The outgoing secretary of state talks to Daniel Dombeyand Edward Luceon how her term in office shaped the United States
THE DAY before Condoleezza Rice sat down with us, the outgoing secretary of state posed for some 600 photos with her state department officials.
Soon after our time with her came to a close, she was due to answer the questions of another interviewer: Venus Williams, the tennis champion.
Dr Rice remains a star during her last month in office. But, in the media flurry before she heads back to Stanford University to write a book about her parents, her effort to burnish her legacy is complicated.
Democrats and diplomats often praise her efforts to improve relations with traditional allies during the past four years - but only after first criticising her part in the perceived unilateralism of President Bush's first term.
"I was national security adviser in the first term and I don't think of it as a period in which we didn't have diplomacy," she says.
But she adds that the first four years were "less a time of solidifying gains and building relationships and more a time of a different kind of engagement" - an apparent reference to the Iraq war.
By contrast, in 2005 she began at the state department by seeking a change of course on Iran, working on a common approach with the European Union.
"When she moved from the White House to the state department she became a vigorous advocate for and in many ways a skilful practitioner of diplomacy," says Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state under President Bill Clinton. "She was one of the more influential secretaries of state where it really counted, which is in the Oval office.
"This partly explains what has been a remarkable and dramatic change in attitude towards the world between the first and the second term of a single president."
Today, discussing issues from Iraq and Iran to Russia and India, Dr Rice makes the case - a far from popular one - that the policies put into place by the Bush administration have made the US stronger.
She disputes the now common view that the US has strengthened Iran by replacing Saddam Hussein, the Islamic Republic's long-standing foe, with a friendly government in Baghdad.
"Iran's allies lost in the south of Iraq," she insists, highlighting this year's battles between the Iraqi army and groups allied with Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia cleric.
She adds that Iran "did everything it could to stop" the agreement the US signed with Iraq this month, which gave bilateral backing for US troops in the country, but also provided dates for their pullout.
Still, Dr Rice concedes that the US-EU push on Tehran's nuclear programme has yet to bear results where it really matters: reining in Iran's enrichment and reprocessing activities.
She maintains that international and unilateral sanctions on Iran, amplified by the effects of the tumbling oil price, will probably change Tehran's behaviour eventually - although she does not know whether by that time Iran will have acquired nuclear weapons capability.
One big factor will be Russia, which in recent months has rejected all attempts to impose substantive new UN sanctions on Iran.
Dr Rice says that, after this year's Georgia-Russia war, co-operation with Moscow is based on "interests", not, as she previously hoped, on "values".
But she adds that Russia is in a state of flux: Vladimir Putin's claims to deliver a better life for ordinary Russians have been strained by the international financial crisis.
Another source of uncertainty is south and central Asia.
Tensions between India and Pakistan have run high in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, while US officials are ever more concerned about al-Qaeda "safe havens" and Taliban bases in Pakistan's frontier regions.
The real issue, Dr Rice maintains, is whether Pakistan cracks down on "terrorism and extremism. They now know it will consume them if they don't . . . This is a very tough problem for this civilian government."
It is a concern that the incoming Obama team has identified as perhaps its biggest foreign policy challenge. It is also a sombre note to strike in an exit interview. In spite of Dr Rice's star status, in many ways the diplomatic scene she leaves behind her is dark and deeply uncertain.
Seasoned adviser Condoleezza Rice was born in 1954 in Alabama and earned a PhD from the University of Denver in 1981. From 1989 to 1991, she was an adviser to George HW Bush, former president, on Soviet and east European affairs.
She has been a member of the faculty of Stanford University since 1981, working as a professor of political science and, in the late 1990s, as the university's provost.
After serving as George W Bush's national security adviser in 2001 to 2005, she became secretary of state in 2005.
Dr Rice, who declines to say if she voted for Barack Obama, recently held a private dinner for Hillary Clinton, her prospective successor. - ( Financial Timesservice)