from a conservative point of view. Korbel had designed the Graduate School of International Studies for 25 Ph.D. students. He created a Korbel Plan for a master's student to work with two advisors on a yearlong independent project instead of taking courses. The only student who did this was Condi. She wrote a long paper with me and Korbel on "Music and Politics in the Soviet Union."
The main purpose of my teaching is to get people to read carefully. I ask questions about striking evidence that conventional views do not explain. Condi offered her own versions of radical criticisms of mainstream views. She was, and is, unusually thoughtful.
In short, the White House story that she learned Soviet diplomacy from a conservative -- Korbel -- and that her views, as a student, augured an extreme conservative approach is simply false.
Condi and her friend Chris Gibson had been undergraduates at D.U. At that time, the political science department had a racist on the faculty, of whom they told me a story. At the first class, he had announced: "It is my duty to tell you that Arthur Jensen is right and that blacks are genetically inferior in intelligence to whites." Condi had stood up and argued with him. Faltering, he said, "You must have a lot of white blood in you."
Condi comes from the black middle class in Birmingham, Ala. Her family, she said recently, had the attitude that "racists are dumb; I am smart." She has humiliated other racists who, like this political scientist, have attacked her. But she does not directly attack racist ideology. She adduces herself as evidence of its error. To add to this picture, her father, John Rice, became a vice chancellor at the University of Denver. In the late 1970s, I organized support for Joe Patterson, a black union leader and electrician who was fired by the university. During the campaign, Rice told Jim Singleton, a black painter who supported Patterson, to drop out. "There are whites in the campaign," he said. Singleton ignored him. These stories suggest the smart and striving Rices.
But John Rice's story, too, has another side. In 1963, the Ku Klux Klan blew up a church in Birmingham and murdered four schoolgirls. John Rice, the minister, patrolled his neighborhood with a shotgun to prevent further Klan attacks. He had called Condi "little star," had her taught the piano -- she is an excellent pianist -- and to be a debutante. She became, in every area, a magnificent performer. But by example, he also taught her how to stand up against racism.
The University of Denver administration of the 1970s permitted John Rice only a narrow scope. "Cooling out" black militancy was part of it. But he also taught a course on Black Nationalism. He invited Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan is an anti-Semite; he inverts racism by criticizing all whites. Yet, Farrakhan and, in a different way, John Rice were very critical of a racism which means that blacks are twice as likely as whites to die at birth, to be unemployed, or to be in the front lines in Iraq. John Rice, too, was a more complex figure than the White House fable about Condi allows.
Two of my students, Condi and Heraldo Munoz, the current Chilean ambassador to the United Nations and recently president of the Security Council, applied for internships with senators. Heraldo worked for Tim Wirth and Condi for Gary Hart, both Democrats. In 1984 and 1988, Condi worked on Hart's presidential campaigns. Today's story that she has always been a Republican is simply a myth.
When Condi finished at D.U., my fellow political theorist and friend at Stanford, Nannerl Keohane -- now president of Duke University -- recruited her to be head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Center. Condi and I joked over the phone about how she had been counted six times for affirmative action purposes -- as a black and a woman in the Center, the political science department, and another division which I have now forgotten. She also told me about what a foolish man Casper Weinberger, Reagan's secretary of defense, was. At Stanford, the main figures in the administration came through. Her job was to show them around. But we then lost touch.
At Stanford, Condi taught students like Jendayi Frazier. After working on Africa for Condi at the National Security Council, Jendayi has recently been appointed American ambassador to South Africa. Jendayi was a candidate for a position in African politics at the Graduate School of International Studies. I strongly supported her. After she was hired, we became friends. According to Jendayi, Condi continued to recommend my book "Marx's Politics: Communists and Citizens," because it gave students a careful picture, of Marx's surprising, flamboyant public action in the German democratic revolution of 1848.
Initially, Condi and Jendayi were critical of liberal politicians who, needing funds from the rich and support from the mainstream press, compromised their fundamental principles and harmed ordinary people. They were also critical of conservatives. But that position has been subtly inverted over time. A scathing critique of liberal hypocrisies has now become support of, sadly, even more outrageous conservative ones -- such as the current American occupation of Iraq in the name of "liberation."
Condi rose in Washington as an expert in Soviet and East European military positions. She became a protégé of Brent Scowcroft, eventually serving on the National Security Council in George H.W. Bush's administration. With her new Republican contacts, she was also appointed to the board of Chevron. Chevron named an oil tanker the Condoleezza Rice. It weighs down one's soul, I suspect, to have a namesake oil tanker -- perhaps the next Exxon Valdez -- floating heavily somewhere in the ocean. Apparently, she didn't feel good about it. Since her appointment as national security advisor to the second Bush, the name has been changed.
