Enlarge By Martin E. Klimek for USA TODAY Condoleezza Rice, shown at her home in Palo Alto, Calif., has written a memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People, which focuses not on her political years but on her childhood. CONDOLEEZZA RICE ON ... CONDOLEEZZA RICE ON ... George W. Bush: "We talk. We e-mail. About everything, really. He's building his library and I'm chairing the board of his institute. I give him a hard time about the Texas Longhorns (football team), and he usually writes back something snide about the Stanford Cardinal." Saddam Hussein 's lack of weapons

of mass destruction: "Do I wish we'd known he didn't have stockpiles? Sure. But he had plenty of capacity. I don't blame anybody, including the intelligence agencies. ( Iraq ) is just an incredibly opaque place. ... If I could have done anything differently, and it occurred to me at the time, that would be to explain better why Saddam was the problem. Not just the WMDs." Pre-9/11 intelligence that suggested

al-Qaeda was planning an attack on the United States: "I don't blame the CIA or the FBI , although the gulf between them made it difficult to bridge the link between what was happening inside and outside the country. ... All of us feel a sense of responsibility that somehow we couldn't figure it out. But I don't think anyone is to blame that no one figured it out." President Obama's election: "I was very proud of the country. You could see it coming, in commercials and TV shows, race and roles being de-linked. Colin (Powell) pushed it. ... I'm fond of the president. I think highly of him. And like every president, black or white, we've become critical of our president." By Marco R. della Cava PALO ALTO, Calif.  This can't be the right place. You would expect the home of Condoleezza Rice— the most successful African-American woman in the history of the executive branch — to be festooned with mementos from her tenure under two Bush presidencies, which culminated in her role as secretary of State. Perhaps some photos with world leaders. Ornate gifts from political counterparts. Lavish furnishings. Nope. Instead, the decidedly generic condo reserved for Stanford University faculty is filled with antiques that belonged to Rice's parents, sports memorabilia and a prominent photograph of her with ... cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The only sign of George W. Bush is found on a hockey-puck-size Lucite disc, which is inscribed with a 9/11-era quote from the 43rd president. But make no mistake: There is no distancing going on. Rice is as proud of her record as ever. "I look back on those eight years fondly," she says, dressed in black, sitting in a small den decorated with NFL helmets and framed shots of her with golfers Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson. "I'm glad I got to serve in a time of tremendous consequence," says Rice, 55. "We did some things well. Some things not so well. But I'm a big believer that history has a long arc. We'll have final determination on things we did long after I'm gone. And that's fine." A change in direction Rice set out to dissect her political life in a book, but that was put on hold when she opted to first pay tribute to the people who truly shaped her, Birmingham, Ala., educators John and Angelena Rice. The result is Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family (Crown, $27), on sale Tuesday. "People often ask me, 'How did you get to be who you are?' And I always say, 'You had to know my parents,' " she says. What is made especially clear by this parental tribute — simultaneously released as a young-adult book — is that Rice was fiercely doted on, the only child of middle-class teachers who insisted she simply had to be "twice as good" as her peers. Young Condoleezza (a tweaking of the Italian musical term con dolcezza, meaning "with sweetness") was the prize the Rices kept their eyes on. Despite the civil rights battles raging in Birmingham in the mid-'60s, Rice writes that her parents were not marching arm in arm with Martin Luther King Jr. "My father lionized" King, she says. "But he was a big, physical man, and I can no more imagine him in a meek way allowing someone to club him than I can imagine myself standing on my head. He would have fought back." Rice says she didn't know people who hit the streets with King. "There was a class element to it, I suppose," she says. "But even those who didn't march helped the movement, whether that was my father not reporting students who cut school to march, or the food drives we had at our church." Rice's upbringing did not foreshadow her becoming a bastion of modern conservatism. Though her father was a lifelong Republican, one of his good friends was Black Panther Stokely Carmichael. John Rice also spent his entire life reaching out to disadvantaged youth, while his wife dedicated her days to bringing music to children. She died of cancer in 1985; John died of heart failure in early 2000. Her parents' social altruism made a mark. In fact, in 1976, Rice proudly voted for Democrat Jimmy Carter. Then everything changed. "I loved Carter's story, the first president from Dixie," says Rice. "But (in the late '70s) I was studying and visiting the Soviet Union. And when they invaded Afghanistan, Carter said he suddenly understood what the Soviets were all about. And I thought, 'Who did you think you were dealing with?' I knew what that place was. So I found myself attracted to Ronald Reagan's policies, and that's how it started." Rice's classically American story is catnip to biographers. A new one is also out today: Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story by Antonia Felix, who also wrote about Laura Bush. Time will tell Elisabeth Bumiller wrote the 2007 biography Condoleezza Rice: An American Life. "The jury is still out on her policies, which will be defined by how the Iraq war ends up, but there's no doubt that she transcended the positions she held by virtue of her race, her gender and her unique relationship with the president," says Bumiller. "Some say Rice got more conservative over time," Bumiller says. "But she will tell you she never changed, the threat did." Rice comes by her conservative credentials "honestly," says her friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Studies at Harvard. "Condi is in a long tradition of black Republicans. We are 40 million strong, and yet we're often spoken about as a small village of like-minded people," Gates says. "She has succeeded in a world dominated by white men. Regardless of what people may think of her policies, she would get a standing ovation from almost any black congregation I can think of. She's a hero." Rice's book does set the record straight on aspects of her life that often flirt with myth. The brilliant student! Not so true in her early years. The piano prodigy! She was solid and worked hard but wanted to quit many times. The aspiring Olympic ice skater! Despite countless morning training sessions, she could never get airborne on jumps. And though she remains a dedicated classical pianist, Rice writes that she has long harbored a love of Motown, rhythm and blues and even hard rock. "One of my favorite songs is Led Zeppelin's Black Dog," she says. Rice also recounts in her book, if fleetingly, both her romances with former NFL players as well as an operation in 2006 to remove uterine fibroids. She shoos away speculation about her sexuality and writes that she simply hasn't met the right man to entertain marriage. She also is a good example of affirmative action. Rice writes about how being hired to teach at Stanford in 1981, at age 27, was fast-tracked because of race. From there, her work took over, soon gaining the attention of prominent conservative thinkers, which eventually led to her joining George H.W. Bush's administration as a Soviet expert. (Rice later returned to Stanford, becoming the school's youngest provost ever at age 39.) "I cannot re-create myself as a white male and see how far I would have gotten," she says. "But I always felt I was taking on things I was plausibly prepared for. And it was a good thing that these institutions were reaching out to other channels to find people who were prepared. "What I don't favor is 'We need 25% of this and 10% of that.' Quotas will lead to bad things. Affirmative action should be access to opportunity, not outcome." Opportunity knocked many times for Rice. The door now remains wide open: She serves on numerous corporate and philanthropic boards, and, despite offers to lead a range of universities, she opted to return here, to her once and future home base. Although her time at palm-studded Stanford hasn't been without controversy — as provost, her 1994 firing of a Hispanic employee led to student hunger strikes — she seems content to hunker down as both a professor of political economy and a fellow at the university's Hoover Institution. She professes no interest in running for public office. "I'm backing both (Republican candidates), Carly (Fiorina, who is running for the Senate) and Meg" Whitman, who is running for California governor, she says. "But me? Hey, I never even ran for student council." Duet with Aretha She is working hard at two things, though: piano and golf. "I just played with Aretha (Franklin) at a benefit, which was amazing," she says, sitting down at the Chickering grand piano her parents took a loan out to buy decades ago. She effortlessly plays a complex Mozart movement. As for golf, her handicap is down to 18 after five years of swinging away. She gets out on Stanford's fabled course, where Tiger Woods honed his collegiate game, at least three times a week. She's suddenly reminded of her early days on the links. "I was secretary of State and didn't have much time, so whenever I could, I would head out with a pro. But not to the driving range — they actually had an entire course for me to learn on." She rolls her eyes, then smiles. "I guess there were perks to that job," she says. "All in all, mine is a most implausible story." Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. 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