Susan E. Rice, named today by Barack Obama to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is only 44 years old, but it would seem she’s been preparing a lifetime for her new role.
A member of Obama’s transition team and one of his foreign policy advisers during the campaign, Rice had extensive high-level service in the Bill Clinton administration. Since then she’s been a member of several influential foreign policy groups.
All of this after growing up in the nation’s capital in an atmosphere described by the Stanford University alumni magazine as “worthy of a Washington think tank.”
Rice’s father, Emmett J. Rice, was a governor of the Federal Reserve System, an African-American who overcame racial barriers throughout his career.
Rice’s mother, Lois Dickson Fitt, is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants who went on to become a vice president of the College Board. Now she’s a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution.
Rice’s stepfather, the late Alfred B. Fitt, was an assistant secretary of defense and later the general counsel of the Congressional Budget Office.
And as a young girl, Rice, who is not related to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, got to know Madeleine Albright, the future secretary of state in the Clinton administration and a friend of Rice’s mother.
“I feel like I’m swearing in family,” Albright said when Rice became her assistant secretary of state for African Affairs in 1997, according to the Stanford magazine.
Rice attended National Cathedral School in Washington where she played three sports, was president of the student council and class valedictorian.
At Stanford, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Graduating in 1986, she won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University where she earned a doctoral degree in international relations.
Rice was a foreign policy adviser to the 1988 presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis. She later worked in Toronto as a management consultant.
In 1993, she joined the staff of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, focusing first on peacekeeping and then on African affairs. She moved to the State Department in 1997, watching over issues and events in Africa.
At State, Rice was considered bright and blunt.
“I guess you could say I’m plainspoken,” she told the Stanford alumni magazine. “I can be diplomatic when I have to be. But I don’t have a lot of patience for B.S.”
After leaving government at the end of the Clinton administration, Rice became a managing director at Intellibridge, a firm providing analysis on international matters.
In 2002, Rice signed on as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution (She is now on leave from that group.)
Rice is a board member of the National Democratic Institute, a international affairs group chaired by Albright.
She’s also on the board of the Atlantic Council of the United States, a group chaired by Gen. James L. Jones, Obama’s pick to be his national security adviser.
Rice, who joined the Obama campaign as an adviser two years ago, is married to Ian O. Cameron, whom she met at Stanford. He’s now the executive producer of the ABC News program, “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
0 Comments
There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.
Leave a Comment