WASHINGTON – Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright, the first female secretary of state, who arrived in the US as a young girl from war-torn Czechoslovakia before becoming a political and feminist icon, died Wednesday at 84.
Albright’s death from cancer was confirmed by her family in a statement posted to Twitter on Wednesday.
Albright, who served as secretary of state from 1997 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton, pushed for NATO expansion eastward into the former Soviet bloc and helped lead the NATO bombing campaign in 1999 to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. She previously served as Clinton’s US ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 1997.
Albright told USA TODAY in 2020 that she had “a trick” to make sure her position was made clear in a foreign policy arena dominated by men.
“After too much of the small talk, I would say, ‘I have come a long way, so I must be frank,’ Then I really did make a point of what I needed to say,” she said. “I don’t think frankly that I was rougher, tougher or anything than any man. I just think people were surprised to hear that language from a woman.”
Ned Price, the State Department’s chief spokesman, called Albright a “trailblazer,” adding President Joe Biden and his chief diplomat Antony Blinken “have been apprised of this” and said the US diplomatic corps was grieving her death.
“She was a trailblazer as the first female secretary of state and quite literally opened doors for a large element of our workforce,” Price said. “Ella She took so many people under her wing de ella… It’s a really devastating piece of news.”
Czech-born, Albright called herself a ‘grateful American’
Born in Prague in 1937, Albright – then Madeleine Korbel – fled to England with her family in 1939, less than two weeks after Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. While her family de ella was of Jewish ancestry, she was raised Roman Catholic and only learned at the time of her 1997 secretary of state confirmation that three of her grandparents de ella died in the Holocaust.
Albright’s family lived in the cellar of an apartment in Notting Hill before returning to Prague after World War II. They moved to the US in 1948 after the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. Ella’s family eventually settled in Denver, where her father de ella worked as a dean of the school of international relations at the University of Denver.
“I lived in many, many places,” Albright told USA TODAY in 2020 when she was recognized as one of USA TODAY’s Women of the Century. “I was asked to describe myself in six words at dinner, which were ‘worried, optimist, problem solver, grateful American.'”
Woman of the Century:Madeleine Albright talks about how she became secretary of state, speaking up as a woman and the importance of calling out wrongs
Albright, who graduated from Wellesley College and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University, married Joseph Albright of the Medill newspaper-publishing family in 1959. The couple had three daughters and divorced in 1982. She did not remarry.
Early political work for Muskie, Carter administration
Before becoming the 64th secretary of state, Albright worked for the 1972 presidential campaign of Edmund Muskie, a Democratic US senator from Maine, and later became his chief legislative assistant. She would go on to work for Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter, and worked for various nonprofits during the Reagan and Bush years.
She also worked as a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University from 1982 to 1993and returned to the university as the school’s Michael and Virginia Mortara Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy.
Shortly after Clinton’s 1996 reelection to a second term, Albright was nominated to replace former Secretary of State Warren Christopher and confirmed by the Senate in 1997. She recalled to USA TODAY she heard criticism that a woman could not serve as secretary of state because Arab leaders would not deal with a woman. But the Arab ambassadors to the UN disagreed.
“They got together and said, ‘We’ve had no problems dealing with Ambassador Albright; we wouldn’t have any problem dealing with Secretary Albright,'” Albright said.
She credited Clinton for paving the way to her history-making confirmation, “with a lot of help from Hillary.”
President Barack Obama awarded Albright the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Following her diplomatic career, Albright, the author of several best-selling books, including a 2003 memoir, became a symbol of female empowerment.
“There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” Albright was famous for saying. She first used the line as US ambassador to the UN in the mid-1990s, but caused a backlash when she pulled it out again while stumping for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 in her primary race against Sen. Bernie Sander.
Albright later apologized in a New York Times op-edwriting: “I absolutely believe what I said, that women should help one another, but this was the wrong context and the wrong time to use that line. I did not mean to argue that women should support a particular candidate based solely on gender .”
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