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

