Rice: Smart but loyal to a fault

In late August 2005, Condoleezza Rice stepped into a Broadway theater to see the musical "Spamalot." At the end, when the lights came on, some in the audience noticed the secretary of State. Evidently angry about both the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, they stood up and booed. A careful, well-documented new biography, "Condoleezza Rice: An American Life," will not dissipate such anger.

Elisabeth Bumiller, who covered the White House for the New York Times during most of George W. Bush's presidency, has labored to present an evenhanded look at Rice. She shows some sympathy for her subject and even more understanding. But, in the end, this is a portrait of a talented, ambitious woman who has allowed intense loyalty to cloud her judgment and good sense.

In Rice's role as national security advisor during Bush's first term, she acted more like a marketer than a counselor, Bumiller argues. Although others persuaded Bush to go to war in Iraq, Rice was all for it. She raised no objections and never doubted the phony claims about weapons of mass destruction. "As a result," the author concludes, Rice "failed in a basic part of her job as national security advisor, which was presenting the president with all the options, particularly dissenting opinions."

In her quest to understand the 53-year-old Rice, Bumiller devotes a good deal of space to the early years. Rice was born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1954, a few years before it became a caldron of racial conflict. Her middle-class African American parents isolated "Condi," as she is known to her friends, from the seething hatred; this was shattered in 1963 when the Ku Klux Klan bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four girls, including a friend of Rice's. The family moved away soon after, eventually settling in Denver, when Rice's father became assistant director of admissions at the University of Denver in 1968.

Rice, who'd been training to be a concert pianist, entered the University of Denver but found her musical skills too limited for a virtuoso career. She fell under the spell of professor Josef Korbel (the father of another future secretary of State, Madeleine Albright) and switched to political science. She earned a doctorate in international studies at Denver, then in 1981 joined Stanford University's faculty, soon attracting national attention as a specialist on the Soviet Union.