NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER Condoleezza Rice sat in the Roosevelt Room of the West Wing of the White House, confidently outlining the Bush administration's case for military action in Iraq.

Sitting under a painting of President Teddy Roosevelt on horseback, she answered questions about the war on terrorism, North Korea's nuclear program and the crisis in the Middle East with ready knowledge.

A question she may not have anticipated took her back to her childhood in Birmingham, Ala. Rice, the first African-American woman to serve as national security adviser, was 8 years old when a bomb went off in the basement of 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four little girls who had just finished their Sunday school lesson.

[...] "You know, in some ways, history takes funny turns and you have a sense that it shocked good people who were perhaps silent into a recognition that this was intolerable. Birmingham has healed in a lot of ways. I think it probably started its healing when people began to realize that you couldn't tolerate this level of hate."

She said she didn't realize it at first, even after 9/11, but with the images coming out of the Middle East, she began to recognize the impact of her experience in Birmingham on her positions.

"The pictures of the children and the families and what they were coping with," she said. "I think what you recognize, if you've been through home-grown terrorism, which is what that was in Birmingham, is you recognize there isn't any cause that can be served by it. No cause, good, bad, indifferent can be served by terrorism. Because it's meant to end the conversation. To end the search for a solution. It's meant to terrorize and frighten people and bludgeon them into submission."

She adamantly refuted the idea that because she serves in the Bush administration she doesn't identify with African Americans.

"I am African American and proud of it. I wouldn't have it any other way. It has shaped who I am, and it will continue to shape who I am. I do not believe that it has limited who I am or what I can become. Because I had parents who, while telling me what it meant to be African American and exposing me to that, also allowed me to develop as an individual to be who I wanted to be."