Madeleine Albright, former US secretary of state and feminist icon, dies aged 84

WASHINGTON — Madeleine Albright, who fled the Nazis as a child in her native Czechoslovakia during World War II and went on to become the first female United States Secretary of State and, in her later years, a pop culture feminist icon, died Wednesday. at the age of 84.

Her family announced her death on Twitter, saying she had died of cancer. Leaders, diplomats and academics remembered her as a pioneer on the world stage.

Albright was the US Ambassador to the United Nations from 1993†1997 in the administration of US President Bill Clinton. He then nominated her to become the first female secretary of state and she held that role from 1997†2001.

“Madeleine Albright was a force. She defied convention and broke barriers time and again,” said U.S. President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. He ordered that American flags be flown at half mast in the White House and government buildings, including embassies, until March 27.

She was a hardworking diplomat in a government that hesitated to interfere in the two greatest foreign policy crises of the 1990s: the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

She once upset a Pentagon chief by asking why the military was keeping more than 1 million men and women under arms if they never used them.

The candid Albright took a hard line about a 1996 incident in which Cuban fighter jets shot down two unarmed American planes, saying, “This is not ballsthis is cowardice,” using a Spanish vulgarity meaning “testicles.”

At the United Nations, where Security Council members stood in silence on Wednesday to honor her memory, she urged a tougher line against Serbs in Bosnia after Bosnian Serb forces laid siege to the capital Sarajevo.

During Mr. Clinton’s first term, many of his administration’s top foreign policy experts did not want to get involved because they vividly remembered how the United States was bogged down in Vietnam.

In 1995, Bosnian Serb soldiers overran three Muslim enclaves, Srebrenica, Gorazde and Zepa, and massacred more than 8,000 people.

The United States responded by collaborating with NATO on air strikes that ended the war, but only after it had been going on for three years.

Albright’s experience as a refugee prompted her to push the United States to use its power as a superpower. She wanted a “muscled internationalism,” said James O’Brien, a senior adviser to Albright during the Bosnian War.

Early in the Clinton administration, while unsuccessfully pleading for a faster, stronger response in Bosnia, Albright supported a UN war crimes tribunal that eventually became the architects of that war, including Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leaders. , put in jail, O’ said Brien.

The painful lessons learned in Rwanda and Bosnia served the United States well in Kosovo, when Washington saw the more powerful Serbs embark on a program of ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians. NATO responded with an 11-week campaign of air strikes in 1999 that extended to Belgrade.

Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani said on Wednesday she was “deeply shocked at the loss of Kosovo’s great friend”, adding that the intervention “gave us hope when we had none”.

During attempts to pressure North Korea to end its nuclear weapons program, which ultimately failed, Albright traveled to Pyongyang in 2000 to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. time.

FEMINIST HEROINE

As the Clinton years and 1990s came to an end, Albright became an icon for a generation of young women seeking inspiration in their search for opportunity and respect in the workplace. Albright liked to say, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”

Albright was a stark contrast to her predecessors and male colleagues in uniform suits. She used clothing and jewelry to send sharp, political messages. A favorite was a snake brooch, a reference to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein who called her an “unrivaled snake.”

She wrote a book on her signature jewelry, one of many bestsellers, explaining that the pins were a diplomatic tool. Balloons or flower pins would indicate she was feeling optimistic, while a crab or turtle would indicate frustration.

Born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague on May 15, 1937, she and her family fled to London in 1939 when Germany occupied Czechoslovakia. She went to school in Switzerland at the age of 10 and took the name Madeleine.

She was raised Roman Catholic, but after she became secretary of state, the Washington Post dug up documentation showing her family was Jewish and relatives, including three grandparents, died in the Holocaust. Her parents likely converted from Judaism to Catholicism to avoid persecution as Nazism took hold in Europe, the paper reported.

After the war, the family left London and returned to Czechoslovakia, then in the throes of a communist takeover.

Her father, a diplomat and academic who opposed communism, moved the family to the United States, where he taught international studies at the University of Denver. One of his favorite students was Condoleezza Rice, who in 2005 would become the second female secretary of state under Republican President George W. Bush.

“It is quite remarkable that this Czech expatriate professor has trained two secretaries of state,” Albright told the New York Times in 2006.

Albright attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts and received his PhD from Columbia University. She became fluent or nearly fluent in six languages, including Czech, French, Polish, and Russian, as well as English.

In 1959, she married newspaper heir Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, whom she met while at work. Denver Post, and they had three daughters. They divorced in 1982.

She followed her father into academia, but also became involved in Democratic Party politics. Albright joined the staff of Senator Edmund Muskie, a Democrat from Maine, in 1976, and two years later became a member of President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council staff.

Since leaving the Clinton administration, she has written a series of books. One, Hell and other destinationswas published in April 2020. Others include her autobiography, Madam Secretary: A Memoir (2003), and Read my Pins: Stories from a diplomat’s jewelry box (2009).

The outspoken Albright made forays into popular culture. Parks and Recreation Star Amy Poehler’s character had a photo of Albright in her office.

In 2005, the Gilmore Girls television series the character Rory dreamed that Albright, dressed in a red suit and an eagle pin, was her mother.

In 2018, she and former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton briefed a fictional Secretary of State in Madam Secretary, a TV drama in which she spoke passionately about the dangers of abusive nationalism. † Diane Bartz/Reuters