By John Otis
Madeleine Albright, the first US female secretary of state, died of cancer on Wednesday. She was 84. Albright came to the US as an 11-year-old political refugee from Czechoslovakia and was an ardent and effective advocate against mass atrocities in Eastern Europe while serving as US ambassador to the UN.
Her Jewish family, who narrowly avoided extermination at the hands of the Nazis, fled to England shortly after Hitler’s tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1938. Several of Albright’s relatives, including three grandparents, died in the concentration camps of Terezinstadt and Auschwitz.
After the war, Albright’s father, a Czech diplomat wary of communism, feared he would be arrested following a 1948 coup by hard-line Stalinists in Prague. The family escaped once more, this time to the US. She said she was drawn to public service to “repay the fact that I was a free person.”
Her ascent in the foreign policy establishment reflected the traditional roles of women in the 1950s and 1960s and her ambition, influenced by the nascent feminist movement, that encouraged women to pursue professional careers.
After studying political science at the all-female Wellesley College, she married a wealthy newspaper heir and began a family. When her twin daughters were born prematurely and placed in incubators, Albright passed time in the hospital by teaching herself Russian.
She became an influential Georgetown salon leader and fund-raiser at Beauvoir, the elite private school in Washington that her daughters attended. In 1976, she earned a doctoral degree in public law and government at Columbia University, where she studied under Zbigniew Brzezinski, a fellow refugee from Eastern Europe.
When Brzezinski was named national security adviser following the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter as president, he brought Albright into the White House as his congressional liaison. She was one of just two women on Brzezinski’s staff.
The biggest catalyst to Albright’s career may have occurred in 1982 when her husband left her for another woman. Although she was initially devastated, the divorce settlement made her a millionaire. She began raising money for Democratic presidential hopefuls, which led to jobs as foreign policy adviser to Republican Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run for vice-president, and to Massachusetts Govenor Michael Dukakis, during his doomed 1988 presidential run.
While working for Dukakis, she met Bill Clinton, a onetime Rhodes scholar who was then-governor of Arkansas and wanted to build a national reputation for himself. Albright wrote a letter of recommendation that helped Clinton gain membership to the Council on Foreign Relations, a prestigious New York think tank.
When Clinton was elected president in 1992, Albright ran his National Security Council transition team and was named ambassador to the UN. Like many immigrants from the WWII generation, Albright saw her adopted homeland as a moral beacon and an “indispensable nation” for resolving international conflicts.
As Clinton’s top UN envoy, she argued for vigorous US engagement abroad at a time when many Americans saw the end of the Cold War as a signal for their government to focus on domestic problems.
Rather than relying on the US to be a global Lone Ranger, Albright argued for its involvement in what she called “assertive multilateralism”. At the UN and the State Department, she lobbied – not always successfully – for muscular multinational responses to thwart a new generation of tyrants, from Haiti and Rwanda to the Balkans.
“When it came to the need to protect people from dictators and genocidal wars, Albright was the conscience of the Clinton administration,” said Ivo Daalder, who served on the National Security Council during Clinton’s first term.
Albright emerged as the administration’s most forceful foreign policy advocate. She won legions of admirers for her tough talk. Her most famous quip followed the Cuban military’s 1996 shoot-down of two unarmed civilian aircraft, killing the four Cuban exiles onboard.
After one of the pilots boasted of firing his missile into the plane’s cojones – Spanish slang for testicles – Albright told the UN Security Council: “Frankly, this is not cojones; this is cowardice.” Albright’s tried to back up her strong words, especially following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
In the newly created state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, scenes of ultranationalist Serbian paramilitaries forcing Bosnian Muslims aboard railroad cars reminded Albright of the Holocaust. Initial paralysis by the international community and by Clinton, who feared getting stuck in a Vietnam-like quagmire, infuriated Albright.
She pushed for military action. At the UN, Albright lobbied for airstrikes against Serbian positions. At one point, she stunned Colin Powell, who was then chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and reluctant to intervene, by asking: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
Recalling the scene in his memoirs, Powell wrote: “I thought I would have an aneurysm. American GIs were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board.” After Serb forces overran the UN haven of Srebrenica and massacred thousands of civilians in June and July 1995, White House opinion swung to Albright’s position.
The first airstrikes, carried out by coalition forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, were launched in September 1995 and helped drive the Bosnian Serbs to the bargaining table. Two months later, the Dayton peace accords ended the war in which an estimated 100000 people died.
Albright saw a stable Europe as central to US interests and was convinced that Warsaw Pact countries should be aligned with the West in order to cement democratic gains achieved since the fall of the Berlin Wall. After six years of transatlantic diplomacy, Albright helped convince Russia and a sceptical US Senate to allow Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join Nato.
It might have been her greatest diplomatic achievement. “To quote an old Central European expression: ‘Hallelujah!’ “ Albright said at the signing ceremony. As secretary of state, Albright was known as a cold-blooded bureaucratic warrior.
Despite resistance from nearly every member state, she led a successful US effort in 1995 to deny a second term to UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was viewed in Washington as ineffective.
Following the disastrous US effort to stabilise Somalia in 1993, her pleas the next year to intervene in Rwanda to stop the genocidal mass slaughter of ethnic Tutsis fell on deaf ears among the White House staff members and the American public.
“Goddammit, we have to do something,” she screamed at her bosses in a telephone call. Instead, Albright was ordered to veto a UN plan to send a multinational force into Kigali. She remained haunted by Rwanda and recalled flying over the killing fields and seeing hundreds of skeletons.
Amid the ideological confusion following the end of the Cold War, some critics insisted that she focused too much on Europe to the detriment of Asia, where the Treasury Department took the lead in addressing the region’s late-1990s economic crisis and the emergence of China as an economic powerhouse.
After leaving government in 2001, Albright became chairperson of the Albright Stonebridge Group, a business and risk-management consulting firm. She returned to teaching at Georgetown and wrote several books, including Prague Winter, a memoir of her dramatic childhood. In 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest honour for civilians.
* This is an edited version of the story that first appeared in The Washington Post.