Condoleezza Rice to Speak at President's Breakfast

Condoleezza Rice, who served as the 66th secretary of state of the United States from 2005-2009, will be the keynote speaker at the sixth annual Westmont President’s Breakfast Friday, March 4, from 7-9 a.m. in the Grand Ballroom of Fess Parker’s Doubletree Resort. Tickets, which are $100 per person, go on sale Tuesday, Feb. 1, at 9 a.m. and can be purchased only at the Westmont website. Seating is limited, and tickets are sold on a first-come, first-served basis.

Rice is professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution and professor of political science at Stanford University.

Before becoming America’s chief diplomat, she served as assistant to the president for national security affairs (national security advisor) from January 2001 to 2005. Rice joined the Stanford University faculty as a professor of political science in 1981 and served as Stanford University’s provost from 1993 to 1999.

In 1999, she was the Westmont Commencement speaker. In her talk, “The Responsibility of the Educated Christian,” Rice praised Westmont for educating the whole person and focusing on personal and spiritual growth as well as intellectual development.

The youngest person and first African-American to become provost at Stanford University, she previously held a high-level post in the Bush administration as senior adviser to the National Security Council and special assistant to the president. She was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1991 to 1993 and returned to the Hoover Institution after serving as provost until 2001. As a professor, Rice won two of the highest teaching honors: the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Her new book, published in 2010, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family” shares how her upbringing in segregated Birmingham, Ala., and her strong, caring family and parents helped to shape the course of her life. She has also authored and co-authored several other books, including “Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1995),” with Philip Zelikow; “The Gorbachev Era (1986),” with Alexander Dallin and “Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984).”

Rice served as a member of the boards of directors for the Chevron, Charles Schwab and Transamerica corporations. She was a founding board member of the Center for a New Generation, an educational support fund for schools in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, Calif., and was vice president of the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula. She currently serves on the board of the Boys and Girls Club of America.

The Westmont Foundation and area businesses sponsor the President’s Breakfast to promote discussion and consideration of current issues among local community leaders. This year’s lead sponsor is Santa Barbara Bank and Trust. Gold sponsors include Anodos Group, Axia, Davies Public Affairs, David C. Fainer, HUB International, Jo and Carl Lindros, Melchiori Investment Companies, MATT Construction, Rabobank, The Storage Place-Carpinteria and V3 Corporation. A very special thanks to Northern Trust.

Past Westmont President’s Breakfast keynote speakers include: Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico; Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and former chairman and CEO of CNN; Fareed Zakaria, host of “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN, Thomas Friedman, author of “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” and “The World is Flat”; and American historian and bestselling author David McCullough, who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize.