Albright shaped group of foreign policy leaders
Madeleine K. Albright, who passed away on Wednesday, shaped a generation of foreign policy leaders — gently and usually with a smile. She knew every senior official, mentored many of them, and managed to say a cheery word even to people who took “dour” as a compliment.
Even into her 80s, Albright had the style of a college undergraduate, gossiping late into the night with her countless friends in the United States and abroad. At the opening dinner of each summer’s gathering of the Aspen Strategy
Group, she would don a cowgirl dress and join other former luminaries in singing show tunes and, always, “America the Beautiful.”
What made Albright truly special was that, throughout her career, as secretary of state and in the more than two decades after, she remained anchored in her values. In her 2018 book, “Fascism: A Warning,” she called the danger posed by President Donald Trump by its true name. “If we think of fascism as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab,” she wrote. As a refugee from Czechoslovakia, totalitarianism wasn’t an abstraction. Her family fled the Nazis in 1938, and then the communists in 1948.
Albright was clear-eyed from the start about Russian President Vladimir Putin. After meeting him in January 2000, just after he was first elected president, Albright wrote in a memo: “Putin is small and pale, so cold as to be almost reptilian.” Even then, she recognized that Putin was, in her words, “embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness.” We’re living now with the horrifying consequences of that revanchism.
Albright had a rare knack for establishing intimacy with what’s often a cold foreign-policy elite. She went “from Pole to Pole,” as she liked to say, when she moved from advising Democratic Sen. Edmund Muskie to assisting national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. When Brzezinski died in 2017, Albright gave a moving and very witty eulogy alongside former president Jimmy Carter.
Her life was an unlikely story of self-discovery. She was raised a Catholic, and she said she had never realized her family was Jewish until Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs uncovered the secret.
Her emigre father Josef Korbel taught at the University of Denver, where one of his star graduate students was a young Russia scholar named Condoleezza Rice. Whenever Rice spoke of Korbel, she expressed genuine passion, and it sometimes appeared that the foreign policy elite was really an extended family.
Albright was always a passionate advocate of America’s role abroad, a stance that was severely tested during the Clinton administration.
As U.N. ambassador, she pressed for U.S. military intervention in the Balkan war in 1995, and again four years later after Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic attacked the province of Kosovo. Her positions were rooted more in American values than interests; but when talking about foreign policy, she didn’t recognize a distinction.
Though she was a hawk about the Balkans, Albright’s gift was for the personal side of diplomacy. With a combination of flattery and teasing humor, she could talk to anyone, and break through even the most reserved fellow diplomats.
After she departed as secretary of state, she annually gathered a group of former senior officials from other nations for a retreat. She asked me to speak at one of these events, held at the lavish Rockefeller family estate in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., and it was a marvel to watch her charm even the Chinese diplomat in the group.
As the first woman secretary of state, Albright was a trailblazer. But she was a person who took herself and her achievements lightly, even as she took the world seriously. She loved to gather friends for dinner at her home in Georgetown for an evening of good food and drink — leading the discussion with the restless curiosity she had through her life.
When thinking about the men who were giants in foreign policy, such as Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, we sometimes wonder why they didn’t reproduce themselves as strategists. It’s very hard to think of a younger version of Kissinger, for example.
But Albright’s proteges surround us. Wendy Sherman, her devoted colleague for decades, is deputy secretary of state, and nearly every member of the Biden administration foreign policy team can trace a lineage to Albright. Albright had dizzying achievements in life. But she knew exactly where she stood and she never lost her balance.