Wartime refugee who became US secretary of state
Madeleine Albright 1937-2022
In 1997, Madeleine Albright became the first female US secretary of state. It was a remarkable achievement for a woman who had only started her political career at 39, and who had arrived in the US as a refugee at 11. She had twice had to flee her homeland of Czechoslovakia – first to escape fascism, and then to escape communism – and this turbulent background would inform her diplomacy, said The Times. Albright “saw America as a champion of freedom and democracy. She believed in its continued global leadership in a post-Cold War era, and in the importance of its transatlantic alliances.” When it came to questions of action or inaction, her “mindset”, she famously said, was Munich, while most of her generation’s was Vietnam.
She was born Marie Jana Korbelová in 1937.
Her father was a diplomat. Days after the Nazis entered Czechoslovakia, her family fled to
Britain, settling in London, where Albright remembered sheltering under a kitchen table during the Blitz. By the time she was six or seven, she was, she said, becoming a “proper English girl”. She was brought up a Catholic, but shortly after she became secretary of state, a newspaper reported that her parents had been Jewish; they’d converted in 1941 and, it seems, fabricated a family history of celebrating Easter and Christmas. She also discovered that 26 of her relatives, including three of her grandparents, had died during the Holocaust. Some questioned how she could not have known; she reasoned that her parents had wanted to protect her.
After the War, the family moved back to Prague – only to leave again in 1948. They were granted political asylum in the US, and settled in Colorado, where her father taught international relations at the University of Denver (one of his students, Condoleezza Rice, went on to become the first black female US secretary of state). Albright won a place at the elite Wellesley College. Then, while interning at The Denver Post, she met Joseph Albright, scion of a wealthy newspaper family. They married in 1959, had three children, and finally settled in Washington. For a few years, motherhood diverted her from her studies; but she eventually secured a doctorate in public law. Her political career began in 1972, when she helped Senator Ed Muskie’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. It failed, but he appointed Albright as his chief assistant in the senate.
In 1982, her husband told her that he was in love with a “younger and more beautiful woman”; he spent months agonising as to what to do about it (at one point, she recalled, he discussed it in percentage terms: “I love you 60% and her 40%”). When he finally chose the other woman, she was devastated, said The Daily Telegraph. Yet it galvanised her career, as it was in work that she found her refuge. She served as a Democratic Party foreign policy adviser, and taught at Georgetown; there, she asked her students to role-play foreign policy situations –and made a point of encouraging women to make sure their voices were heard. When Bill Clinton became president in 1992, he made her the US’s ambassador to the UN, and, in his second term, secretary of state.
Known as a hawk, Albright was an early advocate of US intervention in the wars that convulsed Europe following the break-up of Yugoslavia. “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it?” she once demanded of the chair of the joint chiefs Colin Powell. In 1998-9, she led the push for Western intervention against the Serbs in Kosovo; her critics dubbed it “Madeleine’s War”. She promoted the eastwards expansion of Nato, and supported sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Asked about the 500,000 Iraqi children whose deaths had been attributed to the sanctions, she said it had been a “very hard choice”, but “worth it”. She described the greatest regret of her career as the failure of the US and the international community to prevent the Rwandan genocide of 1994. After leaving politics, she set up a consulting firm, sat on various boards and appeared as herself in a couple of TV shows. Reflecting on her life, she said: “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.”