A member of the Republican Party , she previously served as the 66th United States secretary of state from to and as the 19th U. Rice was the first female African-American secretary of state and the first woman to serve as national security advisor. Until the election of Barack Obama as president in , Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell , were the highest-ranking African Americans in the history of the federal executive branch by virtue of the secretary of state standing fourth in the presidential line of succession.
At the time of her appointment as Secretary of State, Rice was the highest-ranking woman in the history of the United States to be in the presidential line of succession. Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama , and grew up while the South was racially segregated. She obtained her bachelor's degree from the University of Denver and her master's degree from the University of Notre Dame , both in political science.
Bush during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification from to Rice later pursued an academic fellowship at Stanford University, where she later served as provost from to On December 17, , she joined the George W. Bush administration as national security advisor. In Bush's second term, she succeeded Colin Powell as Secretary of State, thereby becoming the first African-American woman, second African-American after Powell, and second woman after Madeleine Albright to hold this office.
Following her confirmation as secretary of state, Rice pioneered the policy of Transformational Diplomacy directed toward expanding the number of responsible democratic governments in the world and especially in the Greater Middle East.
That policy faced challenges as Hamas captured a popular majority in Palestinian elections, and influential countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt maintained authoritarian systems with U. While in the position, she chaired the Millennium Challenge Corporation 's board of directors. Gilligan as the next director of the Hoover Institution on September 1, Rice has roots in the American South going back to the pre—Civil War era, and some of her ancestors worked as sharecroppers for a time after emancipation.
