November 17 …

Susan Rice served as National Security Advisor for the Barack Obama Administration. She is the first African American, the third woman, and the second youngest person to hold the position. Prior to that post, she had served as a key foreign policy advisor for the Obama campaign during the 2008 presidential race.

Listen to her story:

Born in Washington, D.C. on November 17, 1964 to Emmett J. Rice, a Cornell University economics professor and former governor of the Federal Reserve System, and Lois Dickson Fitt, an education policy scholar, Rice was raised in the Shepherd Park community, where she attended Washington’s National Cathedral School, an elite preparatory academy. An active participant in student government, she was elected president of her school’s student council was class valedictorian.

Rice attended Stanford University on a Truman Scholarship, graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree in History in 1986. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa while at Stanford. She then attended Oxford University in the U.K. as a Rhodes Scholar, receiving a Master’s of Philosophy Degree in 1988, and a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in International Relations in 1990. In 1988, while working on her doctorate, she took a position as a foreign policy aide with the Michael Dukakis presidential campaign.

In 1993, Rice was appointed to the National Security Council by President Bill Clinton, and in 1997, the President appointed her Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Considered by many to be one of the foremost experts on Al Qaeda, she was the Clinton administration official who organized and coordinated the investigation of the terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

In 2001, Rice became a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank. In 2004, she was a foreign policy advisor to the presidential campaign of John Kerry. Despite her longstanding association with the Clintons, she publicly endorsed Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency early in 2008. Approved unanimously for her appointment by the U.S. Senate in January 2009, her post was subsequently elevated by President Obama to a cabinet-level position.

Dr. Rice has published widely on foreign policy, particularly with respect to Africa, and has received numerous awards, which include the Walter Frewen Lord Prize of the Royal Commonwealth Society (1990), and the Samuel Nelson Drew Memorial Award (2000). Her doctoral dissertation, titled “Commonwealth Initiative in Zimbabwe, 1979 – 1980: Implication for International Peacekeeping,” was acknowledged by the British International Studies Association as the most important study of international relations involving an African nation.

Until recently Susan Rice served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board under the last several presidents.