Madeleine Albright was the first woman to serve as US
Secretary of State and a ‘Grande Dame’ of foreign policy for the Democratic
Party. She wrote books, served on think tank boards and warned of the risk of fascism
in the Donald Trump era.
She died on March 23, 2022 at the age of 84; the cause
of death was cancer.
Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, halfway through
his two-term presidency, Albright became the highest-ranking woman in the US
government at the time. As the top US diplomat, she called for the use of force
as the conflict in Kosovo descended into ethnic cleansing. That was consistent
with the hard line she had pressed during the Bosnian War, when she was
Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations. She later described the Rwandan
genocide of 1994 and the failure to achieve a Mideast peace accord as among her
biggest regrets.
“Madeleine’s courage and toughness helped bring peace to the
Balkans and paved the way for progress in some of the most unstable corners of
the world,” President Barack Obama said upon awarding Albright the Presidential
Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2012.
Responding to news of her death, State Department spokesman
Ned Price told reporters, “The impact that she has had on this building is felt
every single day. She was a trailblazer as the first female Secretary of State
and quite literally opened doors for a large element of our workforce.”
In a statement, Clinton called Albright “an extraordinary
human being” and “a passionate force for freedom, democracy and human rights.”
Albright was famous for well-tailored suits adorned
with pins or brooches, ranging from balloons to carnivorous animals
and chosen to reflect a mood or an opinion. After learning that the Russians
had bugged a conference room near her office at the State Department, for
example, she wore a pin shaped like a huge bug.
Albright’s stature and style belied a commanding negotiating
skill. When Yasser Arafat walked out of Paris talks in 2000, Albright told
guards at the US ambassador’s residence to “Shut the gates!” As UN ambassador,
she responded to Cuba’s 1996 downing of two unarmed Cessna aircraft: “This is
cowardice.”
In an opinion column published February 23, 2022
in the New York Times, just before Russian forces invaded Ukraine, Albright
took direct aim at Russian President Vladimir Putin. She disclosed that while
flying back to Washington after her first meeting with Putin in 2000, she recorded
her observations of him, “Putin is small and pale, so cold as to be almost
reptilian.”
“Instead of paving Russia’s path to greatness,” she wrote in
the column, “invading Ukraine would ensure Mr. Putin’s infamy by leaving his
country diplomatically isolated, economically crippled and strategically
vulnerable in the face of a stronger, more united Western alliance.”
In an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “The Close,” Leon
Panetta, a White House Chief of Staff under Clinton, recalled Albright as “a
Cold War warrior” who had been “raised to understand what communism was about
and what the threat from Russia was all about.”
Thomas Pickering, who served under Albright as Under Secretary
for political affairs, said in an interview on Bloomberg Radio’s “Sound On”,
“She had little love, I would say, for Russia, and that skepticism and indeed
suspicion about Russia has proven to be more true than I think any of us had
reason to believe when I worked for her.”
An emigrant who fled Czechoslovakia at the dawn of World War
II only to discover her own Jewish heritage more than a half-century later,
Albright witnessed firsthand the displacement of those deemed undesirable.
“In the end, no one who lived through the years of 1937 to
1948 was a stranger to profound sadness,” Albright wrote in “Prague Winter,”
her personal account of the period. “Millions of innocents did not survive, and
their deaths must never be forgotten.”
Albright was born Marie Jana Korbel on May 15, 1937, in
Prague, one of three children of Josef Korbel, a diplomat, and the former Anna
Spieglova. The family statement on her death gave her surname at birth as
Korbelova. When the German army arrived in 1939, the family went into exile in
London.
At war’s end, they returned to Prague, relocating several
months later to Belgrade where her father served as ambassador. At the age of
10, Albright was sent to boarding school in Switzerland.
When the Communist Party took control in Czechoslovakia in
1948, her father accepted a post on a UN commission on Kashmir. The Korbels
stayed in New York. By then, Albright spoke four languages: Czech,
Serbo-Croatian, English and French.
Gaining political asylum in 1949, they moved to Denver,
where her father became a professor at the University of Denver. She met her
future husband, Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, during a summer job at the
Denver Post. They married in 1959, the same year she earned a bachelor’s degree
in political science from Wellesley College in Massachusetts. They had three
daughters -- Anne, Alice and Katharine -- before the marriage ended in divorce
A Catholic who became an Episcopalian in marriage, Albright
learned of her Jewish ancestry ‑ along with the death of more than a dozen
relatives, including three grandparents in the Holocaust ‑ in 1997 at age 59.
In her 2003 autobiography, “Madam Secretary,” she said of
her own parents, “My guess is that they associated our heritage with suffering
and wanted to protect us. They had come to America to start a new life.”
Albright obtained a Ph.D. in public law and government from
Columbia University where she studied under Zbigniew Brzezinski, President
Jimmy Carter’s future National Security Adviser. She also earned a certificate
in Russian studies.
In 1976, Albright became the chief legislative aide to
Democratic US Senator Ed Muskie of Maine. Two years later, Brzezinski recruited
his former student as the National Security Council’s congressional liaison.
When Republicans came to power, she taught at Georgetown
University and advised Democrats on foreign policy, including presidential
candidates Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. In 1989, she became president of
the public policy think tank Center for National Policy.
With Clinton’s victory in 1992, she became US Permanent Representative
to the UN. In 1995, when as many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered in
Srebrenica at the hands of Bosnian Serbs, Albright presented evidence of mass
graves to the Security Council.
With the lessons of Rwanda fresh in mind, she
argued for the use of force. Following the shelling of a Sarajevo market in
August, the largest North Atlantic Treaty Organization mission ever got under
way, leading to the Dayton Accords that ended the war.
When Warren Christopher, Clinton’s first Secretary of State,
announced his plan to return to the private sector, Albright was nominated as
his successor. The US Senate unanimously confirmed her appointment.
Albright sought the use of force again in Kosovo, where in
1998 a civil war had ensued. Dubbed “Madeleine’s War,” NATO engaged in combat
for the second time in its history, launching air strikes in March 1999 without
the approval of the Security Council.
“Madeleine Albright is somebody who grew up learning the
lessons of Munich, the danger of appeasing dictators, and she feels we need
this more-assertive foreign policy not to back down in the face of people like
Milosevic,” historian Walter Isaacson told CNN in a May 1999 interview. By
June, Slobodan Milosevic’s troops began to withdraw from Kosovo.
Her efforts toward an Israel-Palestinian peace weren’t as
successful. “People ask about my greatest disappointment as Secretary. This was
it,” she said in her memoir.
Albright also supported the expansion of NATO and pressured
Iraq to end its blockade of UN weapons inspectors. When Iraq didn’t comply, the
US and Britain launched a series of air strikes known as Operation Desert Fox.
In October 2000, she became the highest-ranking US
representative ever to make an official visit to North Korea, meeting with
President Kim Jong Il. “I am sad to say that the Bush administration didn’t
pick up the hand of cards that we left on the table there,” Albright said on
MSNBC in 2013.
Following her government career, Albright returned to
Georgetown as a professor. In 2005, she founded emerging markets investment
adviser Albright Capital Management LLC within her Albright Group consultancy.
She combined the firm with Stonebridge International in 2009 to form the
Washington-based Albright Stonebridge Group, a global business strategy
firm.
In addition to her autobiography and “Prague Winter,”
Albright wrote best-selling books, including 2009’s “Read My Pins: Stories from
a Diplomat’s Jewel Box.”
Even into her 80s, Albright’s defense of the ideals of
democracy remained strong. The ascendency of authoritarian leaders was “a more
serious threat now than at any time since the end of World War II,” she wrote
in a 2018 essay in the Times that coincided with the publication of
her book “Fascism: A Warning.” She added, “The possibility that fascism will be
accorded a fresh chance to strut around the world stage is enhanced by the
volatile presidency of Donald Trump.”
She led the nongovernmental organization National Democratic
Institute for International Affairs and the Pew Global Attitudes Project. She
also served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the boards of the Aspen
Institute, Center for American Progress and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Albright never lost sight of the way her career broke
through glass ceilings and made a point of promoting the careers of women
throughout her professional life. In fact, she made famous a mantra: “There’s a
special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
