Madeleine Albright
Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright[1] (born Marie Jana Körbelová, later Korbelová; May 15, 1937 – March 23, 2022)[2][3] was an American diplomat and political scientist who served as the 64th United States secretary of state from 1997 to 2001. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the first woman to hold that post.[4]
Madeleine Albright
Bill Clinton
March 23, 2022 (aged 84)
Washington, D.C., U.S.
- Czechoslovakia (before 1993)
- United States (from 1957)
3, including Alice P.
- Josef Korbel (father)
Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Albright immigrated to the United States after the 1948 communist coup d'état when she was eleven years old. Her father, diplomat Josef Korbel, settled the family in Denver, Colorado, and she became a U.S. citizen in 1957.[5][6] Albright graduated from Wellesley College in 1959 and earned a PhD from Columbia University in 1975, writing her thesis on the Prague Spring.[7] She worked as an aide to Senator Edmund Muskie from 1976 to 1978, before serving as a staff member on the National Security Council under Zbigniew Brzezinski. She served in that position until 1981 when President Jimmy Carter left office.[8]
After leaving the National Security Council, Albright joined the academic faculty of Georgetown University in 1982 and advised Democratic candidates regarding foreign policy. Following the 1992 presidential election, Albright helped assemble President Bill Clinton's National Security Council. She was appointed United States ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 1997, a position she held until her elevation as secretary of state. Secretary Albright served in that capacity until President Clinton left office in 2001.
Albright served as chair of the Albright Stonebridge Group, a consulting firm, and was the Michael and Virginia Mortara Endowed Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.[9] She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in May 2012.[10] Albright served on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations.[11]
Career
Early career
Albright returned to Washington, D.C., in 1968, and commuted to Columbia for her doctor of philosophy, which she earned in 1975.[47] She began fund-raising for her daughters' school, involvement which led to several positions on education boards.[48] She was eventually invited to organize a fund-raising dinner for the 1972 presidential campaign of U.S. Senator Ed Muskie of Maine.[49] This association with Muskie led to a position as his chief legislative assistant in 1976.[50] 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.[50] 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.[51] She chose to write on the dissident journalists involved in Poland's Solidarity movement, then in its infancy but gaining international attention.[51] She traveled to Poland for her research, interviewing dissidents in Gdańsk, Warsaw, and Kraków.[52] Upon her return to Washington, her husband announced his intention to divorce her so that he could pursue a relationship with another woman; the divorce was finalized in 1983.[53]
Albright joined the academic staff at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 1982, specializing in Eastern European studies.[54] She also directed the university's program on women in global politics.[55] She served as a major Democratic Party foreign policy advisor, briefing vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988 (both campaigns ended in defeat).[56] In 1992, Bill Clinton returned the White House to the Democratic Party, and Albright was employed to handle the transition to a new administration at the National Security Council.[57] In January 1993, Clinton nominated her to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, her first diplomatic posting.[58]
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
Albright was appointed ambassador to the United Nations, a Cabinet-level position, shortly after Clinton was inaugurated, presenting her credentials on February 9, 1993. During her tenure at the U.N., she had a rocky relationship with the U.N. secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whom she criticized as "disengaged" and "neglect[ful]" of genocide in Rwanda.[59] Albright wrote: "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."[60]
In Shake Hands with the Devil, Roméo Dallaire writes that in 1994, in Albright's role as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the U.N., she avoided describing the killings in Rwanda as "genocide" until overwhelmed by the evidence for it;[61] this is now how she described these massacres in her memoirs.[62] She was instructed to support a reduction or withdrawal (something which never happened) of the U.N. Assistance Mission for Rwanda but was later given more flexibility.[62] Albright later remarked in PBS documentary Ghosts of Rwanda that "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."[63]
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 at a UN Security Council meeting debating a resolution condemning Cuba: "This is not cojones. This is cowardice."[64] The line endeared her to President Clinton, who said it was "probably the most effective one-liner in the whole administration's foreign policy".[64] When Albright appeared at a memorial service for the deceased in Miami on March 2, 1996, she was greeted with chants of "libertad".[65][66]
In 1996, Albright entered into a secret pact with Richard Clarke, Michael Sheehan, and James Rubin to overthrow U.N. secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was running unopposed for a second term in the 1996 selection. After 15 U.S. peacekeepers died in a failed raid in Somalia in 1993, Boutros-Ghali became a political scapegoat in the United States.[67] They dubbed the pact "Operation Orient Express" to reflect their hope that other nations would join the United States.[68] Although every other member of the United Nations Security Council voted for Boutros-Ghali, the United States refused to yield to international pressure to drop its lone veto. After four deadlocked meetings of the Security Council, Boutros-Ghali suspended his candidacy and became the only U.N. secretary-general ever to be denied a second term. The United States then fought a four-round veto duel with France, forcing it to back down and accept Kofi Annan as the next secretary-general. In his memoirs, Clarke said that "the entire operation had strengthened Albright's hand in the competition to be Secretary of State in the second Clinton administration".[68]
Controversies
Sanctions against Iraq
On May 12, 1996, then-ambassador 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."[129][130] The segment won an Emmy Award.[131][132] Albright later criticized Stahl's segment as "amount[ing] to Iraqi propaganda", saying that her question was a loaded question.[133][134] She wrote, "I had fallen into a trap and said something I did not mean",[135] and that she regretted coming "across as cold-blooded and cruel".[129] She apologized for her remarks in a 2020 interview with The New York Times, calling them "totally stupid".[136][130]
Whereas it was widely believed that the sanctions more than doubled Iraq's child mortality rate, research following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has shown that commonly cited data were fabricated by the Iraqi government and that "there was no major rise in child mortality in Iraq after 1990 and during the period of the sanctions".[137][138] Albright addressed the controversy at length in a 2020 memoir: "In fact, the producers of 60 Minutes were duped. Subsequent research has shown that Iraqi propagandists deceived international observers ... Per a 2017 article in the British Medical Journal of Global Health, the data 'were rigged to show a huge and sustained—and largely non-existent—rise in child mortality ... to heighten international concern and so get the international sanctions ended.' ... This is not to deny that UN sanctions contributed to hardships in Iraq or to say that my answer to Stahl's question wasn't a mistake. They did, and it was. ... U.S. policy throughout the 1990s was to prevent Iraq from reconstituting its most dangerous weapons programs. Short of another war, UN sanctions were the best means for doing so."[139]