Meeting Rice: It was love at first clash

[PfcHammer]

http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/apr04/221362.asp

Meeting Rice: It was love at first clash
Posted: April 10, 2004


Eugene Kane

This is a tale of lost love and opportunity, a story I haven't told until now because it hurt too much.

Her name was Condoleezza Rice; from the first second I saw her, my soul was conquered.

(Much like Iraq, but more on that later.)

During the 1992-'93 academic year, we were both ensconced at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. She was a celebrity professor, soon to become provost; I was attending Stanford on a John S. Knight journalism fellowship, on leave from my job as a newspaper reporter in Milwaukee.

The Knight fellowship leader asked Rice to participate in an informal session with a dozen or so visiting journalists.

I didn't know much about her at the time, save for her reputation as a foreign affairs expert in the first Bush administration and that she was considered a leading black conservative in the Republican Party.

Which was all I needed to be skeptical.

Just in her mid-30s, she was fluent in Russian and a concert-level pianist. When she walked into the room, I was immediately captivated by the lean, cocoa-brown woman with the perfect posture.

For the next hour and a half, Rice held court on a variety of issues concerning national and international affairs, demonstrating a controlled and agile mind.

Frankly, the combination of brains and beauty was breathtaking.

My recollections of the session are sketchy, but I distinctly remember part of her remarks concerned post-Cold War attitudes around the globe and her unbridled support for American superiority over all enemies.

As the only African-American journalist in the room, I felt compelled to ask Rice why she opposed affirmative action as a way to address historic discrimination of the past.

Particularly, I asked, seeing how she was raised in Birmingham, Ala., the place where four little black girls died in 1963 after a white racist planted a bomb in a church.

Her eyes flashed as she fixed me with a stare that could melt steel.

"Listen, I was born and raised in the South, you can't tell me about what it was like to live in the South . . ." is what I remember her telling me, not even trying to hide her annoyance.

Eventually, she moved on to argue with others, but it was too late.

I was smitten.

After the session, Rice shook hands with everybody - including me - and said it was always a treat to parry and joust with members of the Fourth Estate.

She walked out of the room; I never saw her again. But I suspect she felt it, too.

I've followed Rice's career since my Stanford days, marveling at her rise to become one of the most accomplished African-Americans on a national stage.

One newspaper report has suggested she may be "the most powerful black woman ever," and if that's hyperbole, it's also not that far off-base.

Some white readers constantly ask me why Rice isn't considered more of a role model or hero for the black community.

My response is that she has been embraced, particularly by black women thrilled to death to see one of their own regarded as one of the most important people in the country.

Rice is regularly featured in black magazines such as Essence and Ebony; she always gets invited to the big award dinners and banquets thrown by black organizations.

She's mainly at odds with mainstream black politicians because of her right-wing Republican ties and her staunch defense of Bush at every turn, even when he appears to be wrong.

That's understandable; it's her job.

Her appearance last week in front of the Sept. 11 commission earned mixed reviews, but most agree Rice more than held her own with the more aggressive questioners on the panel.

In regard to the Sept. 11 hearings, I'm not much on the "blame game" aspect of this sideshow. I blame Bush for invading Iraq without enough proof of weapons of mass destruction, not for being unable to prevent the terrorist hijackings nearly three years ago.

But it was interesting to learn, after all the denials, that Bush received a secret CIA briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States," five weeks before Sept. 11.

And that immediately after the planes hit, Bush was trying to pin it on Iraq.

(Some of us already suspected that.)

Overall, Rice came off well; she didn't make any mistakes, and she looked good in front of the cameras.

Still single, Rice is probably one of the world's most eligible bachelorettes; occasionally, my mind wanders back to the pristine time when she could possibly have been mine.

Maybe it would have worked if she hadn't been so conservative.

And so hawkish on defense.

And, of course, so smart and so successful, which I've discovered can be a deal-breaker if one partner isn't secure enough in his or her career. (OK; his career.)

I can dream, can't I?

[goclark]

1. Not the African American women

that I know!
They are not the least bit proud of her. They are ashamed that a sister that could give back so much to her people only gives back to the Bushco.

[Jane Austin]

3. I asked

a fellow ABB lady I know who is African-American and she thinks the Repubs are USING both Colin Powell and Rice to do their most public lying for them.

I have no way of ever knowing how anyone else feels, of course, but I think I'd resent it if my (whatever) racial minority brothers and sisters were being used like this.

[peacetalksforall]

4. Your friends are exactly and insightfully correct.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

2. I will never recover the time I spent reading this crap.

[Prodemsouth]

5. The most powerful black woman ever and today is Oprah Winfrey

When you have ranchers sue for something you said on TV and they fear your words will have such meaning as to hurt them economically- that shows how powerful you are. That is real power.