Madeleine Albright, a refugee from both Nazi Germany and Soviet communism who became the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of State, has died. She was 84. The cause of death was cancer, her family said in a statement.
Madeleine Albright: “The difference frankly between being an academic and being a policymaker is you all of a sudden have to put your money where your mouth is.”Madeleine Albright, a refugee from both Nazi Germany and Soviet communism who became the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of State, died on Wednesday. She was 84.As the world rearranged itself after the Cold War.
“It is possible to imagine a future secretary of state coming from outside the petri dish of the Foreign Service — many have,” Michael Dobbs wrote for. “But it is hard to conceive of another from as unusual a background as Madeleine Albright’s: escapes from Nazism and communism; a buried Jewish past; a marriage that brought her into the charmed circle of America’s elite; a divorce that spurred a new, career-driven focus to her life; and finally, the triumphant moment in January 1997.
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. 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.
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.
Albright was not a favorite of U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali — ‘’She seemed to assume,’’ he would later write, ‘’that her mere assertion of a U.S. policy should be sufficient to achieve the support of other nations.” She, in turn, helped build a coalition that would block him from a second term.
Having spent much of her time in the United Nations dealing with brutal fighting in Bosnia, Albright was confronted by more crises in the former Yugoslavia, a nation that had split apart when the ethnic and religious differences in the population had become insurmountable. She was also part of efforts to improve relations with Vietnam, China, and nations of the former Soviet Union. In October 2000, she became the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to visit North Korea in an effort to lure the country into the family of nations. It was a 40-way juggling act.
Madeleine Albright attends the American Film Institute's 50th Anniversary Gala at The Library of Congress on Nov. 1, 2017. | Brent N. Clarke/Invision/AP
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