Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,821

This is the unmarked grave of Madeline Albright.

Born in Prague in 1937, Marie Jana Korbelová grew up the daughter of the Czech elite. Her father was a big time diplomat. The family went into exile a year after she was born, as her father was close to Edvard Benes and had to flee when the Nazis took the nation. They were Jewish, but converted to Catholicism in 1941. The future Madeline Albright did later learn about this, but she was raised Catholic and her parents never said a word to her as a child about her being Jewish. They moved to London in 1939, where her father worked for the government in exile. They returned home after the war, but her father was forced out of any government role by the communists in 1948. He got his family out, got a job with the United Nations, and then left. They moved to the United States.

The family ended up in Denver when her father got a job teaching at the University of Denver, where he later became dean of the school of international relations. So she grew up there and then went to Wellesley, graduating in 1959. She became an active Democrat while there and started working on the Denver Post when at home on vacation. She met the journalist Joseph Albright while there. They soon married and moved to New York, when he got a job at Newsday. Over the next decade, the now Madeline Albright combined raising her daughters with taking a lot of classes. They moved between New York and Washington and she ended up becoming a PhD student in Political Science at Columbia, writing a dissertation on the Prague Spring, which she finished in 1975.

By the mid 70s, with her daughters a bit older, Albright began to get involved in politics. She got to know Ed Muskie. She hosted a fundraising dinner for him for his 1972 presidential campaign, they became friends, and he hired her as his chief legislative assistant in 1976. That was nice. But she was headed for the much bigger time. See, she had taken courses with Zbigniew Brzezinski at Columbia. He was impressed. He was close to Jimmy Carter, who named him National Security Advisor. In 1978, he hired Albright as the National Security Council congressional liaison. She already kind of knew everyone in Washington, but now she really did.

Albright went through a nasty divorce in the early 80s, but she kept going by doing a lot of work on eastern European relations, including traveling to Poland to interview people involved in the Solidarity movement. Georgetown hired her to direct their program on women in global politics and to teach courses on eastern Europe. By now, she was a full-fledged Democratic insider on foreign policy issues. She advised both Geraldine Ferraro and Michael Dukakis. She advised Bill Clinton too and he brought her back to the White House to serve on the NSC but then nominated her to be ambassador to the United Nations.

Of course at the UN, she was promoting the Clinton agenda and he was so distracted on foreign policy that it’s hard to know how much when discussing her was real feelings by her boss and how much was her. She later became deeply critical of the UN’s indifference toward the genocide in Rwanda, but then others have stated the Albright herself refused to call it a genocide for a long time. She was fiercely anti-Castro, which made her more popular with Clinton; after the Cuban government shot down two Brothers to the Rescue planes, Albright stated “Frankly, this is not cojones. This is cowardice.” Working a bit blue made Clinton realize he had someone who actually knew about foreign policy and of course certainly helped Democrats in the Cuban community of Florida, which, well, did not last…. Albright also forced Boutros Boutros-Ghali out of UN secretary-general by refusing to vote for him for another term. The rest of the major powers wanted him back, but the UN has rarely existed to do anything the U.S. doesn’t want so he was gone.

Clinton loved this. He wanted to look tough on foreign policy without ever having to really think about it. Albright was perfect–a capable hawk. So he nominated her to be Secretary of State for his second term, in 1997. Albright openly lobbied for the job, using all her connections (most notably, Leon Panetta) to get the job over George Mitchell or Richard Holbrooke. Colin Powell was very hesitant to send U.S. troops to Bosnia, but Albright forcibly argued for it and basically called Powell a wimp, saying what was the point of having troops if you weren’t going to use them? She argued against national security issues being subject to the Kyoto Protocol, one of so many ways the U.S. has never taken climate change remotely seriously. She completely shifted blame on the bombings of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania off of her, blaming others for security lapses. She wanted more U.S. military action in Iraq too, often angering the base of the Democratic Party.

Basically, Albright was one of the reasons why so many lefties were Nader curious in 2000. Moreover, the Clinton administration was horrible on so many issues and Albright was part and parcel to the foreign policy part of this. She really would have been perfect in the Johnson administration, working with Robert McNamara to bomb the living shit out of Vietnam. As she stated in 1998, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.” Yeah, that one really stood the test of time!

To her credit, Albright later opposed Bush’s war in Iraq, though she was very much a loyal opposition type on this. She spent the rest of her life split between doing all the big foreign policy and lobbying work while also being Madeline Albright. Because she was such a pioneering woman, she found herself with lots of offers, such as a guest appearance on Gilmore Girls and another on Parks and Recreation, two shows where of course she would show up. Her personal jewelry collection got its own exhibition of the Museum of Art and Design in New York.

Albright spent the last years of her life in disgust at what the Republican Party had become. Not just Donald Trump, but people such as Mitt Romney too, who she thought was an idiot. Of course she loathed Trump, what halfway decent person doesn’t?

Albright died of cancer in 2022. She was 84 years old. There is much more to say about her, but this post is long enough as is and it can wait til comments.

Madeline Albright is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, D.C. No idea if there’s eventually going to be a marker.

If you would like this series to visit other Secretaries of State, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Warren Christopher is in Hollywood (and with that kind of charisma, where else could he end up?) and Lawrence Eagleburger is in Arlington. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.