The Many Lives Of Madeleine Albright
The Many Lives Of Madeleine Albright
Viewpoint: Presidential Whining
More political coverage from TIME magazine.
Tap into AllPolitics' archive of TIME articles from the days before the internet.
Strategic Moves
By Nancy Gibbs
The Sunday before the election last November, Senator Patrick Leahy, an old friend, sat across from Albright in the dining room of her apartment in New York City's Waldorf Towers. Secretary of State Warren Christopher had told Clinton privately that he planned to leave the job, and both Albright and Leahy knew it.
Leahy began playing the what-if game. What if you were Secretary of State? What would you do? He expected her to beg off the question as impolitic at this moment. Instead Albright spent the next 20 minutes giving him her worldview, almost as if she were rehearsing her testimony for a confirmation hearing.
Leahy returned to his hotel room that night and wrote in his diary, "This country would be well served if she were the next Secretary of State." What Albright did not tell the Senator that night was that she had prepared for that possibility very carefully.
And Bill Clinton, in his own way, had prepared for her. When he first took office, he made his foreign policy principles plain: he didn't have any. And that itself was almost a matter of principle. Three months into his presidency, he announced that "foreign policy is not what I came here to do." Christopher and his team were essentially custodians; all the hotshots were running domestic policy, and soon the State Department's budget was dropping and pieces of its portfolio were shifting over to Commerce and Treasury. Foreign policy became an extension of trade policy by other means: the bailout of Mexico, the passage of NAFTA, the concessions from China and Japan.
By the time Clinton was safely re-elected and considering his choices for his new team, he had learned to trust his instincts on foreign policy, thanks in part to successful interventions in Bosnia and Haiti. "He wanted the chemistry to be such that he would be his own chief policy designer," says a White House insider, "and that he would have people who would carry out his vision."
And so, in the beginning, there was the List. Albright was always on it; during her four years as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., she had treated CNN, as she said, as the 16th member of the Security Council and generally proved to be the Administration's most canny foreign policy salesman. And Clinton loves grand symbolic gestures. "You show him a glass ceiling, and he'll pick up a rock," says a senior aide. Her gender was not enough to guarantee her the job, but it certainly secured her place on the List.
Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan, who was interviewing candidates, warned Albright that lobbying for the job would backfire. "Did he tell you that he would take your case to the President himself?" Geraldine Ferraro asked her friend.
"No," Albright replied hesitantly.
"Then it's bulls___," said Ferraro.
Actually, by that point there wasn't much Albright could do, other than hope her investments would pay off. She had succeeded in winning over some crucial allies. When Hillary Clinton attended the U.N.'s women's conference in Beijing in September 1995, Albright spent the day with her. Albright "flew in, made a cameo appearance and then left," says a high-level participant. "I've known her for years, but it was the first time I was consciously aware of what a public persona she was." Albright also played tour guide when the First Lady visited Prague last July. "She advises her on international stuff, sends her memos and materials. Madeleine's great champion for this job was Mrs. Clinton. Knowing that, there was never any doubt in my mind she would get the job."
Another crucial convert was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's courtly porcupine, chairman Jesse Helms, who had signaled which candidates would never get past his committee. Aides say the North Carolina Senator always had a soft spot for Albright as a fellow full-throated anticommunist. He was delighted that she had ousted U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, loved her attacks on Cuba. But Albright wasn't taking chances. One day, as a favor to a friend, Helms called her in New York and asked if she would come to North Carolina to speak at a foundation luncheon.
"I'll come, but on one condition," Albright told Helms over the phone. "That you come with me and introduce me."
As the two whispered and joked on the dais, Elizabeth Fentress, the luncheon's organizer, says, "you might have thought they were old friends from high school." After lunch Helms draped his napkin over his arm like a waiter, grabbed the dessert tray from the center of the table and walked around to where Albright was sitting. "Madame Ambassador, may I serve you some dessert?" he said with a bow. By the time he escorted her to the airport that evening, they looked like they were on a date.
Within the White House, however, advisers joked about the "corporate board" lined up against her, like Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, as well as Jordan, who was on the transition team, and the new chief of staff and former investment banker Erskine Bowles. Albright's opponents argued that she was not "serious" enough, ill-prepared to manage the immense State Department superstructure and better at selling a strategy than forming one.
The "board" preferred longtime Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn or former Democratic majority leader George Mitchell. Al Gore favored Richard Holbrooke, the brilliant, arrogant implementer of the Bosnian peace accords. Nunn had heft, G.O.P. backing, big throw weight in Europe and the American South; and he was a creative thinker. But he was hardly a Clinton loyalist, having once declared that "Clinton has been a bright, young rising star in three different decades." Mitchell was competent but not exciting and had too many enemies on Capitol Hill. As for Holbrooke, he had the credentials and the media savvy, but the National Security Council team didn't care for his attention-getting style. With Albright, a senior NSC member said, "we get Holbrooke without the neurosis."
As Clinton was mulling over his decision, White House aides opposed to Albright's appointment leaked word that she had fallen to the second tier. "That was like, Kazzam!," says Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, a close friend. "It was an insult to all of us. And it gave us the opportunity to launch a full-court press." Mikulski lobbied Hillary Clinton over a veggie-burger lunch at the White House mess. Connecticut Representative Barbara Kennelly called Gore; Albright had always been his backup choice, and he was now concerned with transferring Clinton's support among women to his own political base. Albright herself had to move very carefully during this stage. She ran into Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala outside the White House mess. "Whadda ya hear?" Albright asked in a whisper. "Keep your head down and stay cool," Shalala whispered back. Albright nodded and kept her fingerprints carefully off any campaign on her behalf.
It was Clinton's comfort level that mattered most, and he had long favored Albright in one particular respect. He would always say about her, after any meeting on the subject, "she gives the best public articulation of my foreign policy of any person around." And she works hard to make it look easy. "People say to me, 'Oh, you sailed through your confirmation hearings,'" Albright says. "Well, I studied. My Christmas vacation was a little like college, when everybody went skiing, and I sat and studied." And she did one last bit of discreet politicking. Knowing that even with Helms in her camp she still had to get past the full Senate, she collared Washington wise man Ken Duberstein at a black-tie dinner for advice on how to approach young hard-liners like Republicans Rod Grams of Minnesota and Craig Thomas of Wyoming. His answer: retail politics. And so Albright went door to door and chair to chair and spittoon to spittoon in the Republican cloakroom until she had the support of everyone on the committee. By the time the Senators voted, she was back in her U.N. office, packing up the debris of four years of globe-trotting, watching the proceedings on C-SPAN. When the final tally was announced, she fell back in her chair, her arms thrown over her head, and let out a whoop. It was 99 to 0. "So who wasn't there?" she asked.
--Reported by Ann Blackman and Douglas Waller/Washington
| back |  page 2 | forward |