“Some say Rice got more conservative over time,” Bumiller says. “But she will tell you she never changed, the threat did.”

Rice comes by her conservative credentials “honestly,” says her friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Studies at Harvard.

“Condi is in a long tradition of black Republicans. We are 40 million strong, and yet we’re often spoken about as a small village of like-minded people,” Gates says. “She has succeeded in a world dominated by white men. Regardless of what people may think of her policies, she would get a standing ovation from almost any black congregation I can think of. She’s a hero.”