The windows of Madeleine Albright’s seventh floor office at the State Department were pelted with rain and snow, blocking her normally clear view of Lincoln Memorial.
Albright was next door in the office her chief of staff. She had joined a small group of people to mark the end of her term in America’s first female Secretary of State and her time as America’s highest-ranking woman in American history.
The room was only partially filled with eyes, which were focused on the TV that was playing a replay of Albright’s last television appearance as a government official. It was taped in Chicago several days before.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State, died Wednesday from cancer. Matthew Lee, AP Diplomatic writer, knew Albright as America’s top diplomat and as a Georgetown University professor.
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Unknown liquor, a gift from a foreign leader, was opened by her as stories began to be told. Some were about her historic trip in North Korea months prior, others about her incredible travel pace and her preference for exotic shopping. But also about the bitter struggle over 2000’s presidential election, which ended in a controversial Supreme Court ruling that would have brought George W. Bush to Washington in three days.
Albright, a lifelong Democrat, was famously forsworn to partisan politics in her four years as America’s top diplomat. However, she had become increasingly frustrated by the negative tone of the election dispute between Bush (Democratic opponent) and Vice President Al Gore. She noticed that the weather was not ideal for the upcoming induction and looked out through the rain-stained windows. With a wry smile, she said: “I hope it rains at those f—- – — s’ parades.”
It was shocking because the remark was so different from what I knew of Albright. When she was secretary of state, she often stated that her “political instincts” had been surgically removed. As a reporter at the French news agency AFP for the State Department, I covered her nearly three years. While most people, including traveling journalists, were well aware of her political tendencies, she tried to hide them and was polite to both Democrats and Republicans.
I have never heard her use such coarse language. She did not use such coarse language in off-the record encounters on her wild travels to places that former secretaries had never visited — Kano, northern Nigeria, Samarkand, and Bukhara, Uzbekistan, and, perhaps most importantly, Pyongyang in North Korea. She was not present at any of the lectures or other events she gave a decade ago at Georgetown University, where I had been a student of mine at School of Foreign Service.
She was the closest to recollecting the incident when she criticized the Cuban government at the United Nations for shooting a civilian Brothers to the Rescue aircraft down. Or her stern and studied expression of anger, anger and aggravation when it became clear that Clinton had lied to her when he claimed that he had never had an inappropriate relationship (or any) with a White House intern.
Rare political remarks were almost always mild in nature. Albright once told of her asking one of her father’s best students at the University of Denver for a job as a foreign policy advisor on a Democratic campaign. Condoleezza Rice replied, “But Madeleine. I’m Republican.” Rice was elected the second female secretary-general of state, and the first Black woman to hold this office four years after Albright resigned.
Madeleine Albright was a strong woman who believed in the truth and wanted to tell things as they were. Her otherwise conservative clothes were often punctuated with a fancy brooch. This was often done to convey a message to her colleagues. They were all from the commonplace to the most menacing, including one made of a snake.
She fled Eastern Europe after the Nazi regime and Soviet suppression. She hated dictatorship and authoritarianism. Yet, she encountered some of the worst. Her appointment books include Hafez al-Assad of Syria, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, Foday Sankoh, the leader of the Sierra Leone rebels, and many others. As she advocated for greater support for U.S. diplomatic efforts at home and abroad, she liked to call America “THE indispensable country”.
She believed in the promise of the United States and as the glass-ceiling-breaking first woman to run the State Department tried tirelessly to change the “pale, male, Yale” culture of the foreign service. She supported the creation of the U.S.-led “Community of Democracies” in order to encourage greater global respect for human freedoms and rights, even though some of America’s closest allies (notably France) scoffed at the idea.
Albright once took a break from a Clinton State Visit to India to fly almost 12 hours to Geneva, Switzerland with a stop in Crete to refuel. She then gave a 15-minute speech criticizing China’s human rights record in front of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. After arguing her case, Albright turned around and flew back home to India, where she joined the presidential visit in Mumbai.
Albright was criticized in humanitarian and left-wing circles for her support for sanctions against Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s rule. She once told an interviewer that the humanitarian suffering many attribute to the sanctions was an unfortunate, but necessary side effect of U.S. policy. She said, “I believe this is a very difficult choice, but we think that the price is worth the effort,” in remarks that are still offensive.
Nevertheless, others were led to believe that her active participation at several Mideast peace efforts — both between Israel, the Palestinians at Camp David, and between Israel, Syria, Shepherdstown, West Virginia — and in her mission to North Korea suggested she was too open to negotiation.
Albright never felt embarrassed or ashamed to push the boundaries of diplomacy.
Albright believed they were worthwhile and continued to try. However, none of these efforts would be successful. Albright, for example, tried until the end of the Clinton administration in an effort to keep the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations alive after Camp David’s failure.
Kosovo was the result. She was a strong advocate of NATO’s intervention in the war.
She was treated as a hero by thousands upon thousands of Kosovars after she visited a refugee camp near Macedonia during World War II. When her presence was known, spontaneous chants of “Albright!” “Albright!” were sung.
Later signs were placed that said “Our future is all bright.”
