Current Position: Ambassador to the United Nations (since January 2009)
Credit: State Department
Why She Matters
A young and outspoken foreign policy whiz, Rice was Barack Obama’s top foreign policy adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign. She was rewarded with the post of ambassador to the United Nations, a slot that Obama includes in his cabinet.
As U.N. ambassador, Rice is likely to push her views that the U.S. must learn to adapt to a post-Cold War reality. As a former assistant secretary of State for African Affairs – at age 33, one of the youngest ever - in the Clinton administration, she has experience dealing with ethnic clashes and has advocated military action as a last resort in cases of genocide.
She is described as brash and fearless by friends. “If I were to characterize her, whether it's playing basketball or anything else, she's fearless,” says family friend and former boss, ex-Secretary of State Madeline Albright. "She says what she thinks. She steps into situations without doubt. She's very determined. "I just never doubted that if Susan wanted to do it all, she could," she said.
At a Glance
Current Position: U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (since January 2009)
Career History: Brookings Institution; Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs (1997 to 2001); Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs, the National Security Council (1995 to 1997);
Director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping, National Security Council (1993 to 1995)
Birthday: N/A
Hometown: Washington, D.C.
Alma Mater: Stanford, B.A, in history, date N/A, Rhodes Scholar, Oxford University, Ph.D in international relations, date N/A
Spouse: Ian Cameron
Office: N/A
Phone: N/A
Email: N/A
Web site: N/A
Path to Power
As a native of Washington, Rice is accustomed to politics as a contact sport. Her father, Dr. Emmett J. Rice, is a former Federal Reserve Board governor, and her mother, Lois Dixon Fitt, is an education policy scholar. 
Along with many of the city’s most politically connected offspring, she attended the prestigious National Cathedral high school, where she played three sports – basketball was her favorite – and earned the nickname “Spo,” short for “Sportin’” – and graduated as the valedictorian.
Rice attended Stanford University, where she studied history, graduated with honors and met her future husband, Ian Cameron, who was promoted in October 2008 as executive producer of “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
She won a Rhodes Scholarship and crossed the pond to attend Oxford University, where she earned her master’s and Ph.D in international relations. Her dissertation focused on Rhodesia’s transition to white rule and would foreshadow her future work on Africa in the State Department.
After a stint as a management consultant at McKinsey and Company, Rice joined the Clinton administration’s National Security Council in 1995 as a special assistant to the president and senior director for African Affairs. From 1993 to 1995, she had served as the NSC’s director for international organizations and peacekeeping.
In 1997, Rice moved into the high-profile role of assistant secretary of State for African Affairs, where she presided over U.S. policy toward the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa. 
In that role, she was the one to get that middle-of-the-night phone call - heralding what she would call “the worst day of my professional career” - informing her of the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Still, Rice called her 1994 visit to Rwanda while on the NSC her most “searing:” "I saw hundreds, if not thousands, of decomposing corpses outside and inside a church." she said. "Corpses that had been hacked up. It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen. It makes you mad. It makes you determined. It makes you know that even if you're the last lone voice and you believe you're right, it is worth every bit of energy you can throw into it."
After George W. Bush was elected, Rice joined the Brookings Institution as a senior fellow in its Foreign Policy and Governance Studies Program. In that capacity, she has written several papers on the dangers of “weak” or failed states and the consequences of “dithering” in Darfur.
She made a name for herself as an Obama surrogate on the 2008 campaign trail. In March 2008, MSNBC host Tucker Carlson asked Rice to respond to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) charge that he wasn’t ready to respond to the 3 a.m. phone call in the case of a crisis. Rice replied that neither Clinton nor Obama was “ready” for that phone call, making her a YouTube sensation.
In Her Own Words
"Well, if the Sudanese government maintains its refusal of a robust U.N. force, then the international community should say to the Sudanese: You have a very short period of time, a week, perhaps two weeks at most, to accept this U.N. force unconditionally or face the threat of the use of military force,” Rice said in November 2006.
The Issues
Democrats jokingly quip that Rice is their version of Condoleeza Rice, Bush’s ex-NSC head and subsequent Secretary of State. 
Condoleeza and Susan Rice are both African-American women whose foreign policy heft has put them in the inner circles of political power. But the differences end there.
Along with other progressive, young Democratic scholars, Rice is part of the Phoenix Initiative that released a landmark July 2008 report titled “Strategic Leadership: Framework for a 21st Century National Security Strategy.” The report is a blueprint for foreign policy in a new Obama administration and describes how America should wield its power in a post-Cold War environment.
“At a time when the United States truly must rise from the ashes of a failed foreign policy, this report breaks away from such traditional concepts as containment, engagement, and enlargement and rejects standard dichotomies of realist power politics versus liberal idealism,” Rice wrote in the report’s preface.
The report states that the new president must lead only when it is narrowly warranted by important and achievable interests. “At times, our interests are best served when others lead with us, or even take our place at the helm,” the report states. It identifies five priorities: counter-terrorism, nuclear non-proliferation, climate change and oil dependence, the Middle East and East Asia.
Africa
As assistant secretary of State for Africa, Rice was criticized for not being a pure Africanist (a term for those who are steeped in African history and language).
But she advocated engagement with the continent and helped arrange President Clinton’s first trip to Africa in 1998. In 1999, Rice supported a measure signed by Clinton that subsidized food assistance to Sudanese rebels fighting the Islamic government in Khartoum in order to isolate it.
She was a strong advocate for isolating the government in Khartoum and believed they were insincere in their desire to stamp out terrorism. At the State Department, she dealt with the 1998 bombings at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that were attributed to Osama bin Laden. She was there when Clinton decided to strike bin Laden with cruise missiles aimed at his camps in Afghanistan and an alleged chemical weapons factory in Sudan.
After leaving the Clinton White House, Rice was perhaps best known for advocating the use of military force as a last resort to stop the genocide in Darfur.
"If the Sudanese government maintains its refusal of a robust U.N. force, then the international community should say to the Sudanese: You have a very short period of time, a week, perhaps two weeks at most, to accept this U.N. force unconditionally or face the threat of the use of military force,” she said in November 2006.
The Network
A life-long Washingtonian, Rice has deep ties to the Democratic foreign policy establishment. Albright is a family friend, and she also served as an advisor to Democratic presidential candidates Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.
She is part of Obama’s inner circle of foreign policy advisers that includes former Clinton National Security Advisor Anthony Lake; ex-Clintonista and Washington power lawyer Greg Craig; Mark Lippert, who was an Obama Senate staffer; Denis McDonough, a former aide to ex-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.); Richard Danzig, who was Secretary of the Navy under Clinton; Ben Rhodes, a foreign policy speechwriter who worked on the Iraq Study Group; and Scott Gration, a retired Air Force General.
Campaign Contributions
Rice has supported Democratic presidential, House and Senate candidates over the years; she even gave $2,000 to
Hillary Rodham Clinton in March 2005, before it was clear that Obama would be a presidential candidate.
