Albright was chief of US diplomacy under President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001, during which time she spearheaded changes in US foreign policy to accommodate the demise of the Soviet Union.
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the first woman to hold the top position in US diplomacy, has died at the age of 84, her family said in a statement on Wednesday.
Albright was head of US diplomacy under the administration of Bill Clinton, between 1997 and 2001. Under her command, Washington completed the new foreign policy of the post-Cold War, after the disappearance of the Soviet Union.
That new approach contemplated the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to incorporate countries that were previously in the Soviet sphere of influence, such as Poland or the Baltic nations.
Before becoming secretary of state, Albright had represented the United States as ambassador to the United Nations between 1994 and 1997, during Clinton’s first term.
A refugee from Nazism and Communism
Albright was born on May 15, 1937, in Prague, in what was then Czechoslovakia and today the Czech Republic, with the name of Marie Jana Korbel. She belonged to a Jewish family.
In 1939 her family emigrated to the United Kingdom, after the invasion of Nazi Germany troops. They returned to the country in 1945, at the end of World War II. Several of her relatives, including three grandparents, died in the Terezinstadt and Auschwitz concentration camps.
The family fled again three years later, after the coup that established a Czechoslovakian communist regime aligned with Moscow, leaving the country behind what would be known for decades as the ‘iron curtain’.
The Korbels settled in the US, and the future diplomat studied at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she graduated in 1959 in political science.
In 1959, she became a US citizen, the same year she married Joseph Albright, a member of a notable family of publishers and journalists.
Albright held various media jobs while continuing her studies. In 1970 she was recruited to work as a congressional liaison for Jimmy Carter’s White House National Security Council.
But with Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980, Albright moved into academia, specializing in Eastern European issues.
Albright worked as a foreign policy adviser for the Democrats in the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, both lost to the Republicans.
In 1992 Clinton called her to manage the transition of the National Security Council, and the following year appointed her to her first diplomatic post as ambassador to the UN.
Cause Of Death:
Madeleine Albright died of cancer. At such a difficult time, the family requested respect for privacy.
Amelia Warner
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