In the cut-throat world of international politics, women have long struggled to make themselves noticed and heard. Yet, in spite of her diminutive presence (she was 4’10”) Madeleine Albright stood out and rose to become a leading player in the Clinton administration, the US envoy at the United Nations from 1993 to 1997 and the first-ever female Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001.

Albright, who has died aged 84, first came to prominence as an expert on foreign affairs. As an adviser to three presidential Democratic Party candidates – Senator Walter Mondale, Governor Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton – she steadily made a name for herself as someone who could explain complex foreign policy matters in a language any “ordinary Joe” could understand.

The daughter of a Czech diplomat, she spoke several languages and seemed equally at ease in the world of academia as in the upper-middle class American society she became part of, after marrying into the powerful Albright-Medill newspaper family. Brought up a Catholic, she converted to Episcopalianism when she married.

What she did not know, however, was that the Catholic rituals of her childhood were part of an elaborate web of lies her Jewish parents had built to protect their family from the tide of antisemitism that was sweeping across Europe at the time. Not only had they converted and brought up their children as Catholic, but to corroborate this new identity they had even built a Catholic backstory for themselves. “They talked about getting ready for Easter and Christmas,” Madeleine recalled many years later.

Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague, the eldest of the three children of Josef Korbel, a press attaché in the Czech Embassy in Belgrade, then Yugoslavia, and Anna Speeglova.

Her father had worked for two Czech presidents, Masaryk and Benes, but after Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, threatened with execution by the Nazis, he moved to London to follow the Benes government in exile.

It was in the London of the Blitz with Europe seemingly overrun by the Nazis that the Korbels decided to convert and built a new religious identity for themselves. The relatives who had remained behind weren’t so lucky: three of Albright’s grandparents died in Nazi concentration camps.

After the war Josef Korbel was appointed the Czech ambassador to Belgrade and his family followed him there. However, to protect his daughter from Communist indoctrination at the local schools, he sent Marie – whose name had been changed to Madeleine – to a private school near Lake Geneva, Switzerland.

The 1948 Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia meant that the Korbel family was on the move again. They finally settled in the US where Korbel was given political asylum. Madeleine studied political science at the prestigious Wellesley College where she graduated with honours in 1959. She had become an American citizen two years earlier.

At Wellesley she had edited the school newspaper and it was while working as an intern at the Denver Post that she met Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, a scion of one of the country’s most powerful newspaper dynasties. They married in 1959.

But a life of idle luxury was not what she aspired to: maybe because of her peripatetic childhood she had also developed a passion for international affairs and, after earning a certificate in Russian at Columbia University, she followed it up in 1968 with a master’s degree in international affairs and a doctorate in 1972.

That same year marked her entry into politics; at first as a fundraiser for the presidential campaign of Senator Edmund Muskie, a family friend. In 1978, Zbigniew Brzezinski, her former tutor at Columbia, who was at the time President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, recruited her as congressional liaison on the National Security Council.

After her divorce in 1982 she became even more involved in politics, working on the election campaigns of Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run for vice president, presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign.

By the time Clinton became president, Albright had made a name for herself for her expertise in both domestic and international affairs. Fluent in several languages, she seemed the perfect choice as US ambassador to the UN.

There she showed her tough side, clashing repeatedly with Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali about peace-keeping operations. It was said that her tenure changed the way women diplomats were seen in the UN.

To educate civilians about the dangers of landmines, she worked with DC Comics on a series of educational comic books for children. Noticing they featured Superman and Batman, she suggested they include Wonder Woman, too. Which they did.

Towards the end of her term came one of her few faux-pas. When asked on NBC 60 Minutes about the (alleged) death of half-a-million children because of sanctions on Iraq, she replied: “I think this is a very hard choice but we think the price is worth it.”

Albright would say later that she immediately regretted her words, which were “a terrible mistake.”

When, at the beginning of his second term, Clinton appointed her Secretary of State, she made it her aim to take the US foreign policy to the American people. Her first official trip was not to Paris or London but to Texas.

“In our democracy we cannot pursue policies abroad that are not understood and supported at home,” she explained.

Her tenure saw a number of regional conflicts – Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Northern Ireland and Iraq – but no major war. She championed NATO’s expansion into the former Soviet Bloc and was against nuclear proliferation.

When in 1997 the Washington Post broke the story of her family’s Jewish roots, Albright was faced with an onslaught of cynicism. People wondered if it was really possible that she hadn’t known. And then antisemitism followed, with some now questioning her credibility.

She took it all in her stride, but years later would say: “I had been asked to represent my country in a marathon, the first time a woman ever had been, and given a very heavy package to unwrap as I ran.”

After she stepped down as Secretary of State in 2001, Albright taught at Georgetown University, training would-be diplomats; she also remained politically active supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016. Ever the feminist, she took some flak for saying during a rally, “remember, there’s a special place in hell for women that don’t help each other.”

She apologised, recognising that women are free to choose whichever candidate they want, but added: “If heaven were open only to those who agreed on politics, I imagine it would be largely unoccupied.”

Albright was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2012.
She is survived by her three daughters: twins Alice and Anne and Katie, six grandchildren, her sister Kathy Silva and her brother John Korbel.

Madeleine Albright: born 15 May, 1937. Died 23 March, 2022