Her father once formed a shotgun brigade after a gas bomb was hurled through a neighbor's window. Ms. Rice's mother, the former Angelena Ray, and father taught at a black Birmingham high school, where her father was also the football coach. She once planned for a career as a concert pianist until she realized she was not good enough. I was going to have to practice and practice and practice and was never going to be extraordinary. I really don't.
Life's too short.
Get over it. Move on to the next thing. From there she earned a master's degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1975 and a doctorate from Denver in 1981, joining the Stanford political science faculty immediately afterward. In her two years in the Bush White House, no task was ever beneath her. On the day Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, she typed the president's talking points for his first public message rather than watch her colleague Richard N. Haass hunt and peck on the computer.