Trial by fire for Obama's choice to succeed Clinton

Susan Rice was playing stand-in on September 16 when she appeared on five Sunday news programmes a few days after the deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton would have been the White House's logical choice to discuss the chaotic events in the Middle East, but she was drained after a harrowing week, officials said. Even if she had not been consoling the families of those who died, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Clinton typically steers clear of the Sunday shows.

So instead, Rice, the ambassador to the UN, delivered her now-infamous account of the episode. Reciting talking points supplied by intelligence agencies, she said that the Benghazi siege appeared to have been a spontaneous protest later hijacked by extremists, not a premeditated terrorist attack. Within days, Republicans were calling for her head.

In her sure-footed ascent of the foreign-policy ladder, Rice has rarely shrunk from a fight. But now that she appears poised to claim the top rung - White House aides say she is President Barack Obama's favoured candidate for secretary of state - this sharp-tongued, self-confident diplomat finds herself in a bitter feud in which she is largely a bystander.

"Susan had a reputation, fairly or not, as someone who could run a little hot and shoot from the hip," said John Norris, a foreign-policy expert at the Centre for American Progress. "If someone had told me that the biggest knock on her was going to be that she too slavishly followed the talking points on Benghazi, I would have been shocked."

At the UN, and in posts in the Clinton White House, Rice, who turned 48 on Saturday, has earned a reputation as a blunt advocate, relentless on issues like intervening in Libya to prevent a slaughter by Muammar Gaddafi.

She was a Rhodes scholar, has degrees from Stanford and Oxford, a list of contacts and a relationship with Obama sealed during his 2008 campaign. So her ascension to lead the State Department would be less a blow for diversity - she would be the second black woman named Rice to hold the job - than the natural capstone to a fast-track career.