Condoleezza Rice was Bush's National Security Advisor during his first term (2001–2005). Before joining the Bush administration, she was a Professor of political science at Stanford University where she served as Provost from 1993 to 1999.

During the administration of George H. W. Bush, Rice also served as the Soviet and East European Affairs Advisor during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification.

Rice's role as advisor to the President and chief diplomat for the United States during a period of intense criticism of America's War on Terror has made her a controversial figure. She currently has the highest public approval and favorability ratings of any administration official, and in 2004 and 2005, she was ranked as the most powerful woman in the world by Forbes magazine and number two in 2006. She is also one of only two African Americans to have been repeatedly ranked among the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine.

Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up in the neighborhood of Titusville. She is the only child of Presbyterian minister Reverend John Wesley Rice, Jr., and his wife, the former Angelena Ray. Reverend Rice was a guidance counselor at Ullman High School and minister of Westminster Presbyterian Church, which had been founded by her father. Angelena was a science, music and oratory teacher at Ullman.

Condoleezza (whose name is derived from the Italian musical expression, Con dolcezza, which means "with sweetness") experienced firsthand the injustices of Birmingham's discriminatory laws and attitudes. She was instructed to walk proudly in public and to use the facilities at home rather than subject herself to the indignity of "colored" facilities in town. As Rice recalls of her parents and their peers, "they refused to allow the limits and injustices of their time to limit our horizons.”

However, Rice recalls various times in which she suffered discrimination and persecution on account of her skin color, which include being relegated to a storage room at a department store instead of a regular dressing room, being barred from going to the circus or the local amusement park, being denied hotel rooms, and even being given bad food at restaurants. Also, while Condoleezza was mostly kept by her parents from areas where she might face discrimination, she was very aware of the civil rights struggle and the problems of Jim Crow Birmingham. Says neighbor Juliemma Smith, "[Condi] used to call me and say things like, 'Did you see what Bull Connor did today?' She was just a little girl and she did that all the time. I would have to read the newspaper thoroughly because I wouldn’t know what she was going to talk about."[4] Rice herself said of the segregation era: "Those terrible events burned into my consciousness. I missed many days at my segregated school because of the frequent bomb threats."

During the violent days of the Civil Rights Movement, Reverend Rice armed himself and kept guard over the house while Condoleezza practiced the piano inside. According to J.L. Chestnut, Reverend Rice called local civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth and his followers' activism as "misguided." Also, Reverend Rice instilled in his daughter and students that black people would have to prove themselves worthy of advancement, and would simply have to be "twice as good" to overcome injustices built into the system. While the Rices supported the goals of the civil rights movement, they did not agree with some of the tactics that activists had utilized, which included putting children in harm's way.

Rice was eight when her schoolmate Denise McNair was killed in the bombing of the primarily African American Sixteenth Street Baptist Church by white supremacists on September 15, 1963.

Rice states that growing up during racial segregation taught her determination against adversity, and the need to be "twice as good" as non-minorities. Segregation also hardened her stance on the right to bear arms; Rice has said in interviews that if gun registration had been mandatory, her father's weapons would have been confiscated, leaving them defenseless against Ku Klux Klan nightriders.

Rice was hired for her first academic position by Stanford University as an Assistant Professor in Political Science (1981–1987). She was granted tenure and promoted, first to Associate Professor (1987–1993), and then (she was off-campus from 1989–1991) to Provost, the chief budget and academic officer of the university (1993–2000), and full Professor (1993–present). In addition to being the first female and first minority to hold the position of Provost at Stanford, Rice was the youngest Provost in Stanford's history. She was also named a Senior Fellow of the Institute for International Studies, and a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) of the Hoover Institution. She was a specialist on the former Soviet Union and gave lectures on the subject for the Berkeley-Stanford joint program led by UC Berkeley Professor George Breslauer in the mid-1980s. She also was an avid reader of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and reportedly told a friend she leaned toward the latter in her world view. She was said to be quietly cerebral, friendly but decorous, and popular among students. Friends and co-workers often saw her exercising in the gym or serving breakfast to undergraduates at Midnight Breakfast, a Stanford tradition during final exams.

As Stanford's Provost, Dr. Rice was responsible for managing the university's multi-billion dollar budget. The school at that time was running a deficit of $20 million. When Rice took office, she promised that the budget deficit would be balanced within "two years." Says Coit Blacker, Stanford's deputy director of the Institute for International Studies, "There was a sort of conventional wisdom that said it couldn't be done ... that [the deficit] was structural, that we just had to live with it." Two years later, Rice convened a meeting to announce that not only had the deficit been balanced, but the university was holding a record surplus of over $14.5 million.

Provost Rice was also responsible for relations with campus organizations, and she managed to maintain friendly contact with various student associations, such as the Venezuelan Student Organization. After departing to enter government service, she returned to Stanford in June 2002 to deliver the commencement address.

Dr. Rice is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Morehouse College in 1991, the University of Alabama in 1994, the University of Notre Dame in 1995, the Mississippi College School of Law in 2003, the University of Louisville, Michigan State University in 2004, and Boston College Law School in 2006.

She has written or collaborated on several books, including Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1995), The Gorbachev Era (1986), and The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983: Uncertain Allegiance (1984).

Rice has served on the board of directors for the Carnegie Corporation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Charles Schwab Corporation, the Chevron Corporation, Hewlett Packard, the Rand Corporation, the Transamerica Corporation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and KQED, public broadcasting for San Francisco. She has also sat on the board of the International Advisory Council of the prominent bank, J.P. Morgan Chase; the Board of Trustees of the University of Notre Dame; and the San Francisco Symphony Board of Governors.

She also headed Chevron's committee on public policy until she resigned on January 15 2001, to become National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush. Chevron honored Rice by naming an oil tanker Condoleezza Rice after her, but controversy led to its being renamed Altair Voyager.

Rice has also been active in community affairs. She was a founding board member of the Center for a New Generation, an educational support fund for schools in East Palo Alto, California and East Menlo Park, California, and was Vice President of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America of the San Francisco Bay Area.

In addition, her past board service has encompassed such organizations as the National Council for Soviet and East European Studies, the Stanford Mid-Peninsula Urban Coalition, and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Rice served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

From 1989 through March 1991 (the period of the fall of Berlin Wall and the final days of the Soviet Union), she served in President George H.W. Bush's 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 this position, Rice helped develop Bush's and Secretary of State James Baker's policies in favor of German reunification. She impressed Bush, who later introduced her to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as the one who "tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union."

In 1989 she served as director for Soviet and East European Affairs at the National Security Council and reported directly to National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. In 1990 she became George H. W. Bush's principal advisor on the Soviet Union and was named a special assistant to the president for national security affairs. At that time she was the highest ranking black woman in the administration.

In 1991, Rice returned to her teaching position at Stanford, although she continued to serve as a consultant on the former Soviet Bloc for numerous clients in both the public and private sectors. Late that year, California Governor Pete Wilson appointed her to a bipartisan committee that had been formed to draw new state legislative and congressional districts in the state.

In 1997, she sat on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender-Integrated Training in the Military.

During George W. Bush's 2000 U.S. Presidential election campaign, Rice took a one-year leave of absence from Stanford University to help work as his foreign policy advisor. The group of advisors she led called itself The Vulcans in honor of the monumental Vulcan statue, which sits on a hill overlooking her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. Rice would later go on to give a noteworthy speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention. The speech asserted that “…America's armed forces are not a global police force. They are not the world's 911.”

In 2003, Rice was also drawn into the debate over the affirmative action admissions policy at the University of Michigan. On January 18, 2003, the Washington Post reported that she was involved in crafting Bush's position on race-based preferences. Rice has stated that she believes that "while race-neutral means are preferable," race can be taken into account as "one factor among others" in university admissions policies.

On October 30, 2005, Rice attended a memorial service in Montgomery, Alabama, in Rice's home state, for Rosa Parks, an inspiration for the American Civil Rights Movement. Rice stated, that she and others who grew up in Alabama during the height of Parks' activism might not have realized her impact on their lives at the time, "but I can honestly say that without Mrs. Parks, I probably would not be standing here today as secretary of state."

On September 24, 2006, Rice was interviewed on the 60 Minutes season premiere by Katie Couric. Rice discussed her experiences growing up as a child in Birmingham and her work as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for the Bush administration.