Madeleine Albright

Madeleine Albright was born on May 15th, 1937 to Anna and Josef Korbel in Prague, Czechoslovakia, now known as the Czech Republic. Born into a world that was about to break out into war, Albright experienced a plethora of struggles early in her life. In 1939 at the start of WWII, Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia when Albright was just two years old. Her entire family was forced to flee their country to go to England. For a long time, the Catholic Albright believed the migration was solely due to their family’s political beliefs, but she soon learned it was also due to her Jewish family history. It was later revealed that their family had converted from Judaism to Catholicism, changing her name from its original Marie Jana Korbel to Madeleine Korbel. It was also discovered that three of her grandparents ended up perishing in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust.

After WWII ended in 1945, the Korbels moved back to their home in Czechoslovakia. However, once the Communist party began to gain influence, the Korbels were forced to emigrate again. This firsthand experience of communism in her country would later influence Albright to become a huge proponent of spreading American democratic ideals as Secretary of State. The family relocated to Colorado in the United States, where her father, Josef, became a professor of international relations at the University of Denver, thanks to his experience as a part of the Czechoslovak Foreign Service and Ambassador to Yugoslavia. There, Albright grew up learning a lot about international relations from her father. She graduated high school and received a scholarship to Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she graduated in 1959 with a Bachelor of Arts in political science with honors. While attending Wellesley, she married Joseph Albright, whom she had worked with as an intern at his family’s publishing company. After that, Albright went on to achieve her Master’s and a Ph.D. in Public Law and Government at Columbia University in 1976. After graduating from Columbia, Albright settled in Washington D.C. and went on to become a legislative assistant to Democratic Maine Senator Edmund S. Muskie. After four years, Albright began serving under the National Security Council under former President Jimmy Carter. However, once Ronald Reagan came into office, Albright started to work for several nonprofit organizations. She also became a Research Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and became the Director of the Women in Foreign Service Program. Around this time, her life changed drastically. Her husband left her for another woman, and the couple divorced in 1982.

Throughout her tenure as the Secretary of State, Albright supported a humanitarian agenda and pushed for democratic values and greater U.N. intervention. For example, she advocated for greater international intervention during the humanitarian crisis in Kosovo in 1999, in which millions of refugees sought to flee Kosovo in response to Serbian oppression and expulsion of ethnic minorities. In addition, she helped negotiations between Israel and several Arab nations and worked to spread the influence of the United Nations further east in Europe. In 2000, she made history by being the highest ranking official from the United States to visit North Korea in person to negotiate with Kim Jong Il about a nuclear deal.