The Many Lives Of Madeleine Albright
The Many Lives Of Madeleine Albright
Viewpoint: Presidential Whining
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Mergers And Acquisitions
By Nancy Gibbs
Madeleine Albright learned how to throw everything out and start over almost from birth. Her life and career unfolded in chapters, each with its own plot line, but each propelling the next. The stress of dealing with premature twins in an incubator inspired her to study Russian as a distraction; her success raising money for her children's school led directly to raising money for her future mentor, Edmund Muskie. "Women's careers don't go in straight lines," Albright says. "They zigzag all over the place." Along the way Albright assembled the intellectual, political and social skills she would need when her moment finally came.
"The part I think about most in my childhood," she recalls, "is that we were constantly going somewhere else. I had to make friends very easily." Her father, an up-and-coming Czech intellectual and diplomat, found himself on a political hit list after Hitler invaded; in the days before he could manage their escape, he and his wife walked the streets of Prague, their baby daughter in their arms, careful to stay in public places until he got the fake diplomatic papers that let them make their way to London to wait out the war.
"I remember spending huge portions of my life in air-raid shelters singing A Hundred Green Bottles Hanging on the Wall," Albright recalls. "I remember when we moved to Walton-on-Thames, where they had just invented some kind of a steel table. They said if your house was bombed and you were under the table, you would survive. We had this table, and we ate on the table and we slept under the table and we played around the table."
Albright's mother Anna was born to a prosperous family and a comfortable life, educated, like Madeleine, in Switzerland. It was from her, Albright says, that she learned about resilience. Again and again, she would have to pack up just what they could carry and move her family to a new place, learn new customs, a new language. "Mother used to tell stories of how she had to buy pots and pans but didn't know what to choose because she had never cooked," recalls Albright's brother John. "She had no idea of what foods to purchase or in what quantity."
Albright's discipline and assiduousness, she says, came from her father. Josef Korbel was a formal man, a statesman turned professor, who learned to ski wearing his topcoat and tie. "He was a strict European parent," says John. Family routines were sacrosanct. Children were expected to be at the dinner table on time. "The most severe form of punishment was when our father wouldn't talk to us for a week." When Madeleine was invited to the prom in ninth grade, it triggered a family fight over whether she would be allowed to ride in the boy's car. Her father's compromise: she rode to the prom with her date, and her father followed them in his car. Then Josef drove Madeleine home when the dance ended.
Her father was the first of the intellectual mentors who sharpened her skills and toughened her hide. The other dominant figures, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Muskie, were known for their fierce, intellectual appetites and the grilling they put their students and colleagues through. Brzezinski, Albright's Ph.D. adviser at Columbia and later her boss at the National Security Council, could fillet an unprepared student in a second; he gave out so few A's that he wrote personal notes along with them. Albright became a favorite of his, and it was here, as one of the few female students in his class, that she learned she had to be better prepared than the boys to be taken seriously.
Muskie had a reputation as the hardest Senator on Capitol Hill to work for. He had an expansive intellect and a volcanic temper, which, Albright says, "he admitted to me he used as a device." His style with aides was prosecutorial. He would warn them in advance: "My rule is I want to know everything everybody else knows about this--and more." To work for him amounted to training with Jesuits, dissecting one's faith and then reassembling it. At dinner he'd even challenge an aide about his or her wine selection.
Apart from the intellectual equipment her mentors provided, Albright also learned to keep her wits about her as she acquired the essential diplomatic skill of making people who were uncomfortable with each other become comfortable with her. This was never clearer than when Muskie was Secretary of State and Brzezinski tapped Albright to work with him at the National Security Council. It was a low-level staff job, but "she was always at the center of things," recalls Richard Moe, then Vice President Mondale's chief of staff. She was the rare staff member who could work with both men and not get chewed up by the rivalry. At her going-away party, she recalls, "Muskie said that I was unique in that I was the only woman in the world to go from Pole to Pole."
It was during the 1980s that Albright reinvented herself from a faceless staff member into a political star. Once again the propellant was as much personal as professional. When her husband Joe Albright, after 23 years of marriage, suddenly announced himself in love with another woman, "it shook her up and made her re-evaluate her life," says her friend Winifred Freund. "But it contributed to her strength. Our generation of women never expected this to happen to them." For years Madeleine poured out her bitterness to friends, telling them that Joe Albright couldn't deal with a strong woman and that she never would have made much of her professional life had she stayed married to him. Finally, several friends told her to shut up about Joe, to get on with her life.
Albright took her years of experience at the White House and Senate and turned herself into one of the most popular professors at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. Many of her fellow professors, especially in the blue-blooded government department, may have looked down on her for her thin academic credentials. But the students loved her. "She was like a pied piper," says Peter Krogh, the dean who hired her. "Students flocked to her." They would vote her the best teacher in the School of Foreign Service for a record four years.
The Mondale and Dukakis campaigns were welcome intermissions from the classroom, in which she served as a foreign policy adviser and broadened her connections in the party. But there were three other critically important training outlets as well, whose imprint would become more apparent as she moved closer to the prize. The first was the Georgetown Leadership Seminar, an invention of Henry Kissinger's back when he was an ambitious young Harvard professor trying to make connections with up-and-comers around the world. Each summer about 75 government officials, lawyers, bankers, journalists and military officers from all over the world were invited to Georgetown for a week packed with sessions attended by heavyweights from the State Department, the Pentagon and foreign capitals. Albright never missed a minute of it and never forgot a name.
The second outlet: the Great Decisions TV program, with Dean Krogh as host, on PBS. Scholars and policymakers would debate the foreign policy issues of the day, so Albright got a chance to practice her one-liners in an off-Broadway setting. Though its audience was small, it did attract Washington's policy wonks, and Albright began to be noticed.
The final outlet opened up in 1989, when she took over the Center for National Policy. Bob Rubin, Mickey Kantor and Warren Christopher, all of whom would be in the Clinton Cabinet, served on the center's boards. Albright transformed the way policy papers were produced, demanding that researchers ground their analysis in polling and opinion surveys as well as in textbooks. She coined a word for it--"internestic"--combining international with domestic. The graybeards of diplomacy had to get their hands grubby with domestic issues, she believed, or no foreign policy initiative would succeed.
At the same time, Albright began another important ritual to incubate ideas and expand her network. She began playing host during dinners at her Georgetown home, to argue policy over cocktails and chicken-rice casseroles. "You never went to Madeleine's for the gourmet food," says a participant. "You went for the discussion." Among her regular guests were many of the people now sitting around the Cabinet and conference table with her.
By the time Clinton won in 1992, her profile in Washington made her a natural candidate for the U.N. job. Albright would joke later that someday she would write a book about her experience on the Security Council and title it Fourteen Suits and a Skirt. And she wasn't afraid to play off her gender. On Valentine's Day she placed sweets in red gift bags on the empty chairs of the 14 other Security Council members in the council room, each with a note attached saying how proud she was "to sit with 14 handsome young men." And during one tense round of negotiations over Haiti, Albright turned to the Chinese ambassador, who was being obstreperous, and pleaded, "It's Sadie Hawkins Day, and on that day men are supposed to do something nice for women." But Albright is the first to say the U.N. was the perfect final training ground for any future Secretary of State. Every meal during the week was booked for diplomatic functions. To line her pockets with IOUs that she would need in critical Security Council votes in the future, Albright made a point of visiting the home country of every Security Council member and having each U.N. ambassador show her off to his Foreign Minister. At one point in 1994, when France, China and Russia pushed for relaxation of the economic sanctions against Iraq, Albright flew to practically all the capitals of the remaining 11 Security Council members and, behind closed doors, showed them CIA photos of weapons Saddam was still trying to hide. When she returned to New York, the Russian, Chinese and French ambassadors shelved the relief proposal after discovering they would be slam-dunked in a vote.
Her strong-arm tactics, particularly when it came time for her to lead the fight to oust Boutros-Ghali, won her rave reviews among the ever more conservative lawmakers watching from Capitol Hill; but her relations on First Avenue suffered as a result. Critics at the U.N. considered her too quick to shift blame if U.S.-backed policies failed, too camera struck, too often absent, too willing to run the U.S. mission as an outpost of the Clinton Administration rather than as a diplomatic mission. "Now she would say she was carrying out U.S. policy, but there are ways of doing it that don't leave people angry and upset," says international lawyer Rita Hauser, a friend of Boutros-Ghali's who has known Albright since the Carter years.
Albright always made a point to reporters that she had the job she loved; but from the beginning of her U.N. tour, she began consulting privately with her closest advisers on the next step. At one point she toyed with the idea of running for the Senate, thus following the path of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. She quickly gave up the thought because she didn't really have a home state she could run from.
Instead she booked a travel schedule that looked like a Secretary of State's. She made a special point of getting to know better her essential foreign policy partner, the military. She flew into Mogadishu when U.S. troops were there, driving through town in an armored personnel carrier and wearing a flak jacket. She toured Sarajevo in helmet and body armor. She spent free weekends with Joint Chiefs Chairman General John Shalikashvili, visiting U.S. troops overseas on peacekeeping duty. "You know what I discovered about myself that I did not know? It's that I'm not afraid," she says. "I've done what I need to for my family. My daughters are the greatest source of pride for me--but they don't really depend on me anymore. I have a great sense of freedom now."
Albright's main travel destination, however, was always Washington. She lived on the shuttle, loath to miss Cabinet or NSC-principals meetings that would allow her to help shape the instructions she would have to carry out. When it snowed, she took the train. Sometimes she drove. When it wasn't possible to do either, she participated through video conferences.
White House foreign policy meetings in the first Clinton term were famous for dragging on forever. Albright had a penchant for efficiency. During one Saturday White House video conference on Bosnia in March 1995, Albright finally became exasperated with the abstract seminar Anthony Lake and State Department diplomats were holding forth on U.S. policy in the civil war. "Gentlemen," she said, "it's nice to think about all these things we hope to do or wish we could do," they heard Albright interrupt from the screen. "But you better start figuring out what we're going to do and whether we're going to send in troops to enforce a cease-fire." By the end of that year, the U.S. would deploy troops in Bosnia. "She wasn't afraid to confront the tough questions," recalled a participant in that meeting. "But you just didn't do that in tea-and-crumpet diplomacy."
And up until recently, you just didn't do it in the Clinton White House either. "Clinton wasn't interested in substance," says an NSC member. "He was interested in the lead in the next morning's papers and in making sure that nobody got killed before Nov. 6." Albright shares Clinton's obsession with the next morning's headlines, and that's partly why she got the job. But she's also interested in re-establishing the importance of foreign policy in the minds of Congress and the American people--and, along the way, of "the primacy of the Secretary of State," as a knowledgeable White House aide put it.
Even her closest friends are not sure how she plans to wield her power. But any student of Munich--and any legatee of the Holocaust--must have absorbed this lesson of power: that failing to use it can be just as dangerous as using it unwisely.
--Reported by Ann Blackman and Douglas Waller/Washington
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