Susan rice biography condoleezza rice

Susan Rice couldn’t believe her ears. Meeting with Nigerian opposition leaders at the presidential villa in Abuja, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs listened as the men talked about her in the third person, as if she weren’t there. They were praising a tough speech she had given at the Brookings Institution back in Washington several months earlier. In it, she had denounced Nigeria’s Gen. Sani Abacha as “one of the worst abusers of human rights on the African continent” and said the United States insists that his successor not come from military ranks. It was the Clinton administration’s first direct condemnation of the dictator. Pro-government newspapers in Nigeria lampooned Rice in cartoons, but the opposition leaders were thrilled. Finally, they said, a diplomat who shoots straight.

Of course the men had no idea that the battle-ax they were imagining was the 5-foot-3 woman in stylish short skirt and pumps sitting right next to them. They had, in fact, dismissed the youthful Rice as somebody’s low-level aide. When the meeting ended, a bemused Rice introduced herself. “You could see their jaws drop. It was comical,” she recalls. “They said, ‘We thought you were 60 years old, 250 pounds and 6 feet tall!’ ”

Rice, ’86, has a way of surp

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