Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 01/18/05 1:47 pm:
Hank FYI this is the resume she brings to the job:

She graduated high school at 15; earned her bachelor's degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver in 1974 at the age of 19 .she earned her master's from the University of Notre Dame in 1975; and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981.

She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Morehouse College in 1991, the University of Alabama in 1994, the University of Notre Dame in 1995, the National Defense University in 2002, the Mississippi College School of Law in 2003, the University of Louisville and Michigan State University in 2004.

She joined the Stanford faculty, spent neatly twenty years there, and became the youngest Provost (chief academic officer) in the history of not just Stanford, but all major universities, at the age of 39. As Provost she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and the academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students. At Stanford, she was a member of the Center for International Security and Arms Control, a Senior Fellow of the Institute for International Studies, and a Fellow of the Hoover Institution.

Her books include 'Germany Unified and Europe Transformed '(1995) with Philip Zelikow, 'The Gorbachev Era '(1986) with Alexander Dallin, and ''Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army' (1984). She also wrote numerous articles on Soviet and East European foreign and defense policy.

She was a Council of Foreign Relations member, a National Endowment for the Humanities trustee, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is an expert in Russian literature. She speaks French.

She plays the piano, and could have had a concert career. She started piano lessons aged 3, gave her first recital at 4 and plays at concert level. Her mother, also a piano player, fashioned her name from the Italian score instruction “con dolcezza” (to play “with sweetness”). She accompanies cellist Yo Yo Ma, with ease and comfort. She learned figure skating as a child, and could have had a championship career in that field..You just cannot get smarter, more energetic, more intellectually diverse, or all out more admirable than her .

She was a member of the boards of directors for the Chevron Corporation. Chevron named an oil tanker Condoleezza Rice after her (but later quietly renamed it Altair Voyager) . She was a member of the Charles Schwab Corporation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the University of Notre Dame, the International Advisory Council of J.P. Morgan and the San Francisco Symphony Board of Governors. She was a Founding Board member of the Center for a New Generation, an educational support fund for schools in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, California and was Vice President of the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula . In addition, her past board service has encompassed such organizations as Transamerica Corporation, Hewlett Packard, the Carnegie Corporation, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Rand Corporation, the National Council for Soviet and East European Studies, the Mid-Peninsula Urban Coalition and KQED, public broadcasting for San Francisco.

In 1976 she was a registered Democrat and backed Jimmy Carter. But she was disenchanted by what she regarded as his inept, naive and dangerously lax approach to the Soviet Union. From 1989 through March 1991, the period of German reunification and the final days of the Soviet Union, she served in the Bush Sr. Administration as Director, and then Senior Director, of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council, and a Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. She so impressed President Bush that he introduced her to Mikhail Gorbachev as the one who "tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union.".

In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, she served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1997, she served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender -- Integrated Training in the Military. (information accumulated from various Rice biographies )

She is currently completing 4 years as National Security Advisor for the President of the United States at a very difficult time in our nation's history.