The rest of America is starting to get the point, too. Madeleine Albright is not your father’s diplomat. The new secretary of state doesn’t cloak her words in the oh-so-polite euphemisms of foreign policy. “I tell it like it is,” the 59-year-old Czech refugee is fond of saying. And so she does: whether it’s blasting Fidel Castro for “cowardice, not cojones,” or, after the Iraqi press dubbed her “snake woman,” proudly donning a brooch–shaped like a snake. Last week one State Department wag likened her whirlwind arrival at Foggy Bottom, and her promise of exciting new days, to a pledge to “bring in ‘da noise, bring in ‘da funk.” Albright’s color and dash are deeply refreshing in the stodgy world of foreign affairs. But it’s not just a matter of style. In the cold war, American diplomats chose their words very carefully not just because most of them were boring white males–though most of them were–but because one false step, in theory at least, could have cataclysmic consequences.
The world is a very different place today: crises are real but the stakes seem less apocalyptic. Precisely because foreign policy is now so complicated, and sometimes necessarily ad hoc, the time may well have come for a secretary of state who can afford to react to events like a human being–with candor and earthy common sense. Albright, a deft communicator but not a self-styled strategic thinker, will test this proposition.
While Washington swoons, the outlines of what confronts the new secretary aren’t far from view. This week Albright takes her case to Houston, where she’ll meet with George Bush and James Baker to make the bipartisan case for global engagement. Later this month she takes her first overseas trip as secretary–a voyage that puts her in nine capitals in 10 days including Rome, Moscow and Beijing. Her new style will be on display–and so will the challenges that face the United States. Albright, for instance, ventures to China at a time when Sino-American relations are fraying over everything from trade to human rights.
While diplomacy has long been dominated by gray men in gray suits, Albright is a red dress, a point she has not hesitated to make as she begins her tenure as the first female secretary of state. When the divorced mother of three grown daughters addressed State Department employees last week, she mocked herself. “You may notice that I don’t exactly look like Secretary Christopher,” she said as she stepped out from behind the podium for a small, ritualized curtsy. The differences are more than cosmetic (though there have been plenty of those, including her decision to display modern art in the secretary’s office). She told a gathering of Foggy Bottom employees: “I don’t shilly-shally much. I don’t say “on the one hand, on the other hand’.” And she encouraged even low-level staffers to send her good ideas. “Don’t ignore me just because I’m secretary of state.” Albright promises to be far more public–and that means more than just appearing on the traditional chat-show circuit. Look for her to do everything from town meetings to daytime talk shows.
Jesse Helms and feminists, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Ted Kennedy–everyone seems to be an FOM (Friend of Madeleine). No wonder she’s attracting more media than any secretary of state in memory. Though barely a dozen reporters regularly traveled with Warren Christopher, the number of journalists who have already signed up for Albright’s tour is forcing the State Department to consider organizing a rotating “pool” to cover the secretary. That’s a staple of presidential coverage, but it’s rare at the cabinet level.
That Albright is making such a splash isn’t entirely surprising. The best way to understand Madam Secretary is as a Great Communicator–someone who wrote for her college newspaper, was four times teacher of the year as a foreign-policy professor at Georgetown University and vows to take her foreign-policy message not just to Berlin and Beijing but to Saginaw and San Diego. For her, Foggy Bottom is a bully pulpit–a podium for convincing Americans that foreign policy matters. Albright won’t bring high-minded theory to her lectures. She may be as flashy as Henry Kissinger–the last secretary of state to be a bona fide celebrity–but she lacks his Big Global Vision. Bosnia, Iraq, China–each lends itself more to problem solving than to grand theorizing. “She can go out there and explain in terms that people understand why stopping the war in Bosnia or famine in Africa or the sale of chemical weapons in the former Soviet Union should matter to them,” says a White House official. In other words, the secretary as salesman.
She knows that game; until recently, her chief product was herself. She carefully prepared for her debut on the world stage. For instance, she has courted archconservative Helms assiduously over the past four years. (The senator is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, which confirms secretaries of state.) She even flew to North Carolina to appear at a women’s college at Helms’s behest–a trip she made over the objections of the White House staff, who believed Helms should be ignored. And Team Albright has been very precise about her exposure to the press. Her staff is parceling out her time, giving each network some access: she did time on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and ABC’s “World News Tonight,” and a crew from CBS’s “60 Minutes” is trailing her. Even when there have been image slip-ups, they have been quickly remedied. When Albright testified on Capitol Hill, her makeup looked heavy and pancaked under the klieg lights. By the time she appeared on the Sunday talk shows, she looked more natural.
Albright has wowed Washington perhaps because she’s a local, not an out-of-towner like Christopher of Los Angeles. She lives in a posh Georgetown town house that’s a salon for Democratic lawmakers like Richard Gephardt and intellectuals like foreign-policy specialist Morton Abramowitz. (And like Kissinger, she has Hollywood connections: Albright has bonded with Barbra Streisand.) She has a weekend place amid the Virginia horsy set. Even at the United Nations she kept up her Washington connections; Albright was a constant presence on the New York-D.C. shuttle. It paid off. The First Lady supported her elevation to State; and though Al Gore favored Richard Holbrooke for the job, the vice president is still an Albright fan.
Her rise is a great immigrant success story. In 1948 Madeleine Jana Korbel arrived in America. The girl was only 11 but had been a refugee twice–first in 1938, when the Nazis rolled into Czechoslovakia and forced her father, a diplomat, to flee to England. The second time came 10 years later when a communist coup forced the Korbels to flee once again, this time to America. The family settled in Colorado. Albright’s friends say this experience of flight is key to understanding her belief in American power, whether it’s in Bosnia or Haiti. She’s a great fan of the military–something that was apparent when she donned camouflage paint in 1994 for a visit to army troops in Louisiana. She even ate the army’s less-than-gourmet MREs (meals ready to eat). She keeps an enormous Marine Corps knife on her desk.
For women who have worried that taking a few years off to raise their children would ruin their careers, Albright offers a reassuring example. She attended Wellesley College, where she met Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, a publishing heir whom she married in 1959. She stayed home to raise her children, stretching out her Ph.D. at Columbia University for nearly a decade. She rose at 4:30 a.m. and even knitted in movie theaters. In 1968 the family moved to Washington. After a particularly successful stint as a fund raiser at her child’s tony private school, Albright went into Democratic politics. “She jumped right from fund raising for the kindergarten to fund raising for [the late senator Edmund] Muskie,” recalls a contemporary.
Her career was propelled by hard work and the patronage of powerful men. Muskie made her his legislative assistant in the Senate, where she learned the delicate art of compromise. When Zbigniew Brzezinski, her old thesis adviser from Columbia, became Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser in 1977, he tapped Albright to handle his relations with Capitol Hill. Her charm paid off: “She kept me from getting in trouble with Congress,” Brzezinski says.
In 1982, her personal world fell apart. That year, her husband, Joe, summarily announced that he was leaving her for another woman. Albright was devastated and has not seriously dated since. Still, revenge is a dish best served cold. Fifteen years to the day after Joe walked out, Albright was being feted in New York by the British ambassador to the United Nations, celebrating her appointment to State at dinner with colleagues in an East Side town house. Joe was shivering in Moscow, where he is a reporter with the Cox newspaper chain.
After the divorce Albright threw herself into politics and policy. (By this time her three daughters were fully grown.) She honed her skills as a communicator. Her foreign-policy interests were in areas such as terrorism and the press–today’s hot topics but, at the time, dismissed as soft by her fellow academics, who were more interested in topics like nuclear throw-weight. Her Georgetown home became a gathering place for intellectuals and Democratic politicians. When Clinton named his foreign-policy team in 1992, the faces were so familiar to Albright’s daughter Katharine that she repeated to the Los Angeles Times: “Mom, they’ve all been around our table.”
During this period, Albright was very much in the mainstream of Democratic thinking on foreign policy. She supported the nuclear freeze, opposed aid to the Nicaraguan contras and urged delay in the use of force against Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990. Over time, though, she became known as a hawk. What accounted for the move? Her friends say she came to trust her latent hawkish instincts. Like fellow refugees Brzezinski and Kissinger, she basically cottoned to the use of U.S. power. “There are people with all kinds of hang-ups from Vietnam or wherever about bringing power to bear,” says Herbert Okun, a retired diplomat who has known Albright for years. “She doesn’t have those hang-ups.” Now that she’s at the top, she has the chance to put those sensibilities to the test.
She’s had some practice, of course. When Clinton appointed her to the United Nations in 1992, she inherited a job that was a perfect stage for someone with a theatrical sensibility. In the old days of the cold war, the United Nations was largely irrelevant: the Soviets had used their veto in the Security Council to stymie all real diplomacy. But the new Russia was more congenial, making the United Nations a place where things actually got done. Albright used the New York stage effectively in ways small and large. She initiated a series of lunches with the seven female ambassadors at the United Nations, jokingly calling them the G-7, a play on the great power alliance. She pressed her colleagues on replacing its besieged secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Within the administration she was a particularly effective advocate on the part of the cause that moved her most–Bosnia. She fought with Colin Powell and against others who were wary of escalating the U.S. military presence in the Balkans. When she visited Bosnia, local Serbs in one small village threw rocks at her; one journalist on the trip made up a T shirt saying I GOT STONED WITH MADELEINE ALBRIGHT IN VUKOVAR.
But the rest of her U.N. tenure was not so impressive. She pushed the resolution that transformed the Somali relief effort into a small and futile war. “Assertive multilateralism,” she called it. Albright says that she regrets the phrase, but guests at a recent diplomatic dinner in New York recall her championing the policy in spirit if not in name. And Albright’s candor at the United Nations sometimes crossed the line into being obnoxious. “She is a fierce advocate,” says Nabil Elaraby, the U.N. ambassador from Egypt. “She pushes hard.”
So she runs the risk of getting into public trouble. Still, behind the scenes, Albright has a lot going for her. Most important, she may be spared the bureaucratic tensions that have long strained relations between the White House’s National Security Council and the State Department. The ani- mosity between the two organizations is decades old. “They’re like rival State Departments,” says one Clintonite. But the difficulties are likely to ease considerably under Albright, who is close to her NSC counterpart, Sandy Berger, a longtime pal. She and Berger chat constantly on their secure “drop lines.” They’ve cross-pollinated their staffs. Berger’s deputy, James Steinberg, is an old friend of Albright’s from Michael Dukakis days. Having Clinton pal Strobe Talbott as her viceroy also gives her a good line into the White House.
But while Albright may bring a new tone to Foggy Bottom, she inherits any number of vexing problems that won’t be solved simply with tough talk and sound bites. At the top of the agenda is China. American relations with the world’s most populous nation are more strained than at any time in the 18 years since the United States recognized the communist behemoth. However sharply Albright reacts to Chinese tyranny, her rhetorical outrage won’t solve the difficult conundrum of getting the nation to come up with political reforms to match its stunning economic transformation. When Albright goes to Beijing later this month, she’s unlikely to wring any concessions from Chinese leader Jiang Zemin.
Similarly, Albright may run into trouble when it comes to expanding NATO. As an emigre from Central Europe, Albright would like to see the alliance extend its membership to include the new democracies of Europe, including Poland, Hungary and her native Czech Republic. Unfortunately, the Russians are less than delighted with the idea of an expanding military axis moving closer to their borders. No matter how strongly Albright feels about a bigger NATO, this will require a deft touch. The experience of two Russia hands, Talbott and Thomas Pickering, the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and soon to be Albright’s number three, will probably help. Their gray style may prove a healthy complement to Albright’s flamboyance.
Meanwhile, Albright must also move quickly to fill top vacancies at U.S. embassies around the world. In an age of faxes and the Internet, the idea of embassies may seem antiquated, but they’re still key to diplomacy, intelligence and international commerce. Among the top vacancies, and replacements, NEWSWEEK has learned, are France, where Pamela Harriman is likely to be replaced by Frank Wisner or Felix Rohatyn; Russia, where Jim Collins may get the nod; Mexico City, where Hattie Babbitt may fill the soon-to-be-vacant slot, and Tokyo, where former House speaker Tom Foley is the leading candidate to replace Walter Mondale.
In the end, the most important person Albright must keep happy is Bill Clinton. Cabinet secretaries who cut flashy figures need a president who will back them when the inevitable controversy comes. While Albright’s a star, Clinton will surely be with her. But what if the going gets rough? And what of the world? America is now sending forth a symbol of the country’s immigrant past and its increasingly powerful women. Even for a charming survivor like Albright, that’s a pretty tall order to live up to.
One Woman’s Journey to the Top
Forged by a refugee childhood, a painful divorce and Washington’s hardball politics, Albright survived, becoming the first woman to lead Foggy Bottom.
