Madeleine Albright: A Skillful Diplomat Who Knew the Use of Force
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, the Secretary of State, was born Marie Jana Korbel, in Prague in 1937, spent the years of World War Two in England, and moved to Denver with her family in 1949. She had her first job in Denver, selling lingerie in a department store. As late as the mid-’60’s, having focused more on her husband’s and children’s needs than on her own training, she considered taking a job as a carhop or as the greeter at a tattoo parlor. Thirty years later, she was serving in the government of President Bill Clinton as the 64th Secretary of State — and the first female one. She did good and difficult work crafting U.S. policy in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Kosovo. She didn’t solve the problems of the Middle East — but she tried very hard. She was the highest-ranking woman in American history.
Albright’s father, Josef Korbel, taught international politics for 28 years at the University of Denver, and a School of International Studies there is named for him. He had been a Czech diplomat and a professor, and Madeleine was not only his devoted daughter, but an intellectual protege. His good opinion mattered enormously to her, and her way of seeing the world was deeply colored by his. He’d seen the Nazis and transmitted to his daughter the idea that we can’t assume democracy will survive; democracy needs a free press, a strong judiciary, and vigilant citizens.
Madeleine and her family were driven from their homes first by the fascists, then by the communists. As a young girl she got a visceral sense of what it’s like to live in fear, to be a refugee. In Denver, she was a good student because she had a good, systematic mind, and disciplined habits. Her parents also gave her a passion to achieve. She said once, “I was taught to strive not because there were any guarantees of success but because the act of striving is in itself the only way to keep faith with life.”
As an undergraduate at Wellesley College, she got a summer job for the Denver Post, upstairs in the “morgue” where old stories were kept. There she kept seeing an intrepid young reporter climbing the stairs to look through the morgue files. One day, she introduced herself and the young man said he was Joseph Albright. They began dating, and she learned that he came from a famous newspaper family, and stood to inherit a great fortune. His parents expected him to marry a young woman far wealthier and more socially prominent than Madeleine Korbel, but Joseph Albright wanted Madeleine.
Josef Korbel had his own concerns about the match. He looked at Joe Albright’s family and saw many divorces. He sat Joe Albright down and bluntly informed him that the Korbels did not believe in divorce; you either make a lifetime commitment to my daughter, young man, or let her go, so she can find another man who will. In 1959, Madeleine Korbel married Joseph Albright, and took his last name. In 1961, Madeleine gave birth to twin daughters, Alice and Anne, and in 1966 to their third daughter, Katie.
She did graduate work at Columbia University in the Government Department and at the Russian Institute. She wrote a dissertation on the role of Czech journalists in the Prague Spring of 1968. Getting a Ph.D. was important to her, having academic credentials. Her father had loved teaching and much of his status had come from being a professor. She wanted that, too. But she also wanted to play a political role, to affect policymaking.
A key insight for her was that politicians always need money, and so raising money for them and helping to finance their campaigns is a way to get on the inside track when they’re doling out policy jobs. In 1972, she organized a fund-raising dinner for Senator Ed Muskie of Maine who was running for President. In 1976, Muskie’s top legislative assistant left to work on the Carter-Mondale campaign for President. Urged on by her husband, Madeleine applied for the position, and was hired. The money she’d raised for her boss helped but so did her Ph.D. The staff announced that “Dr. Albright” had been hired, and she no longer felt defined by being Joe Albright’s wife.
Still, her first government job came when she was 39 years old, and she was always aware of her late start. She decided she would outwork people who doubted her because of her late start and her gender. Another obstacle for her was the idea that for a man being strong was a good thing — he was “assertive,” “confident,” or a “take-charge guy.” But a strong woman was “bossy,” “aggressive,” or “emotional.” Albright had to find a way of working which was true to herself, and to learn not to worry too much what the guys thought.
One day around 1981, her husband suddenly told her their marriage was dead; he was in love with a younger woman in Atlanta. Madeleine was shocked. She and Joe had been fairly distant recently, both of them busy with work, but there had been no quarrels. She’d been looking forward to some more intimate time with Joe. Now he was adamant: the marriage was over. He pressed her to tell Alice and Anne and Katie that the decision to divorce was equally hers. She refused, feeling it was wrong to lie about what had happened and that their daughters would see through such a lie.
Madeleine told almost no one outside the family what had happened. The decision of whether or not to stay married dragged on for months, and because they couldn’t discuss it in front of their daughters, Madeleine and Joe took long walks together through Georgetown. One of Madeleine’s friends saw them out walking several times, and told her wistfully: ‘I wish I could get my husband to do that with me.’ Finally, in 1982, Joe and Madeleine divorced.
In 1987, Albright joined the presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis. She had met Dukakis years before, and respected his mind, his decency and honesty. By joining his presidential team early, she got on the inside track. Dukakis surprised many people by winning the Democratic nomination, and Albright found her status soaring. One Washington lawyer she knew was all smiles, flattering Madeleine and angling for a job with Dukakis. But when Dukakis lost the election badly to George Bush, her status fell just as sharply. “Boy, you fucked that up,” said the Washington lawyer who’d been all smiles six months before.
In 1992, she had a break. Bill Clinton won the presidency, a Democrat who liked smart women, and wanted his administration to feature women in major positions. He appointed her as Ambassador to the United Nations, a position she was sure would go to a man named Richard Gardner, who’d been preparing for it his whole life and had been a more active supporter of the Clinton-Gore campaign.
Few people had heard of Madeleine Albright but she felt ready. She’d been working for 25 years to be an “overnight success.” She heard men saying they personally didn’t mind an ambitious woman, but America was doing diplomacy in the far corners of the world, and men in Latin America, Africa, and in the Arab states would not accept a woman of high status. The threat of macho men abroad being unable to take her seriously she felt was a non-issue. She flew to their country in a giant plane with UNITED STATES OF AMERICA on its side, and had the ear of the President of the United States. That was enough to inspire respect.
Haiti was a tough issue early in the Administration. President Clinton and UN Secretary Albright knew there was political and intellectual talent in Haiti, because the Haitian-American leaders they met were impressive. But Haiti remained a poor, corrupt country. Father Aristide had emerged in the late 1980’s as a populist hero in Haiti, was elected president by a landslide in 1990 but overthrown by the Haitian military within a year. A General Cedras replaced Aristide, pretended he’d be leaving shortly, then settled in for a long stay at the public trough.
Albright favored a military invasion of Haiti, carefully planned, with America in the lead, but with a multi-national force. She spent much of July 1994 convincing the U.N. Security Council that such an invasion was needed. Russia had sent peacekeepers to Soviet Georgia and wanted the U.N. to foot the bill but Boutros Boutros-Ghali of the U.N. had just denied that request; now he told Albright he couldn’t turn around and pay for a Haiti invasion. The U.N. was broke, he pointed out, in part because the U.S. had stopped paying its dues.
General Cedras sent quiet signals that he would never leave. Brazil objected to the U.S. invasion, unable to condone any U.S. invasion in Brazil’s part of the world. Albright assured them the invasion would set no precedent. Russia was determined to extract concessions from Albright that, in exchange for their signing off on a Haiti invasion, we publicly support their actions in Georgia.
Even Father Aristide was a problem. The public image that Albright had helped craft for him of a shining idealist yearning to return to his country and lead it to prosperity and democracy was not quite the case. Aristide had suffered a great deal in Haiti, and feared for his life there. In Washington, his life was safe, he was treated as a moral hero on the political and cocktail party circuit, and he had access to creature comforts rare in Haiti. It was not clear he wanted to return to Port-au-Prince, especially if he was to be installed by the “imperialist” United States.
Only when the 82nd Airborne were in the air, flying to Haiti did General Cedras agree to resign. By October 1994, Aristide was again President of Haiti, and Albright was proud that the United States had played the leading role in restoring democracy there.
In President Clinton’s second term, 1996–2000, Madeleine Albright became Secretary of State. The international travel was constant, the problems thorny, and success fleeting, but it was a fascinating four years.
Albright was frustrated by how many people felt the United States should be governed by either Wilsonian idealism or by cynical geopolitical “realism.” She felt any modern President of Secretary of State must be able to merge those visions, to have high ideals but a willingness to use brute force; to strengthen multilateral institutions, while leading in the Balkans and the Middle East; to promote democracy but work smoothly with non-democracies; to defend human rights, but not at the cost of core alliances; and to ensure we only make commitments that we’re prepared to keep.
She believed that a Secretary of State and President, working together, should master every level of involvement, from gentle attempts at verbal persuasion; to tough talk with the same goal; to economic sanctions; to peacekeeping operations; to the use of force; to a full-on invasion. Every nation and crisis is different, and she rejected all rigid frameworks of response.
Her interaction with President Clinton about the Monica Lewinsky affair was painfully awkward. Both Albright and Donna Shalala had taken the President at his word when he insisted there was nothing to the charges. Both had defended him in front of TV cameras on that basis. On the other hand, Albright’s own experience with men led her to believe they simply could not be trusted to tell the truth in sexual matters.
The most peculiar White House meeting during her eight years with President Clinton was one called so the President could apologize to his cabinet for having lied about Monica Lewinsky. It was understood that he owed the largest apologies to Albright and Shalala, who’d been forced to choose between two competing stories and had chosen to believe their male boss rather than a fellow woman. The President walked in, made no eye contact with anyone but vented about the rage he’d felt for the last four-and-a-half-years. He never made clear what, exactly, he was apologizing for — the sexual acts; or the lying about them. Albright thought he was entitled to frustration with his job, but not rage, especially if it distorted his moral values. She saw Bill Clinton as an immensely gifted man with good intentions, but one who was flawed and couldn’t see his own flaws well, or the dangers they posed to himself and others.
By the end of her public career, she had made herself an historic figure, but there were still rude jolts. One year, Wellesley College invited her to give a talk at reunions, and the reunion coordinator suggested the talk might be titled “Did My Career Cause My Divorce?”
Before setting out to write her memoirs, she read the memoirs of other Secretaries of State. They seemed to her fine examples of their type, but to only rarely and obliquely reveal how human relationships had shaped policy and events. The authors came off as a bit stiff.
Her memoir, “Madam Secretary,” published in 2003, was an effort to tell the policy story, but also the personal one, and to shed light on how personalities and relationships shaped the events she’d seen.
In 2018, with President Trump riding high and degrading many of the institutions of the nation he claimed to be leading, she published a stark book called “Fascism: A Warning.” In it, she wrote that President Trump’s instinctive isolationism and admiration for dictators would embolden proto-fascists abroad. She urged Democrats and Republicans to work together to pass useful legislation, and to explain to voters why democracy is in peril. She said that Republicans must not imagine they could use Trump for their own purposes; she noted that in Italy and Germany conservatives tried to “use” Hitler and Mussolini, intending to push them aside once the liberals had been defeated — but found those fascists had an iron grip on power.
“The temptation is powerful,” wrote Madeleine Albright, “to close our eyes and wait for the worst to pass, but history tells us that for freedom to survive, it must be defended, and that if lies are to stop, they must be exposed.”