104 | MARCH 31 • 2022
OBITUARIES
OF BLESSED MEMORY
M
adeleine Albright
was the quintessen-
tial late 20th-century
Jewish diplomat, haunted by
the Holocaust and determined
to use what tools her adopted
country had to crush inhu-
manity when it arose.
Except she didn’t know she
was Jewish until she was in
her 50s, or so she claimed, a
revelation that led some Jews
to embrace her and others to
question whether, like so many
others, she had been driven by
persecution into denial.
Albright, 84, died March 23,
2022, of cancer, 25 years after
making history by becoming
the first woman to serve as U.S.
secretary of state.
“The world has lost a cham-
pion for democracy,
” said
Tamara Cofman Wittes, who
was mentored by Albright
when they both served on the
National Democratic Institute,
and who has been nominated
for a senior State Department
position under President Joe
Biden. “
America has lost one
of its greatest (as she always
said, grateful) patriots. Women
have lost a trailblazer and role
model.
”
Albright was adept at out-
maneuvering statesmen —
always men — who thought
they knew much better than
she did. She also delighted in
subsequent years in the fact
that two close friends, Hillary
Clinton and Condoleezza
Rice, followed her into the
secretary of state role, to which
she had been nominated by
Clinton’s husband, President
Bill Clinton.
Albright hated macho pos-
turing. If she had a credo, she
stated it at the U.N. Security
Council in 1996, after the
Cuban air force shot down two
small civilian craft attempting
to flee the country, killing four
people aboard. “Frankly, this is
not cojones,
” she said. “This is
cowardice.
”
TWO-TIME REFUGEE
But though she cherished the
feminism she embraced in her
40s when her husband, a news-
paper fortune heir who made
her wealthy, abruptly left her
for another woman, her drive
was informed less by her status
as a woman than as a two-time
refugee: in 1939, fleeing her
birthplace, Prague, as a toddler,
and then in 1948, when she
was 11, fleeing the city once
again as Communist troops
moved in.
That sensibility informed
her tough-minded diplomacy.
Clinton’s second term marked
a shift in his diplomatic foot-
ing from the Vietnam war
opponent wary of American
involvement overseas to a
robust interventionist whose
policies and credible threat
of military force helped end
carnage in Bosnia, Kosovo and
Iraq, and expanded the NATO
footprint right up to Russia’s
doorstep.
Key to that transition,
which still reverberates in the
crippling American sanctions
on Russia for its war against
Ukraine, was switching secre-
taries of state from the reserved
and camera-shy Warren
Christopher to the gabby,
soundbite-friendly Albright.
Albright, an early backer
of Bill Clinton when he was a
relatively unknown Arkansas
governor, was his first U.N.
ambassador, repayment in part
for the money she helped raise
for his campaign. She chafed
at her relative lack of influence
in the administration, howev-
er; Clinton’s lack of action in
Rwanda infuriated her.
Years later, she still fumed,
telling an interviewer who
challenged her on her efforts at
the United Nations to preclude
an international effort to stop
the genocide that she was “glad
you asked that.
”
“President Clinton has said
repeatedly that failure to act in
Rwanda was the biggest policy
mistake of his presidency,
”
Albright told the Washington
Post in 2014. “It’s my biggest
regret from that time.
”
As she matured into her
role as U.N. ambassador,
she could no longer contain
herself. The images of Serbs
forcing Bosnian Muslims onto
rail cars reminded her of the
Holocaust, in which many
members of her extended
family were murdered. She
lobbied for airstrikes against
Serbian targets, once telling
Colin Powell, then the chair-
man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
“What’s the point of having
this superb military you’re
always talking about if we can’t
use it?” Powell, famous for his
Vietnam-era-founded reluc-
tance for military intervention,
said the question nearly caused
him an “aneurysm.
”
As secretary of state, she
could, and did, address the
frustrations she had endured
as U.N. ambassador. She was
behind Clinton’s decision to
confront the Serbian military
in 1999 as it bore down on
Kosovo. Yugoslav strongman
Slobodan Milosevic once told
her, “Madam Secretary, you are
not well informed.
” Albright,
whose father Josef Korbel,
had served as a diplomat in
Belgrade, countered, “Don’t tell
me I’m uninformed — I lived
here.
”
She also muscled Boris
Yeltsin’s Russia into not block-
ing the entry into the NATO
alliance of Poland, Hungary
and the Czech Republic.
The ethos that brought
Albright to diplomacy was one
that spurred so many other
American Jews to enter public
service, a dedication borne of
the horrors of the midcentury
to seek a benevolent American
hegemony in its latter half and
into the 21st century.
“I am an optimist who
worries a lot,
” is how she char-
acterized her outlook when
she spoke in Cambridge,
Massachusetts in 2012 on a
book tour.
Madeleine Albright, First Woman
Secretary of State Dies at 84
RON KAMPEAS JTA
Madeleine
Albright