Albright: A Career Shaped By Experience Nominee Knows Personally The Power Of Foreign Policy
She was an 11-year-old girl when she arrived in this country from Czechoslovakia after World War II. Her family had fled its homeland twice, first from Hitler, then from Stalin.
Welcomed to America as a refugee, Madeleine Albright rose far from those beginnings. On Thursday, President Clinton announced Albright as his choice for secretary of state. If confirmed by the Senate, she would be the first woman to hold that job and the highest-ranking female government official in U.S. history.
“It says something about our country - and about our new secretary of state-designate - that a young girl raised in the shadow of Nazi aggression in Czechoslovakia can rise to the highest diplomatic office in America,” Clinton said during an Oval Office ceremony where he unveiled his foreign-policy team.
Albright reflected on her own life saga: “The story of my family has been repeated in millions of variations over two centuries in the lives not only of immigrants but of those overseas who have been liberated or sheltered by American soldiers, empowered by American assistance, or inspired by American ideals.”
Albright, who has been the U.S. representative to the United Nations since 1993, is considered a middle-of-the-road Democrat who specializes in U.S.-Soviet relations and Eastern Europe.
Albright’s life has been steeped in foreign affairs. She was born Maria Jana Korbel in Prague 59 years ago. Her father, Josef Korbel, was a diplomat who urged her to push herself.
When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, the family spent World War II in Britain. After the war, he went to Belgrade as the Czech ambassador. Maria Jana was sent to boarding school in Switzerland at age 10, where she acquired the name Madeleine.
After the 1948 Communist coup, Korbel and his family arrived in the United States.
Albright attended Wellesley College on a scholarship and graduated with honors and a political science degree in 1959. Three days later, she married her college sweetheart, Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, heir to a prominent newspaper family.
Madeleine Albright raised three daughters while pursuing a doctorate in Russian studies at Columbia University, which she earned in 1976.
From 1976 to 1978, she was chief legislative assistant for Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie, and then was a staff member of the National Security Council and White House responsible for foreign-policy legislation from 1978 to 1981.
In 1982, her husband left her. She joined the faculty at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where she stayed until her appointment as U.N. representative. One of Albright’s best quips came earlier this year after Cuban jet fighters shot down two unarmed civilian planes from Miami. Intercepts of the Cuban pilots had them bragging about their “cojones” - the crass Spanish word for testicles - in shooting down the planes. Albright raised eyebrows when she echoed them on the floor of the United Nations: “Frankly, this is not cojones, this is cowardice.”
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Angie Cannon Knight-Ridder Newspapers