After getting a nice beatdown in the Big Game, Stanford can at least sleep well knowing that the next Secretary of State will be one of their own. I’m talking about Condoleezza Rice. I came across a wonderful (and long) article about her in the Sunday Times (London). After having read it, I have even more respect for the woman than I did before. Here are a few interesting excerpts:

By age four Condi had mastered a handful of pieces and given her first recital. She spent more time indoors — practising the piano and French — than most of the other girls on the block. Two who lived across the street remembered “waiting for what seemed like hours for her to finish her latest Beethoven or Mozart and come outside”.

French? Who knew?

The memory of her father out on patrol lies behind Rice’s opposition to gun control today. Had those guns been registered, she argues, Bull Connor would have had a legal right to take them away, thereby removing one of the black community’s only means of defence. “I have a sort of pure second amendment view of the right to bear arms,” she said in 2001.

Good to know.

A few months later she walked into a class that changed everything: Introduction to International Politics. The topic that day was Stalin and the professor was Josef Korbel, a former Czech diplomat whose daughter, Madeleine Albright, would later become America’s first female secretary of state.

This surprised me the most. I wonder who else took that class…

Be sure to read it, as it’s a classic American success story. If I had to guess, I would say that Ms. Rice will be somewhere on the Presidential ticket in 2008. And after reading more about her life, I’d say she more than deserves it. But it’s way too early to be thinking about this.