The smart woman behind Dubya

To begin by getting the obvious out of the way: Ms Condoleezza Rice is not stuck with one of those African-American made-up names, like Tawana; one of those names that the excellent black critic Debra Dickerson has termed "Venusian".

Ms Rice's mother was a pianist and liked the sound of the Italian musical admonition con dolcezza, which means "with sweetness". Quite how the c became an e, somewhat spoiling the effect and the harmony, is something between President Bush's National Security Advisor and her baptismal certificate.

Many millions of Americans began life the same way, with misspelled Hungarian and Yiddish names foisted upon them by hasty immigration officers scribbling away at Ellis Island. The President has already solved the problem in his own labour-saving way by referring to his most influential adviser as "Condi" in public and private. The Chevron oil company, on whose board she sat until recently, gives the full-out version on the majestic prow of the oil tanker it has named after her.

She began life not as an immigrant but in deeply segregated Birmingham, Alabama, where her father was a Presbyterian minister and the Dean of a black college. (She became a Republican, she says, because the Democrats of those days would not register the old man to vote.) After a spell of concertstandard musical studies, she decided to pursue international relations as her course of study at the University of Denver. The mentor was Professor Joseph Korbel, a refugee from Czechoslovakia who was also the father of Madeleine Albright. Within a few years, she had mastered Russian and become a specialist in Soviet studies.

Just the other day, the Washington Post spotted Rice and Albright lunching chummily together at a restaurant in the Watergate and splitting the bill down the middle. But their differences in style are the defining difference between the policies of the two administrations. Don't make too much of this - the Clinton people were more hesitant about the Balkans, more keen on "Star Wars", more foot-dragging on Kyoto, more reluctant about Rwanda and North Korea and more enthusiastic about capital punishment than they want anyone to remember.

We have recently learned that Father Bush exerts real influence on Boy Bush when it comes to foreign policy and that the White House did an about-face on North Korea, just last week, for just that reason. Condoleezza Rice is one of the key handful of people to have made the transition from the last Bush administration (the others being Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell) but she, as the first-ever female National Security Advisor, is the only one whose sole job it is to advise the President. She is also the one with the best academic credentials; the one who can speak for Bush in her capacity as a former Provost of Stanford University. At a time when the President is thought of mainly as a laughing-stock among intellectuals and the professoriat, this is a considerable advantage.

In a tough speech at the Republican National Convention last summer, she borrowed the old rhetoric of the Left, first to celebrate the much-ballyhooed "diversity" of the party and second to say that the United States should no longer be the world's policeman. When speaking of Bosnia and Kosovo, she has ridiculed the idea that the 82nd Airborne should be concerned with escorting children to school in war-ravaged foreign territory. She was opposed to Clinton's intervention in Haiti. She would have left Rwanda alone, even more than Albright did. In this respect, what she says is what Bush thinks, or vice-versa.

She has another job, too, which is to phrase his essentially provincial arguments in a more globalised rhetoric. Bush's first speech on former Yugoslavia gave everybody the impression that he genuinely didn't know there were any European troops there; she can cover for him on stuff like that. She can also talk to him about baseball, which is his great passion and her strong interest. In case of need, she can also talk to the Russians in their own language.

How smart is she, and what's she really like? On the first point, one must not forget that her school of Soviet scholars, along with the whole of the CIA, was totally surprised by the Gorbachev moment. To the last, she and her co-thinkers persisted in suspecting that it all might be a trick. One of those who reviewed her doctoral dissertation wrote that she "frequently does not sift facts from propaganda and valid information from disinformation or misinformation ... passes judgments and expresses opinions without adequate knowledge of facts". At Stanford University, many remember her as a toughminded bureaucrat, who cut muscle rather than fat when across-the-board expenditure reductions needed to be made, and who wasn't an especially good listener.

As to what she's like; I have met her only once and found her a jolly good listener even if she preferred to stay with noncommittal small talk. She's very good-looking and amazingly well turned-out; there's never been either a hint of scandal or a suggestion of marriage. She was an only child and once said that her parents piled so many books on her bedside table that she lost the taste for reading and never got it back. One has to hope that this is not her secret bond with a President who boasts all the time that while he's not a great bookman himself, at least he's hired people who are.

? Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.