Americans love rags-to-riches stories and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s personal tale is one of the best. In 1948, at age 11, she arrived in New York Harbor in a boat, a poor refugee from Prague. Forty-eight years later, she was named secretary of state, the highest-ranking woman in the history of U.S. government.
But there is a second part to Albright’s rags-to-riches tale that is less well-known. The mother of three girls, Albright was once a stay-at-home mom, ferrying her children to after-school activities, selling Girl Scout cookies, heading the PTA and sewing Halloween costumes.
After many years in the domestic trenches, Albright began her career in public service at the ripe old age of 40. Some see her as walking, talking proof that, yes, there is life after the carpool.
“I’ve always said women can do everything, they just can’t do it all at the same time,” she said in a Chicago interview last week. “Women’s lives often have a zigzaggy nature.”
Albright was in town for two reasons: to offer the keynote address at the Chicago Foundation for Women’s 18th Annual Luncheon & Symposium at the Chicago Hilton & Towers and to promote her newly released memoir “Madam Secretary” (Miramax, $28).
Albright, 66, says women do a lot of volunteer work that never makes it onto their resumes. “If you’re president of your school board, that is the equivalent of running a corporation,” she said. “If you put out the school newsletter, that’s like being an assistant secretary for public affairs.”
As unlikely as it may seem, Albright said her own rise to fame was launched in 1969, when she agreed to handle fundraising for her daughters’ tony private school in Washington, D.C.
During that time she learned how to ask people for money and made important contacts among the powerful elite of the nation’s capital.
Later, she offered her talents as a fundraiser to former Sen.
Edmund Muskie of Maine, who was seeking the Democratic Party nomination for president. She also raised money for Walter Mondale and other Democratic politicians.
Meanwhile, Albright, who earned her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College, worked on her PhD in international relations at Columbia University. Between overseeing her daughters’ homework and driving them to horseback riding lessons, she finished her dissertation in 1975. It took her 13 years to complete and was, she writes, “the hardest task I have ever faced on my own.”
Over the years, she employed a bevy of baby-sitters to help care for her children while she attended classes. Albright still grimaces when she recalls the sting of criticism she felt from women who thought she should be at home with her kids.
“I was a better mother, because I didn’t spend all my time with my children,” she said. “That’s the combination that worked for me and I feel every woman has to do it her own way. Women should make their own choices.”
After earning her doctorate, Albright joined Muskie’s Senate staff, then moved to the White House, where she was a member of the National Security team under former President Jimmy Carter.
A marriage in trouble
While Albright’s star was rising, her marriage was in trouble. She had married Joe Albright, the scion of a wealthy newspaper family, in 1959, calling him her “American prince.”
After 23 years of marriage, as the two sat sipping coffee one morning in their living room, he told her he was leaving her for another woman, one younger and, as he described, “beautiful.”
“It was the lowest point of my life,” she recalled. “I was such a product of my age group. I wanted to get married, I loved being married and I wanted to stay married.”
At first, she blamed herself for the loss of her marriage. “It took me years to figure out it wasn’t anything I’d done,” she said. “It was as if I was living in two worlds. Outwardly, I was all stiff upper lip. Inside, I hurt physically. I was in genuine physical pain.”
Her divorce became final in 1983, and Albright says she turned to politics and academia to help ease the pain. She served as foreign policy adviser to Mondale’s presidential campaign and taught at Georgetown University, where she also created a program to encourage women to enter international relations.
She has mentored many young women and has hired others, in the State Department and during her ambassadorship to the United Nations. Helping women remains one of Albright’s passions.
“Women must make sure not to push the ladder of success away from the building after they have climbed to the top. Helping other women is important,” she says. “You certainly don’t get enough help from men.”
When Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, he appointed her U.S. ambassador to the UN, the first woman to serve in that post.
Being the lone woman
While serving at the UN, Albright said she wanted to write a memoir titled “Fourteen Suits and a Skirt”–a reference to the 14 male foreign leaders who had seats as permanent representatives on the UN Security Council and to her, the lone woman. Whenever she entered the room where the council met, her “female instincts” told her to stay quiet, figure out who was who and watch their interaction, she says.
“I think that’s what most women will do in that situation, but I couldn’t do that because I was there representing the United States,” she said. “I had to speak up right away, and I became comfortable doing that.”
Albright says she never endured condescension from male foreign leaders while she was secretary of state, because she arrived in each country in a large, imposing airplane with the seal of the United States stamped on its side.
“It was men in my own government who gave me problems,” she said.
Former National Security Adviser Tony Lake used to glance at his watch and drum his fingers on a tabletop whenever she began talking, she said. “Many of these men were nice people, not nasty, chauvinistic men. But they had trouble seeing I had the highest-level job.”
Still, Albright cautions women away from bitterness. “You have to stand up for yourself, but you can’t go around with a redwood on your shoulder.”
Albright herself came in for some criticism when Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs discovered that three of her grandparents were Jewish and had died in World War II-era concentration camps. She was charged with hiding her Jewish ancestry, an allegation she strongly denied.
Dobbs, who wrote a biography about her, “Madeleine Albright: A 20th Century Odyssey,” (Henry Holt, 1999), said she is personable, charming and friendly but also driven, ambitious and ruthless.
Developing strategy is not one of her strengths. “She tends to see the world in black and white,” Dobbs told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in a 1999 interview.
The Lewinsky briefing
One of the most difficult incidents during her years as a member of the Clinton cabinet came when the president briefed them on his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
“I was angry with the president for risking so much for less than nothing, but I had learned from my own experience not to be surprised when a man lies about sex,” she writes in her memoir.
The affair was a crisis facing the president and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, but it did not affect Albright’swork in foreign policy, she said. “I hurt for Hillary. I thought she might want to talk with me, because I’d gone through something similar, but she’s a very private person.”
Since leaving public service, Albright has returned to teaching at Georgetown University and has founded a global strategy firm with several other women–including former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner and State Department Counselor Wendy Sherman–who held high-ranking positions in the Clinton administration.
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A few of Albright’s best lines from a speech she gave last week in Chicago:
On her legacy: ‘I don’t want to be a historical accident.’
On Secretary of State Colin Powell: ‘[He] needs to speak up more.’
On the Middle East road map to peace: ‘I’m hoping it’s only in the glove compartment.’
On the Palestinian leader: ‘Arafat loves being a victim.’
On Iraq: ‘Is there an exit strategy?’
On her looks: ‘My problem was my hair, which was minimal.’
On sisterhood among women: ‘There really is a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.’
