Susan Elizabeth Rice (born on November 17, 1964) is an American foreign policy advisor and United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Rice served on the staff of the National Security Council and as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during President Bill Clinton's second term. Rice is the United States' third woman ambassador to the UN. Jeane Kirkpatrick and Madeleine Albright were first and second. She is also the first African-American woman to hold the position and the third African-American person to do so (after Andrew Young and Donald McHenry). Rice was confirmed by the United States Senate by unanimous consent on January 22, 2009.

Her father always told her to "never use race as an excuse or advantage". As a young girl she says she "dreamed of becoming the first U.S. Senator from the District of Columbia". She also held "lingering fears" that her accomplishments would be diminished by people who attributed them to affirmative action.

Rice attended Stanford University, where she received a Truman Scholarship, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1986. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. On graduation day, as she shook hands with University President Donald Kennedy, he said, "I know who you are." She and Condoleezza Rice, the former U.S. Secretary of State, are both female foreign policy experts of African-American descent who have ties to Stanford University; however, they are not related.

Rice married Canadian-born ABC News producer Ian Officer Cameron in 1992 while they both lived in Toronto, she as a management consultant for McKinsey, he a producer for the CBC. They met as students at Stanford. They reside in Washington, D.C. with their two children.


Susan Rice, third from the right, is seen with President Obama and her mother, far left, father, far right, husband Ian Cameron and their two children

Nice!

This is all I needed to know. it seems that Obama has surrounded himself with some of the most intelligent people he can. Great education, good achievements, cute family. Wow, we are lucky to have such SMART people in office right now. I hope she does a better job with this than we had before. Maybe she can shed some of the bad international feelings off of us that the previous eight years of thinking that we were punishing someone by not talking with them, that political incorrectness was OK, and that we were the, "...You are either with us or against us," and the, "We don't compromise or follow sanctions from the United Nations," attitude the world has seen us as for much too long. I hope she can last for the full term, in the past eight years, I just found out that we had several people in that post , which included Richard Holbrooke 1999–2001, James B. Cunningham (acting for the remainder of the term starting in 2001), John D. Negroponte 2001–2004, John Danforth 2004–2005, Anne W. Patterson (acting) 2005, John R. Bolton (interim) 2005–2006, Alejandro Daniel Wolff (acting) 2006–2007, with Kofi Annan, Ban Ki-moon both acting in 2007, and Zalmay Khalilzad from 2007–2009. Must be a rough job. Nine people over eight years.