First in her class

Commonweal, Feb 13, 2004 by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels

Madam Secretary

A Memoir

Madeleine Albright

Miramax, $27.95, 562 pp.

Madeleine Albright's measure as secretary of state (1997-2001) could be taken by comparing her to Warren Christopher, her predecessor, and Colin Powell, her successor. Christopher was the passive instrument of the Clinton administration's first-term aversion to foreign affairs. On his watch, Bosnia festered and Rwanda blew up in a genocidal rage. Colin Powell has become the accommodating instrument of the Bush administration's plunge into a war during which he has witnessed the violation of every cautionary principle he pressed on the Clinton administration as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (During the Bosnia crisis, Albright famously asked Powell, "What are you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can't use it?") Christopher and Powell, for all of their intelligence and integrity, are likely to be counted poor stewards of U.S. foreign policy.

Not so Madeleine Albright, who was an effective advocate of the activist policy she reshaped to the challenges of the post-cold-war world. She had the good fortune to head the State Department in Bill Clinton's second term when foreign policy could no longer be set aside (and Colin Powell had retired). In Kosovo, assisted by Richard Holbrooke, she pursued diplomacy with Slobodan Milosevic; and when that failed, assisted by General Wesley Clark, she supported war--diplomacy by other means, as she says, with Clausewitz. She fostered peace agreements between the Palestinians and Israelis, first working with the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu and then the left-wing Ehud Barak. She began an initiative to normalize relations with Iran, and took North Korea seriously as a diplomatic player in Asia. Attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 gave her a full sense of terrorism's reach: she flew round-trip over two days to stand in mourning with her ambassadors, and was back in Washington in time to support the president's attack on terrorists' camps in Afghanistan.

She was both diplomat-in-chief and public educator, pursuing the national interest while tutoring the U.S. public on its responsibilities as "the indispensable nation." Her energy and peripatetic style did not impede either her instinct for the appropriate gesture (the flight to Africa to support her ambassadors) or capacity for hard work (she was back in her office a few hours after her return). Thomas W. Lippman, diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post, reports in a recent book (see sidebar, page 26) that shortly after taking office, in a week when Albania was falling apart, the Middle East in turmoil, and the Russian foreign minister due in Washington, Albright took an hour to visit a D.C. public school. It was important to her, a spokesman explained, "to create an awareness even at an early age of the connection of the United States to the larger world."

She also made peace along the way with Senator Jesse Helms (R.-N.C.), a persistent critic of the United Nations who had made her tenure as UN ambassador problematic. (It was hard to promote a vigorous policy when the United States refused to pay its dues.) Under a charm assault from Albright, Helms finally agreed to pay up on the UN's peacekeeping operations and to increase funds for the State Department.

Albright was a born diplomat. In her four years as ambassador to the UN and four at the State Department, she exercised her native talent and hard-won knowledge on behalf of her adopted country.

Madeleine Korbel Albright was a "first" from the beginning--first-born in Prague on May 15, 1937, of Joseph and Anna Korbel. Pater Korbel was a Czechoslovak patriot and democrat, a diplomat in the foreign ministry under President Tomas Masaryk. An ardent supporter of Czech independence, Korbel fled the Nazis in 1939 and the Communists in 1948. Granted U.S. asylum, the family landed in Denver where the senior Korbel taught international relations at the University of Denver (in later years, Condoleezza Rice was one of his students). Albright admits that she was her father's willing student. "To understand me, you must understand my father. To understand him, you must understand that my parents grew up in what they thought was a golden place"--Czechoslovakia in the interwar years. Embedded in this tutelage and deeply shaping the daughter's foreign-policy outlook were his own experiences--the Munich agreement that turned Czechoslovakia over to the Nazis and the Yalta accords that conceded Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Her father's posts in England and Yugoslavia gave the young Madeleine a taste for the diplomatic life, which she resumed with relish during the Clinton administration.

The freedom and opportunity offered her family and other displaced persons after World War II have been frequent themes in her speeches and reference points for her policies. (The Cuban exile community in Florida loved her, and she them!) What may have sounded like corny patriotism to native-born Americans was heart-felt gratitude in Albright. She actually believes in the American dream because she has lived it.