Extraordinary Ordinary People - Condolezza Rice

Condoleezza Rice's Extraordinary Ordinary People provides a view inside the life of the former Secretary of State's parents and the journey they took together.  Condoleezza was the daughter of a Presbyterian Minister and a school teacher. She spent her early childhood in segregated Montgomery, Alabama.  She was taught by her school teachers that they had to be twice as good as the next person to get ahead.  Her parents solid middle class values viewed education as the pathway to success and invested considerable resources in to assure their daughter's success.

There were problems with the Klan in Alabama and her father would take his turn with the shotgun on the porch as part of the neighborhood watch program as the police department were either part of the Klan or would not respond to acts of violence in their neighborhood.  This influenced her perception of gun rights as the government was not there to protect her family from armed members of the Klan.

She describes the subtle class distinctions made between dark skinned and fair skinned black people in the south.  Her fair skinned mother was only asked to name the first President of the United States when registering to vote.  Her darker skinned father was asked to give the exact number of marbles in a jar.  The father later was told of the lone Republican registrar who would take anyone as they were trying to increase the number of registered voters.  That event cemented his party affiliation along with his daughters. 

The family left Alabama a year after the church bombings that killed one of Condoleezza's friends at a church not far from her father's.  She also describes the difficulty for a black family to travel in the south as they could not stay in hotels or find a place to eat when travelling so they had to get a very early start in the morning and pack their own food. 

Her parents pushed her along in school and by the time she entered college at Colorado State she had moved up two grades.  Her parents supported her love of piano and figure skating.  She dated Rick Upchurch, the U of Minnesota receiver for the Denver Broncos and became a member of the football wives/girlfriends club of the Denver Broncos.  She shared a passion for professional football with her father.  I am sure she would jump at the chance to become NFL commissioner.

She also describes her time at the NSC during the first Bush administration, her time as provost at Stanford and the time she spent campaigning for George W. Bush in 2000.  Her background in Russian studies was put to good use as the administration worked to handle the collapse of the Soviet Union.  She was a strong administrator at Stanford helping cleaning up a fiscal mess because of Stanford's higher overhead cost for government grants. 

The health problems of her parents and her own health scares are described in detail.  The book's final chapter deals with events leading to her father's death on Christmas Eve of 2000. 

 

Brief section of her book read by the author - 7 minutes

 

Discussion about her book - 54 minutes