NYT: As Her Star Wanes, Rice Tries to Reshape Legacy
By HELENE COOPER
Published: September 1, 2007
WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 — On May 25, Stanford University’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, devoted the bulk of its front page to the university’s former provost, who is on leave while she serves out her term as secretary of state. “Condi Eyes Return,” read the headline, “but in What Role?” Within hours, the letters to the editor started coming in. “Condoleezza Rice serves an administration that has trashed the basic values of academia: reason, science, expertise, and honesty. Stanford should not welcome her back,” wrote Don Ornstein, identified by the newspaper as an emeritus professor of mathematics in a letter published May 31.
Online comments on the newspaper’s Web site were even harsher, a veritable stream of vitriol. One of the milder posts came from Jon Wu, who did not give an affiliation: “Please go away, Rice. We don’t want someone who is responsible for the slaughter of an entire nation teaching at our school.”
There was a time when, perhaps more than Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice seemed to have the best shot at becoming the first woman or the first African-American to be president. But that was before she sounded public alarms based on faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, telling CNN, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” It was before a former top Bush administration colleague, David Kay, charged with finding unconventional weapons after the Iraq invasion, referred to Ms. Rice in Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial” as “probably the worst national security adviser since the office was created.”
And it was before furious Lebanese hung a huge banner depicting Ms. Rice’s face, with blood dripping from her lips, from a bridge in central Beirut.
Today, Ms. Rice, 52, continues to have far more star appeal than any other of Mr. Bush’s top advisers. Just last month, GQ magazine ranked her the most powerful person in Washington. Forbes has twice ranked her as the world’s most powerful woman, and Time has listed her as one of the world’s most influential people four times.
But a lot of her gloss has diminished under the steady drumbeat of exposés and tell-all books about the unraveling of the Bush administration and specifically about her inability, as national security adviser, to effectively arbitrate the running turf war between Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over Iraq policy, a war which she, and President Bush, allowed Mr. Rumsfeld to win....
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/washington/01rice.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all 
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