Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (10 page)

Her long-held goal of becoming a professional pianist provided a laser-like focus upon which everything else neatly revolved. But between her sophomore and junior year at the university, this well-constructed plan suddenly fell apart. That summer she attended the famous Aspen Musical Festival and ran into the stiffest competition she had ever faced. “I met eleven-year-olds who could play from sight what had taken me all year to learn” she said, “and I thought I’m maybe going to end up playing piano bar or playing at Nordstrom, but I’m not going to end up playing Carnegie Hall.” If she could not be a career performer—appearing with symphony orchestras and playing Mozart and Beethoven on the world’s eminent recital stages—she would not stay with the program. This change of heart had been coming for a time, but the Aspen experience clinched it for her.

“We both became disillusioned with piano,” said Darcy Taylor, who studied at the Lamont School of Music with Condi. “Condi was extremely talented, but she decided it wasn’t for her. We were all very good, but there are people who are just brilliant. There are not many people who get selected for concert work; there aren’t that many positions. We had to realize that we’d be going into the teaching end of it, or the church music end of it, to be a choir director, for example; and we had to face up to the fact that we weren’t good enough to cut it in the concert world. Like Condi, I wasn’t willing to be second fiddle.”

Darcy and Condi sometimes commiserated about the hard, cold reality of the music world. They found nothing glamorous about round after round of competing in front of distracted music professors. “We all entered several contests a year and had several major performances per year,” Darcy said. “We all had to learn Beethoven, Bach and Chopin—Condi really liked Chopin—and these contests taught us a lot about the life a musician has lead. We talked about that a lot. You would work hard and then, during a jury or audition, the professors would rattle paper and talk to each other and interrupt you in the middle of your performance. Their comment to us was that this is what it’s like in the real world, so get used to it. I didn’t like that, and Condi felt the same way.”

Condi could not envision herself teaching piano for the rest of her life, helping kids “murder Beethoven,” as she put it. “I decided there had to be more to life than that,” she said. She decided to drop her performance major. This change of plans was a painful dose of reality that went against much of what she had come to believe about herself. Her identity, which from earliest memory had been wrapped up in music, had been challenged at Aspen, and she was compelled to find another field that was equally challenging yet not as competitive. Some young people who lose their professional artistic dreams, such as ballet dancers who mature into un-ballerina-like figures, struggle for years with depression and feel too inadequate—or disinterested—to start over in something else. But Condi did not approach it that way. She resigned herself to the fact that she was “pretty good but not great,” and immediately began to nose around for a new major. “Technically,” she explained years later, “I can play most anything. But I’ll never play it the way the truly great pianists do.”

At this halfway point in her undergraduate program, Condi had to tell her parents that everything had changed. “I went on a mad search for a major,” she said. “I went to my parents, who had spent a fortune and all of their time turning me into a pianist, and said, ‘Mom and Dad, I’m changing my major.’” She couldn’t tell them what it was; all she knew was that she no longer wanted to be a pianist. The three of them made one agreement—regardless of what her new major would be, she would still finish her B.A. in four years. During fall semester of her junior year she changed her major to “undeclared” and explored a few options like English and Government. She scratched English Literature because it was too conceptual—in her words, “squishy”—and not rigorous enough. She actually hated it, which is not surprising for someone whose early exposure to books was under the glaring light of a speed-reading machine.

Government studies also proved wanting. Classes in local and state administration, voting behavior, political parties, and the structure of government did not appear compelling or demanding enough to pique her interest. But at the start of spring semester she walked into a class that changed everything. The course was “Introduction to International Politics,” the topic that day was Stalin, and the professor was Josef Korbel, former Central European diplomat and father of Madeleine Albright.

“It just clicked,” she said. “I remember thinking, Russia is a place I want to know more about. It was like love. . . . I can’t explain it—there was just an attraction.” The challenge and mystique of Soviet studies was exactly the kind of challenge Condi was looking for. It was a specialized path in academia that fit her perfectly, requiring tough scholastic discipline and an aptitude for foreign languages. It was totally new territory that felt oddly familiar, and it ignited a passion that she had not felt for anything outside of music. She recalled feeling a hint of that engaging interest back in 1968, when she watched the news story of the Soviets invading Czechoslovakia. It hit her hard. “I can still feel the strong sense I had of remorse and regret that a brave people had been subdued,” she said.

Dr. Korbel was impressed by her brightness and enthusiasm, and encouraged her to join the university’s school of international relations, which he had founded. “I really adored him,” she said. “I loved his course, and I loved him. He sort of picked me out as someone who might do this well.” Condi immediately turned her sights onto the Soviet Union, immersing herself in “Soviet politics, Soviet everything.”

With that introductory course, Condi knew she had found her place. Her parents were very surprised at her choice, but supported it. “Condi is the kind of person who is very sure of herself and makes excellent decisions,” said her father. “But political science? Here’s the time for fainting. Blacks didn’t do political science.”

Condi’s fellow piano refugee, Darcy, ventured into business classes and at nineteen started up her own landscape design firm in Denver. Today her company is very successful, and she believes that both she and Condi found new ways to direct their creative energy. “Design is a way to have a create outlet and still use the expressive gifts I used in music,” she said. “Condi, in taking all those foreign languages, is also using the brain power she needed as a musician, and the decision-making she does is also creative.” Darcy remains grateful to Condi’s father for all his guidance and support in helping her get scholarships at the university. “John Rice was friendly and outgoing, but also demanding at the same time,” she recalled. “If he was going to stick his neck out for you, he wanted to make sure you really wanted it, worked hard for it, and didn’t take it from someone else who also deserved it and needed it as much. He gave, but he also expected a lot. I thought that was wise. If you’re going into college and trying to figure out what to do with your life, it’s nice to have someone to prompt you to think and grow from what you’re doing. He was a very smart man.”

Condi signed up for political science and Russian language courses, but she did not close the door on music. Even though she was no longer working toward a career in piano, she remained a serious student of the instrument. “I found my passion in the study of Russia but, in fact, I continued to be passionate about music,” she said. “I continued to work at it and to study for quite a long time.” This aspect of her background puts her in the ranks of a small group of prominent government officials who started their college careers in music. Edward Heath, prime minister of Great Britain from 1970 to 1974 (while Condoleezza was an undergraduate), was an organist and choir director while a student at Oxford, and after he retired from politics, he spent much of his time conducting orchestras throughout Europe. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, started out as a wood-wind player at Juilliard. He studied clarinet and saxophone and played in jazz bands before transferring to New York University to pursue a degree in economics. “I don’t regret giving up the music career,” said Condi in 2001. “The great thing about music is that you can love it all of your life,” Condi said, “you can pick it up at different phases.”

Condoleezza has often remarked that Josef Korbel is the reason she entered international politics. Few matched his stature in the field, and his experiences in Europe before, during, and after World War II made him a fascinating mentor to young people eager to understand international relations. He was an Old World figure who had always attracted artistic types to his inner circle. “Korbel had a way of encouraging talented people,” said one long-time friend of the family, “He was not an artist, but he attracted artists to him.” A student like Condi—multi-lingual, classically trained musician, and extremely bright, poised, and selfreliant—was precisely the type to gravitate to him and to gain his admiration. Korbel immediately took Condi under his wing.

Josef Korbel was born in Czechoslovakia in 1909 and studied in Paris before receiving his law degree from Charles University in Prague. His first position in the Czech government was with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in 1937 he became the press attaché at the Czech Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He learned to speak Serbian, and made close friends with Yugoslav journalists, contacts who would become very important to him and his family when Hitler entered Czechoslovakia. Nazi troops enter Prague in March 1939, and Korbel, a Jew, was on a list of those to be arrested. Like several other Jewish families in Czechoslovakia, the Korbels had abandoned their ancestral ties. Whenever Josef had to fill out documents that asked for his religious affiliation, he wrote, “None.” “Korbel was one of the very, very few Jews who succeeded in getting into the Foreign Ministry before the war,” said one of his Czech colleagues in Michael Dobbs’ biography of Madeleine Albright. “He did so by not giving any signs of his Jewishness.” For weeks, Josef had been working on an escape plan to get his family to Yugoslavia, and thanks to official letters from two Belgrade newspapers who hired him as a foreign press correspondent, he obtained exit visas for himself, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter, Madeleine. They spent a few weeks in Belgrade, then moved to London where the leaders of the Czech government were living in exile.

Korbel worked as a personal secretary to the Czech foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, then became the chief of the Czech broadcasting service. During the family’s stay in London, Hitler’s blitzkrieg pounded their neighborhood, and back at home, more than twenty members of their family were killed in the Holocaust. Three of Madeleine’s grandparents, two aunts, one uncle, a first cousin, and nineteen others died at Auschwitz or Terezín, the concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

After the war the Korbels returned to Prague, and Josef remained a top official in the Czech government. Madeleine was eight years old, and the family lived in a luxurious apartment near the presidential palace. Korbel was part of the Czech delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1946 where the new world order was established. Following the conference, at age thirty-six, he was appointed Czech ambassador to Yugoslavia. He traveled back and forth between Prague and Belgrade, where Madeleine lived a pampered existence in the ambassador’s residence. The Korbels hired private tutors for Madeleine so that she would not be exposed to communist propaganda at the local schools, and when she was ten, they sent her to a private boarding school in Switzerland. The growing tension between the communists and democrats in Czechoslovakia hung over the family like a dark cloud, and when the communists seized control of the Czech government in 1948, the family fled to the United States. Before leaving Prague, Korbel had been appointed to a United Nations Commission on India and Pakistan and began serving in that post at UN headquarters in New York City. Pressure from the new regime in Prague forced him to leave the job in 1949.

After World War II, several intensive programs in international politics were launched on U.S. campuses. As a new player on the world stage, America was in need of expert instruction on the centuries of history leading up to the formation of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc. These new college programs sought out European experts who had immigrated to the United States, and the University of Denver found their expert in Josef Korbel. After leaving the UN, Korbel was hired by the university as professor in international relations. In 1959, he became dean of the Graduate School of International Studies and director of the Social Science Foundation. Throughout his career he was considered an extraordinary teacher; attentive, warm, and generous with his time. He was in demand throughout the world and acted as a visiting professor at Oxford, Harvard, Columbia, MIT and other colleges. He published six books and countless articles that focused on Eastern Europe and the Cold War.

Korbel became the second most important man in Condi’s life, next to her father. John Rice had sparked Condi’s interest in world affairs and politics when she was very young, spending time with her to discuss the news of the day. She would pattern her life after him in many ways. She has described Josef Korbel as the “intellectual father” she shared with Madeleine Albright who, like Condi, was very much her father’s daughter. “There is no doubt that Madeleine was the object of her parents’ hopes and dreams from an early age,” wrote Dobbs. “She was the oldest, the brightest, the most driven.” Madeleine described her father as strict but “very loving” and supportive.

An integral part of Condi’s new major in political science was learning Russian. Sometimes called a “ten-year language” because of the difficulty of learning its Cyrillic alphabet and grasping its complexity, this is a formidable challenge for many students. But Condi’s early lessons in French, Spanish, and German had given her an affinity for language study that helped her proceed quickly. Previous language experience gave her a solid grounding in the grammatical terms that many English students quickly forget, but are the keys to learning a new language. “It helps to have another foreign language under your belt,” said Jason Galie, a Russian instructor and Ph.D. student at Columbia, “because you use a lot of grammatical terms in the beginning, which, if you don’t remember from English grammar, makes it more difficult.” He explained that the Russian alphabet is a challenge, but not the most demanding part. “Russian is much more difficult than the Romance languages,” he said, “in part because of the alphabet. You start writing English letters instead of Russian at first. But even more difficult is understanding the role that the words are playing, which, unlike English, isn’t determined by the placement of the words in the sentence but by the endings of the words themselves. For some students that’s very difficult to grasp.”