Madeleine Albright

She was born in Prague 16 months before the Munich Agreement drove her family out of it. Her father, a Czech diplomat loyal to Beneš, took them to London in May 1939, where they lived through the Blitz with a steel table in the house to shelter under. In 1941 her parents converted from Judaism to Catholicism and told none of their children. The family went home after the war and left again after the Communist coup of 1948, sailing from Southampton and landing at Ellis Island that November. Her father applied for asylum, found a post in Denver, and later taught Condoleezza Rice. Marie Jana had by then become Madeleine, at a Swiss finishing school. She reached Wellesley on a full scholarship and was naturalized in 1957.

She came to power late and sideways. A fundraising dinner for Ed Muskie in 1972 turned into a job on his staff, which turned into a seat on Zbigniew Brzezinski's National Security Council, which ended when Carter lost. She taught at Georgetown through the 1980s and briefed two losing presidential campaigns. Clinton made her ambassador to the United Nations in 1993, where she engineered the removal of Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali over the objection of nearly everyone else, and Secretary of State in 1997, the first woman to hold the office. She pushed NATO east into her own former part of the world, ran the diplomacy around the 1999 air campaign over Kosovo that the press called Madeleine's War, and in 2000 became the first American secretary of state to sit down with Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang.

On May 12, 1996, Lesley Stahl put it to her that half a million Iraqi children had died under sanctions, more than died at Hiroshima, and asked whether the price was worth it. Albright answered that they thought the price was worth it. She apologized for that sentence for the next 24 years, calling it stupid and a trap she had walked into, and noting that later research found the Iraqi mortality figures had been inflated by the government supplying them. The defense does not cover the other case. Two years earlier, at the United Nations, she avoided calling the killing in Rwanda genocide until the evidence made it impossible, under instructions to support pulling the peacekeepers out. She wrote afterward that it was the deepest regret of her public life.

She died of cancer in Washington on March 23, 2022, at 84, and was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown. Her funeral at the National Cathedral drew a sitting president, two former ones, three former secretaries of state and the presidents of Kosovo and Georgia, which is roughly the shape of her reputation abroad. In Serbia and Republika Srpska the same week produced a wave of mocking obituaries and internet memes, which scholars have since studied as a deliberate reactivation of memory about the 1999 bombing. The brooches she had worn as diplomatic signals became a book in 2009 and a travelling museum show, which is a small and characteristic way to outlive an argument.

Madeleine Albright's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Madam Secretary: A Memoir book
  Her account of the United Nations years and the State Department 2003
• The Mighty and the Almighty book
  On religion and American foreign policy 2006
• Read My Pins book
  On the brooches she wore as diplomatic signals 2009
• Prague Winter book
  On her family, Czechoslovakia, and what her parents did not tell her 2012
• Fascism: A Warning book
  Written at 80, and her biggest-selling book 2018
• Hell and Other Destinations book
  A memoir of the two decades after she left office 2020

• May 1939 aged 1 The family reaches London and lives through the Blitz Her father worked for the Czechoslovak government-in-exile.
• November 11, 1948 aged 11 Arrives at Ellis Island aboard the SS America Her father applied for political asylum after the Communist coup in Prague.
• 1959 aged ~22 Graduates from Wellesley on a full scholarship and marries Joseph Albright She had become an American citizen two years earlier.
• 1975 aged ~38 Takes a Columbia doctorate on the journalists of the Prague Spring
• 1978 aged ~41 Zbigniew Brzezinski brings her into the National Security Council He had taught her at Columbia.
• February 9, 1993 aged 55 Presents her credentials as ambassador to the United Nations
• May 12, 1996 aged 58 Tells 60 Minutes that the price in Iraqi children is worth it She apologized for the sentence repeatedly for the rest of her life.
• January 23, 1997 aged 59 Sworn in as the first woman Secretary of State Within weeks the Washington Post reported the Jewish ancestry her parents had hidden.
• March 23, 2022 aged 84 Dies of cancer in Washington at 84

• Bill Clinton b. 1946
  42nd president whose centrist politics, economic agenda, and impeachment shaped the post-Cold War era. appointed by
• Jimmy Carter 1924–2024
  39th president who emphasized human rights, brokered the Camp David Accords, and built a major post-presidential humanitarian legacy. served on his National Security Council
• Condoleezza Rice b. 1954
  First Black woman to serve as Secretary of State after directing national security policy under George W. Bush. taught by her father at Denver
• Henry Kissinger 1923–2023
  National security adviser and secretary of state who shaped détente, China policy, and controversial Cold War interventions. the other foreign-born Secretary of State
• Hillary Clinton b. 1947
  First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, and first woman to win a major party's presidential nomination. the next woman in the job