Former U.S. Secretary of State Condaleezza Rice is an accomplished classical pianist. I think her favorite classical composer is Johannes Brahms. A major preoccupation of Secretary Rice during the George W. Bush Adminstration was the Iraq War that commenced in 2003.
Here she is with fellow musicians in a news story reported by Katie Couric of CBS News. I wonder if Secretary Rice has ever performed at the Greenspan home? Alan Greenspan and his wife, NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell, have a grand piano. Incidentally, Alan Greenspan is an accomplished sax player.
Bob Strauss is a friend of the Greenspans. Oddly enough, Bob Strauss used to be U.S. Ambassador to Russia, while Secretary Rice speaks fluent Russian. Strauss said, upon his nomination to the diplomatic post in 1991: "I don't speak Russian, but I know people." And, indeed he does! Vernon Jordan has connections to CBS News. Small world.
My humorous thoughts about Johannes Brahms:
ReplyDeletehttp://dailstrug.blogspot.com/2009/10/richard-wagner-society.html
The YouTube caption states: Condaleezza Rice playing the piano.
ReplyDeleteI know a little Russian, too.
While I was working at the firm, years ago, I happened to see the NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell on Connecticut Avenue. I could have sworn she recognized me. But I thought, how on Earth would Andrea Mitchell, of all people, know who I was. I knew nothing about Andrea Mitchell's personal life at that time. In 1997 I learned that Andrea Mitchell married Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, with whom she had lived for many years. Bob Strauss was a guest at the wedding. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg officiated. I also read that the couple loves classical piano and owns a grand piano, on which talented guests perform. Incidentally, Bob Strauss's father, Charles Strauss, aspired to be a concert pianist when he was a young man.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the Greenspans got married in 1997. A year earlier, in 1996, I wrote a letter to my then treating psychiatrist at GW about my paranoid suspicions that involved Justice Ginsburg and Alan Greenspan. The letter contained my fantasy that President Clinton might be impeached for what psychoanalysts call "a boundary breach." I alleged that President Clinton had received confidential mental health information about me via my former employer's senior managers, a possible illegality under D.C. law. A few years later, President Clinton was in fact impeached for a boundary breach (having sex with a White House intern).
Uncanny, isn't it?