It had not always looked so grim for Rice, 48. When women's magazine Glamour asked politicians about her in 2009, opinions were unequivocal. President Barack Obama's ambassador to the United Nations was "incredibly effective," Vice President Joe Biden said. She was "tough," according to former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, and Senator Susan Collins called her "brilliant."
All that turned in the wake of the September 11 attack in Libya, where ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed at the Benghazi consulate. Five days after the attack, Rice said that "the best assessment we have today was that in fact this was not a pre-planned, premeditated attack" and described it as the result of a protest against an anti-Muslim internet video. It later emerged that US intelligence services had received information that the attack had been planned.
She spent days meeting last month with senators in a bid to calm the storm, but the criticism did not seem to abate. After the meetings, she even seemed to have lost a key potential supporter, moderate Republican Senator Susan Collins, who told reporters after their meeting that she still had many unanswered question and was "troubled" by Rice, in a diplomatic post, playing an apparent political role.
Rice and Obama have many experiences in common and are considered personal friends. Both worked their way up as African-Americans in a predominantly white political establishment. Obama had been reluctant to withdraw support from Rice and had been an outspoken advocate even amid the criticism. Both grew up in privileged environments: Obama with his white mother and her parents, Rice as the daughter of a university professor who put great emphasis on education and taught his children from a young age never to use skin colour as an excuse to come second.
Rice was rarely second at anything, be it in sports at the elite Stanford University and in 1986 at Oxford University, where she studied in Britain as a recipient of a prestigious Rhodes scholarship, which Bill Clinton had received 18 years earlier. At Oxford, she became an expert in African affairs, and conflicts in that part of the world made her a key member of Clinton's staff, but also were among the toughest tests she encountered: in 1994, as a matter of political tactics, she recommended non-intervention in the Rwandan genocide.
Later, she promised herself to act differently if she was again to face a similar scenario, whatever the cost. During the presidency of Republican George W Bush, Rice worked for several think tanks and was an advisor to Bush's unsuccessful 2004 Democratic challenger, John Kerry, who has now replaced her as the leading candidate to succeed Clinton.
Four years later, when Obama appointed her US ambassador to the UN, Rice reaped unanimous praise. She is regarded as a workaholic who fights for her beliefs. She is also regarded as difficult. When she does not get her way, she can quickly become vicious, critics complain, and even people close to her largely agree. She is more of a fighter than a moderator and is not good at building alliances, precisely what has made many a US secretary of state successful.
Glamour magazine praised Rice as a "peacemaker," and the Washington Post described her as "charming, down to earth, quick with a joke." Since then, however, the Post has portrayed Rice in a different light: It said she is a "most undiplomatic diplomat" who has made many enemies in Washington with her uncompromising ways. Conservative Fox News even talks of her "many blunders." In the UN Security Council, which brings together 15 countries, she was even at times nicknamed "The Bulldozer," and the Washington Post cited a bitter comment from her French colleague, Gerard Araud. "We are not the 14 dwarves, and she is not Snow White," The Washington Post quoted him as having said.