In early 1998, at exactly the same time that Kosovo was beginning to explode in violence, back in Washington the various groups that had been pursuing the president for several years on whether he had made sexual advances toward a woman named Paula Jones stumbled onto what might have been, in terms of White House promiscuity, a mother lode.
On the morning of January 21, the banner headline in the Washington Post was not about Kosovo or Milosevic or the increasing strength of the KLA. Not at all. The headline read: “Clinton Accused of Urging Aide to Lie; Starr Probes Whether President Told Woman to Deny Alleged Affair to Jones’ Lawyers.” Thus did the nation begin to learn about a young woman named Monica Lewinsky. There was growing evidence that the president had had some kind of sexual relationship with Lewinsky, a twenty-four-year-old former White House intern, who had in one searingly romantic moment seduced him in his own office by flirtatiously lifting her skirt and flashing both her thong underwear and her youthful ass at him. He, a man not famous for his resistance to sexual temptation, apparently took that as an invitation. In that wildly seductive moment, when the culture of Beverly Hills 90210 met the culture of good old boy Arkansas politics, the entire Clinton administration had been placed in jeopardy. (“I thonged him,” Lewinsky later explained to Linda Tripp, her onetime confidante.1)
When the story broke, Clinton immediately denied the relationship with, as he so gallantly described his paramour, “that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” (He used the phrase not so much to distance himself from her, he later confided to his Hollywood producer friend Harry Thomason, but because he had momentarily forgotten her first name.2) Not everyone believed his denial, for he had been linked with a long trail of women—Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, and now Monica Lewinsky—and some people were ungenerous enough to think that they all had one thing in common: a certain aura of accessibility. (The sexual lure of presidential power, and the notable lack of Clinton’s own discipline, meant that his various staff members had always been aware, especially on presidential trips, of the need to keep women away from the president. Someone was usually detailed to say no on his behalf because of fears that it would not be his own instinctive response.) It would take well more than a year of his denials, some of them extremely petulant, and Lewinsky’s own testimony to a grand jury before Clinton admitted that she had indeed performed oral sex on him in the White House. What followed was presidential politics not as high art, but as low soap. At times Mike McCurry, the White House press spokesman, found himself trying to explain to a vast horde of journalists (who hungered for more and more of this X-rated sitcom) and to the nation at large—something his parents had almost surely not raised him to do—what the difference was, as the president of the United States of America perceived it, between having sex and having oral sex. Of all the jobs in the federal government at that moment, his might have been the worst. “It’s like we’re standing under Niagara Falls, looking for a boat to get us out of here,” the beleaguered McCurry said at one point.3
Ms. Lewinsky, a somewhat insecure young woman who was the product of a broken home in Los Angeles, had constant problems with her weight and seemed to find emotional relief in what was known as American Express therapy, that is, credit card shopping sprees—a true child of the modern American mall. She had been involved with older men before and had virtually stalked one teacher, following him and his family to Oregon. She had obviously been infatuated with Clinton and his power, ready if need be to replace Hillary, who in her mind was cold and unsympathetic. Lewinsky would watch a presidential motorcade with the president and the first lady go by and tell her confidante Linda Tripp that she resented not being the one in the car with him.4 By December of 1997, she seemed to be too infatuated, and the president tried to break off the relationship, giving her as farewell presents a stuffed animal bought at the Black Dog store on Martha’s Vineyard, a pair of goofy sunglasses, a Rockettes blanket, and a box of chocolates. They had parted with what Lewinsky later described as a passionate kiss. But she was unable to keep their special secret entirely to herself. The political carelessness of what Clinton had done was staggering, and yet very Clintonesque, to risk so much for so little at such an important moment in his political career. Though already being pursued by several right-wing posses who were obsessed by his character, or lack thereof, he had still courted danger in his own office, where nothing was ever secret, with an impressionable young woman who would probably, sooner or later, blather. Was there anyone more likely to talk about what had happened between them than an ego-driven, infatuated, somewhat delusional post-teenager from Beverly Hills, not necessarily the citadel of personal restraint and modesty? After all, her greatest moment had been the conquest of the president of the United States, albeit a conquest, she later complained, that had taken place on her knees, saying her real title should have been “Special Assistant to the President for Blow Jobs.”5 She also referred to him as the Big Creep.
Lovelorn because it appeared that the relationship had been more functional than romantic, Lewinsky soon babbled into the hidden microphone of an alleged friend, Linda Tripp, whose purpose was not to offer friendship or to console a young girl in an emotional crisis, but to provide formidable amounts of ammunition for those Americans who wanted to take down William Jefferson Clinton. Later Tripp tried to rationalize her treachery: “I never considered Monica a friend. We never spent time together outside the office, nor discussed my life. I am not a gossip. The idea that I would cultivate this foolish young girl is offensive. I thought she was a pest. But over time I will say that something kicked in, not a sense of pity . . .”6 The right wing, especially the fundamentalists, had hated Clinton because they always believed he would do something exactly like that, and now, by God, he had done it and made them prophets. Details about what Clinton and Lewinsky had done and where they had done it soon began to trickle out and eventually became a flood. Lewinsky, not surprisingly, was terrified by her role in the scandal and the degree to which she had been singled out by history. Yet on occasion, she appeared to be thrilled by her notoriety as well, and when her brief moment of Warholian fame was coming to a close, she seemed to be eager to stay in the spotlight.
Clinton had put at risk his entire second term, all the leverage his comfortable reelection margin had provided him. The nation watched transfixed, millions of ordinary citizens caught between self-dislike for being Peeping Toms and impatience for more lurid details. All sorts of media titans shrugged and spoke of how much they hated covering something like this, then covered it with an energy rarely seen when it came to budget disputes or foreign policy issues. Sam Donaldson, one of the leading personalities on ABC television, went on the air almost immediately and said that if Clinton was not telling the truth, “I think his presidency is numbered in days.” That turned out to be absolutely prophetic; his presidency was numbered in days, but the number, some three years later when Clinton finally left office, was almost 1,100.
Clinton’s wife staunchly defended him on national television against what she called a vast right-wing conspiracy. In one of the lowest moments of his presidency, Clinton also sent the women members of his cabinet out to speak on his behalf, and regrettably they did just that, vouching for a version of the story that was, unfortunately for them, untrue. All of this was the performance not of Clinton the masterful politician who could shrewdly weigh the odds and consequences of every political act and sense what was best for the country, but of Clinton the emotionally truncated man-child, still, some people who knew him thought, more thrilled by the idea of illicit sex than by sex itself. He had never been entirely responsible for his actions and, going back to his Arkansas days, always thought he could get away with whatever he wanted to get away with. And he did get away with it, to a degree. He would be impeached by a partisan vote in the House, but the Senate failed to convict him. Even so, he paid a monstrous price in the coin of his presidency, the coin of what might have been.
All of this meant that the middle of Clinton’s second term, instead of being devoted to new initiatives, ones postponed during the first term because of lack of political leverage and pressing economic problems, was devoted to hunkering down to fight off Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, a man of uncommon zealotry, and the hard-right Republicans in the Congress, not all of whom had been as faithful to their wives as their political righteousness would indicate. (At one point Starr, believing that Ms. Lewinsky had purchased what he believed to be a scatological novel, tried to subpoena the records of her book buying. It was not one of American democracy’s finest moments.) Clinton was forced to play defense, not offense, and even when it was all over and he had been impeached but not convicted, he was a badly wounded chief executive, stripped of the prime political capital of any president who intends to bring change, his moral authority. The damage to his presidency was incalculable. The Republicans, as part of their assault on the Democrats in 1998 and 2000, said that Bill Clinton had diminished the office of the presidency. That was probably not true; the presidency rises or falls to the level of the ability and the character of its incumbent. What he had done was something quite different. He had grievously diminished his own presidency, which was sinful and foolish enough.
Starting in January 1998 with the first Washington Post story, the noose steadily tightened around Clinton’s neck. More and more bits of evidence indicated that something had indeed taken place between Clinton and Lewinsky, and that there might, in this age of DNA, be a smoking gun of sorts, in this case a dress stained with presidential semen. Thus it appeared ever more likely that his earlier denials had been lies, and while people might consider him a skilled politician, they did not consider him a paragon of the truth. Now the only real question was whether Lewinsky could hold the line against the special prosecutor’s team. As the pressures around the White House grew greater, the bright young men and women who represented the president to the outside world spun the story as best they could. They said that the Lewinsky affair, Monicagate as it was inevitably called, was not deflecting the president from his appointed duties. The White House was going on as normal and he was sticking to his job of being president, which was what the American people had elected him to be and wanted him to do. The line was that the president was out there every day selflessly working for all the people, in spite of those vengeful people who would pull him away from his serious responsibilities. That was also the line spun by the Nixon White House when Watergate, a very different kind of scandal, political instead of sexual, had progressed and the young first-lady-to-be Hillary Rodham was working for one of the investigating congressional committees.
Certainly there was not a lot of talk about the scandal in the White House itself, where it was the multiton elephant standing in the corner of the room that was never mentioned. Or as Michael Waldman, a Clinton speechwriter, once noted, “The White House was the one place in the country you could have a two-hour meeting on Bill Clinton and the name Monica Lewinsky wouldn’t come up.”7 Despite the public denials, however, the truth about what the president was doing was very different. As soon as the story broke, the White House circled the wagons. All political risks were to be dropped. Coin was to be conserved for this massive winner-take-all political confrontation, and Clinton’s vulnerability in other areas instantly went up. A classic example of that came in mid-December 1998 when Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen wanted to bomb Saddam Hussein because he was blocking UN inspectors from certain military sites. Cohen argued first that American credibility overseas depended on such a bombing. If we did not bomb now, Saddam’s defiance would only be greater in the future, Cohen said, and other dictators would be encouraged. Then Cohen added the clincher: “If you don’t act here, the next argument will be that you’re paralyzed.” That, as Bob Woodward noted, introduced impeachment (and Lewinsky) into national security decision-making.8 Such an argument, coming from a long-term Republican politician of notably independent credentials, whose responsibility, along with the Pentagon, was to represent or at least make a read on the Republicans on the Hill, was devastating. Iraq was bombed.9
The Clinton presidency was in total jeopardy, and no one knew it better than the president himself. After all, only two people knew for certain that the story was true, Lewinsky, quite terrified by the implications of the events she had set in motion, and the president, who, despite the denials—to his wife, to the country—knew that he was embattled and the clock was ticking against him. The posse was getting closer, and disgrace of monumental proportions possibly awaited him. What Clinton gradually came to face was a Hobson’s choice: a short-term personal disgrace of a high order by confessing to egregious misconduct with a young intern, while at the same time trying to hold on to his office and avoid even greater disgrace—impeachment—by claiming that it was personal, not political, misconduct and not grounds for impeachment; or to continue to stonewall his pursuers. Neither choice was particularly attractive. (At one point he even authorized Dick Morris, himself tainted by sexual scandal, to conduct a poll to see if the American people were as yet ready for a public confession. Morris reported back that they were not.) He had played right into the hands of his enemies, and no one knew it better than Clinton.
He was angry and sometimes petulant, and while on occasion he later and somewhat belatedly in public accepted the blame for what he had done, essentially what he really did was blame the fates. “God damn, fuck it,” he once said to a friend. “I’m dying [of] a thousand cuts. It’s like someone kicked me in the stomach. I’ve had a knot in my stomach for months.” No person, no ordinary citizen, no politician or president, had ever been subjected to anything like this, he complained.10 To some degree he was right. The sexual behavior of some presidents before him had been comparable and had not been an issue. But this was a different world, and sexual behavior now had a political and media viability it had lacked in the past. Just ask Gary Hart. He had tempted the fates and the fates had bitten him.
Yet even as the Lewinsky scandal played out, both sides escalated the violence in Kosovo. In May of 1998, when Milosevic was beginning to retaliate against the KLA, some people in the administration wanted to use airpower against him. At a meeting in the White House, Bob Gelbhard, who had replaced Holbrooke as the special negotiator, made the case for threatening to use NATO airpower on a list of targets that General Wes Clark had put together, and which they believed would pressure Milosevic to back off in Kosovo. Madeleine Albright had wanted to go ahead and use airpower. Like Clark, she was quite hawkish. But Sandy Berger, who was regarded as a weather vane to Clinton’s political mood and needs, and in whose office the meeting was held, quickly and angrily rejected the idea, asking the old Colin Powell question: What happened if airpower did not work? After Berger silenced Gelbhard, no one—not Albright or Strobe Talbott—supported him. Berger had clearly spoken for Clinton. The White House was not yet ready for Kosovo.11 Too much else was going on at home.
If Albright was the leading hawk in the administration, she backed off for the moment. But in the vacuum that existed in Washington, she was becoming a central player on the Balkans for the first time. She was absolutely certain of her beliefs about what needed to be done in Kosovo. She was convinced the villain was Slobodan Milosevic, and until he was dealt with, nothing good was going to happen. She was also the beneficiary of the dynamic taking place in both Belgrade and Kosovo, where the KLA and Milosevic were tearing at each other in a predictable way, which inevitably made her a prophet because the KLA violence was greeted in much of the world with a degree of sympathy, while the more brutal Serb backlash angered international opinion. As the new secretary of state, Albright would argue for a hard line against the Serbs, saying anything less would only encourage Milosevic. In her opinion negotiations with him were futile and he understood only force. Albright was absolutely sure that Kosovo was a repeat of Bosnia and that the United States would, sooner or later, have to take military action against Belgrade.
No one else in the administration was that certain of events or of what the policy in the Balkans should be; no one else was so ready or so eager to choose that fateful a path. Tony Lake, never entirely tuned to the president, might have been an ally, but he was out of government. Holbrooke might have been on her side, but he, too, was out of government, and his and Albright’s personal relationship had always been flawed. They were bitter rivals for the job she had been given, and thus when Holbrooke did come in on special missions—often against her wishes—their combined energy was not as great as it might have been. Moreover, Holbrooke for the moment was not quite as hawkish as Albright; if he was not Milosevic’s ally, he had nevertheless worked with him on the Dayton settlement and still believed there might be a solution short of military action. Bill Cohen at Defense was dovish and cautious, an attitude shared by the Joint Chiefs. Sandy Berger was not yet ready for action, and reading him was the purest litmus test as to where the president stood politically on any foreign policy issue. Berger most emphatically reflected the president’s desire, if at all possible, to delay any action.
All of this enhanced Albright as a player. In the first Clinton administration she had been very much on the periphery of the decision-making, holding a job that, no matter how extravagant the promises of the president to its would-be occupant, was usually a form of window dressing. Being able to exploit the reputations and distinguished names of former UN ambassadors (Adlai Stevenson, Henry Cabot Lodge, Pat Moynihan, George Bush) was a decided advantage. The post was often given to a well-known figure in the president’s party whom the administration wanted to showcase but did not really want to hear from. As a reward for taking such a job, the incumbent ambassadors were often eviscerated by bright young men and women half their age in the NSC office. Albright’s tour in Manhattan had not been easy. Representing the United States in the center of the nonwhite political world at a time of waning presidential interest in foreign affairs, and with Jesse Helms chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was not an enviable task. At the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali spoke openly (and snobbishly) about what he considered her shortcomings as a diplomat. In Washington among those who were supposed to be her peers in the administration, the condescension was more muted but no less real.
In part, that reflected the fact that she was an activist at a nonactivist time, and, in part, it meant that the title of ambassador to the UN was often a debit. Some of it, too, was that she was a woman, and power at the top, despite titles, still belonged to the men. It was also true that many of the men occupying the power centers in Washington, in both the executive and congressional branches, did not like her constituents—the poorer and to them noisier nations of Africa and Asia. In Washington, her speech and op-ed pieces on nation-building in Somalia clung to her like a cloak after that disaster. But she seemed to love the UN job, to glory in the celebrity that went with it and the public fascination with her. As a woman in so visible a place, she was something of a star and had access to other stars. She clearly liked that kind of attention and tended to maximize her publicity through the skills of Rubin, her press officer. But that, too, worked against her with her Washington peers, as if she was a little too publicity hungry, which went against the traditional rules of the old boys’ club. She was, they said, a bit of a grandstander, though some of the people who said that were known to grandstand themselves.
Of all the high-level people, Albright, along with Holbrooke and Lake, had the fewest doubts about the use of force in Bosnia. She had been especially critical of Colin Powell and the military for their caution. Powell had had reservations about almost all the members of the Clinton team, but she had been a particular irritant, and he often came back from meetings she had attended shaking his head, clearly angered by her. “Madeleine’s at it again,” he would tell friends. It was all so easy for her, he said. You dropped off a soldier or two here to keep the peace, and a soldier or two there to make the world better, and sooner or later you had a policy. But you would also have American soldiers strung out vulnerably all over the world with little domestic political support.
The ease with which Albright was willing to dispatch troops, some observers thought, was because of all her high-level peers she was the person least affected by Vietnam. It was as if, in foreign policy terms, she had simply skipped a generation. She was literally and figuratively a child of Munich, the Holocaust, and the post–World War II descent of the Iron Curtain, not of the Vietnam experience, and of the American military being impaled in an unpopular, unwinnable war twelve thousand miles away, and the doubts it had created among many of her contemporaries about America’s use of its power. The passions of the Vietnam era, though she was just coming of age at that time, graduating from college in 1959, just a few years before Vietnam began to emerge as the dominant concern for the most politically involved people of her generation, always remained distant. Instead, she was very much a product of her personal history. She had arrived in America at the age of eleven, her family barely escaping Czechoslovakia when the Soviets engineered a coup in 1948. Like so many immigrants from Eastern Europe, her family was intensely anticommunist, and she and her parents were unusually grateful for their place in America. As a young woman, Albright was not eager to criticize America or its foreign policy even during one of its most tormented periods; she was not about to disparage the strong, generous hand that had welcomed her and her family. To her, this country even in its darkest moment had been America the hospitable and the just.
Her father, Josef Korbel, who had been a high-level official in the Czech foreign ministry in the years after World War II, had shaped her thinking. The great event forming his postwar political prism was the crude domination of once sovereign Eastern European countries by the local communist governments controlled by Moscow—an invisible occupation supported by a combination of the Red Army and the secret police. Korbel had escaped first the Nazis, then the communists, and had come to America at the age of thirty-nine with a ceiling imposed on his own career. What it might have been had he been born here and what it was for a newly arrived, middle-aged immigrant working in an alien language were very different things. His dreams limited by the upheavals he had witnessed, he would look to Madeleine, the oldest and most intellectually talented of his three children, to fulfill his ambitions.
Friendly government agencies found him a position teaching foreign policy at the University of Denver, and though he might have been moderately liberal on domestic issues, on foreign policy he remained unbendingly anticommunist, a hawk during the Vietnam War, deeply offended by the student protests of that period. He had fled his native land because of the Nazis, knowing that almost all of his and his wife’s family had died in concentration camps. He had returned to his home right after the war during that brief time when Czechoslovakia teetered between the West and the East. But even then the vulnerability of his life had made him both smart and nimble, and he understood that the future for Czechoslovakia lay not in its idealism and its democratic aspirations, but in its geography. While serving as the Czech ambassador to Belgrade in 1948, aware that the iron hand of Moscow was about to descend on Prague, he went to the British ambassador and got British visas for himself and his family, receiving them just before the Soviet coup.
Korbel had, it could be said, a hard-earned anticipatory sense of the vagaries of modern European history and the unspeakable price paid in the twentieth century by those who were Jewish. Though both he and his wife were Jews, in May 1941 they had become Roman Catholic, keeping their ethnic origins a secret from their children. The persecution he had already seen in his lifetime was bad enough, and he understood all too well it was soon going to get even worse. He sought no extra burdens, and certainly not in America, once he had arrived as an immigrant in a strange nation that might have its own more covert prejudices. The New World might be more enlightened than the Old, but it was just easier to be Catholic. Or as his wife, Mandula Spiegel Korbel, once told a friend, “To be a Jew is to be constantly threatened by some kind of danger. That is our history.”12 He also dropped the umlaut over the o in Korbel, thus making the name for those knowledgeable about that kind of thing, and there were a great many of them in Europe, albeit fewer in America, a bit more Germanic. It was one more step in de-Semitizing himself.
What he—a historian and political scientist—did to his own children is a fascinating example of the mind-set and the paranoia of a certain kind of survivor. Korbel sought a fresh start in the New World, not for himself, for he knew the limits of his own career, but for them; he wanted his children as unburdened as possible by the past. But in so doing he denied his own personal history to his children, thereby denying them a crucial part of their personal histories. He withheld the true story of the cruel murders of their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and he set his daughter up for the terrible embarrassment that would descend upon her at the height of her career. For only after she became secretary of state and a reporter named Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post began pursuing what were quite recognizable roadmarks along the path of her own unusual journey did Madeleine Albright find out about her Jewish background. She appeared to be, as someone who knew her said, the last to know, though while she was at the UN, a number of other governments (the Czechs and Israelis, for example) had clearly known the truth of her ethnic roots. It was also clear that several attempts had been made to tell her at least part of the truth of her family’s history. Given the number of her relatives who had perished in the death camps, given her mother’s maiden name, given what became, as she rose in prominence, little desire to connect to those few who were still alive back in Prague and to learn more about her roots, she apparently understood as an adult exactly how much to know and how much not to know. If the family’s harrowing journey had left her father and mother with a need to change what they had been, their daughter was left with a sixth sense that the door to the family attic was never, if at all possible, to be opened.
Josef Korbel was a great survivor; she was a survivor’s daughter, raised in a household where circumspection was important. By the time Albright was nominated to be secretary of state, though she had come of age in tumultuous times, there were no statements of hers, except for some ill-fated words on nation-building in Somalia, that could cause her political problems; she had rarely departed from the conventional wisdom on larger issues. That, thought her friends, was not so much conscious as it was instinctive, something she had learned at home. She had gone to a private day school in Denver, then on to Wellesley College, and after graduation she had married Joseph Albright, or more properly, Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, himself just out of Williams College. He was shy and earnest, a descendant of the mighty Medill and Patterson families who had dominated Chicago journalism for generations, and the nephew of Alicia Patterson, the irreverent and iconoclastic woman who had founded Newsday, the immensely successful Long Island suburban daily. For their marriage she became an Episcopalian. Two years later, in June 1961, she gave birth to twin daughters.
For a time Joe Albright worked at Newsday and was seen as the heir apparent who might one day edit or publish the paper. Thus her career, because of the nature of the era and his connections, was always to be ancillary to his. Even as a young couple, their future seemed already scripted. He would be the worthy, thoughtful publisher of a good, serious newspaper; she would be his wife and partner, perhaps more interested in foreign and domestic policy than other loyal spouses, but a wife and mother nonetheless. Joe Albright had not really wanted to be a newspaperman and had thought about becoming a scientist. It was primarily pressure from his aunt Alicia that had pushed him in that direction. As a journalist he was intelligent, dutiful, hardworking, and steadfast, but not intuitive in the way that makes the profession easier for some reporters. His name may have been more of a burden than an asset. Much was expected from him in a profession where he was never a natural. Later in his career, he gained a considerable level of success as a full-time reporter drawn to serious issues often overlooked by more facile journalists in search of sexier stories.
Almost from the start outside forces affected Albright’s original career plan. Alicia Patterson, who had intended to turn Newsday over to Joe, died suddenly and unexpectedly of bleeding ulcers in July 1963. She owned 49 percent of the paper, and her far more conservative husband, Harry Guggenheim, owned 51. He was not that impressed by her nephew, his talent, and especially his politics. He did not want Joe anywhere near a position of power and, for a time, brought in Bill Moyers, Lyndon Johnson’s former press officer, to be publisher, mistakenly thinking him to be conservative as well. When Moyers inevitably disappointed him, Guggenheim sold the paper to the Chandlers of Los Angeles, apparently believing they were as politically conservative in this generation as they had been in the past. The sale made Joe Albright a wealthy young man, but he was not going to be the top executive of an important paper.
If the ceiling on their ambitions as a couple had been lowered significantly, Madeleine Albright still tried to follow the original script as an earnest, supportive, and conventional wife. Her report to her Wellesley fifth reunion class book in 1964 showed how typical her life was and probably would remain: “In the past five years have moved from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, to Chicago to Garden City, Long Island, to Washington, D.C., and back to Long Island. Only unusual accomplishment has been production of twins . . .”13 Six years after their birth, a third child was born. All were girls. What set the Albrights apart from so many other young couples they knew in the sixties, all of them trying to find their place in what were first the Kennedy, then the Johnson, and finally, and tragically, the Vietnam years, was that they had no money problems. In fact, they had to be careful to spend less than they could for fear of being different and perhaps ostentatious. There was no women’s movement at the time, and the idea that Madeleine Albright would one day have a full and rich career—and that it might be more important than her husband’s—was unheard of.
But she was her father’s daughter. She was a good student, she always worked hard, and even as a housewife, she began to study for a graduate degree in political science. She took classes at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies and then at Columbia, where she got a master’s and a Ph.D. There she met Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was a rising star in the foreign policy world. Their backgrounds, both exiles from Eastern Europe and children of diplomats, were quite similar (Brzezinski, born in Warsaw, was married to a grandniece of the great Czech democrat Edvard Benes). Brzezinski was, like many Poles, Soviet-phobic. In the late sixties Madeleine Albright was busy being a housewife, working on her Ph.D., but staying essentially apart from that enormous youthful antiwar energy. That made her true to her roots. Her father was a hard-liner, her most important Columbia faculty member was a hard-liner, and her doctoral thesis about contemporary Soviet repression in central Europe could not at that particular moment have been more unfashionable.
In time, with Newsday out of the play, Joe Albright became a reporter for the Cox newspaper chain in Washington. He and his wife were not that different from many other ambitious and idealistic young couples in the late sixties and seventies; they were pleasant and industrious, serious but not really glamorous, and obviously a little more privileged than most. Joe Albright’s career was to come first; for her initial venture into politics, Madeleine Albright became a board member at the private elementary school their daughters attended. That after all was the most natural role for a serious, quietly ambitious young woman who was a good citizen and wanted to be a part of her community; it allowed her to become involved in something larger than herself while remaining well within her place in the established hierarchy. On that board, she began to make connections with a number of political people in Washington. She was hardworking and intelligent if not brilliant; she was, Brzezinski noted years later, “a very pleasant, amiable, easy-to-get-along-with graduate student,” but, as he then added, hardly special.14
Like many women tentatively entering the world of politics, Madeleine Albright began by doing the heavy lifting, the so-called donkey work, for a political event or campaign that required a lot of time and effort, offered little glory, and which the men were only too glad to deed over. Ironically, that somewhat limited role kept her from being caught up in the bitter ideological wars of that overheated period, when much of the debate centered not just around Vietnam, but what it said about American foreign policy in general. Years later she had fewer enemies and had made fewer embarrassing statements because in her early political activities she had been given no voice and played so small a role.
Through friends she got to know Ed Muskie, the Maine senator, who was the leading centrist Democrat of the period, though dovish on Vietnam. She proved to be an effective fund-raiser for him, and in 1976 when he faced a difficult reelection campaign, she became his chief fund-raiser. She was hardly a star, but she was beginning to move up the ladder of Democratic politics. She and Joe Albright had a lovely home in Georgetown and enough money to make it the center for other bright young people interested in politics and foreign policy. The Albright wealth was a considerable asset in working the fundraising circuit; in order to get you had to give as well. Madeleine Albright was slowly but surely becoming both connected and credentialed. In 1976, seventeen years after graduating from Wellesley—nothing came easily for a woman with three young children—she received her Ph.D. from Columbia.
In the brief period when the Democrats came back to power under Carter in 1977 to 1980, a number of the more senior Muskie people went into the administration, creating vacancies in his office and clearing a relatively solid place for Albright on Muskie’s staff as chief legislative assistant. That signaled that she was valued, but the idea that in twelve or thirteen years she would be a leading candidate for one of the top jobs in a Democratic administration was still inconceivable. The top candidates of her generation were already in place: Tony Lake at Policy Planning and Dick Holbrooke as an assistant secretary of state, young men who were now moving into positions that would surely guarantee a big ticket the next time the Democrats ruled. Their stars burned brightly; Albright’s did not, and she soon left Muskie to work for Brzezinski as a liaison between his NSC office and Congress. Hardworking and steady, she was perceived by some of her peers as the grind who got the job done. She was also, without anyone noticing it, quietly moving ahead of the curve, if not for bright, up-and-coming foreign policy specialists in the Democratic Party, then for women in the foreign policy world.
In the early eighties her personal life fell apart. After twenty-three years of marriage, Joe Albright had met a younger woman who was working as a journalist and asked his wife for a divorce. At the time Madeleine Albright was forty-five years old, she and her husband had raised three children, and they had been together as a couple virtually from the moment she had graduated from college. For years she had been a dutiful wife and mother with career coming only after her other responsibilities. She had been raised a Catholic and did not believe in divorce—no one in her family had ever been divorced. Not only had her world been clearly defined, but her role in that world had been every bit as well-defined. But now the world she had always counted on was shattered overnight. Some of their mutual friends thought that part of the problem was that his career had hit a plateau and her career had begun to surpass his. The divorce left her quite wealthy; Michael Dobbs, her biographer, estimated that by the time of her appointment as secretary of state in 1997, her net worth was around $10 million. Of the couple, quite visible in the world of Georgetown over the past fifteen years or so, she had been the more extroverted and gregarious; Joe Albright, quieter, more reserved. The divorce also left her with a large number of friends whom she had dealt with loyally and steadfastly, a handsome Georgetown home in which to entertain, and, for a time, a great deal of anger. She was devastated; she had, friends thought, been made to feel old and used and unwanted. Her friends also believed that from that moment on she became career-driven as she had never been before, as if to prove to the now departed Joe Albright who the star in the family really was and what a mistake he had made.
In the eighties and into the early nineties, the Reagan and Bush years and a Democratic wasteland, Albright became increasingly important in insider Democratic politics in Washington, connecting the party’s political figures with its foreign policy experts at dinners at her home, which were quite serious and often seemed more like seminars. Now things began to come her way. Because more women were entering the world of international relations, the administrators of the Georgetown School for Foreign Service, a prestigious school not then known for the gender parity of its faculty, offered her a teaching position, a plum job particularly hard won for a woman. It was one more credential to add to her résumé. In the eighties, during two presidential campaigns, she held jobs that were additional credentials—not great ones, given the outcome of the respective elections, but a sign of an ascent still very much in progress. She became foreign policy adviser to Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 during her ill-fated vice-presidential run, and having backed Michael Dukakis early in the 1988 primaries, she served as his chief foreign policy adviser.
That his campaign turned out to be a disaster was not held against Albright. It was widely assumed that Dukakis did not listen to her because, the world of old-line Washington Democrats believed, he did not listen to anyone. She was, however, at least a partial coconspirator in the creation of the catastrophic tank photo. Someone suggested that it might help Dukakis’s image if he visited a tank factory (military bases are off-limits to candidates) and thus show he was not a wimp. Albright concurred. Dukakis went to a factory in Sterling Heights, Michigan, got into a tank, and put on a tanker’s helmet, thereby violating one of the primary laws of American politics—never wear any hat that might make you look goofy because, as John Kennedy once said, the only thing the voters would remember was a photograph of you in some bizarre hat. Dukakis, helmet on, stuck his head out of the hatch of the tank and grinned while the television cameras rolled away. At first all the Dukakis people were pleased by the coverage. Then they saw the footage. Dukakis did not look combat-ready: he looked silly. The Republicans were delighted and used the clip for many of their commercials. Albright was partially on the spot. The idea of visiting the factory had been good, she insisted later, but it was Dukakis’s fault for putting on the helmet.15
The Dukakis campaign had hardly made her a star, but in truth, the Democrats, as they prepared to take office in 1993, had no stars. In many political fields, the constituencies had changed as the country had changed. Only twenty or twenty-five years earlier, for example, the perfect curriculum vitae for a seat on the Supreme Court might have included a WASP background, an education at Harvard or Yale and their respective law schools, and clerking for someone like Earl Warren. But now, especially for Democrats, there were obligations to a much wider variety of interest groups, by ethnicity, gender, and region. The background that had once been an advantage might be a debit; and what had once been a debit might be an advantage. So it was with foreign policy. Joe Albright was a graduate of Groton, an elite New England prep school, which in the old America had helped incubate secretaries of state and would-be secretaries of state (Acheson, Harriman, Bundy, and Bundy) and a national-security kingmaker (Alsop); in the new America, it was the East European ex-wife of a Groton graduate who would earn that title. Credentials were different now. In the years that Albright had struggled upward, more ant than grasshopper, the women’s movement had come of age, and gender had become more politicized. The bitter battles over abortion had seen many nominally Republican women switch to the Democratic Party and had made them a powerful force, one that was increasingly well-organized and articulate. Their votes, not the votes of white males, had elected Bill Clinton both times. By 1997 the beginning of an old girls’ network was coalescing in Washington. Its leader was Wendy Sherman, who had worked for Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski. The old girls knew what they wanted, and that was a woman as secretary of state, and they had a powerful ally in the White House—Hillary Rodham Clinton. The men, because there were a number of candidates, were divided; the women, because there was only one candidate, were not. Madeleine Albright got the job.
Not unlike Tony Lake, who had been strikingly handsome as a young man and had aged dramatically over the years, Albright’s struggle to reach the top showed in the photos of her. It was as if she had never really had a childhood and had always been under considerable subsurface pressure to achieve, to succeed in this country not just for herself but for her father, who had had his career stolen from him by the cruelty of modern history. In addition, the road to power was simply harder for a woman of her generation, despite her achievements. Albright for a long time felt she had not quite gotten her due. Her male peers—such as Tony Lake, Dick Holbrooke, Les Gelb, Win Lord, Frank Wisner, and Dick Moose—were almost automatically named to all kinds of committees and study groups that she was just as automatically left out of. “The boys,” she called them in private, and she said it with an edge that implied that they took care of their own, and she was not one of their own and never would be. In her mind (and few women of her generation in the national security world dissented), men automatically said and did exclusionary things without thinking they were sexist. When Colin Powell wrote in his memoir that her more activist attitude about the use of troops in Bosnia had nearly given him an aneurysm, she was infuriated by the phrasing he used to quote his answer to her: “I patiently explained . . .”16 Patiently explained smacked of upper-level sexism in her view, and they exchanged friendly notes about the passage—she signing one of hers, “Forcefully, Madeleine.” If you were a woman operating at that level, she once told a friend, you did not seek the battle over gender, but it was there all the time. It sought you.
The years of fighting her way up in male bastions had made Albright both strong and hard, and she emerged during her tour at State as quite territorial, which was not surprising, given the lack of control over territory she had experienced for most of her life. She was immensely sensitive to any criticism, and personal public relations were unusually important to her. It was especially ironic that when she was ambassador to the UN, she had thrived in an almost innocent way not just in the job, but in the star status that went with it. Now the same people who had hindered her career and helped create some of her insecurities made fun of her because she took such pleasure in the perks of her new job. That Henry Kissinger, himself something of a wallflower for much of his life, had blossomed as a sex-symbol star when he attained comparable power and had enjoyed celebrity-hopping and social climbing every bit as much if not more than Albright was not mentioned.
In terms of ideology and beliefs, it was not easy to get a fix on her. Though she had climbed the ladder of the foreign policy establishment slowly and carefully over the years, no one associated her with any particular view or wing of the party. No label seemed to stick to her. But she was passionate about one issue and one man, the Balkans and Milosevic. The reference point she used, again and again when the subject came up, was Munich. He must not be appeased; only force would stop him. At the UN she had been from day one a hard-liner on the Balkans. It was Europe, an area she knew (she also knew the Slavic languages, Russian and Czech); her father, in his last major assignment before the communist coup in Prague, had been ambassador to Belgrade. She had, because of her family history, a powerful antipathy toward military aggression and genocide, and she hated Milosevic as a reincarnation of Hitler and Stalin. From the time she joined the Clinton administration, she had been a hawk on the Balkans, though no one listened to her carefully. Now in 1998, it was her turn to be a signature figure and for her voice to be heard.
Her authority was increasing for two reasons besides the fact that she had a more important position now than she had held in the first Clinton administration. Number one, she was working in something of a vacuum because the administration was preoccupied, most notably with the president’s survival in an impeachment trial; and number two, Milosevic systematically played into her hands, the latest Serb atrocities always validating those who wanted to take the hardest line against him.