I recently attended Glamour magazine's 50th anniversary celebration of its annual Top Ten College Women competition. The celebration in New York made me reflect on my career path.
I had just graduated from Spelman College and was on my way to Harvard to undertake graduate study in political science when I stopped in New York for Glamour's announcement of the winners of its college competition, the oldest of its kind for college women in the United States. As one of those selected, I joined a club of outstanding women. The fact that I was one of the first winners from a black college made the prize all the more exciting and meaningful. A new possibility existed: Beginning that year, 1981, winners would be selected regularly from historically black institutions.
I was also one of two Top Ten award recipients interviewed by Jane Pauley on NBC-TV's Today. In response to her question about my future, I declared that I hoped to be the first black U. S. Secretary of State. Later, I heard my comment caused quite a stir in certain quarters, with some saying that my goal could never be achieved.
As fate would have it, a few years later I met a young woman who was wise beyond her years. I don't recall hearing her say that she wanted to be secretary of state, but everyone who met Stanford University assistant professor Condoleezza Rice knew that she was on her way to something unprecedented. I asked her to be one of my dissertation advisers, and she became my outside reader. Recently, Secretary Rice and I coauthored, along with Serhiy Kudelia and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Strategy of Campaigning: Lessons from Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin. In addition, an essay by Rice on German unification is included in the forthcoming Turning Points in Ending the Cold War, an edited volume of commentaries by American and Russian statesmen and scholars that Rice and I conceived of years ago.
Words are powerful. My declaration on Today served as a harbinger of things I never imagined at the time. Years later, I returned to the program for an interview with Katie Couric. We discussed Reagan, In His Own Hand, a book of President Reagan's writings that I coauthored, which became a New York Times best seller. Soon thereafter, my government career began when Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appointed me to the Defense Policy Board. In the past, I envisioned a career at the state department. Instead, I have served at the Pentagon since 2001 in the roles of observer and adviser.
Glamour magazine deserves some of the credit for the path I have taken because there is nothing like telling the world your plans. Once you make your goals public, you feel compelled to pursue them.
Kiron K. Skinner is an associate professor of history and political science at Carnegie Mellon and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. She is a member of the Defense Policy Board and the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel. She is also a presidential appointee to the National Security Education Board, having been unanimously approved by the U.S. Senate.
