When former President George Bush introduced Condoleezza Rice to then-premier Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, Bush said: "She tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union."
Rice is once again giving advice to a president named Bush. Her appointment as national security adviser in January makes her the first woman to hold the post.
A Stanford professor of political science since 1981 and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Rice served as University provost from 1993 to 1999. She took a leave from Stanford to join George W. Bush's campaign staff and was widely rumored to be in line for either secretary of state or the top National Security Council job. Her ties to the Bush family date to the late '80s, when the elder Bush brought her to Washington to be director of Soviet and East European affairs.
Pundits have been watching Rice for some time, and many have been impressed. Jay Nordlinger, in a 1999 article in the National Review, predicted that a Cabinet post might make her "a major cultural figure, adorning the bedroom walls of innumerable kids and the covers of innumerable magazines."
