OBITUARIES
OF BLESSED MEMORY
Madeleine Albright, First Woman Secretary of State Dies at 84 RON KAMPEAS JTA
M
adeleine Albright was the quintessential late 20th-century Jewish diplomat, haunted by the Holocaust and determined to use what tools her adopted country had to crush inhumanity when it arose. Except she didn’t know she was Jewish until she was in her 50s, or so she claimed, a revelation that led some Jews to embrace her and others to question whether, like so many others, she had been driven by persecution into denial. Albright, 84, died March 23, 2022, of cancer, 25 years after making history by becoming the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of state. “The world has lost a champion for democracy,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, who was mentored by Albright when they both served on the National Democratic Institute, and who has been nominated for a senior State Department position under President Joe Biden. “America has lost one of its greatest (as she always said, grateful) patriots. Women have lost a trailblazer and role model.” Albright was adept at outmaneuvering statesmen — always men — who thought they knew much better than she did. She also delighted in subsequent years in the fact that two close friends, Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, followed her into the secretary of state role, to which she had been nominated by Clinton’s husband, President Bill Clinton.
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Albright hated macho posturing. If she had a credo, she stated it at the U.N. Security Council in 1996, after the Cuban air force shot down two small civilian craft attempting to flee the country, killing four people aboard. “Frankly, this is not cojones,” she said. “This is cowardice.” TWO-TIME REFUGEE But though she cherished the feminism she embraced in her 40s when her husband, a newspaper fortune heir who made her wealthy, abruptly left her for another woman, her drive was informed less by her status as a woman than as a two-time refugee: in 1939, fleeing her birthplace, Prague, as a toddler, and then in 1948, when she was 11, fleeing the city once again as Communist troops moved in. That sensibility informed her tough-minded diplomacy. Clinton’s second term marked a shift in his diplomatic footing from the Vietnam war opponent wary of American involvement overseas to a robust interventionist whose policies and credible threat of military force helped end carnage in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq, and expanded the NATO footprint right up to Russia’s doorstep. Key to that transition, which still reverberates in the crippling American sanctions on Russia for its war against Ukraine, was switching secretaries of state from the reserved and camera-shy Warren Christopher to the gabby,
Madeleine Albright
soundbite-friendly Albright. Albright, an early backer of Bill Clinton when he was a relatively unknown Arkansas governor, was his first U.N. ambassador, repayment in part for the money she helped raise for his campaign. She chafed at her relative lack of influence in the administration, however; Clinton’s lack of action in Rwanda infuriated her. Years later, she still fumed, telling an interviewer who challenged her on her efforts at the United Nations to preclude an international effort to stop the genocide that she was “glad you asked that.” “President Clinton has said repeatedly that failure to act in Rwanda was the biggest policy mistake of his presidency,” Albright told the Washington Post in 2014. “It’s my biggest regret from that time.” As she matured into her role as U.N. ambassador, she could no longer contain herself. The images of Serbs forcing Bosnian Muslims onto rail cars reminded her of the Holocaust, in which many members of her extended family were murdered. She
lobbied for airstrikes against Serbian targets, once telling Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Powell, famous for his Vietnam-era-founded reluctance for military intervention, said the question nearly caused him an “aneurysm.” As secretary of state, she could, and did, address the frustrations she had endured as U.N. ambassador. She was behind Clinton’s decision to confront the Serbian military in 1999 as it bore down on Kosovo. Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic once told her, “Madam Secretary, you are not well informed.” Albright, whose father Josef Korbel, had served as a diplomat in Belgrade, countered, “Don’t tell me I’m uninformed — I lived here.” She also muscled Boris Yeltsin’s Russia into not blocking the entry into the NATO alliance of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The ethos that brought Albright to diplomacy was one that spurred so many other American Jews to enter public service, a dedication borne of the horrors of the midcentury to seek a benevolent American hegemony in its latter half and into the 21st century. “I am an optimist who worries a lot,” is how she characterized her outlook when she spoke in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2012 on a book tour.
