Rice a "Moron"? Have they no shame?

James at Outside the Beltway reports on the shameful treatment of Condoleezza Rice at the hands of some pundits and nano-pundits. It seems they have unearthed a critical review of her first book which was based on her dissertation. From this they conclude that she is not bright enough to be Bush's National Security Advisor. James addresses that fairly conclusively when he writes:

I would note that this particular book was not only picked up by a major academic press but was a revised version of her doctoral dissertation, which was by definition vetted by a panel of subject matter experts. I'm sure there were flaws in it—there always are—but it was almost certainly well researched.

Reviews in academic journals tend to be rather brutal, as they’re usually aimed at showing how clever the reviewer is. This is likely to be even more true when the reviewer is a Czechoslovakian historian reviewing the work of a political scientist studying the Soviet Union.

See also the posts on ProfessorBainbridge, Heretical Ideas, PoliBlog, and Asymmetrical Information

When Peter Paret and Gordon Craig came out with the second edition of "The Makers of Modern Strategy", they got contributions from a Who's Who of military historians. And who did they choose to write about pre-WWII Soviet doctrine and strategy? Not Kevin Drum or Josef Kalvoda.

Yeah, it was Rice. And this is in 1984-1986 before she served in government and when she was barely into her thirties.

NB: Both Paret and Craig were professors at Stanford and Rice was a young assistant professor there. So if she was a moron, you would think they might have noticed. The fact that they included her contribution shows that they respected her intellect and scholarship.

This is also an interesting article:

Josef Korbel's Enduring Foreign Policy Legacy

Professor Mentored Daughter Albright and Student Rice

By the way, anyone want to compare the scholarly contributions of Rice to Albright? Did we have SoS who was a moron too? Or is that only a question when we are talking about African-American women who work in Republican administrations?