On January 23, 1997, Madeleine Albright made a little bit of history. Aged 58, she became America’s first female secretary of state in the 207-year history of that post, and the highest-ranking woman in US history.
It was an achievement made all the more remarkable by her life story. She was born not in the US, but in Czechoslovakia shortly before the Second World War. Her family were twice forced to flee their homeland — once by Hitler’s Nazis, and again by Stalin’s communists. They arrived in the US, via London, when she was 11 and granted political asylum. She proceeded to marry and have children, and was 39 by the time she began her first political job.
Ten days after she took office that story took another twist. In a front page article headlined “Albright’s Family Tragedy Comes to Light”, the Washington Post revealed that Albright, though raised a Roman Catholic, was actually of Jewish descent, and that a dozen of her relatives, including three grandparents, had died in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.
Albright was astounded. Her parents had told her that her grandparents had died of old age. “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,” she wrote in her memoirs. “How do you deal with such a seminal truth in the sixth decade of your life?”
Her turbulent background informed her diplomacy. She saw America as a champion of freedom and democracy. She believed in its continued global leadership in a post-Cold War era when it might have withdrawn, and in the importance of its transatlantic alliances.
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Albright fought hard to bring the former communist nations of central and eastern Europe, including the newly divided Czech and Slovak republics, back into the western fold. She was not afraid to threaten force against oppression, and her greatest achievement was to goad Nato into military action to end Slobodan Milosevic’s slaughter of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Despite her initial intellectual insecurity and diminutive stature, and being abruptly abandoned by her husband when she was 45, Albright was direct, gutsy, tireless and idealistic, and served as a role model for other women. Ruminating at the end of her memoirs on how she would like to be remembered, she wrote: “I hope people will say I did the best with what I was given, tried to make my parents proud, served my country with all the energy I had, and took a strong stand on the side of freedom. Perhaps some will also say that I helped teach a generation of older women to stand tall, and younger women not to be afraid to interrupt.”
Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Korbel in Prague in 1937, the oldest child of a Czechoslovakian diplomat. Shortly before her second birthday the Nazis occupied that city, and the family fled to London. They moved into a flat in Notting Hill Gate during the Blitz and Albright’s father began working as an information officer for the Czechoslovakian government in exile, broadcasting on the BBC. The family later moved to Walton-on-Thames, and by the time the war ended Albright was “busy becoming a proper little English girl”.
After a brief return to Prague her father was appointed ambassador to Yugoslavia. In Belgrade she became the embassy mascot, greeting dignitaries including the future Yugoslav dictator Josip Tito, until she was sent to school in Switzerland to learn French. A Soviet-backed communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 ended that adventure, and soon afterwards the family sailed for New York in the SS America. Her father started teaching at the University of Denver in Colorado, and rose to become the dean of its school of international relations. Albright became “an American teenager” named Madeleine. She later remarked that the British welcomed refugees then asked when they were leaving, while Americans welcomed them and asked when they were becoming citizens.
At 18, she won a scholarship to Wellesley, the elite women’s college near Boston. Working at the Denver Post one summer she met another intern, Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, scion of a wealthy newspaper family. They married in 1959 and went on to have three daughters, Katie and twins Anne and Alice. Her children survive her.
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Their early married life was peripatetic. After six months of military service in Missouri her husband began learning the family business first on Chicago’s Sun-Times, then Long Island’s Newsday, before settling in Washington DC’s fashionable Georgetown district in 1968 (they later bought a farm in Virginia). By then she had embarked on a PhD in Soviet studies at Columbia University where she was taught by Zbigniew Brzezinski, her future boss on President Carter’s National Security Council.
Albright’s route to political prominence was improbable. As her husband became a well-known journalist she began fundraising for her daughters’ private school, and then became chairwoman of its trustees. That led to her organising a fundraising dinner in 1972 for Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, who was running for president. Four years later, impressed by her intelligence and efficiency, he appointed her his chief legislative assistant. At 39, with three children, she had landed her first serious job since briefly working for Encyclopedia Britannica 15 years earlier. After two years she moved to the Carter White House as congressional liaison for Brzezinski, her former professor. By the time Carter lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan she was a seasoned member of Carter’s foreign policy team, having helped to deal with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis.
Out of office, she added Polish to her list of languages, and visited Poland during the early days of the Solidarity uprising against communist rule. Then came a “thunderbolt”. Her husband announced he was leaving her for another woman. They divorced in 1983. She never remarried, and gradually came to enjoy the freedom of being single. “I finally realised I could not fill the huge hole in my life. When I gave up that search I became more content.”
Rocked but not broken, Albright began teaching international affairs at Georgetown University. She also served as a foreign affairs adviser to Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign, and three years later she became one of the first senior Democrats to back Michael Dukakis’s presidential bid. She served as his senior foreign policy adviser as he won the Democratic nomination but lost to George HW Bush.
Another extraordinary year in Albright’s life was 1990. She returned to her native Czechoslovakia in the immediate aftermath of the Velvet Revolution that overthrew communism. There she befriended the new president, the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel, and helped him to create a new democratic government. She also organised his first official visit to the US where he was hailed as a hero. Theirs was “one of the most precious friendships of my life,” said Albright.
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In 1992 Bill Clinton won the presidency and made Albright his UN ambassador at a time when the Cold War’s end had unlocked the deadlock within that global body but unleashed pent-up ethnic conflicts around the world. She described the security council as “14 suits and a skirt”.
Albright argued for “assertive multilateralism”, meaning US leadership of collective operations, but her tenure began with two conspicuous failures.
The US leadership of a UN force charged with ending a civil war in Somalia culminated in a warlord’s militia shooting down two US Black Hawk helicopters, killing 19 US soldiers and dragging their bodies through the streets of Mogadishu. “I had been part of the decisions that led to this . . . It was a nightmare,” Albright admitted. Worse, she and others failed to foresee or halt the genocide in Rwanda in which an estimated 600,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutus. “My biggest regret in public life was that we did not do more, sooner, to halt the killing,” she said. Yet she was influential in persuading the Clinton administration, backed by the UN, to threaten the use of force that persuaded the military junta in Haiti to step down and restored Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the elected president, to power. More importantly, she championed the use of force to end the long and bloody Balkans war, at one point asking Colin Powell, then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff: “What are you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?”
As her term progressed she grew in confidence and became a faintly glamorous figure, consorting with the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barbra Streisand and becoming the first senior US official to meet Aung San Suu Kyi while she was under house arrest in Myanmar. Her term ended with her orchestrating the removal of the UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whom she regarded as an obstacle to reform, and his replacement by Kofi Annan.
Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996. On December 4 that year, disregarding four strong male candidates, he appointed Albright the first female secretary of state, a decision he attributed to his wife. She had told him, he said: “Only if you pick Madeleine will you get a person who shares your values, who is an eloquent defender of your foreign policy, and who will make every girl proud.”
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It was a momentous announcement. Returning to New York by train, Albright was mobbed by the passengers including a young girl seeking her autograph. “You can be anything you want to be,” she wrote. The Senate approved her nomination unanimously. A predecessor, Henry Kissinger, jovially chided her for taking away the one thing that had made him a unique holder of the office — his foreign birth.
Being a woman was no great disadvantage, she said. Arriving in a big aircraft proclaiming “United States of America” meant foreign governments knew that “if they were going to do foreign policy they at least had to talk to me”. She developed a habit of wearing brooches that sent signals: flowers, hot air balloons or, in one instance, a coiled snake. Her achievement over the next four years was to rally domestic and international support for the use of force to stop Milosevic’s Serb forces slaughtering ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. She rallied reluctant European allies, circumvented Russia’s opposition, and brought a wary Pentagon on board.
The Nato bombing campaign began on March 24, 1999, and “Madeleine’s War”, as Time magazine dubbed it, lasted 78 days before Milosevic capitulated. He was subsequently ousted from power and tried by the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague.
“If Nato had not acted, the Serb offensive would have permanently displaced more than half a million Kosovars, radicalising many and creating a new source of long-term tensions within Europe,” she contended. “Milosevic would have been strengthened, perhaps tempting others to enhance their own power through similar methods. And Nato would have been left divided and questioning its own relevance as the 21st century dawned.”
Earlier she had worked hard to secure Nato’s eastward expansion in the face of Russian opposition, and enjoyed an emotional trip to Prague to deliver its membership invitation to her native land in person. She helped to secure an easing of US sanctions on Cuba, and to break a long stand-off with Libya by persuading Colonel Gaddafi to surrender for trial two men charged with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.
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Other diplomatic ventures were less successful. She and Clinton devoted huge amounts of time to the Middle East. They managed to persuade Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu and the Palestinians’ Yasser Arafat to sign the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, but their best efforts to persuade the two sides to honour that road map failed.
She and Clinton also fought long and hard to force Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to accept international weapons inspections, but ended up bombing key Iraqi targets when he refused. On her watch, the US also bombed targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for al-Qaeda’s bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Clinton and Albright’s terms ended with a quixotic effort to persuade North Korea to end its missile tests. She became the most senior US official ever to visit Pyongyang, holding six hours of talks with Kim Jong-il to determine whether Clinton should meet the North Korean dictator.
Albright was succeeded by Colin Powell, the first black secretary of state (obituary, October 18, 2021). She returned to teaching at Georgetown University, set up an international strategy consulting firm, wrote several books, played herself in a couple of television shows and served on the boards of the New York Stock Exchange and Council on Foreign Relations. She generated controversy when she backed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid by declaring: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t back other women.”
When Havel stepped down as Czech president in 2003 he suggested that Albright seek to succeed him. It was a great honour, she said, and she was tempted by the idea of living in Prague Castle, but by that time she had “long since become an American”.
Madeleine Albright, first female US secretary of state, was born on May 15, 1937. She died of cancer on March 23, 2022, aged 84
