Coit Blacker, a Stanford professor who is one of the secretary of state’s closest friends, recalls going into a shop where Rice asked to see earrings. The clerk showed her costume jewelry. Rice asked to see something nicer, prompting the clerk to whisper some sass under her breath.

Blacker remembers Rice tearing the woman to shreds.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” he recalls her saying. “You are behind the counter because you have to work for minimum wage. I’m on this side asking to see the good jewelry because I make considerably more.”

A manager quickly brought Rice better baubles.

Glenn Kessler recounts the tale in his penetrating new bio, “The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy.” Kessler, a Washington Post correspondent who enjoyed unprecedented access to his subject, says Rice has lost none of her bluntness, once cutting off bulldog Donald Rumsfeld in front of startled Japanese counterparts. But she’s also worked hard to soften her edges.

Her top aide, Jim Wilkinson, decreed that she shouldn’t be photographed alone, but rather in the convivial company of other people. They may have tried hard to thaw her image when she showed up at a U.S. air base in Germany dressed in a black, knee-high skirt and saucy knee-high boots. “With one arm stretched out, she looked like a cross between Mussolini and Liza Minnelli,” Kessler writes.

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