WITHOUT A DOUBT.(national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice)

Just outside the entrance to Condoleezza Rice's office in the West Wing of the White House hangs a large color photograph of Rice, the national-security adviser, standing onstage with Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist, their hands clasped, their arms hoisted in triumph. They are acknowledging the audience's applause after having played a Brahms sonata together at Constitution Hall, in Washington. Inside her office, across the front edge of Rice's desk, are four meticulously cleared-out boxes labelled "Intel," "Out," "Read," and "Immediate Action," and behind them is a small mirror on a stand.

Rice is a performer. She appeared in public before an audience for the first time when she was four. "It was a tea for the new teachers in the Birmingham public-school system," she told me, during one of four interviews we had in her office over the past few months. She had asked her parents for piano lessons, and they complied, when she was three. "And somehow my mother persuaded these people to let me play this little Tchaikovsky knockoff. It was called 'A Doll's Funeral.' And I have a picture of me sitting there in this taffeta dress with a fuzzy tam on my head--I don't know where she got that idea. But that was the first time I played. And I played a lot. I would be asked to play at this or that function. And I did that until I was about ten. And then, all of a sudden, I wasn't the cute little kid anymore. And I wasn't asked to play very much anymore. And I got really bored with the piano and wanted to quit. It's the only time my parents ever intervened. My mother said, 'You're not old enough or good enough to make that decision. When you are old enough and good enough, then you can quit, but not now.' And I'm really glad she didn't let me quit. Because by the time I did decide I wasn't going to pursue it I was good enough to play just about anything that I wanted to, and that's why even today it's a great avocation."

Flagging demand isn't a problem for Rice these days. The weekend after the September 11th attacks, when the Administration's top national-security officials gathered at Camp David to consider how to respond, after business hours Rice, accompanied by Attorney General John Ashcroft on the piano, entertained her colleagues by singing traditional American songs. In the Random House Audio version of "A World Transformed," the memoir of the end of the Cold War by former President George H. W. Bush and his national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, Rice is the narrator. On many Sunday mornings, one can see Rice on the Washington television talk shows, explaining, always in perfect paragraphs and with flawless composure, President George W. Bush's foreign-policy positions. An enthusiastic shopper, Rice, who dresses for work stylishly, even just short of daringly (by Washington standards), in bold-colored suits cut slightly above the knee, is also photographed now and then in a strapless gown for fashion magazines. In the next few months, three biographies of Rice, two of them meant to inspire preteen readers, will be published. Chevron, the California oil company on whose board she served before becoming national-security adviser, named a tanker after her, which she christened in 1993, at a launching ceremony in Rio de Janeiro.

Several of the crucial turns in Rice's career have had the quality of an audition--she makes a big impression. The Washington portion of her life proceeds directly from a dinner after a faculty seminar at Stanford University in 1984, at which Scowcroft, who was then the head of President Reagan's Commission on Strategic Forces, had given a talk on arms control. Rice, then a very junior faculty member in Stanford's political-science department, challenged him on some policy conventional wisdom, and did it most effectively. Scowcroft told me, "I thought, This is somebody I need to get to know. It's an intimidating subject. Here's this young girl, and she's not at all intimidated." Scowcroft began grooming Rice for a position in government, by arranging for her to be invited to seminars and conferences and to meet people. In 1989, when he became national-security adviser, Scowcroft appointed her to the National Security Council, as its chief authority on the Soviet Union. In just two years there, Rice became personally close to President and Mrs. Bush, as upper-middle-level White House staff members almost never do; just before she returned to Stanford, in 1991, she was invited upstairs into the White House family quarters to say goodbye. In 1992, as a member of Stanford's presidential-search committee, she so impressed one of the candidates, Gerhard Casper, at their first meeting that after he got the job he appointed Rice provost of the university. In 1998, Governor George W. Bush, of Texas, whom Rice already knew, but not well, from visits to the Bush family in Texas and in Kennebunkport, Maine, and who was thinking about running for President, spoke at a Republican fund-raising event in San Francisco. George Shultz, the former Secretary of State, who introduced Bush, arranged an impromptu policy discussion for him the following day, at the Shultz home on the Stanford campus, with a group of experts from the Hoover Institution, an on-campus think tank that functions as a Republican government-in-exile. Rice, by that time also a protegee of Shultz's, was there, and evidently turned in another dazzling performance. "Condi had a lot to say," Shultz told me. "And he listened." Soon Shultz's experts were being invited to Austin for more seminars. In 1999, Rice resigned as provost of Stanford and became the head of Bush's team of foreign-policy advisers, which was known within the campaign as the Vulcans.

To spend time with Rice is to see right away how she has such an effect on people. "Condi is just an A-plus-plus-plus presence," one former Administration official who knows her says. "She's the most gifted speaker and conveyer of solid thoughts, in articulate form, of anybody I've ever met. I'd put her in the top quartile in terms of the thoughts themselves. But that's not her thing--her thing is presenting it." She appears impeccably organized and prepared, with a great mass of detail in her head which she has reduced to a simple, clear form. She is gracious, poised, and charming, and isn't stiff or puffed up with her own officialdom. She has a wide, easy smile and a comfortable manner. No question ever seems to catch her unaware or to set off a rambling, disjointed answer. She ties everything up in a neat package of certainty and conviction. Before Rice answers a question, there is a moment that recalls a figure skater--another of her youthful performing careers--taking a first look at the program for the day's competition. There's a barely visible nod, conveying something like "Yup--got it," and then comes a reply unerringly pitched to the level of detail and expertise where, she senses, the person she's talking to wishes to dwell. That may be one reason that, when I asked several people who know Rice to describe her thinking, I often got the feeling that they were really describing themselves.

George Shultz, a tough-minded former labor negotiator, said, "She starts with saying, 'What are the interests of the United States?' And she recognizes that what happens elsewhere is important to us. But she starts with the United States, as any thinker about foreign policy should."

John Ashcroft, the Administration's leading evangelical Christian, said, "I think she understands that America is a very, very important leader. We not only have the reputation of leading by power, we have the opportunity of leading by moral authority: the basic values of freedom, opportunity, and duty."