Mourning Madeleine Albright: The First of Its Kind

Madeleine Albright was the first woman to head the US State Department. Her trademark: She didn’t mince words. The Democrat was 84 years old.

January 23, 1997, a historic day: Madeleine Korbel Albright was sworn in as Secretary of State, the first woman in US history. Two things are reflected in her life, the almost 60-year-old said at the time: firstly, the turbulence in Europe in the middle of the century, and secondly, the constant tolerance and generosity of the United States.

Born in Prague in 1937 as the daughter of a diplomat, Madeleine Korbelova soon had to flee the Nazis with her family. It was only decades later that she found out what her parents had kept from her: She comes from a Jewish family, and many of her relatives were murdered during the Holocaust. In 1948 the family settled in the USA. The young woman studied, did her doctorate, married and had three daughters.

career in the 1990s

When her marriage fell apart, she plunged into an identity crisis. As it turned out, she later said in an interview, the next ten years were the most influential. Albright worked as a foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential candidates. Bill Clinton first sent her to the United Nations in 1993 and then made her Secretary of State.

Her trademark: She didn’t mince words. When Cuba’s military shot down two small US civilian planes, she said it had nothing to do with “cojones,” meaning guts, that was cowardice. Bill Clinton is said to have been enthusiastic about this sentence. And about the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, she said she didn’t think the world had seen anyone as evil as Saddam Hussein, except maybe Hitler.

Striking brooches for official occasions

What she later regretted was that the US and the world had not acted faster and prevented the genocide in Rwanda. In the dispute over Kosovo, Albright supported the NATO attacks. She got along extremely well with the then German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.

Anyone who wanted to know what Albright was thinking had only to look at the large brooches she wore to official occasions. Saddam Hussein once called it a snake. She had this wonderful antique snake brooch, she said later, and from then on she always wore it whenever they had anything to do with Iraq. When she met Russian President Vladimir Putin, she wore a piece of jewelery depicting the three monkeys that see, hear and speak nothing.

criticism of Trump

After Clinton’s presidency ended, Albright remained loyal to politics, democracy, the Democrats, and Hillary Clinton, who supported her during the campaign. “Remember, there’s a special place in Hell for women who don’t help each other,” Albright cried, and was heavily criticized for it.

She didn’t go so far as to call Donald Trump a fascist, but she did see American democracy in jeopardy. But four years ago she came up with a strong sentence: she is now 80 and she doesn’t want to end her life in a bad mood about the United States. Now she died at the age of 84.