Condoleezza Rice: America's face to the world

She will succeed Colin Powell, who announced his resignation on Monday. "During the last four years I have relied on her counsel, benefited from her great experience and appreciated her sound and steady judgment," Bush said in a ceremony in the White House Roosevelt Room. Bush also said that he was honoured that she agreed to take the post.

"The secretary of state is America's face to the world, and in Dr. Rice the world will see the strength, the grace and the decency of our country," he said. Bush said that Rice's deputy, Steve Hadley, would succeed her as national security adviser. Rice said it had been a privilege to work for Bush during his first term." I look forward, with the consent of the Senate, to pursuing your hopeful and ambitious agenda as secretary of state," she said. She also praised Powell.

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"It is humbling to imagine succeeding my dear friend and mentor Colin Powell. He is one of the finest public servants our nation has ever produced," she said. "Colin Powell has been a great and inspirational secretary of state. It was my honour to serve alongside him, and he will be missed."

"Now that the election is over," Powell's letter to the president reads, "the time has come for me to step down as secretary of state and return to private life. I, therefore, resign as the 65th secretary of state, effective at your pleasure."

If confirmed, Rice, who turned 50 on Sunday, would be the first black woman, and only the second woman ever, chosen as the nation's top diplomat.

In June 1999, she completed a six year tenure as Stanford University's Provost, during which she was the institution's chief budget and academic officer. As Provost she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and the academic programme involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students.

As professor of political science, Dr. Rice had been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and had won two of the highest teaching honours -- the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

At Stanford, she was a member of the Center for International Security and Arms Control, a Senior Fellow of the Institute for International Studies, and a Fellow (by courtesy) of the Hoover Institution. Her books include Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (1995) with Philip Zelikow, The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin, and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984). She has also written numerous articles on Soviet and East European foreign and defense policy, and has addressed audiences in settings ranging from the U.S. Ambassador's Residence in Moscow to the Commonwealth Club to the 1992 and 2000 Republican National Conventions.

From 1989 through March 1991, the period of German reunification and the final days of the Soviet Union, she served in the Bush Sr. administration as Director, and then Senior Director, of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council, and a Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, she served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1997, she served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender -- Integrated Training in the Military.

Hadley is a former member of the Nixon and Bush Senior administrations, and was part of the foreign policy team with Rice and Richard Perle in the lead-up to George W. Bush's first election.

Rice has spent more time with the president than any of his top aides except White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card. She was at his side at all times in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, her mother, a music teacher, taught her the piano and she initially studied music with the ambition of becoming a classical pianist. Her father, a pastor and school principal, influenced her to become a keen sportswoman.

She was eight years old when the Ku Klux Klan carried out one of its most infamous bombings, of an Alabama church. One of four 10-year-old girls killed had been a friend of Dr Rice since infants school.

Her parents taught her that education was the only way to escape segregation. She has said that to get ahead she had to be "twice as good" as white children.

As a result she followed a glittering academic career. She went to the University of Denver at the age of 15 and graduated at 19 with a degree in political science. She then gained a doctorate from the University of Denver's Graduate School of International Studies.

At 26, Rice was already a fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control specialising in Soviet affairs.

A fluent Russian speaker and expert in arms control, she served as Soviet affairs adviser to the elder President George Bush, and coached him before nuclear summits with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Dr Rice returned to Stanford in 1991, and in 1993 became the youngest, the first female and first non-white provost at the elite California university.

The change at the head of US diplomacy comes as Washington makes a new push for Middle East peace following last week's death of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. Powell, who is expected to stay on the job until mid-January, will make a trip to the region this month to possibly meet Palestinian leaders. Rice met Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei in Berlin in May in what was the highest-level US contact with Qorei at the time.

Rice's training was in Russian affairs, but in her current job she has to focus on all the world's hot spots. Without having any prior training and experience as a diplomat Dr. Rice is expected to face many challenges. We can only wish her the best of luck.

AKM Mazharul Islam writes from the Department of Anthropology, Minnesota State University, USA.