![]() “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it,” she said in comments that remain anathema. Having made her case, she turned around and flew back to India, rejoining the presidential visit in Mumbai.Īlbright drew criticism in left-wing and humanitarian circles for her support of punishing sanctions imposed on Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s rule, telling an interviewer once that the humanitarian suffering that many blamed on the sanctions had been an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of implementing U.S. Once, in the middle of a Clinton state visit to India, Albright broke off from the trip in Delhi to fly nearly 12 hours to Geneva, Switzerland, with a refueling stop in Crete, to deliver a 15-minute speech excoriating China’s human rights record before what was then known as the U.N. She championed the creation of a U.S.-led “Community of Democracies” to promote greater global respect for human rights and freedom even when some of America’s closest allies, notably France, sneered at the idea. She believed in the promise of the United States and as the glass-ceiling-breaking first woman to run the State Department tried tirelessly to change the “pale, male, Yale” culture of the foreign service. She liked to say that America was “THE indispensable nation” as she lobbied for more support for U.S. Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, Sierra Leone rebel leader Foday Sankoh and others can all be found in her appointment books. Having fled eastern Europe from the horrors of the Nazi era and subsequent Soviet suppression, she abhorred dictators and authoritarianism. They ranged from the mundane to the menacing - including one of a snake. She often punctuated her otherwise conservative attire with a fancy brooch, often picked to send a message to her interlocutors. Madeleine Albright was a woman of conviction and determination who liked to say she told things like they were and not the way she might like them to be. Four years after Albright left government, Rice became the second female secretary of state and the first Black woman to hold the office. “But Madeleine, I’m a Republican,” she said Condoleezza Rice had replied. Albright once recalled asking one of her diplomat father’s most gifted students at the University of Denver to serve as a foreign policy adviser on a Democratic campaign. Her rare political comments were almost always tame in nature. The closest anyone could recall was when she castigated the Cuban government at the United Nations for shooting down a civilian Brothers to the Rescue plane by saying it hadn’t been “cojones” but rather “cowardice.” Or her studied and stern visage of annoyance, anger and aggravation when she learned that Clinton had lied when he swore to her that he had not had an inappropriate relationship with a White House intern. And not ever in lectures or other events of hers that I attended a decade earlier at Georgetown University, where she had been a professor of mine at the School of Foreign Service. Not in off-the-record encounters during her frenzied travels to locales that former secretaries of state had never ventured to - Kano in northern Nigeria Samarkand and Bukhara in Uzbekistan and perhaps most famously Pyongyang, North Korea, to name just a few. I had certainly never heard her use such coarse language. I had covered her for nearly three years as a State Department reporter for the French news agency AFP, and, while most people including the traveling press corps, knew well her political leanings, she had striven to mask them and was unfailingly polite to Democrats and Republicans alike. ![]() She often said that she had had her “political instincts surgically removed” when she became secretary of state. The remark was jolting because it was so unlike the Albright that I had known. ![]()
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