Young Susan’s education started at the family dinner table, where she was fed a steady diet of policy discussions worthy of a Washington think tank. She also called the shots off the court, as president of the student council and class valedictorian. She especially loved basketball, where she played point guard and directed the offense. power brokers for a century (including, most recently, the Gore girls), Rice was a three-sport athlete whose nickname, Spo, was short for Sportin’. President Clinton sided with Rice and signed the bill.Īt Washington’s National Cathedral School, the elite prep academy that has educated the daughters of D.C. In November, she stood up to some colleagues in the State Department when she supported a controversial congressional measure that would allow Washington to provide food assistance to rebels fighting the regime in Sudan. Rice has championed an all-African peacekeeping force to avert conflict on the continent. That effort bore fruit in October, when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright vowed to quadruple U.S. Back home, she’s lobbied for increasing foreign aid to the region. She’s made trips to most of the 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, war broke out in the Congo and between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and much of the continent is unstable, reeling from disease and ethnic rivalries. In more than two years at the State Department, Susan Rice has seen a lot of conflict-both in Africa and in Washington. Democrats even have a saying: “They’ve got their Rice, and we’ve got ours.” The two Rices are not related, but they do have a lot in common: both are articulate, telegenic, dagger-sharp young black women with international expertise and a talent for charming politicians. In fact, she’s often compared to former Stanford Provost Condoleezza Rice, foreign policy adviser to former president George Bush and now to his son, would-be president George W. She won’t have to look too hard she’s well-regarded among both the political pros and the Beltway policy wonks. ”Īfter seven years on the Clinton team, Rice, now 35, will likely soon be looking for a new line of work. But I don’t have a lot of patience for B.S. “I guess you could say I’m plainspoken, ” she laughs. Rice’s frank-some say blunt-talk can be disarming. She threw career diplomats off guard in 1997 when she left the White House National Security Council to become one of the youngest assistant secretaries of state ever. The daughter of one of Washington’s elite black families, she married a white Canadian, college sweetheart Ian Cameron, ’83. After studying history in college, she did a stint as a management consultant. Rice, ’86, has a way of surprising people. “They said, ‘We thought you were 60 years old, 250 pounds and 6 feet tall!’ ” ![]() ![]() ![]() When the meeting ended, a bemused Rice introduced herself. They had, in fact, dismissed the youthful Rice as somebody’s low-level aide. Of course the men had no idea that the battle-ax they were imagining was the 5-foot-3 woman in stylish short skirt and pumps sitting right next to them. Finally, they said, a diplomat who shoots straight. Pro-government newspapers in Nigeria lampooned Rice in cartoons, but the opposition leaders were thrilled. It was the Clinton administration’s first direct condemnation of the dictator. Sani Abacha as “one of the worst abusers of human rights on the African continent ” and said the United States insists that his successor not come from military ranks. They were praising a tough speech she had given at the Brookings Institution back in Washington several months earlier. assistant secretary of state for African affairs listened as the men talked about her in the third person, as if she weren’t there. ![]() Meeting with Nigerian opposition leaders at the presidential villa in Abuja, the U.S.
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