SEASON'S OF HER LIFE: A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright. - Review - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Jan, 1999 by Wayne Biddle

SEASONS OF HER LIFE: A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright by Ann Blackman Scribner, $27

Possibly the only thing one needs to know about Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright is that she was Zbigniew Brzezinski's favorite grad student. But Time magazine correspondent Ann Blackman provides far more in this detailed biography. There is much about Czechoslovakia before, during, and after World War II; foreign policy luminaries of the Democratic Party; the ever-evolving roles of Washington society wives (and ex wives); the never-ending question of authentic Jewish identity; and other morasses that Albright somehow navigated on her way to the top.

Though she now embodies the lead role in a popular immigrant success story--the war-torn refugee "who works harder than the rest of us," as Blackman writes--it would be a major insult to the huddled masses of history ever to cast Madeleine Albright as disadvantaged. Before the war, her father, Josef Korbel, was an ambitious Czechoslovak diplomat ensconced in the privileged circles of Prague and Belgrade. In 1939 he left with his wife and two-year-old "Madlenka" for England, where he helped organize his government-m-exile's information service in London. During the Battle of Britain, they moved first to a 16th century farmhouse owned by his brother and then to a new four-bedroom home where "a very pleasant life" ensued. Immediately after the war the family returned to "a large, five-room apartment with a big fireplace and separate maid's quarters" in Prague. In 1946, Korbel was named the first Czechoslovak ambassador to Yugoslavia.

Though he served the Czech Communist government for ten months after it came to power in 1948, Korbel defected near the end of that year and moved to the United States. His wife and three children--Madeleine now had a brother and sister--sailed first-class to New York with 21 pieces of luggage and a Yugoslavian maid. They settled in affluent Great Neck on Long Island before moving to Colorado, where Korbel became a professor of international relations at the University of Denver. Here began the swift Americanization of Madeleine Korbel, who attended the elite Kent School for Girls and entered Wellesley College in 1955. She graduated with honors and, hr more significantly, a diamond engagement ring from millionaire press scion Joseph Medill Paterson Albright.

Whether from their palatial estate on Oyster Bay, Long Island, where Joe's family published Newsday, or their three-story red brick home in Georgetown, the Albrights were bright young lights on the 1960s and '70s social circuit of well-heeled Democrats. She found time to earn a Ph.D in political science from Columbia, writing a dissertation about the role of the press during Czechoslovakia's 1968 "Prague Spring." White House lawyer and party sage Harry McPherson noticed Madeleine's fundraising abilities when she served on the board of the Beauvoir School in Washington, thus introducing her to Senator and 1972 presidential candidate Edmund Muskie. From Muskie's Capitol Hill office she segued onto Jimmy Carter's National Security Council staff under Brzezinski, her former professor. Money aside, here was a tough lady, able to put her hustle and social clout to maximum advantage in a world dominated by stiff suits.

In 1982, Joe Albright told her he was in love with another woman and wanted a divorce. She took the split bitterly, according to Blackman, though it made her "many times a millionaire." Proceeding to use Joe's former money and the social contacts available to her, she practiced what might be called the Pamela style of political salon networking, which culminated in becoming a foreign policy adviser to Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign. In 1989, she ushered Bill Clinton to membership in the Council on Foreign Relations. "He did not forget who helped put him there," Blackman writes with some understatement.

As Secretary of State, Albright has presided over diplomatic successes in Bosnia and the Middle East, but Seasons of Her Life is not about her approach to foreign policy. Blackman mentions that Albright is "comfortable projecting American force," that her interventionist views on Bosnia "had been formed by the dissolution of her native Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938," but purposely makes no attempt to assess her official impact. One anecdote is almost enough, anyway: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Albright asked Colin Powell at an NSC meeting. "I thought I would have an aneurysm," the general later recalled.

By contrast, the curious subject of Albright's Jewish identity is featured in a chapter ominously titled "The Bombshell" and touched upon whenever possible from beginning to end, probably because it remains the biggest personal news story of her tenure as Secretary. The upshot? From all the evidence that Blackman methodically assembles, it seems that the influence of religious or ethnic Judaism on Madeleine Albright until 1997, when a Washington Post reporter revealed the tragedy of her grandparents' death in the Holocaust, was zero. Her parents, who raised her as a Roman Catholic, "took no part in any aspect of Jewish life, whether it was religious, educational, or cultural," Blackman writes. "Religion did not appear to figure strongly" even for the grandparents, who were "fully assimilated into Czechloslovak society" and celebrated the Christian holidays. It was thus Hitler's racist concept of "Jewish blood" that doomed the elder Korbels and countless other European nationals whose background had long evaporated from everyday life by the time he cast his maniacal net.