Condoleezza rice vladimir putin biography

American diplomat and political scientist (born )

Condoleezza "Condi" Rice (KON-də-LEE-zə; born November 14, ) is an American diplomat and political scientist serving since as the 8th director of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. A member of the Republican Party, she previously served as the 66th United States secretary of state from to and as the 19th U.S. national security advisor from to Rice was the first female African-American secretary of state and the first woman to serve as national security advisor. Until the election of Barack Obama as president in , Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, were the highest-ranking African Americans in the history of the federal executive branch (by virtue of the secretary of state standing fourth in the presidential line of succession). At the time of her appointment as Secretary of State, Rice was the highest-ranking woman in the history of the United States to be in the presidential line of succession.

Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew u

This morning Jane Pauley has questions for, and answers from, Condoleezza Rice, a first-hand eyewitness to huge changes overseas and here at home:

Her eight years in the White House, as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, were perhaps preordained. From the age of four, Condoleezza Rice (an only child) was president of her family.

"I was elected every year," she said. "And it had real responsibilities. For instance, if we were going to leave for Denver from Alabama, I'd call a family meeting. We'd decide when we were leaving, what were we taking for food, all of those sorts of things. My parents were just giving me a sense that I could have authority and be confident."

And did she vote for herself?  "I did vote for myself!" she laughed.

Those annual trips to Denver were not for summer vacation.  

"If you were black, you couldn't go to the University of Alabama for graduate school in ," she said. "And so my father, who was getting an advanced degree in student personnel administration, and my mother, who was qualifying to teach music in the schools -- she was a science teacher before that -- would go to Denver."

As the daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of musicians, Rice aspired to be a concert pianist. 

But at age 17 she went to the Aspen Music Festival and School, where she met "year-olds who could play from sight what it had taken me all year to learn. And I thought, 'I'm going to end up one of those people who plays as you shop in the department store or something like that. But I'm not going to Carnegie Hall!" 

So halfway through college, inspired by an international relations course taught by the father of future Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, she changed her major. 

"I went back home and I said to my parents, 'I found, I want to be a Soviet specialist.' They said, 'You go for it.'" 

And she did. With a new Ph.D., she found a home at Stanford, where as a young assistant profes

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told an audience of several thousand Wednesday night that Russia's takeover of the Crimean peninsula was a "violation of international law" as Crimea is a part of a sovereign state, Ukraine.

Rice was in Fayetteville to speak in the University of Arkansas' student-funded Distinguished Lecture Series. She was chosen by a student committee. Essentially no seats were unoccupied in the lecture configuration at Barnhill Arena, which a UA spokesman said could be up to 6, people. It was an impressive number, considering the Razorbacks were playing basketball at the same hour at nearby Bud Walton Arena, beating Ole Miss

Rice quickly summarized the region's history with western Ukraine formerly part of Poland, eastern Ukraine and Crimea being Russian, either speaking or in ethnicity, yet the divisions were not terribly important when all of it was in the Soviet Union. Crimea was given to Ukraine in , she said, and earlier this week Russian President Vladimir Putin took Crimea back.

Putin took advantage of chaos in Kiev when Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted, using it as a pretense to send Russian military into Crimea.

"Putin has never been reconciled to the loss of territory that the Soviet Union suffered when it dissolved," Rice said.

‘A RUTHLESS MAN’
As national security adviser in the first term of President George W. Bush then secretary of state in his second term, Rice met several times with Putin.

"He's an intimidator. He's a ruthless man. He's former KGB," she said. "He has to be reminded that after the Cold War that most of Eastern Europe has chosen to move to the West," meaning capitalistic economies and democratic governments.

Rice gave one anecdote of his intimidating personality. She met with him in about the former Soviet republic of Ge