Post by Admin on Mar 23, 2022 15:00:44 GMT -4
Madeleine Albright, first female secretary of state, dies at 84
Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of state, has died, her family said in a statement. She was 84.
Then-President Bill Clinton named Albright U.S. ambassador to the United Nations shortly after he was inaugurated in 1993, and nominated her as secretary of state three years later. She served in the post for four years, actively promoting the expansion of NATO and military intervention in Kosovo.
In 2012, then-President Barack Obama awarded Albright the Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.
Marie Jana Korbelova was born May 15, 1937, in Prague. She was variously called Madla, Madlan and Madlenka before her study of French led her to the version of her first name that she liked, Madeleine.
In 1938, Czechoslovakia was at the epicenter of a crisis in Europe, coveted by German dictator Adolf Hitler but, in theory, protected by France and Britain. That all came to the end with the Munich Agreement, a notorious act of naivete that tried to calm Hitler by accepting his territorial demands.
Nazi Germany swallowed most of Czechoslovakia in two bites and, on March 25, 1939, 10 days after the second bite, Albright’s family fled, settling in England. During the war that followed, the emigre community in England made a film about its plight and the young Madeleine was given a starring role. In payment, she said she received “a pink stuffed rabbit” that became her beloved companion.
Raised in the Roman Catholic faith, she would learn in 1997 of her family’s decision to convert from Judaism — and that three of her grandparents left behind in Europe had perished in the Holocaust. Dobbs unearthed her family history while doing research. The discovery brought unwanted criticism down on her parents and complications for her personal sense of identity.
“I am a firm admirer of the Jewish tradition but could not — beginning at the age of 59 — feel myself fully a part of it,” she would later write of her newly found Jewish roots in “Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948.”
Once the Nazis were gone from Eastern Europe, the Soviets filled the void. Albright’s family briefly returned to Czechoslovakia, but then came to the United States in 1948, settling in Colorado, where her father would teach international relations at the University of Denver. “I did everything I could to fit in, but I could not escape knowing that, in our times, even decisions made far away could spell the difference between life and death,” she wrote in “Fascism: A Warning.”
She attended Wellesley College. After graduating, she married Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, from a wealthy and distinguished publishing family, and they moved to Chicago, where she got a job with Encyclopaedia Britannica. The couple had three girls (twins Anne and Alice, and then Katie), but their marriage ended in 1982 when he left her for another woman.
She became a U.S. citizen in 1957 and made her entry into the political world when she raised funds for Sen. Edmund Muskie’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1972. An event she planned at the Washington Hilton would later become something of a Watergate footnote, when it was revealed that the 200 pizzas that arrived unordered were part of Donald Segretti’s dirty tricks campaign.
Albright went on to be an aide for Muskie and in 1977 was brought into the Carter administration working for Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Carter’s national security adviser. Like her, Brzezinski was an European immigrant wary of the Soviet Union; he needed her to help smooth out his rough relations with Congress.
After the Carter years, she joined the faculty at Georgetown University and served as an adviser to Democratic candidates, including Michael Dukakis. It was during Dukakis’ failed 1988 campaign that Albright met Bill Clinton. “She was the foreign policy adviser,” he wrote later in his autobiography. “I was very impressed with her intellectual clarity and toughness and resolved to keep in touch with her.
Four years later, Clinton was elected president, and he nominated Albright to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She was smack in the middle of an uncharted time in global politics: The end of the Cold War had left it unclear what practical steps the world’s last superpower was supposed to be taking.
RIP
