WASHINGTON, Jan 19 (AFP) - Condoleezza Rice -- who won the Senate Foreign Relations committee's backing Wednesday to serve as secretary of state, pending full Senate approval on Thursday -- is President George W. Bush's top foreign policy adviser, a fluent speaker of Russian with expert knowledge of the former Soviet Union.
The first black woman to be appointed secretary of state and just the second woman tapped for the position, Rice, 50, has been Bush's national security adviser for the past four years.
In announcing her nomination late last year to succeed Colin Powell as the top US diplomat, Bush declared that "the secretary of state is America's face to the world, and in Dr. Rice, the world will see the strength, the grace and the decency of our country.
"During the last four years, I've relied on her counsel, benefited from her great experience and appreciated her sound and steady judgment," Bush added.
If confirmed by the Senate as expected, Rice would be only the second woman to hold the top cabinet post, after Madeleine Albright, whose father, a university professor, persuaded Rice to abandon a career as a concert pianist to study international relations.
Rice, who was also the second female US national security adviser, has been admiringly called a "steel magnolia" and a "warrior princess."
A popular member of the Bush administration, Rice has her share of detractors, including former top US counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, who accused her of failing to take strong enough action against Al-Qaeda prior to the September 11 attacks.
Rice has also received some criticism for her coordination of foreign policy among the strong personalities of Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA director George Tenet.
Rice's intellectual brilliance is undisputed, but many Americans wonder how a black woman born into segregation in the deep US South came to ally herself with one of the most conservative administrations of the past 25 years.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama on November 14, 1954, Rice's mother, a music teacher, taught her to play the piano. Her father was a pastor and a school principal who instilled in her a love of sports, particularly American football.
The president referred to her upbringing in announcing her nomination late last year.
"As a girl in the segregated South, Dr. Rice saw the promise of America violated by racial discrimination and by the violence that comes from hate," he said.
Rice has said that racism was so ingrained in her childhood she hardly noticed it.
She was eight years old on September 15, 1963, when the Ku Klux Klan carried out one of its most infamous bombings, of an Alabama church. One of four 10-year-old girls killed had been Rice's friend since kindergarten.
Rice's parents taught her that education was the only way to escape segregation. She has said that, because of her skin color, she had to be "twice as good" as the other children to get ahead.
Rice enrolled at the University of Denver at the age of 15 and graduated at 19 with a degree in political science. She earned a master's degree at the University of Notre Dame and a doctorate from the University of Denver's Graduate School of International Studies.
Rice studied music with the ambition of becoming a classical pianist. But she was inspired to switch to superpower relations during a course on international politics taught by Czech refugee Josef Korbel, Albright's father.
At 26, Rice was already a fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control, specializing in Soviet affairs.
She served as Soviet affairs adviser to the National Security Council during the administration of Bush's father, president George Bush, and prepped the elder Bush ahead of summits with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Rice, who is single, returned to Stanford in 1991. In 1993, she became the elite California university's youngest provost, as well as the first woman and the first minority to hold the post.
For 10 years, Rice sat on the board of Chevron, which named a 129,000-tonne oil tanker in her honor. The company removed "Condoleezza Rice" from the tanker's hull after critics charged that it further proved the administration's ties to Big Oil.

01/19/2005 17:38 GMT - AFP