Known as the “Warrior Princess” to her staff, but never to her face, Dr. Rice brought with her an alarm clock that played the opening bars of a Mozart symphony and she kept her watch on Eastern Standard Time. The two pieces were gifts from President Bush, visible signs of the esteem in which he held her. At 5 A.M. EST she awoke and spent the next hour working out on the weights and a rowing machine installed in the suite at her request. Physical fitness was an important part of her life; it had given Dr. Rice the figure of a catwalk model and the stride of an athlete. At some time during the flight she had used her phone—code-named POTUS (for President of the United States)—to call President Bush; they spoke several times each day. Fifty-two years old, Dr. Rice was the most powerful person in his administration. Its other members knew she was perhaps one step away from her ultimate ambition of becoming the first woman to be President of the United States, and the first African American to hold the office.
The Mossad profile revealed that if Dr. Rice had a weakness, “it is shoes. She is known to have splashed out on eight pairs of Ferragamos and regularly sends her personal shopper into Washington fashion boutiques to see what’s new from Paris, Milan, or London.” The profile had contained other personal details—how as a student she had her hair curls ironed out and “has taken to wearing her hair in a style that suggests a headmistress at a Swiss finishing school.” It described her upbringing in the mid-fifties in the then still segregated deep South, how her parents had christened her after the Italian musical term
Afterward the family moved to Colorado where Condoleezza was enrolled in an integrated Catholic school. In her teens she learned Russian and at college wrote her dissertation on the Czechoslovak Army. Her most notable achievement came when she became provost of one of America’s top universities, Stanford. She was the youngest to do so at the age of thirty-eight and the first African American to hold the post. Her next climb up the ladder came when the then secretary of state, George Shultz, nominated her to the board of the oil giant, Chevron. One of its million-barrel oil tankers was first named after her. That tanker still sails the high seas even in the most turbulent weather. "
The Mossad profile pointed out that “turbulence has continued to surround Dr. Rice”—not least because of the surprise caused when George Bush asked her to join his presidential campaign in 1998. They quickly bonded through their common zeal for physical fitness. “She gave him a pedometer to check how many steps he took during his coast-to-coast campaign. Their faith also plays an important role in their association; both are devout Sunday church-goers.” Bush made no secret of his dependency on her. “She explains the subtleties of foreign policy in a way I understand,” he once said. When Bush took over the presidency in January 2001, he made her his national security adviser. Dick Cheney tried to block the appointment. She dealt with his opposition in a closed-door meeting. Since then the “Warrior Princess”—a nickname given to her by Donald Rumsfeld—has translated the president’s impulses into foreign policy. Never married, she relaxes by “playing her Steinway grand piano and watching American football on television,” revealed the profile.
It also explained why she had two mirrors in her offices to check the back of her hair was in place down to the last brush stroke. “If she is having a ‘bad hair day,’ it is like a weather vane warning.” There had been many of those times: her confrontation with Germany and France over the war with Iraq; her determination to maintain Spain’s resolve to support the war. All this made her an admired figure in Israel.
