For now. One of the secrets to the spectacular rise of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is that every boss she has ever worked for was convinced that she shared his worldview. And each, after she left his employ, was left scratching his head as he saw Rice make a 180-degree turn away from the core beliefs he thought they shared. It happened with former National Security Advisor (NSA) Brent Scowcroft, who thought Rice was a rock-ribbed realist only to see her become the most ardent acolyte of idealist President George W. Bush and his “Freedom Agenda.” It even happened with former Stanford University President Gerhard Casper, for whom Rice served as provost and vice president—Stanford’s number two—and with her college political science professor Alan Gilbert, a leftist who says of Rice, “[Her interest] wasn’t really Great Power realism. If I had to put her in a category, I’d say she was closer to Marxist.”

More surprising than Gilbert’s assertion that Rice was a radical is the frequency with which you hear the same refrain: Across the political spectrum, many of Rice’s former bosses now question whether she ever identified with them at all. Rice’s central philosophy is power—not realist or idealist or Marxist, but personal power. She does what she has to in order to achieve it in whatever situation she finds herself, and, throughout her career, some would argue, opportunistically conformed to her mentors’ opinions in order to rise. “She did this...