RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON — Susan E. Rice may have hoped that paying a conciliatory call on three hostile Senate Republicans on Tuesday would smooth over a festering dispute about the deadly attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, and clear a roadblock to her nomination as secretary of state.But the senators seemed anything but mollified, signaling instead that they would still oppose Ms. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, if she is nominated by President Obama, even after she conceded errors in the account of the assault she gave on Sunday morning television programs shortly after it occurred in September.

Two of the Republicans, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, said they would seek to block Ms. Rice, who according to administration officials remains Mr. Obama’s preferred choice to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The third Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, said on Fox that he would be “very hard-pressed” to support Ms. Rice.

“Bottom line, I’m more disturbed than I was before,” Mr. Graham said after the tense, closed-door meeting.

The continued criticism of Ms. Rice, 48, a diplomat with close ties to Mr. Obama, deepens an already bitter and unusually personal feud between the White House and Republicans over Libya. Responding to a question about criticism of Ms. Rice at a news conference two weeks ago, Mr. Obama said, “If Senator McCain and Senator Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me.”

It also raises the prospect of a confirmation battle if the president goes ahead with nominating Ms. Rice. To some extent, that battle is already under way, even before he has submitted her name. Ms. Rice’s visits to senators, which will continue Wednesday, bear all the hallmarks of a presidential nominee seeking to win over reluctant lawmakers.

A senior administration official said the harsh reaction to Ms. Rice’s appearance on Tuesday would have no effect on her chances for secretary of state. “They’ve been saying the same thing for months,” he said.

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, is the other leading candidate for the post. Several senators, including Mr. McCain, said they would prefer Mr. Kerry and predicted that he would sail through a confirmation hearing.

In a statement after the meeting, Ms. Rice said she incorrectly described the attack in Benghazi, which killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, as a spontaneous protest gone awry rather than a premeditated terrorist attack. But she said she based her remarks on the intelligence then available — intelligence that changed over time.

“Neither I nor anyone else in the administration intended to mislead the American people at any stage in the process,” said Ms. Rice, who was accompanied at the 10 a.m. meeting by the acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael J. Morell.

But Mr. Morell reinforced the perception of an administration that cannot get its story straight by asserting during the meeting that the F.B.I. had modified Ms. Rice’s talking points by removing a specific reference to Al Qaeda. At 4 p.m., the senators said in a statement, the C.I.A. called to notify them that Mr. Morell had erred, and that the agency had made the change, not the bureau.

“We are disturbed by the administration’s continued inability to answer even the most basic questions about the Benghazi attack and the administration’s response,” the senators said.

Ms. Rice had requested the meeting amid signs that Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham were softening their criticism. “She deserves the ability and the opportunity to explain herself,” Mr. McCain said Sunday.

It is difficult to gauge whether the opposition of the three Republicans, however vociferous, would be enough to derail Ms. Rice’s chances for the secretary of state post. Assuming the White House had the support of every Senate Democrat, it would have to win over only five Republicans to gain a filibuster-proof majority.

At a minimum, though, Ms. Rice would face harsh scrutiny. Other Republicans on Tuesday continued voicing suspicions that the White House shaded its initial accounts of the attack in Benghazi, during a hard-fought election, to preserve Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism credentials.

Some Republicans condemned Ms. Rice not so much for her handling of the Benghazi affair but for what they said was her blind loyalty to the president. “While I think she’d be outstanding as head of the Democratic National Committee,” said Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, who will meet with her on Wednesday, “I’ve just never seen that sense of independence from her, and I think that’s one of the reasons she got herself into so much trouble.”

The White House continued to defend Ms. Rice, publicly and privately. The press secretary, Jay Carney, said, “There are no unanswered questions about Ambassador Rice’s appearance on Sunday shows and the talking points she used.”

Ms. Rice has other defenders, including Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut independent who has often lined up with Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham. Mr. Lieberman, who is retiring in January, said she had “told the truth and nothing but the truth.”

After meeting with Ms. Rice, Mr. Lieberman said she told him that in her televised remarks, she wished she had said that the “core of Al Qaeda” had been decimated, not simply “Al Qaeda.”

That distinction has been a bone of contention with Mr. McCain, who says the administration has improperly claimed credit for wiping out Al Qaeda when its affiliates are on the march in Iraq, Libya and Yemen.

As they spoke after the meeting, it was clear that Mr. McCain, Mr. Graham and Ms. Ayotte had different grievances. Mr. McCain seemed most intent on extracting an admission from Ms. Rice that her initial account of the attack was incorrect.

Mr. Graham delivered a sweeping critique of the intelligence agencies, which he said had moved slowly in trying to get answers to what happened in Benghazi — for example, in analyzing F.B.I. interviews with survivors of the attack.

On-the-ground accounts indicate that Ms. Rice’s description of the attack, though wrong in some respects, was accurate in others. Witnesses to the assault said it was carried out by members of the Ansar al-Shariah militant group, without any warning or protest, in retaliation for an American-made video mocking the Prophet Muhammad.

The legacy of President George W. Bush also hangs over this dispute. In his comments about Ms. Rice, Mr. Graham cited John R. Bolton, a conservative who was installed by Mr. Bush as ambassador to the United Nations in a controversial recess appointment. “Democrats dug in their heels and said, ‘We’re not going to vote, we’re not going to consider this nomination until we get basic answers to our concerns,’ ” Mr. Graham said.