Condi Rice can't lose

By Romesh Ratnesar: George W. Bush's foreign-policy adviser is a future superstar: It was December 1989, and George Bush had arrived for a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev on the stormy waters off Malta in the Mediterranean. He introduced the Soviet President to his advisers, stopping near a reed-thin, 35-year-old African-American woman. "This is Condoleezza Rice," Bush told Gorbachev. "She tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union." Read on. (Time, 20 September 1999)