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Madeleine Korbel Albright (born Marie Jana Korbelová on May 15, 1937) served as the 64th United States Secretary of State. She currently serves as the Mortara Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Madeleine Albright was nominated by President Bill Clinton on December 5, 1996, as Secretary of State. After being unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate 99-0, she was sworn in as the 64th Secretary of State on January 23, 1997 Albright was the first female Secretary of State.
Personal information Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelová in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), and raised Roman Catholic by her parents, who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism in order to escape persecution. She has a brother, John, who later became an economist. Madeleine was the French version of "Madlenka", a Czech nickname given by her grandmother. Albright adopted the new name when she attended a Swiss boarding school. Albright is the daughter of a diplomat — her father, Josef, served in the Czech diplomatic service. Her brother said, "Madeleine had a special relationship with our father, partly because she followed so closely in his footsteps." Later in life, she joined the Episcopal Church USA. In 1939 the Korbel family fled to London after Bohemia and Moravia were annexed by Germany. That may have saved her life, as many of her Jewish relatives in Czechoslovakia were killed in the Holocaust, including three of her grandparents . After World War II, the Korbel family moved to Belgrade, where her father, Josef Korbel, served as Czechoslovakia's ambassador to Yugoslavia. She and her parents fled again when the Communists assumed power over Czechoslovakia, moving to the United States in 1948. Once settled there, Josef became the founding dean of the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Korbel later taught future Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In Madam Secretary, Albright wrote of how her mother told her that Rice was her father's favorite student. At Josef's funeral, Rice gave the family a piano in the memory of Korbel. Albright attended school in Switzerland and Denver, and later majored in political science on a scholarship at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She became a U.S. citizen in 1957. After Wellesley graduation in May 1959, she married Chicago newspaper journalist Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, whom she had met working a summer job with the Denver Post. They had three daughters, twins Anne and Alice, and Katie. When the twins were born six weeks prematurely, Albright took a course in Russian as a distraction. By the end of their hospital stay, she was fluent in the language. While raising her family, she earned a Ph.D. in Public Law and Government from Columbia University. The couple divorced in 1982, when Joseph announced that he was in love with someone else. In 1996, Albright discovered that her grandparents had been murdered at Auschwitz and Terezin. Albright has stated that she did not know she had Jewish ancestors until she was an adult. Albright is multilingual, being fluent in English, French, and Czech in addition to Russian, with good speaking and reading abilities in German, Polish and Serbian. After her retirement, Albright published her memoir, Madam Secretary (2003) ISBN 0-7868-6843-0 and The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs (2006) ISBN 0-06-089257-9. Academic and public career Madeleine Albright graduated from Kent Denver high school in 1955. Awarded a B.A. from Wellesley College with honors in Political Science, she studied at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, received a Certificate from the Russian Institute at Columbia University, and her Masters and Doctorate from Columbia University's Department of Public Law and Government. She was also awarded Honorary Doctors of Laws from the University of Washington in 2002 and the University of Winnipeg in 2005. From 1976 to 1978, she served as Chief Legislative Assistant to U.S. Senator Edmund Muskie. From 1978 to 1981, as both a staff member of the White House and the National Security Council, Albright was an important Carter Administration official responsible for the formulation of foreign policy legislation. From 1981 to 1982, Secretary Albright was awarded a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution following an international competition in which she wrote about the role of the press in political changes in Poland during the early 1980s. From 1981 to 1982 she also served as a Senior Fellow in Soviet and Eastern European Affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, conducting research in developments and trends in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1981 she co-founded the Center for National Policy. She also served as President of the organization. In 1982, Albright was appointed Research Professor of International Affairs and Director of Women in Foreign Service Program at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. She taught undergraduate and graduate courses in international affairs, U.S. foreign policy, Russian foreign policy, and Central and Eastern European politics, and was responsible for developing and implementing programs designed to enhance women's professional opportunities in international affairs. She was voted "best teacher" four times. Before becoming Secretary of State, Albright served as a member of President Clinton's Cabinet. Today, Secretary Albright is once again a professor at Georgetown. Ambassador to the UN Albright gained recognition as a foreign policy adviser to vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and to presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988. Though both failed to be elected, she emerged as a key adviser to Democrats on foreign policy. Albright was appointed ambassador to the UN, her first diplomatic post, shortly after Clinton was inaugurated, presenting her credentials on February 9, 1993. During her tenure at the UN, she had a rocky relationship with the United Nations Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. She did not take action against the genocide in Rwanda. "It was a very very very difficult time, the situation was so unclear. You know in retrospect it all looks very clear" - Madeleine Albright in the PBS Documentary "Ghosts of Rwanda". She was also criticized for defending the sanctions of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, which led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. In 1996, she made highly controversial remarks in an interview with Lesley Stahl on CBS's 60 Minutes. Asked by Stahl with regards to effect of sanctions against Iraq: "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?". Albright replied: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." . When asked about this remark in 2005 she said "I never should have made it, it was stupid", but she still supported the concept of tailored sanctions . In the same statement she also incorrectly denied that the sanctions had ever applied to food and medicine. The lawyers of Mohamed al-'Owhali, convicted in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, would later play back Albright's 60 Minutes comment in an attempt to save the terrorist from the death penalty. Also in 1996, after Cuban pilots shot down two small civilian aircraft flown by the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue into Cuban territory, she announced, "This is not cojones. This is cowardice." The line reportedly endeared her to President Clinton. Boutros Boutros-Ghali's spokesperson Sylvana Foa said of Albright, "She's no shrinking violet. She can be biting." Secretary of State When Madeleine Albright was confirmed as the 64th Secretary of State of the United States, she became the first female Secretary of State and the highest-ranking woman in the history of the United States government. Being foreign-born, she was not eligible as Presidential Successor and was excluded from nuclear contingency plans. As Secretary, Dr. Albright reinforced America’s alliances, advocated democracy and human rights, and promoted American trade and business, labor and environmental standards abroad. During her tenure, Albright considerably influenced American policy in Bosnia and the Middle East. She incurred the wrath of a number of Serbs in the former Yugoslavia for her perceived personal anti-Serb position and her role in participating in the formulation of U.S. policy during the Kosovo War and Bosnian war as well as the rest of the Balkans. According to Colin Powell's memoirs, Albright once argued for the use of military force by asking, "What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it?" According to several accounts, the American 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. 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." According to Clarke, Albright, realizing that Clarke was a friend, smiled coyly at him. Albright was sworn in as Secretary of State more than 18 months before the embassies she inherited were bombed. In 1998, at the 50th anniversary 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 "D's" to happen." In 2000, Secretary Albright became one of the highest level Western diplomats to ever meet Kim Jong-il, the communist leader of North Korea, during an official state visit to that country. Post-2001 career Following Albright's term as U.S. Secretary of State, many speculated that she might pursue a career in Czech politics. Czech President Václav Havel talked openly about the possibility of Albright succeeding him after he retired in 2002. Albright was reportedly flattered by suggestions that she should run for office, but denied ever seriously considering it. Albright and at least five other members of the Clinton administration currently serve on the Council on Foreign Relations board of directors. Albright is currently the Mortara Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service in Washington, DC. On October 25, 2005, Albright guest starred on the TV drama Gilmore Girls as herself. She appeared in a dream with Rory (Alexis Bledel) as Rory's mother. 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 Grasso compensation scandal, in which the Chairman of the NYSE Board of Directors, Dick Grasso, had been granted $187.5-million dollars 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. On January 5 2006, she participated in a meeting at the White House of former Secretaries of Defense and State to discuss United States foreign policy with 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. Albright currently serves as chairperson of National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and as president of the Truman Scholarship Foundation. She is also the co-chair of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor. In an interview to Newsweek International published in July 24, 2006, Albright gave her opinion in United States' current 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." In September 2006 she received the MiE Award, with Václav Havel, for furthering the cause of international understanding. | ||||||||
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