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Madeleine Albright biography
Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelová in the Smíchov district of Prague, Czechoslovakia. At the time of her birth, Czechoslovakia had been independent for fewer than twenty years, having gained independence from Austria after World War I. Her father, Josef Korbel, was a Jewish Czech diplomat and supporter of the early Czech democrats, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Edvard Beneš. She was his first child with his Jewish wife, Anna (née Spieglová), who later also had another daughter Katherine (a schoolteacher) and son John (an economist).
At the time of Albright’s birth, her father was serving as press-attaché at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade. However, the signing of the Munich Agreement in March 1938 and the disintegration of Czechoslovakia at the hands of Adolf Hitler forced the family into exile because of their links with Beneš. Prior to their flight, Albright's parents had converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. Albright spent the war years in England, while her father worked for Benes’s Czechoslovak government-in-exile. They first lived on Kensington Park Road in Notting Hill, London, where they endured the worst of The Blitz, but later moved to Beaconsfield, then Walton-on-Thames, on the outskirts of London. While in England, a young Albright appeared as a refugee child in a film designed to promote sympathy for all war refugees in London.
Albright was raised Catholic, but converted to Episcopalianism at the time of her marriage in 1959. Albright did not learn until late in life that her parents were Jewish and that many of her Jewish relatives in Czechoslovakia perished in The Holocaust, including three of her grandparents.
After the defeat of the Nazis in the European Theatre of World War II and the collapse of Nazi Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Albright and family moved back to Prague, where they were given a luxurious apartment in the Hradcany district (which later caused controversy, as it had belonged to an ethnic German Bohemian industrialist family forced out by the Beneš decrees - see "Controversies"). Korbel was named Czechoslovak Ambassador to communist Yugoslavia, and the family moved to Belgrade. Communists governed Yugoslavia, and Korbel was concerned his daughter would be indoctrinated with Marxist ideology in a Yugoslav school, so she was taught by a governess and later sent to the Prealpina Institut pour Jeunes Filles in Chexbres, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Here, she learned French and went by Madeleine, the French version of Madlenka, her Czech nickname.
However, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia took over the government in 1948, with support from the Soviet Union, and as an opponent of Communism, Korbel was forced to resign from his position. He later obtained a position on a United Nations delegation to Kashmir, and sent his family to the United States, by way of London, to wait for him when he arrived to deliver his report to the U.N. Headquarters, then in Lake Success, New York. The family arrived in New York City, New York, in November 1948, and initially settled in Great Neck, on Long Island, New York. Korbel applied for political asylum, arguing that as an opponent of Communism he was now under threat in Prague. With the help of Philip Mosely, a professor of Russian at Columbia University in New York City, Korbel obtained a position on the staff of the political science department at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. He became dean of the university’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, and later taught future U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Albright spent her teen years in Denver, and graduated from the Kent Denver School in Cherry Hills Village, a suburb of Denver, in 1955, where she founded the school’s international relations club and was its first president. She attended Wellesley College, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on a full scholarship, majoring in political science and graduated in 1959. Her senior thesis was written on Czech Communist Zdeněk Fierlinger. She became a U.S. citizen in 1957, and joined the College Democrats of America.
Marriage and early career
While home in Denver from Wellesley, Albright worked as an intern for The Denver Post, where she met Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, the nephew of Alicia Patterson, owner of Newsday and wife of philanthropist Harry Frank Guggenheim. The couple were married in 1959, shortly after her graduation, in Wellesley. They lived first in Rolla, Missouri, while he served his military service at nearby Fort Leonard Wood. During this time, she worked at the Rolla Daily News.
In January 1960 the couple moved to his hometown of Chicago, Illinois, where he worked at the Chicago Sun-Times as a journalist, and Albright worked as a picture editor for Encyclopædia Britannica. The following year, Joseph Albright began work at Newsday in New York City, and the couple moved to Garden City on Long Island. That year, she gave birth to twin daughters, Alice Patterson Albright and Anne Korbel Albright. The twins were born six weeks premature, and required a long hospital stay, so as a distraction, Albright began Russian classes at Hofstra University in Village of Hempstead, New York.
Education
In 1962, the family moved to Georgetown in Washington, D.C., and Albright began studying international relations and continued studying Russian at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. However, in 1963 Alicia Patterson died, and the family returned to Long Island with the notion of Joseph taking over the family business. Albright gave birth to another daughter, Katherine Medill Albright, in 1967, and continued her studies at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. She earned a certificate in Russian, a Masters of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy, writing her masters dissertation on the Soviet diplomatic corps, and her doctorate thesis on the role of journalists in the Prague Spring of 1968. She also took a graduate course given by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would later be her boss at the U.S. National Security Council.
The family returned to Washington in 1968, and Albright commuted to Columbia for her PhD, which she received in 1975. She began fund-raising for her daughter’s school, which led to several positions on education boards.[28] She was eventually invited to organize a fund-raising dinner for U.S. Senator Ed Muskie of Maine’s presidential campaign in 1972. This association with Muskie led to a position as his chief legislative assistant in 1976. However, after the 1976 U.S. presidential election of Jimmy Carter, Albright's former professor Brzezinski was named National Security Advisor, and recruited Albright from Muskie in 1978 to work in the West Wing as the National Security Council’s congressional liaison. Following Carter's loss in 1980 to Ronald Reagan, Albright moved on to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where she was given a grant for a research project. She chose to write on the dissident journalists involved in Poland's Solidarity movement, then in its infancy but gaining international attention. She traveled to Poland for her research, interviewing dissidents in Gdansk, Warsaw and Krakow. Upon her return to Washington, her husband announced his intention to divorce her for another woman.
In addition to her PhD, Albright was also awarded Honorary Doctors of Laws from the University of Washington in 2002, Smith College in 2003, University of Winnipeg in 2005, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007 and Knox College in 2008 Today, Secretary Albright is once again a professor at Georgetown, and serves as a Director on the Board of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Albright is multilingual, being fluent in English, French, and Czech in addition to Russian, with good speaking and reading abilities in Polish and Serbo-Croatian.
Career
Albright has served as a lecturer in political science and international relations at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., since 1982, specializing in Eastern European studies. She has also directed the University's program on women in global politics. She has also served as a major Democratic Party foreign policy advisor, and briefed Vice-Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988 (both campaigns ended in defeat). In 1992, Bill Clinton returned the White House to the Democratic Party, and Albright was employed to handle the transition to a new administration at the National Security Council. In January 1993, Clinton nominated her to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, her first diplomatic posting.
Secretary of State
When Albright was confirmed as the 64th U.S. Secretary of State, she became the first female U.S. Secretary of State and the highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government. Not being a natural-born citizen of the U.S., she was not eligible as U.S. Presidential successor and was excluded from nuclear contingency plans. As secretary, Albright reinforced the U.S.'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 Herzegovina and the Middle East. She incurred the wrath of a number of Serbs in the former Yugoslavia for her role in participating in the formulation of US policy during the Kosovo War and Bosnian war as well as the rest of the Balkans. But, together with President Bill Clinton, she remains a largely popular figure in the rest of the region, especially Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Croatia. According to Albright's memoirs, she once argued with Colin Powell for the use of military force by asking, "What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can't use it?"
As Secretary of State she represented the U.S. at the Handover of Hong Kong on July 1, 1997. She boycotted the swearing-in ceremony of the China-appointed Hong Kong Legislative Council, which replaced the elected one, along with the British contingents.
According to several accounts, the U.S. 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 US 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." Albright was booed in 1998 when the brief war threat with Iraq revealed that citizens were opposed to such an invasion, although this is often overlooked.
In 1998, at the 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 "Ds" to happen."
In 2000, Albright became one of the highest level Western diplomats ever to meet Kim Jong-il, the communist leader of North Korea, during an official state visit to that country.
In one of her last acts as Secretary of State, Albright on January 8, 2001, paid a farewell call on Kofi Annan and said that the U.S. would continue to press Iraq to destroy all its weapons of mass destruction as a condition of lifting economic sanctions, even after the end of the Clinton administration on January 20, 2001.
Madeleine Albright quotes
"There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."
"I have said this many times, that there seems to be enough room in the world for mediocre men, but not for mediocre women, and we really have to work very, very hard."
"It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent."
"To understand Europe, you have to be a genius – or French."
Source and additional information: Madeleine Albright