Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State, dies at 84 years old after a long illness. Mrs Albright served under President Bill Clinton and helped negotiate peace in Northern Ireland and secure an Israeli-Palestinian agreement for his successor George W Bush in 2004.
Madeleine Albright was the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of state, and passed away on Thursday, May 14th at age 84. She served under President Bill Clinton from 1997-2001.
Madeleine Albright, the 64th Secretary of State of the United States and the first woman to hold the position, died of cancer, according to her family. She died at the age of 84.
Albright’s family said she died Wednesday “surrounded by family and friends” in a statement posted to her Twitter profile.
The State Department’s spokesperson, Ned Price, was giving a regular briefing for media when news of her death came. He told reporters that “her imprint on this building is felt every single day in just about every single corner,” and that “she was a pioneer.”
Albright climbed through the ranks of American politics before being appointed Secretary of State by then-President Bill Clinton in 1997. In 2012, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Albright was born in Prague in 1939 as Marie Jana Korbelova. Her Jewish parents escaped the Nazi-occupied nation just two years after she was born. They relocated to the United Kingdom and converted to Catholicism. During the Holocaust, more than two dozen of Albright’s family were killed, including three of her grandparents. Albright had no idea about her past — or even that she was Jewish — until The Washington Post revealed it in 1997.
“I’ve always considered myself a Czechoslovak Catholic,” Albright stated at the time in an interview with The Washington Post. “My parents belonged to a generation that believed they were the offspring of a free Czechoslovakia, Central Europe’s lone democracy. This was their pride, and that was the environment in which I grew up.”
After the war, Albright’s family returned to Czechoslovakia, where her father worked as a Czech ambassador, but they were forced to evacuate once again when the nation was overthrown by communists in 1949. They arrived in the United States as refugees.
“Becoming a citizen of the United States is the most significant thing that has ever occurred to me,” Albright wrote to then-President Barack Obama ahead of the 2016 United Nations General Assembly. Summit on Refugees. “People in Europe said to my father, ‘We are sorry for your troubles and hope that you have everything you need; by the way, when will you be leaving to go back home?’ But in America, people said, ‘We are sorry for your troubles and hope that you have everything you need; by the way, when will you become a citizen?’”
Albright earned her bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College, one of the most distinguished women’s institutions in the country, in 1959 and went on to build the Albright Institute at her alma mater. She went on to Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and Columbia University to enhance her education.
She met Joseph Medill Albright, of the Medill newspaper family, while at Wellesley. After a “whirlwind” relationship, the two married and produced three daughters: premature twins Alice and Anne, as well as Katherine, a third daughter. A second pregnancy between the twins and Katherine resulted in the death of the child, which Albright subsequently claimed was caused by her catching German measles while pregnant. “At the time, I would have given up any prospect of a career if it would have helped Joe alter his mind,” she wrote in her memoir after her marriage ended in 1982.
She started her career as an adviser to Senator Edmund Muskie of the United States, who eventually became Secretary of State under President Jimmy Carter. She continued to work in American politics, eventually becoming a member of the National Security Council’s staff in 1978.
Despite serving as a foreign policy advisor to three Democratic presidential candidates (Walter Mondale in 1984, Michael Dukkais in 1988, and Bill Clinton in 1992), she was not well-known when Clinton chose her to be the UN’s ambassador.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of Albright’s work centered on Eastern Europe, including a fellowship she got for her articles on the role of the press in political developments in Poland in the early 1980s.
Albright had her “deepest regret” of her career while serving as United Nations ambassador: the international community’s inability to halt the massacre in Rwanda. “This was such a large-scale slaughter in such a short period of time. Hundreds of thousands of people killed in a matter of minutes “In 2004, she told PBS.
Albright and Clinton battled with then-United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali as she fought vehemently for American and democratic values. Boutros-Ghali would later write in his biography that the couple “betrayed” him when she vetoed his for a second term as Secretary-General in 1996.
Clinton appointed Albright as Secretary of State only weeks afterwards.
“As secretary, I would try my best to speak about foreign policy in personal and nonpartisan terms,” she stated at the time. “I believe this is critical because, in our democracy, we cannot pursue foreign policies that are not understood or supported at home.”
The United States Senate confirmed her overwhelmingly.
Reardon, Sophie
Reardon, Sophie is a News Editor at CBS News. Reach her at [email protected]
Related Tags
- madeleine albright parks and rec
- fascism: a warning
- the first female u.s. senator was from what state
