Madeleine Albright

Madeleine Albright, a child refugee from Nazi- and then Soviet-dominated eastern Europe who rose to become the 1st female U.S. secretary of state and a ...

Albright later said that she became aware of her Jewish background after she became secretary of state. As secretary of state, she played a key role in persuading Clinton to go to war against the Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic over his treatment of Kosovar Albanians in 1999. As secretary of state, Albright was the highest-ranking woman in the history of U.S. government. "Because she knew firsthand that America's policy decisions had the power to make a difference in people's lives around the world, she saw her jobs as both an obligation and an opportunity," Clinton wrote. They had three daughters and divorced in 1983. Three of her Jewish grandparents died in concentration camps. Albright graduated from Wellesley College in 1959. Albright emigrated to the U.S. as a child. Albright helped win Senate ratification of NATO's expansion and a treaty imposing international restrictions on chemical weapons. Albright was an internationalist whose point of view was shaped in part by her background. Secretary Albright was a mentor, colleague and friend over several decades. She was a trailblazer and luminary.

She was the first woman to serve as Secretary of State. And she left an indelible mark on the world and the @UN.

Our country and the UN are stronger for her service.— @USAmbUN

President Bill Clinton chose Albright as America's top diplomat in 1996, and she served in that capacity for the last four years of the Clinton administration.

At the time, she was the highest-ranking woman in the history of U.S. government. She was not in the line of succession for the presidency, however, because she was a native of Czechoslovakia. WASHINGTON (AP) — Madeleine Albright, the first female U.S. secretary of state, has died of cancer, her family said Wednesday. She was 85.

Albright, who died this week at the age of 84, often said, with her customary humor and spirit, that the PBS NewsHour helped launch her into a storied spot ...

Her interview was, as Robin MacNeil would later note, a fitting finale to a war in which she had become a frequent target of criticism but which had concluded on a far more successful note than most had predicted. As I was reminded by another NewsHour reporter, Jonathan Spalter, Havel wanted a cigarette break before the interview with Jim Lehrer. She walked with him to the somewhat dilapidated park behind the building where he could smoke in peace. As she later acknowledged, she was less successful in having Havel look directly at Jim while answering questions. Just as she was assertive in promoting American interests and democracy and human rights, so she projected on many an evening on the NewsHour a clearly spoken directness to the American and global publics. In August 1991, the first day of what would be an ultimately failed Moscow coup against Gorbachev, Albright was on a concluding panel that assessed where the USSR and U.S. were headed. Another Albright mission was behind the scenes.

As Secretary of State, she foresaw the danger of Putin's rule even as she campaigned for NATO's expansion to Russia's borders.

“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 those crimes,” she wrote in her memoir, “Madam Secretary.” One of my favorite memories of Albright was from her seventy-fifth-birthday party, in 2012, organized by her twin daughters, Anne and Alice. The guest list was entirely female. She wore a giant bug after the Russians were caught tapping her State Department. Her collection of brooches —amassed from dime stores, flea markets, antique dealers, and upscale designers—became so legendary that the Smithsonian exhibited them. One of Albright’s legacies is the square and statue in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, honoring her role in what came to be known as “Madeleine’s war.” Time magazine described Kosovo as “ground zero in the debate over whether America should play a new role in the world, that of the indispensable nation asserting its morality as well as its interests to assure stability, stop thugs and prevent human atrocities.” In the Clinton Administration, Albright was a dogged supporter of NATO intervention to stop Serbian attacks on Kosovars seeking independence. They did a takeoff on the rivalries in “West Side Story.” Albright played Maria; Primakov was Tony. To the tune of “America,” the two bantered back and forth: After a Cuban pilot bragged about shooting down two civilian planes carrying four exiles, in 1996, she said, “This is not cojones,” the Spanish slang for testicles. “We leave America in 2001 safer,” she told me. “We will continue erasing—without replacing—the line drawn in Europe by Stalin’s bloody boot,” she said, in 1999. As almost a million people were slaughtered in Rwanda, in 1994, she famously shouted on a phone call from the U.N. to colleagues in Washington, “Goddammit, we have to do something!” President Bill Clinton opted out, and it haunted her. In a final Op-Ed for the Times—published a month before she died, of cancer, on Wednesday, at eighty-four—the former Secretary of State recalled her initial impressions of the Russian leader. Her family first fled Adolf Hitler’s Nazis and later Joseph Stalin’s Communists as they expanded deeper into Europe. She landed in Colorado at the age of eleven and became a U.S. citizen at the age of twenty. “Only in America could a refugee from Central Europe become Secretary of State,” she told newly minted U.S. citizens, decades later, at a naturalization ceremony.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has died at age 84. But many of the foreign policy concepts she helped bring to the post-Cold War world remain.

The advisability of NATO enlargement will be hotly debated for years to come and Albright’s role in the process should not be spared scrutiny. Now that rival states are more willing to punch back, it is far riskier for U.S. leaders to perform the role of indispensable nation. It is understandable, perhaps, that she wanted to harness this awesome power toward causes such as nurturing freedom and democracy in countries that had struggled for decades to rid themselves of authoritarianism. It would be Albright’s lasting regret that the U.S. failed to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 and stop the slaughter. She saw the alliance as a conduit through which the United States could impart peace, order and good governance upon a fragile European continent. When the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so did the primary justification for America’s enormous troop presence abroad and globe-spanning web of military alliances.

Albright was the US representative to the UN and secretary of state under President Bill Clinton.

“Madeline Albright was one of my earliest lessons in the bankruptcy of identity politics. But she argued that the country did not pose an immediate threat to the US and called for keeping focus on defeating al-Qaeda. “It was a stupid statement. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.” “We are heartbroken to announce that Dr. Madeleine K. Albright, the 64th US Secretary of State and the first woman to hold that position, passed away earlier today. She was in the post until 2001.