Madeleine Korbel Albright (May 15, 1937) is the
first woman to become a
United States Secretary of
State. She was appointed by
U.S. President Bill Clinton on December 5, 1996, and was
unanimously
confirmed by a
U.S. Senate vote of 99-0. She was sworn in
on January 23, 1997.
Personal
Early life and education
Albright
was born Marie Jana Korbelová in the Smíchov
district of Prague
, Czechoslovakia
. At the time of her birth, Czechoslovakia had
been independent for fewer than twenty years, having gained
independence from Austria
after
World War I. Her father,
Josef Korbel, was a
Jewish Czech diplomat and supporter
of the early Czech democrats,
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and
Edvard Beneš. She was his first
child with his Jewish wife, Anna (
née Spieglová), who
later also had another daughter Katherine (a schoolteacher) and son
John (an economist).
At the
time of Albright’s birth, her father was serving as press-attaché
at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade
.
However, the signing of the
Munich
Agreement in March 1938 and the disintegration of
Czechoslovakia at the hands of
Adolf
Hitler forced the family into exile because of their links with
Beneš. Prior to their flight, Albright's parents had
converted from
Judaism to
Roman
Catholicism.
Albright spent the war years in England
, while her
father worked for Benes’s Czechoslovak
government-in-exile. They first lived on Kensington Park Road in
Notting
Hill
, London
, where they
endured the worst of The Blitz, but later
moved to Beaconsfield
, then Walton-on-Thames
, on the outskirts of London. While in
England, a young Albright appeared as a refugee child in a film
designed to promote sympathy for all war refugees in London.
Albright was raised
Catholic, but converted
to
Episcopalianism
at the time of her marriage in 1959. Albright did not learn until
late in life that her parents were Jewish and that many of her
Jewish relatives in Czechoslovakia perished in
The Holocaust, including three of her
grandparents.
After the
defeat of the Nazis in the European Theatre of World War
II and the collapse of Nazi Germany
and the Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia, Albright and family moved back to
Prague, where they were given a luxurious apartment in the Hradcany
district (which later caused controversy, as it had
belonged to an ethnic German Bohemian
industrialist family forced out by the Beneš decrees - see
"Controversies"). Korbel was named Czechoslovak Ambassador to
communist
Yugoslavia
, and the family moved to Belgrade.
Communists
governed Yugoslavia, and Korbel was concerned his daughter would be
indoctrinated with Marxist ideology
in a Yugoslav school, so she was taught by a governess and later
sent to the Prealpina Institut pour Jeunes Filles in Chexbres
, on Lake
Geneva
in Switzerland
. Here, she learned
French and went by Madeleine, the French
version of Madlenka, her
Czech
nickname.
However,
the Communist Party of
Czechoslovakia took over the government in 1948, with support
from the Soviet
Union
, and as an opponent of Communism, Korbel was forced
to resign from his position. He later obtained a position on a
United Nations delegation to Kashmir
, and sent his family to the United States
, by way of London, to wait for
him when he arrived to deliver his report to the U.N.
Headquarters, then in Lake Success
, New
York
. The family arrived in New York City
, New York, in November 1948, and initially settled
in Great
Neck
, on Long
Island
, New York. Korbel applied for
political asylum, arguing that as an
opponent of Communism he was now under threat in Prague.
With the
help of Philip Mosely, a professor of Russian at Columbia University in New York City, Korbel obtained a position on the staff of the
political science department at the University of Denver
in Denver
, Colorado
. He became dean of the university’s
Josef Korbel School
of International Studies, and later taught future U.S.
Secretary of State
Condoleezza
Rice.
Albright
spent her teen years in Denver, and graduated from the Kent Denver School in Cherry Hills
Village
, a suburb of Denver, in 1955, where she founded the
school’s international relations club and was its first
president. She attended Wellesley College
, in Wellesley
, Massachusetts
, on a full scholarship, majoring in political science and graduated in
1959. Her senior thesis was written on Czech Communist
Zdeněk Fierlinger. She became
a
U.S. citizen in
1957, and joined the
College Democrats of
America.
Marriage and early career
While home in Denver from Wellesley, Albright worked as an intern
for
The Denver Post, where
she met
Joseph Medill
Patterson Albright, the nephew of
Alicia Patterson, owner of
Newsday and wife of philanthropist
Harry Frank Guggenheim. The couple
were married in 1959, shortly after her graduation, in Wellesley.
They
lived first in Rolla
, Missouri
, while he served his military service at nearby
Fort Leonard Wood. During
this time, she worked at the
Rolla Daily News.
In
January 1960 the couple moved to his hometown of Chicago
, Illinois
, where he worked at the Chicago Sun-Times as a journalist,
and Albright worked as a picture editor for Encyclopædia
Britannica. The following year, Joseph Albright
began work at
Newsday in New York
City, and the couple moved to
Garden
City on Long Island. That year, she gave birth to twin
daughters, Alice Patterson Albright and Anne Korbel Albright.
The twins
were born six weeks premature, and required a long hospital stay,
so as a distraction, Albright began Russian classes at Hofstra
University
in Village of Hempstead
, New York.
Education
In 1962,
the family moved to Georgetown
in Washington, D.C.
, and Albright began studying international relations and
continued studying Russian at the
School of
Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore
, Maryland
. However, in 1963 Alicia Patterson died, and
the family returned to Long Island with the notion of Joseph taking
over the family business. Albright gave birth to another daughter,
Katherine Medill Albright, in 1967, and continued her studies at
Columbia University's
School of
International and Public Affairs. She earned a certificate in
Russian, a
Masters of
Arts and
Doctor of
Philosophy, writing her masters
dissertation on the
Soviet diplomatic
corps, and her doctorate thesis on the role of journalists in
the
Prague Spring of 1968. She also
took a graduate course given by
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would later be
her boss at the
U.S. National Security
Council.
The family returned to Washington in 1968, and Albright commuted to
Columbia for her PhD, which she received in 1975. She began
fund-raising for her daughter’s school, which led to several
positions on education boards. She was eventually invited to
organize a fund-raising dinner for U.S.
Senator Ed Muskie of Maine
’s
presidential campaign in 1972. This association with Muskie
led to a position as his chief legislative assistant in 1976.
However,
after the 1976
U.S. presidential election of Jimmy
Carter, Albright's former professor Brzezinski was named
National
Security Advisor, and recruited Albright from Muskie in 1978 to
work in the West
Wing
as the National Security Council’s
congressional liaison. Following Carter's loss in 1980 to Ronald Reagan, Albright moved on to the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars
at the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington, D.C., where she was given a grant
for a research project. She chose to write on the dissident
journalists involved in Poland
's Solidarity movement, then in its infancy but
gaining international attention. She traveled to
Poland for her research, interviewing dissidents in Gdansk
, Warsaw
and
Krakow
.
Upon her return to Washington, her husband announced his intention
to divorce her for another woman.
In
addition to her PhD, Albright was also awarded Honorary Doctors of
Laws from the University of Washington
in 2002, Smith College in 2003, University
of Winnipeg
in 2005, the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill
in 2007 and Knox College
in 2008 Today, Secretary Albright is once again
a professor at Georgetown, and serves as a Director on the Board of
the Council on Foreign
Relations.
Albright is
multilingual, being
fluent in
English,
French, and
Czech in addition to
Russian, with good speaking and reading
abilities in
Polish and
Serbo-Croatian.
Career
Albright
has served as a lecturer in political science and international
relations at Georgetown University
in Washington, D.C., since 1982, specializing in
Eastern European studies. She has also directed the
University's program on women in global politics. She has also
served as a major
Democratic Party foreign
policy advisor, and briefed Vice-Presidential candidate
Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Presidential
candidate
Michael Dukakis in 1988
(both campaigns ended in defeat).
In 1992, Bill
Clinton returned the White House
to the Democratic Party, and Albright was employed
to handle the transition to a new administration at the National
Security Council. In January 1993, Clinton nominated her to
be
U.S. Ambassador to the
United Nations, her first diplomatic posting.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
Albright was appointed ambassador to the United Nations, her first
diplomatic post, shortly after Clinton was inaugurated, presenting
her credentials on February 9, 1993. During her tenure at the U.N.,
she had a rocky relationship with the
U.N. Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whom she
criticized as "disengaged" and "neglect[ful]" of genocide in
Rwanda
.
Albright wrote:
My deepest regret from my years in public service is
the failure of the United States and the international community to
act sooner to halt these crimes.
In
Shake Hands with the
Devil, Roméo Dallaire
claims that in 1994, in Albright's role as the U.S.'s permanent
representative to the U.N., she avoided describing the killings in
Rwanda as "genocide" until overwhelmed by the evidence for it; this
is now how she describes these massacres in her memoirs. She was
instructed to support a reduction or withdrawal (which never
happened) of the
U.N. Assistance Mission
for Rwanda but was later given more flexibility. Albright later
remarked in
PBS documentary
Ghosts of
Rwanda that
it was a very, very difficult time, and the situation
was unclear.
You know, in retrospect, it all looks very
clear.
But when you were [there] at the time, it was unclear
about what was happening in Rwanda."
She was also criticized for defending the
U.N. sanctions against Iraq (under
Saddam Hussein) in a 1996 interview with
Lesley Stahl on a segment of
CBS's
60 Minutes
that, according to Albright, ignored
Saddam's culpability, his misuse of Iraqi resources, or
the fact that we were not embargoing medicine or food.
I was exasperated that our TV was showing what amounted
to Iraqi propaganda.
When asked by Stahl, "We have heard that half a million children
have died [as a result of sanctions]. I mean, that's more children
than died in
Hiroshima. And, you know, is
the price worth it?" Albright replied: "I think this is a very hard
choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it." She
expressed regret for this remark in 2001 and when she wrote in her
2003 autobiography,I must have been crazy; I should have answered
the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaws in
the premise behind it. […] As soon as I had spoken, I wished for
the power to freeze time and take back those words. My reply had
been a terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy, and wrong. […] I had fallen
into a trap and said something that I simply did not mean. That is
no one’s fault but my own.
This "trap" has been identified as a
loaded question. Her failure to "refram[e
the question] and point[] out [its] inherent flaws" has been called
"the non-denial heard 'round the world" because "by not challenging
the statistic, Albright inadvertently lent credence to it." When
asked about her response in 2005, Albright said "I never should
have made it, it was stupid," and that she still supported the
concept of tailored sanctions.
Both Bill Clinton and Albright insisted that an attack on Hussein
could only be stopped if Hussein reversed his decision to halt arms
inspections. "Iraq has a simple choice. Reverse course or face the
consequences," Albright said.
The lawyers of
Mohamed
Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali, convicted in the 1998 bombing of the
U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, used Albright's
60 Minutes
comment in an attempt to save the terrorist from the death
penalty.
Also in 1996, after Cuban military pilots shot down two small
civilian aircraft flown by the Cuban-American exile group
Brothers to the Rescue over
international waters, she announced, "This is not
cojones. This is cowardice." The
line endeared her to President Clinton, who said it was "probably
the most effective one-liner in the whole administration's foreign
policy."
Boutros
Boutros-Ghali's spokesperson Sylvana Foa said of Albright,
"She's no shrinking violet. She can be biting."
Secretary of State
When Albright was confirmed as the 64th U.S. Secretary of State,
she became the first female U.S. Secretary of State and the
highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government. Not
being a natural-born citizen of the U.S., she was not eligible as
U.S.
Presidential
successor and was excluded from nuclear contingency plans. As
secretary, Albright reinforced the U.S.'s alliances, advocated
democracy and human rights, and promoted American trade and
business, labor and environmental standards abroad.
During
her tenure, Albright considerably influenced American policy in
Bosnia and
Herzegovina
and the Middle
East. She incurred the wrath of a number of
Serbs in the former
Yugoslavia for her role in participating in the
formulation of US policy during the
Kosovo
War and
Bosnian war as well as the
rest of the
Balkans.
But, together with
President Bill Clinton, she remains a largely popular figure in the
rest of the region, especially Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo
, and
Croatia
. According to Albright's memoirs, she once
argued with
Colin Powell for the use of
military force by asking, "What’s the point of you saving
this superb military for,
Colin, if we can't use it?"
With NATO officers during the NATO
Ceremony of Accession of New Members in 1999.
As Secretary of State she represented the U.S. at the
Handover of Hong Kong on July 1, 1997.
She
boycotted the swearing-in ceremony of the China-appointed Hong Kong
Legislative Council
, which replaced the elected one, along with the
British contingents.
According to several accounts, the
U.S. Ambassador to Kenya,
Prudence Bushnell, repeatedly
asked Washington for additional security at the embassy in Nairobi,
including in an April 1998 letter directly to Albright. Bushnell
was ignored. In "Against All Enemies," Richard Clarke writes about
an exchange with Albright several months after the US embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania were bombed in August 1998. "What do you think
will happen if you lose another embassy?" Clarke asked. "The
Republicans in Congress will go after you." "First of all, I didn't
lose these two embassies," Albright shot back. "I inherited them in
the shape they were." Albright was booed in 1998 when the brief war
threat with Iraq revealed that citizens were opposed to such an
invasion, although this is often overlooked.
In 1998,
at the NATO
summit,
Albright articulated what would become known as the "three Ds" of
NATO, "which is no diminution of NATO, no discrimination and no
duplication—because I think thatwe don't need any of those
three "Ds" to happen."
In 2000,
Albright became one of the highest level Western diplomats ever to
meet Kim Jong-il, the communist leader
of North
Korea
, during an official state visit to that
country.
In one of her last acts as Secretary of State, Albright on January
8, 2001, paid a farewell call on
Kofi
Annan and said that the U.S. would continue to press Iraq to
destroy all its weapons of mass destruction as a condition of
lifting economic sanctions, even after the end of the Clinton
administration on January 20, 2001.
Post-2001 career
Following Albright's term as Secretary of State, many speculated
that she might pursue a career in
Czech politics. Czech
President
Václav Havel talked
openly about the possibility of Albright succeeding him after he
retired in 2002. Albright was reportedly flattered by suggestions
that she should run for office, but denied ever seriously
considering it. She was the second recipient of the
Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship
Award presented by the
Prague Society for
International Cooperation.
In 2001, Albright founded the
Albright
Group, an international strategy consulting firm based in
Washington, D.C.
It has Coca-Cola,
Merck, Dubai Ports World
, and Marsh & McLennan
Companies among its clients, who benefit from the access that
Albright has through her global contacts. Affiliated with
the firm is
Albright Capital
Management, which was founded in 2005 to engage in private fund
management related to emerging markets.
Albright currently serves on the
Council on Foreign Relations
Board of directors and on the
International Advisory Committee of the
Brookings Doha Center.
She is also currently
the Mortara Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at the Georgetown
University Walsh School of Foreign
Service
in Washington, D.C. On October 25, 2005,
Albright guest starred on the telvision drama
Gilmore Girls as herself.
In 2003,
she accepted a position on the Board of Directors of the New York
Stock Exchange
. In 2005, Albright declined to run for
re-election to the board in the aftermath of the
Richard Grasso compensation scandal, in which
Grasso, the chairman of the NYSE Board of Directors, had been
granted $187.5 million in compensation, with little governance by
the board on which Albright sat. During the tenure of the interim
chairman,
John S. Reed, Albright served as chairwoman of the NYSE
board's nominating and governance committee. Shortly after the
appointment of the NYSE board's permanent chairman in 2005,
Albright submitted her resignation.
On
January 5, 2006, she participated in a meeting at the White House of former Secretaries of Defense and State to
discuss U.S. foreign policy with George W. Bush administration officials.
On May 5,
2006, she was again invited to the White House to meet with former
Secretaries and Bush administration officials to discuss Iraq
.
Albright currently serves as chairperson of the
National
Democratic Institute for International Affairs and as president
of the
Truman
Scholarship Foundation. She is also the co-chair of the
Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor and held
the Chair of the
Council
of Women World Leaders Women's Ministerial Initiative
up until November 16, 2007, succeeded by
Margot Wallström.
In an interview given to
Newsweek
International published July 24, 2006, Albright gave her
opinion on current U.S. foreign policy. Albright said: "I hope I'm
wrong, but I'm afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the
greatest disaster in American foreign policy—worse than
Vietnam."
In September 2006, she received the
Menschen in Europa Award, with
Václav Havel, for furthering the cause of
international understanding.
Albright has mentioned her physical fitness and exercise regimen in
several interviews. She has said she is capable of
leg pressing 400 pounds.
At the
National Press Club in Washington on November 13, 2007, Albright
declared that she with William Cohen
would co-chair a new "Genocide Prevention
Task Force" created by the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum
, the American Academy of Diplomacy,
and the United States
Institute for Peace. Their appointment was criticized by
Harut Sassounian and the
Armenian National
Committee of America.
On May
13, 2007, two days before her 70th birthday, Albright received an
honorary doctor of laws degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill.
Albright endorsed and supported
Hillary
Clinton in her 2008 campaign for U.S. President. Albright has
been a close friend of Clinton and serves as her top informal
advisor on foreign policy matters. She is currently serving as a
top advisor for U.S. President
Barack
Obama in a working group on national security. On December 1,
2008, then-President-elect Obama nominated then-Senator Clinton for
Albright's former post of Secretary of State.
Books
After her retirement, Albright published her memoir,
Madam Secretary (2003),
The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World
Affairs (2006),
Memo to the President Elect: How We
Can Restore America's Reputation and Leadership (2008), and
Read My Pins (2009).
Controversies
Albright is a part of International Advisory Committee for
Brookings Doha Center, which is a part of Saban Center for Middle
East Policy. The Savab Center is named for its financier Haim
Saban, an American-Israeli billionaire and media proprietor. Saban
has stated of himself, “I’m a one issue guy, and my issue is
Israel”.
Radovan Karadžić
During
his first hearing in front of the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia
, Radovan
Karadžić stated that Albright along with Richard Holbrooke offered him a deal which
would allow him not to get prosecuted for asserted war crimes if he
would disappear from public life and politics. According to
Karadžić, Albright offered him to get out of the way and go to
Russia
, Greece
, or
Serbia
and open a
private clinic or to at least go to Bijeljina
. He also said that Holbrooke or Albright
would like to see him disappear and expressed the fear for his life
by saying "I do not know how long the arm of Mr Holbrooke or Mrs
Albright is ... or whether that arm can reach me here."
Note on religious affiliation
* Albright was raised Catholic and is affiliated by
choice with an Episcopal church. But traditional Judaism, which
considers neither conversion nor nonaffiliation as relevant to
Jewish status, considers Albright Jewish based on her mother having
been Jewish.
References
- Albright, Madeleine K. Madam Secretary, 2003, pp.
8-9
- Choosing to Remain a 'Forced Convert', Ari
Beker, Haaretz, October
12, 2006
- Albright, 2003, pp. 9-11.
- Albright, 2003, p. 9.
- Dobbs, Michael. "Albright's Family Tragedy Comes to Light",
The Washington Post February 4,
1997, p. A01.
- Albright, 2003, p. 15.
- Albright, 2003, p. 4.
- Albright, 2003, p. 17.
- Albright, 2003, p. 18.
- Albright, 2003, p. 19-20.
- Albright, 2003, p. 20.
- Albright, 2003, p. 24.
- Albright, 2003, p. 47.
- Albright, 2003, p. 43.
- Albright, 2003, pp. 34-35.
- Albright, 2003, p. 36.
- Albright, 2003, p. 48.
- Albright, 2003, pp. 49-50.
- Albright, 2003, p. 52.
- Albright, 2003, p. 54.
- Albright, 2003, p. 55.
- Albright, 2003, p. 56.
- Albright, 2003, pp. 56, 59, 71.
- Albright, 2003, p. 57.
- Albright, 2003, p. 71.
- Albright, 2003, pp. 63-66.
- Albright, 2003, p. 65.
- Albright, 2003, p. 91.
- Albright, 2003, p. 92.
- Albright, 2003, p. 94.
- Albright, 2003, p. 99.
- Albright, 2003, p. 100.
- Albright, 2003, pp. 102-104.
- Albright, 2003, p. 127.
- Albright, 2003, p. 131.
- Albright, 2003, p. 207.
- Albright, 2003, p. 147.
- Albright, 2003, pp. 150-151.
- Albright, 2003, pp.274-275.
- Albright, 2003, p. 205.
- Albright, 2003, p. 182.
- Madeleine Albright to Co-Chair Genocide Prevention
Task Force, Huffington Post, November 20,
2007.
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