Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright[1] (born
Marie Jana Korbelová; May 15, 1937)
[2][3] is an American politician and diplomat. She is the first woman to have become the
United States Secretary of State. She was nominated 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.
Early life and career
Early life
At the time of her birth, Josef was serving as press-attaché at the Czechoslovak Embassy in
Belgrade. However, the signing of the
Munich Agreement in September 1938 and the
disintegration of Czechoslovakia at the hands of
Adolf Hitler forced the family into exile because of their links with Beneš.
[12] In 1941, Josef and Anna had
converted from Judaism to Catholicism.
[8] In an interview in January, 1997, Madeleine Albright, who was raised in Roman Catholicism and now is an Episcopalian, said her father and mother never talked to her or her two siblings about their Jewish background.
[13]
Life in the United Kingdom
While in England, a young Albright appeared as a refugee child in a film designed to promote sympathy for all war refugees in London.
[16]
Albright was raised Catholic, but converted to
Episcopalianism at the time of her marriage in 1959. She did not learn until adulthood that her parents were originally Jewish and that many of her Jewish relatives in Czechoslovakia had perished in
the Holocaust, including three of her grandparents.
[17][18]
Return to Czechoslovakia
Life in the United States
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.
[33] The following year, Joseph Albright began work at
Newsday in New York City, and the couple moved to
Garden City on Long Island.
[34] 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.
[34]
In 1962, the family moved to
Georgetown, and Albright began studying
international relations and continued studying
Russian at the
Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, a division of
Johns Hopkins University in
Washington, D.C..
[35] However, in 1963 Alicia Patterson died, and the family returned to Long Island with the notion of Joseph taking over the family business.
[36] Albright gave birth to another daughter, Katherine Medill Albright, in 1967, and continued her studies at
Columbia University's Department of Public Law and Government
[37] (later renamed as the
political science department, which is located within the
School of International and Public Affairs). She earned a certificate in Russian, a
Master of Arts and a
PhD, writing her Master's
thesis on the
Soviet diplomatic corps and her doctoral
dissertation on the role of journalists in the
Prague Spring of 1968.
[38] She also took a graduate course given by
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would later be her boss at the
U.S. National Security Council.
[39]
Career
Early career
Albright returned to
Washington, D.C. in 1968, and commuted to Columbia for her
PhD degree, which she received in 1975.
[40] She began fund-raising for her daughters' school, involvement which led to several positions on education boards.
[41] She was eventually invited to organize a fund-raising dinner for the 1972 presidential campaign of U.S. Senator
Ed Muskie of
Maine.
[42] This association with Muskie led to a position as his chief legislative assistant in 1976.
[43] 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.
[43] 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.
[44] She chose to write on the dissident journalists involved in
Poland's
Solidaritymovement, then in its infancy but gaining international attention.
[44] She traveled to Poland for her research, interviewing dissidents in
Gdańsk,
Warsaw and
Kraków.
[45] Upon her return to Washington, her husband announced his intention to divorce her for another woman.
[46]
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
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.
[53]
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."
[56]
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."
[57] The line endeared her to President Clinton, who said it was "probably the most effective one-liner in the whole administration's foreign policy."
[58]
Secretary of State
When Albright took office as the 64th U.S. Secretary of State on January 23, 1997, she became the first female U.S. Secretary of State and the highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government at the time of her appointment.
[59] Not being a natural-born citizen of the U.S., she was not eligible as a
U.S. Presidential successor and was excluded from nuclear contingency plans. In her position as Secretary of State, Albright reinforced the United States' alliances; advocated democracy and human rights; and promoted U.S. trade and business, labor, and environmental standards abroad.
[citation needed]
According to several accounts,
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.
[62] She later stated that when she spoke to Albright about the letter, she told her that it had not been shown to her.
[63] In
Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke writes about an exchange with Albright several months after the U.S. 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."
[64]
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 that we don't need any of those three "Ds" to happen."
[65]
With NATO officers during NATO Ceremony of Accession of New Members, 1999
Also in 1998, both Bill Clinton and Albright insisted that an attack on
Saddam Hussein could be stopped only if Hussein reversed his decision to halt arms inspections. "Iraq has a simple choice. Reverse course or face the consequences," Albright said.
[66]
In 2000, Albright became one of the highest level Western diplomats ever to meet
Kim Jong-il, the then-leader of communist
North Korea, during an official state visit to that country.
[67]
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.
[68]
Post-2001 career
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.
[75]
On October 25, 2005, Albright guest starred on the television drama
Gilmore Girls as herself.
[76]
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.
[citation needed]
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."
[77]
In September 2006, she received the Menschen in Europa Award, with
Václav Havel, for furthering the cause of international understanding.
[78]
Albright has mentioned her physical fitness and exercise regimen in several interviews. She has said she is capable of
leg pressing 400 pounds.
[79][80] Albright was listed as one of the fifty best-dressed over 50s by the
Guardian in March 2013.
[81]
Albright endorsed and supported
Hillary Clinton in her 2008 presidential campaign. Albright has been a close friend of Clinton and serves as her top informal advisor on foreign policy matters. On December 1, 2008, then-President-elect
Barack Obama nominated then-Senator Clinton for Albright's former post of Secretary of State.
[citation needed]
U.S. Secretary of State
John Kerrygreets Albright, February 6, 2013
In September 2009, Albright opened an exhibition of her personal jewelry collection at the
Museum of Art and Design in
New York City, which ran until January 2010. The collection highlighted the many pins she wore while serving at the United Nations and State Department, including the famous pin showing a snake and apple she wore after the Iraqi press called her "an unparalleled serpent", and several jeweled insect bugs she wore to meet the
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov after it was discovered the Russian secret service had attempted to bug the State Department.
[85] In 2009 Albright also published the book
Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat's Jewel Box about her pins.
Investments
Controversies
Sanctions against Iraq
On May 12, 1996, Albright defended
UN sanctions against Iraq on a
60 Minutes segment in which
Lesley Stahl asked her "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" and Albright replied "we think the price is worth it."
[94] Albright later criticized Stahl's segment as "amount[ing] to Iraqi propaganda"; said that her question was a
loaded question;
[95][96] wrote "I had fallen into a trap and said something I did not mean";
[97] and regretted coming "across as cold-blooded and cruel".
[94] Sanctions critics took Albright's failure to reframe the question as confirmation of the statistic.
[97][98][99] The segment won an Emmy Award.
[100][101]
Art ownership controversy
Following the
Washington Post's profile of Albright by
Michael Dobbs, an Austrian man, Philipp Harmer, launched legal action against Albright, claiming her father, Josef Korbel, had illegally taken possession of artwork which belonged to his great-grandfather, Karl Nebrich.
[102] Nebrich, a German-speaking Prague industrialist, was forced to abandon some of his possessions when ethnic Germans were expelled from the country after World War II under the
Beneš decrees. His apartment, at 11 Hradčanská Street in Prague, was subsequently given to Korbel and his family, which they occupied before also being forced to flee to America. Harmer felt Korbel stole his great-grandfather's artwork, which was left in the apartment. The matter was handled by Albright's brother, John Korbel.
[102]
Allegations of hate speech against Serbs
The place where the Prague incident took place.
In late October 2012, during a book signing in the Prague bookstore
Palác Knih Luxor, Albright was visited by a group of activists from the Czech organization "Přátelé Srbů na Kosovu". She was filmed saying "Disgusting Serbs, get out!" to the Czech group, which had brought war photos to the signing, some of which showed Serbian victims of the
Kosovo War in 1999. The protesters were expelled from the event when police arrived. Two videos of the incident were later posted by the group on their
YouTube channel.
[103][104] Filmmaker
Emir Kusturica expressed thanks to Czech director Václav Dvořák for organizing and participating in the demonstration. Together with other protesters, Dvořák also reported Albright to the police, stating that she was spreading
ethnic hatred and disrespect to the victims of the war.
[105][106]
Albright's involvement in the
NATO bombing of Serbia was the main cause of the demonstration – a sensitive topic which became even more controversial when it was revealed that her investment firm, Albright Capital Management, was preparing to bid in the proposed
privatization of Kosovo's state-owned telecom and postal company,
Post and Telecom of Kosovo. In an article published by the New York-based magazine
Bloomberg Businessweek, it was estimated that the deal could be as large as €600 million. Serbia opposed the sale, and intended to file a lawsuit to block it, alleging that the rights of former Serbian employees were not respected.
[107]
Albright supported
Hillary Clinton during her
2016 presidential campaign. While introducing Clinton at a campaign event in
New Hampshire ahead of
that state's primary, Albright said, "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other" (a phrase Albright had used on several previous occasions in other contexts). The remark was seen as a rebuke of younger women who supported Clinton's
primary rival, Senator
Bernie Sanders, which many women found "startling and offensive."
[108] In a
New York Times op-ed published several days, after the remark, Albright said: "I absolutely believe what I said, that women should help one another, but this was the wrong context and the wrong time to use that line. I did not mean to argue that women should support a particular candidate based solely on gender."
[109]
Honorary degrees
