How To Analyze Politico-Financial Networks

In the history of word usage, according to "The Word Detective," the word "plum" shows up by the mid-19th century as 

slang for “a coveted prize” ... or ... “a choice job or appointment,” and, in particular, such posts awarded as political rewards (“The boys enjoying the plums will support anybody who is good for him or them,” 1887). So the use of “plum job” reflects a long history of likening a choice position to the sweet fruit of the plum tree.

It was the first word that popped into my mind when I began asking myself back in 2004 how Condolezza Rice collected one plum after another during her rise to fame. Were the plums that appeared in her curriculum vitae awarded because of her excellence or because she happened to be at the right place at the right time? What do you think, after reading this research?

CONDI PICKS A PLUM

©June 9, 2004 by Linda Minor

Professional "plums" create networks.

Part 1

Condoleezza Rice was selected to work for the administration of George H.W. Bush inaugurated in 1989, and she returned for W. Bush in 2001. She, therefore,  is a component of a network that supports, and in turn is supported by, the Bush political agenda.

By focusing on the institutions funding Condi Rice throughout her life we may ultimately gain a clearer picture of the decades-old Bush family network. If successful, we may also get a glimpse of what this network plans to do in the future.

Condi’s talents were recognized when she was very young by successful members of the community of which she became a part, and those talents were amplified by concentrating resources into her educational development and providing remuneration for her achievements in the form of fellowships and professional career opportunities. These professional "plums"—as those of us who have struggled hard to find gainful employment well know—do not always grow on trees; that is, not unless those trees are located within a well-cultivated orchard. Picture young Condi walking through just such an orchard, while being handed ripe plums as she strolls from one tree to another. 

Who owns this orchard? Let's try to find out. All we have to do is follow the money.

The plums described here can be identified from reading Condi’s curriculum vitae, ignoring all the contrived spin. Notwithstanding her high marks at university and other impressive awards, her credentials are weak. She has never been in a role that required her to make decisions. At her appearance before the 911 Commission, she reiterated time and again:

“But no one told us we needed to DO anything."  

 She was accustomed to taking orders, not to giving them.

911 Commission testimony

Further examination into each aspect of her resume should help us discover who “created” the current National Security Advisor. By examining her C.V., we can see the interaction of interests and capital that led her from the piano to the right hand of  George W. Bush.

An excerpt from the Encyclopedia of World Biography Supplement, Vol. 23, (Gale Group, 2003), is indicative of the contrived emotionalism used to describe her, but also informs us about certain intriguing facts surrounding her rise to fame:

At age 15, Rice graduated from high school and started attending the University of Denver, hoping to become a concert pianist. She won a young artist's competition and was invited to play Mozart's Piano Concerto in D Minor with the Denver Symphony Orchestra. Although she was a talented performer, she knew that the competition for professional performers was stiff. Partway through college, she decided she would never become a concert pianist. She took a course called "Introduction to International Politics." Her professor, Dr. Josef Korbel, a Soviet specialist and the father of Madeleine Albright (who later became secretary of state under President Bill Clinton), inspired her. She changed her major to political science.

Rice was an avid student, and in 1974, she earned her bachelor's degree in political science (cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) at age 19. She was awarded the Political Science Honors Award for "outstanding accomplishment and promise in the field of political science." She went on to get her Master's degree in government and international studies at Notre Dame University in just one year. She returned to Denver, unsure of what to do next.

"I thought I had a job as executive assistant to a vice president of Honeywell," she told Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker. "Before I could go to work, they reorganized, and I lost the job." She taught piano lessons and applied to law school. Then, when she was down at the university, Dr. Korbel recommended that she take some classes. By 1981, she had received her Ph.D. in international studies from the University of Denver.

Do you get a feeling from reading this that things are not as they seem? 

Is it possible that the woman appointed by Democrat Bill Clinton to be Ambassador to the United Nations and later Secretary of State (Albright) and the woman selected by Republican George W. Bush as his National Security Adviser (Rice) were each indoctrinated while in their teens by the same man—Josef Korbel? What a strange coincidence! 

Sec. of State Hillary Clinton with Pres. Clinton and Madeleine Albright

But perhaps it is more than just a coincidence. Deeper inspection must be made into Condi Rice's background by examining each element in her résumé in light of  where the money for it came from and the purpose behind those providing the funding..

Presbyterian Network

Condi Rice has never married. She has always been dependent either upon her father and his financial network, or upon educational institutions with attendant financial fellowships and  corporate board directorships—all resulting from her university study of political science and international relations.

Condi with Rev. Rice and her mother

Her father, John W. Rice III, was a second-generation Presbyterian minister when he took a job as assistant vice-chancellor at the University of Denver. Prior to 1969, he had been Dean at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama—a college founded after the Civil War by white Southern Presbyterians for the purpose of training black ministers. His own father had been a Stillman graduate, but the son finished his undergraduate and masters studies at Johnson C. Smith University, another black Presbyterian college in Charlotte, N.C. 

John Rice obtained his PhD at the University of Denver in 1969, shortly before his employment there, first as an assistant dean, teaching Black history courses while serving also as one of four associate pastors at a white Presbyterian Church. He was, obviously, sold on the Protestant work ethic. His involvement in city government in Denver and as a counselor on the Foreign Service Generalist Selection Board implies connections to someone of influence within the U.S. State Department in order to receive that appointment, which required periodic travel to Washington, D.C. for board meetings. [1]

Several decades before the civil rights movement of the 1960s, John Foster Dulles, who came from a long line of Presbyterians in positions of power in the United States, helped to turn the Federal Council of Churches, an association including American Presbyterians, into an advocate for global government. Trained in international affairs by his maternal grandfather, John Watson Foster, secretary of state under Benjamin Harrison, and his uncle, Robert Lansing, who had been secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson, Dulles  also learned theology from his father, Allen Macy Dulles, a Presbyterian minister, and his paternal grandfather, John Welsh Dulles, a missionary. 

While a student at the Presbyterian Princeton University, the president of which was later-U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, young J.F. Dulles traveled with then-Secretary of State John W. Foster, to the Second Hague Peace Conference of 1907, where Sec. Foster represented the Chinese delegation, and Dulles acted as the group's secretary.

Dulles addressing Federal Council of Churches

As a partner at the Wall Street international law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, J.F. Dulles and his brother Allen represented clients who desired to exploit investment opportunities that transcended national borders, while at the same time they wanted to be protected against currency fluctuations or devaluations which could wipe out their investment. [2] Dulles no doubt learned much from senior partner William Nelson Cromwell, a legal genius, whose firm employed the young grandson of Cromwell's friend John Watson Foster. [3] In 1891 Cromwell was the designer of a plan to rescue business enterprises in distress using a New York insolvency law that allowed creditors to reach a voluntary agreement in reorganizing a firm so it could continue in business and fulfill its obligations to creditors—the forerunner of today’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy provision under Federal law. [4] 

John Foster Dulles, appointed in 1918 by Woodrow Wilson as legal counsel to the United States delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference, later served as chairman of the Federal Council of Churches' Commission on a Just and Durable Peace through which Dulles became a delegate to the San Francisco Conference in 1945 to set up the United Nations. As a Presbyterian elder for many years, Dulles assisted in turning the church philosophy to a more internationalist position. [5] It was this global philosophy promoted by Presbyterians in which Condi’s father's and grandfather’s careers were shaped and to which they rendered many years of faithful service.

See conclusion of "Condi Picks a Plum" and all endnotes at Part 2.