In an exclusive excerpt on The Daily Beast from her memoir, No Higher Honor, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tells the story of her meeting with the now-dead Libyan dictator Muammar Gadaffi during the Bush administration's second term. Gadaffi was clearly infatuated with her; she writes, "At the end of dinner [in Gadaffi's private kitchen, he] told me that he’d made a videotape for me. Uh oh, I thought, what is this going to be? It was a quite innocent collection of photos of me with world leaders—President Bush, Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao, and so on — set to the music of a song called 'Black Flower in the White House,' written for me by a Libyan composer. It was weird, but at least it wasn’t raunchy.

Rice explains the political importance of delaying and then having a meeting with the Libyan leader, who, she notes, referred to her as his "African princess." Rice, a member of The Commonwealth Club's Board of Governors, spoke to the Club in October 2010 about her previous book and her upbringing in the segregated South. You can watch a video of that event on the Club's website.

No Higher Honor will be published by Crown on November 1, 2011.