ALBRIGHT, MADELEINE

born May 15, 1937, Prague, Czech. ne Marie Jana Korbel American public official, the first woman to hold the cabinet post of U.S. secretary of state. Marie Jana Korbel was the daughter of a Czech diplomat. After the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, her family fled to England. Although she spent most of her life believing that they had fled for political reasons, she learned in 1997 that her family was Jewish and that three of her grandparents had died in German concentration camps. The family returned to Czechoslovakia after World War II, but the Soviet-sponsored communist coup made them refugees again, and by 1948 they had settled in the United States. Korbel graduated from Wellesley (Massachusetts) College (B.A., 1959) and married Joseph Albright, a member of the Medill newspaper-publishing family. After earning (1968) a master's degree from Columbia University, New York City, she worked as a fund-raiser for Senator Edmund Muskie's failed 1972 presidential campaign and later served as Muskie's chief legislative assistant. By 1976 she had received a Ph.D. from Columbia and was working for Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser. During the Republican administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the 1980s and early '90s, Albright worked for several nonprofit organizations, and her Washington, D.C., home became a salon for influential Democratic politicians and policy makers. She also was professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., from 1982 to 1993. After the election of President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, in 1992, Albright's political star began to rise, and Clinton named her ambassador to the United Nations in 1993. At the UN she gained a reputation for tough-mindedness as a fierce advocate for American interests, and she promoted an increased role for the United States in UN operations, particularly those with a military component. Her nomination to the position of secretary of state was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 1997. Additional reading Thomas Blood, Madam Secretary: A Biography of Madeleine Albright (1997); Ann Blackman, Seasons of Her Life: A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright (1998); Michael Dobbs, Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth-century Odyssey (1999).