82 The Economist April 2nd 2022
Obituary Madeleine Albright
Whenevershewasaskedwhatadvantagesa womanbrought
to the running of foreign policy, Madeleine Albright had sev-
eral answers. Women disliked head-on arguments; they preferred
to sit down and talk things through. Men focused on power and
position, dangerous obsessions; women focused on almost any-
thing but that. And, being so small a minority in that men’s world,
they got noticed more. She herself, short, round and blonde, was
instantly recognisable the world over, and enjoyed making herself
more so. When she accused Fidel Castro’s operatives of having no
cojones, or called Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia a murderer, people
were more startled than if a man had said it. A streak of aggression
in a woman went a long way. So did sheer pizzazz. When she was
nominated as secretary of state by President Bill Clinton in 1996
she wore a bright red outfit and a pearl necklace with an eagle pen-
dant, both of which advertised her pride and joy far better than
boring black could.
Her brooches and pins were another subtle gambit men did not
have. She took up this delightful pastime when she was America’s
ambassador to the unfrom 1993 to 1997: at first the only woman on
the Security Council, one skirt among 14 suits. On happy days she
wore flowers, butterflies or balloons; on bad days, crabs and carni-
vores. When the Iraqis called her an “unparalleled serpent”, a tag
she revelled in, she pinned on a snake. When the Russians wired
her conference room she wore a huge bug, just to let them know
she knew. If she wanted to divert press interest from delicate talks,
she sported a mushroom pin to make the point that some things
did better in the dark.
Nonetheless, she also keenly felt a woman’s disadvantages. As
professor of diplomacy at Georgetown University she urged her fe-
male students to interrupt and speak up, but she herself some-
times felt a squirm of fear when she butted into a debate among
men. Inevitably career and family clashed, too. Even as she accu-mulated degrees and expertise, she wanted to be a good mother
and a dutiful wife. When her husband, Joseph Albright, the scion
of a wealthy newspaper family, left her in her 40s, calling her too
old-looking, she wanted him back so badly that she was prepared
to abandon any thought of a career.
In the end, however, that career saved her. The world, its trou-
bles and their possible solutions were utterly absorbing; she could
have stayed at Foggy Bottom for ever. In a sense, she had already
been trained for it. Her father, her chief model and adviser, had
been the Czech ambassador in Belgrade; the family had been
forced first by Nazis and then by Communists to abandon Czecho-
slovakia and make their way, slowly, to America. They arrived in
1948, when she was 11 and, already, a citizen of the world. She
worked hard at becoming “thoroughly American Maddy”, until
she dreaded that her parents might do something European in
front of her friends, such as serving cabbage rolls or singing Slovak
songs. America was a haven of peace, democracy and freedom
which she keenly embraced and never took for granted.
Her approach to foreign policy flowed naturally from this. She
wanted to give freedom and democracy to everyone. Yet America’s
power to lead was so morally important that it could not be squan-
dered on risky enterprises. As secretary of state she fostered Euro-
pean alliances that could carry some of the burden, and expanded
nato’s umbrella to cover the new democracies emerging from the
Soviet rubble. (Eastward expansion was a step towards Russia, she
insisted, not against it.) Her loathing for Donald Trump, when he
appeared, was part-based on his disdain for these alliances, which
included the places of her past.
Her years at the State Department, from 1997 to 2001, were rela-
tively quiet. It had not been so at the un, where Somalia, Rwanda
and Bosnia were all traumatic for her. In Somalia, where anarchy
reigned, America sent in troops to feed the hungry but, when 18
were killed, felt humiliated and withdrew. In Bosnia, convulsed
with ethnic cleansing, America stood by for far too long until lim-
ited natoair strikes cleared the way for a negotiated peace. As for
Rwanda, it exploded in 1994 with such volcanic intensity that she
received no intelligence and nothing could be done. She argued
hard for humanitarian aid but it was too late even for that, and no
one, least of all Congress, seemed to care. Working at the unleft
her in two minds: first, that it was wonderful that such a body ex-
isted; but second, that it was a monstrous bureaucracy which,
while people were dying, argued over commas.
Failure in Rwanda was her deepest regret. Having huddled
through the London Blitz, she knew something of war, but not like
this: children’s skulls gouged by machetes, stadiums carpeted
with blood. Another vivid cause for regret was her remark on “60
Minutes” that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children, suppos-
edly caused by the sanctions placed on Saddam Hussein for block-
ing unnuclear inspections, were a price worth paying. The figures
turned out to be false, but she hated to appear so cruel.
The fighting in Yugoslavia touched her most closely. First, she
had lived there. But second, it raised again the spectre of concen-
tration camps in Europe, into which Muslim men and boys were
herded to be starved or killed by Serbs. By that date she had also
learned, to her horror, that 26 members of her own family had
been murdered in Terezin and Auschwitz, including three grand-
parents. She found two of their names on the wall of the Pinkas
synagogue in Prague, which she had visited before without know-
ing. Her parents had wiped that Jewish heritage away, and had her
baptised a Catholic, in order to escape such persecution.
She accepted this astonishing truth just after becoming secre-
tary of state. It shocked her, but she stayed an Episcopalian, as she
had become to marry Joe, and did not exploit her new identity. Her
overwhelming response was to praise and defend what her par-
ents had done for her. Yes, they had lied, and had deprived her of
part of herself. But they had enabled her to live, succeed and be an
American, the luckiest thing in the world. nA different kind of secretaryMadeleine Korbel Albright, America’s first female secretary
of state, died on March 23rd, aged 84