Rice seeks evangelists for democracy

Condoleezza Rice is cold. It's a searing June morning in Washington, and on the streets outside her handsome 7th floor office suite at the State Department, damp passersby are reminded why this muggy neighborhood at the edge of the Potomac River is called Foggy Bottom. But Condi Rice is cold, because the air conditioning is set so high the room feels refrigerated.

In her house in northern California, Rice explains, she never needs to turn on the AC. The climate is temperate, never freezing, never scorching. One of her aides jokes that they could move State's headquarters west, and Rice enthusiastically backs the idea. This is the second time in half an hour that she has compared aspects of her previous life, as an academic, to her new one as secretary of State. Each time she came down favoring the old days. "The best job I ever had was provost of Stanford," she says.

Rice has never been afraid to say, diplomatically, that being the highest ranking member of the president's Cabinet, the fourth in line to the Oval Office, isn't her dream job. This is, after all, the woman who repeatedly declared that her highest aspiration was to be commissioner of the National Football League. When Paul Tagliabue announced he would resign this year, Rice was seriously considered to be a potential replacement.

So if, in a perfect world, Rice would be somewhere else, if she misses the old days, why is she embracing the role of the State Department's chief manager? When so many of her predecessors eschewed the thankless task of corralling a far-flung bureaucracy and stuck to the glamour job of counseling the president, why does she speak of the Foreign Service's need to transform? And why is she devoting her time and reputation to changing a diplomatic corps that, for most of its existence, has outlasted the whims of political administrations?

Because some old days, Rice thinks, are gone for good.