Half bright

National Review, Oct 12, 1998 by John J. Miller

Madeleine Albright is the perfect secretary of state for the Clinton Administration.

IT was the domestic version of a fatal diplomatic faux pas: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stood outside the West Wing of the White House on January 23, a few minutes after President Clinton had lied to her and the rest of his Cabinet about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. "I believe that the allegations are completely untrue," declared Mrs. Albright. Seven months later, with President Clinton begging the nation for its forgiveness, his loyal surrogate could not summon the kind of tough talk she routinely hurls at foreign leaders. "I feel that he is doing a great job as President," she said on ABC News. Asked whether she felt ill used by Mr. Clinton, she replied: "I do not."

For a hard-nosed woman with a penchant for flamboyant truth-telling, Madeleine Albright is strikingly demure when it comes to the Clinton scandal. Words have not often failed her since she joined the Administration in 1993 as U.S. Representative to the United Nations. When Cuban pilots shot down a civilian plane in international airspace two years ago, she boldly announced, "This is not cojones, this is cowardice."

Her sharp words are still applied to everyone but Bill Clinton. Unfortunately, they have come to sound like nothing more than empty rhetoric. If Theodore Roosevelt developed the policy of speaking softly and carrying a big stick, Mrs. Albright has reversed it; whether the issue is Iraq, Kosovo, or Israel/Palestine, she speaks loudly and flails empty hands.

Much of the problem, to be sure, lies with her President, who, when he thinks about international affairs at all, would rather play the role of First Tourist than geopolitical strategist. "Moses could not have done a good job as secretary of state to this President," says Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. Yet Mrs. Albright has done little to burnish her own image in these admittedly trying circumstances. As Mr. Clinton's reputation sinks to new depths, hers has been headed downward on a parallel track.

Inside Washington's foreign-policy establishment, she is widely regarded as a lightweight uncomfortable with formulating large-scale strategics or grappling with the global economy. She is well liked, but not greatly admired. Critics call her "Half Bright" or "Not-at-Alright." They say she lacks confidence in dealing with matters outside her areas of expertise, which essentially means anywhere in the world except for Central Europe. There, her knowledge has proved helpful in the NATO expansion; elsewhere, her record of accomplishment is spotty.

The most important international issues today are economic, as markets reel in Asia, Russia, and Latin America. Mrs. Albright, however, stays far removed from these concerns. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin takes the lead in her place. Although that is in one sense appropriate, given his own areas of expertise, it has created the impression that somebody other than the secretary of state is running American foreign policy. On July 2, for example, the New York Times printed a photograph of Robert Rubin touring the De-Militarized Zone in Korea. What does that have to do with overseeing markets?

OFFICIAL Washington had high expectations for Madeleine Albright when President Clinton announced her nomination as secretary of state in 1996. Even some conservative Republicans were pleased with the choice: "She's a tough and courageous lady," said Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The media predictably went into raptures at the prospect of her being elevated to secretary of state: this would be the highest post in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government ever occupied by a woman. Mrs. Albright immediately embarked on a honeymoon with the press that is only now coming to an end. Laudatory coverage turned up everywhere. Even People magazine, which doesn't usually care about foreign affairs, ran a glowing profile: the new secretary of state is "highly effective," "a tough negotiator," and she goes shopping with Barbra Streisand!

The 61-year-old Madeleine Korbel Albright is a two-time refugee from Czechoslovakia, where her family fled from Hitler and then, shortly after returning home, had to flee again, this time from Stalin. The Korbels came to the United States when Madeleine was 11, settling in Colorado; her father, who had been a diplomat, became a professor of international relations at the University of Denver. Madeleine won a scholarship to Wellesley College, and eventually went into international relations herself, earning her PhD from Columbia while raising three daughters. She also became involved in Democratic politics, working on Capitol Hill for Sen. Edmund Muskie in the 1970s and joining President Carter's National Security Council at the behest of one of her Columbia professors, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

She had married the wealthy Joseph Medill Patterson Albright in 1959; in 1982, he left her for a younger woman. Under the terms of the divorce, she received their Georgetown house, which she quickly turned into a salon for Democratic foreign-policy experts shut out of government during the Reagan-Bush years. She taught at Georgetown University, winning Best Teacher awards an impressive four times in a row. She continued her Democratic activism, helping develop the party line on issues such as aid to the Nicaraguan Contras (against), the nuclear freeze (for), and the Gulf War (against--although she now calls this a mistake). In 1988, she advised Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. During the campaign, she met the then-governor of Arkansas and wrote a recommendation for him to join the Council on Foreign Relations. She finally hit political pay dirt in 1992, when she teamed up with the winning Clinton campaign. "I'm a very political animal," she told the New York Times.