Madeleine Albright

American secretary of state (1997–2001)

• Born: May 15, 1937
• Birthplace: Prague, Czechoslovakia (now in Czech Republic)
• Died: March 23, 2022
• Place of death: Washington, D.C., U.S.

As ambassador to the United Nations and the first woman to hold the office of US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright helped shape a foreign policy that emphasized an activist but not unilateral role for the United States.

Early Life

Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Korbel in Prague, Czechoslovakia, shortly before Nazi Germany took control of the country. Her father, Josef Korbel, was an intellectual and a member of the Czech diplomatic corps. Her mother, Anna Speeglova Korbel, was the daughter of a prosperous family. Albright had two siblings, Katherine Korbel Silva and John Joseph Korbel. Albright’s grandparents were Jewish, and three of them died in the Holocaust, a fact Albright learned only after her appointment as secretary of state. Her parents converted to Roman Catholicism, apparently to escape persecution, and Albright grew up celebrating Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter.

Albright’s earliest experiences were shaped by World War II. When German agents took power in Czechoslovakia in 1938, her father, an outspoken opponent of the Nazis, was targeted for execution. While Josef Korbel tried to get false diplomatic papers that would get his family out of the country, he and his wife walked the streets of Prague with the infant Madeleine, making sure they stayed in public places where the Nazis would not assault him. They were able to escape to England. Albright later recalled staying in London air-raid shelters and sleeping under a steel table during bombing raids. During her stay, she became fluent in English. After the war, the Korbel family returned briefly to Prague. Josef soon resumed his diplomatic career, which took him to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and then to New York, where he was assigned a position at the United Nations (UN).

While the Korbels were in New York, Czechoslovakia experienced another coup; the communists took charge and Josef Korbel was once again a wanted man. The family was granted political asylum in the United States, and in 1949, they moved to Colorado, where Josef became a professor of international relations at the University of Denver. A respected scholar and the author of many books on diplomacy, he was Albright’s first major intellectual authority. She attributed many of her views to her father’s influence.

In Colorado, Albright attended a small private high school. She won a scholarship to Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she majored in political science, edited the college newspaper for a year, and campaigned for Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. In 1959, she graduated with honors.

Only three days after graduation, she married Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, the heir of a prominent newspaper family. They moved to Chicago, where he was employed with the Chicago Sun-Times. Albright, however, was told that as a journalist’s spouse, she would never be hired by a newspaper. Instead, she worked briefly in public relations for the Encyclopedia Britannica before her family moved to New York City in 1961. During the next six years, Albright gave birth to twins Alice and Anne and daughter Katherine. She also enrolled in the graduate program in public law and government at Columbia University.

Life’s Work

Albright credited her success to her willingness to work hard. She earned a master’s degree, a certificate in Russian studies, and, in 1976, a doctorate. Her dissertation concerned the role of the press in the 1968 crisis in Czechoslovakia, during which dissidents tried to end Soviet control of the country. The dissertation, like much of her later career and writing, would combine Albright's dual fascinations with journalism and foreign policy. At Columbia, Albright studied with Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who directed the Institute on Communist Affairs. Along with her father, Brzezinski would be one of Albright’s most important intellectual mentors.

In 1968, Albright’s husband was transferred to Washington, DC, where he became the bureau chief of Newsday. Albright became involved with her daughters’ private school, for which she organized several successful fund-raising projects. As a result, a friend recommended her as a fund-raiser for Senator Edmund Muskie’s campaign for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. Although Muskie did not win the nomination, he hired Albright to serve as the chief legislative assistant in his Senate office. She was especially involved in assisting Muskie with his duties as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

When Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, he appointed Brzezinski to be his national security adviser. Brzezinski brought Albright onto the staff of the National Security Council, where she worked as congressional liaison. When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, Albright moved from governmental service to a position as senior fellow in Soviet and Eastern European Affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In 1982, Albright and her husband separated, and she began to devote herself wholeheartedly to her career as a foreign policy analyst and advocate. With the support of a fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, she published Poland: The Role of the Press in Political Change (1983).

In 1982, Albright joined the faculty of Georgetown University, where she remained until 1993 and where she returned after her service as secretary of state. Her experience as a faculty member was a decided success. She served as a professor of international affairs and directed the school’s Women in Foreign Service program. She was named teacher of the year on four occasions. While on the Georgetown faculty, Albright began inviting a variety of guests from academia, the diplomatic service, journalism, and politics to her home for discussions of international issues. Among those who attended Albright’s “salons” was the then governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton; among the topics was the shape that US foreign policy might take when the Democrats regained the White House.

Albright coordinated foreign policy for Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale and vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro during the 1984 campaign. Four years later, she was senior foreign policy adviser and a major speechwriter for Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. During the next four years, Albright served as president of the Center for National Policy, a Democratic think tank and a resource for members of Congress, where she dealt principally with eastern European affairs. She was also involved with the Georgetown Leadership Seminar, an annual session for government officials, bankers, journalists, and military officers. Albright was a frequent guest on the public television program Great Decisions, which provided a chance to reach a larger audience with her views on international affairs.

When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, Albright helped write the foreign-policy sections of the Democratic party platform as well as position papers for the nominee. She was, therefore, an obvious choice for a diplomatic post in the Clinton administration. In December 1992, the president-elect named her US ambassador to the United Nations and made her a member of his cabinet.

Albright brought great energy to her role at the United Nations. She traveled to the capital of every member nation of the Security Council, visited Somalia when US troops were stationed there, and went to Bosnia, where she strongly advocated greater American involvement in the conflict with Serbia. In 1995, she attended the UN Conference on Women, held in China, where she spent a day escorting First Lady Hillary Clinton. She also led the First Lady on a tour of Prague in 1996.

Albright increased the visibility of the seven women ambassadors to the United Nations by organizing lunches for them. She also led the effort to oust Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali from his leadership post. Boutros-Ghali was intensely unpopular with conservatives in the US Congress, and Albright's opposition to him later helped her win Senate approval for her appointment as secretary of state. While serving in the United Nations, Albright remained closely tied to the decision-making process in Washington, DC, where she attended cabinet meetings and sessions of the National Security Council’s principals’ group.

After Clinton was reelected in 1996, it soon became apparent that Secretary of State Warren Christopher would step down from his post. Clinton considered several former senators and career diplomats to fill the position, but he eventually chose to nominate Albright. She was easily confirmed by the Senate, which supported her nomination by a vote of 99–0.

As secretary of state, Albright faced instability in many areas of the world, financial crises that had diplomatic repercussions, and a reconsideration of relations with some of the United States’ friends and adversaries. For example, in the Middle East, hostile relations with Iraq continued as Saddam Hussein apparently persisted in threatening his neighbors and in resisting United Nations inspections of his country’s weapons capabilities. The United States maintained a hard line against the Iraqi leader while trying to ease the hardships endured by the people of that country. On the other hand, a dialogue emerged between the United States and Iran, with Secretary Albright suggesting that the two former adversaries might look for common ground. She encouraged the Israelis and Palestinians to continue their peace process and negotiate the future of the disputed territories.

With respect to Europe, Albright was an enthusiastic supporter of an expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to include Poland and the Czech Republic and of the Good Friday Agreement to resolve the political and religious conflicts in Northern Ireland. She advocated a strong multilateral response to the crisis in Bosnia, including a US “police” presence, economic assistance, and punishment of war criminals. Albright also encouraged economic assistance to Russia to avert a political and economic emergency there. The secretary of state visited a number of African nations, as well as important Asian countries such as Korea, Japan, and China. In addition to reaffirming support for the United States’ traditional allies, she explicated President Clinton’s policy that promoted expanded trade with China while keeping the issue of human rights on the diplomatic agenda. In light of the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan, Albright called for both countries to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and reaffirmed the administration’s desire that the US Senate ratify the treaty. She also urged Congress to provide assistance through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to Indonesia and other countries experiencing economic crises and to appropriate funds to pay the United States’ obligations to the United Nations.

Unlike some of her predecessors who saw foreign policy as a very personal achievement, Albright believed in developing a highly competent team to carry out the US diplomatic agenda. For example, during Albright’s term in the Department of State, Richard Holbrooke, who had negotiated the Dayton Agreement to resolve the Bosnian crisis, became ambassador to the United Nations. Albright described Holbrooke’s appointment as part of her program to surround herself with strong people. Albright was also involved in promoting the humanitarian element in international development efforts, focusing on the connections between economic investments and everyday family life in less-developed countries.

Albright was particularly aware of the status of women around the world and its implications for US foreign policy. She pressed for Senate ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and emphasized the need to stabilize birth rates, educate women, and involve them in international development efforts. She used her office to promote the empowerment of women as an integral element in achieving peace and prosperity and to attempt to increase the representation of women in diplomatic service. Albright saw herself as part of a network of female foreign ministers, many of whom became acquainted through their service in the United Nations. In response to questions about how she was viewed by leaders of countries whose cultures did not recognize the equality of women, Albright stated that she was always viewed with the highest respect. She noted that having a woman represent the most powerful country in the world was a message in itself.

Albright left the State Department in 2001 when Republican president George W. Bush took office. After leaving her cabinet post, Albright wrote several books. Among them were a memoir called Madam Secretary (2003); The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs (2006), which considers the role of religion in world affairs; Memo to the President Elect (2008), in which she offers her advice for the next presidency; Read My Pins (2009), an account of her years of jewelry-themed diplomacy; Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1938–1948 (2012), a family history; Fascism: A Warning (2018), a historical discussion of authoritarianism and its continued threat to democratic nations in contemporary times; and Hell and Other Destinations: A 21st Century Memoir (2020). Some two hundred pins featured in Albright's memoir were displayed in a two-year traveling exhibit that visited such prestigious institutions as the Smithsonian Castle, New York Museum of Arts and Design, National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library, Clinton Presidential Center, Gerald Ford Museum, and the Mint Museum of Art during the Democratic National Convention.

Albright also formed a strategic consulting firm, the Albright Group; resumed her faculty position as a professor at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service; held an appointment as a distinguished scholar at the University of Michigan; and served on the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange and the Council on Foreign Relations. She headed the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the Pew Global Attitudes Project, and the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation and served on the Defense Department's Defense Policy Board, the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library National Advisory Board, and the board of trustees for the Aspen Institute. She traveled abroad widely with organizations promoting human rights. In the latter role, Albright led a 2006 delegation to Africa as part of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor. She also served as a foreign observer of the 2007 Nigerian elections in conjunction with her involvement with the National Endowment for Democracy.

After her retirement from politics, Albright spoke out about numerous policy concerns, among them the debt-ceiling debates under President Barack Obama and the National Security Administration (NSA) surveillance leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. She also encouraged US military intervention against the Syrian regime during the Syrian civil war and favored talks with Iran regarding its nuclear program.

Perhaps most notably, Albright strongly criticized the conduct of the George W. Bush administration for its arrogance and unilateralism. She argued that the 2003 war in Iraq was the worst disaster in American foreign policy and that its unintended consequences had undermined the future security of the Middle East. Albright contended that the United States, rather than operating independently, must form partnerships with other nations to address vital issues of energy, environmental conditions, and terrorism. In Albright’s view, terrorism was a method used by diverse groups to achieve their political goals. Unless Americans learned what terrorism was intended to accomplish, fighting a “war” on the method would be futile. She said that to regain the trust of other nations, the United States must display not only its military power but also its power to do good. In her view, because the biggest problem in the world was the gap between the rich and the poor, addressing that gap should have been an American priority.

As a political scientist, Albright described the world as being in the process of a systemic change, whereby the old dominance of nation-states was challenged by larger forces such as globalization and by fragmentation through ethnic separatism and the power of actors who were not nations, such as the leaders of militant religious movements. Thus, the system was far more chaotic than it was during the relative stability of the Cold War. Such a time of change required a moral and multilateral foreign policy. Albright expressed the hope that future presidential administrations would follow such an approach.

During the presidency of Donald Trump between 2017 and 2021, Albright was also often outspokenly critical of Trump's policies, calling his stance and actions undemocratic. Though in 2020 his administration ultimately had her removed from the Defense Policy Board on which she had long served, in 2021, under President Joe Biden's administration, she was appointed as its chair. In addition to having kept her position at the head of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs over the years, she voiced her perspective on significant geopolitical issues such as Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

For her accomplishments, Albright received such honors as the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012), the US Military Academy's Thayer Award (2013), and the UN Journalism Fellowship's Dag Hammarskjöld Inspiration Award (2013).

Albright died in Washington, DC, of cancer on March 23, 2022, at the age of eighty-four.

Significance

Prior to Albright’s appointment as secretary of state, no woman had held such a high position in the US diplomatic service. Only one woman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, had preceded Albright as the US ambassador to the United Nations. Albright assumed the secretary of state’s post with a reputation for being candid, and she was also outspoken about affirming her identity as a woman. Immediately after assuming her post, she noted that the secretary of state’s office had been designed with a male occupant in mind: it was equipped with conveniences such as racks for men’s suits and drawers for socks. Albright noted that apparently, she did not fit the traditional image of the secretary of state.

With respect to foreign policy, Albright was an enthusiastic advocate of the assertive use of US power and influence, if not military engagement. She stated that her “mind-set is Munich”; in other words, her view was formed by the experience of Czechoslovakia. At Munich in 1938, diplomats from Great Britain and France effectively handed control of her native country over to Adolf Hitler in return for his promise to cease aggression. Hitler then promptly took over Czechoslovakia, continued his conquests, and provoked World War II. In Albright’s view, the lesson of Munich was that nations should not compromise with aggression; however, she always held that diplomacy must precede and would often avert conflict.

As secretary of state, Albright was a severe critic of nations charged with violations of human rights, including Cuba, Iraq, and Iran. On the other hand, she had to find ways to balance disapproval of China’s internal repression with efforts to promote trade with the world’s most populous country. During her tenure, the Department of State faced instability in Russia, conflicts in the Middle East, and tensions caused by the expansion of NATO, but the United States was able to avoid military involvement in any major foreign conflicts. She was a severe critic of the Bush administration’s unilateral approach to international affairs and especially its conduct in the Iraq War.

Albright had an important influence in two areas of public life: as a model of a woman who achieved success in a traditionally male-dominated role and as a major architect of American foreign policy at the end of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Albright, Madeleine. Madam Secretary. 2003. New York: Harper, 2013. Print.

Albright, Madeleine. "Madeleine Albright on Peace Talks: 'This Is the Beginning of the Beginning.'" Here & Now. Boston U, 29 July 2013. Web. 23 Dec. 2013.

Albright, Madeleine. The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs. New York: Harper, 2006. Print.

Albright, Madeleine. Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937–1948.. New York: Harper, 2012. Print.

Dobbs, Michael. Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey. New York: Holt, 1999. Print.

Dumbrell, John. "President Clinton's Secretaries of State: Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright." The US Secretaries of State and Transatlantic Relations. Ed. Klaus Larres. New York: Routledge, 2010. 29–39. Print.

Gibbs, Nancy. “The Many Lives of Madeleine.” Time 17 Feb. 1997: 52–61. Print.

Kelly, Caroline. "Madeleine Albright, First Female US Secretary of State, Dies." CNN, 23 Mar. 2022, www.cnn.com/2022/03/23/politics/madeleine-albright-obituary/index.html. Accessed 7 Apr. 2022.

Lippman, Thomas W. Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy. Boulder: Westview, 2004. Print.

McFadden, Robert D. "Madeleine Albright, First Woman to Serve as Secretary of State, Dies at 84." The New York Times, 23 Mar. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/us/madeleine-albright-dead.html. Accessed 7 Apr. 2022.

Sciolino, Elaine. “Madeleine Albright’s Audition.” New York Times Magazine 22 Sept. 1996: 63–67. Print.