Madeleine Albright

Biography

Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Körbelová in Prague in 1937, the daughter of the Czechoslovak diplomat Josef Korbel. The family moved to the United States after the communist coup of 1948 and settled in Denver, where her father taught at the University of Denver; she became a US citizen in 1957. She graduated in political science from Wellesley College in 1959 and later earned a doctorate at Columbia University in 1975 with a thesis on the Prague Spring.

Albright worked for Senator Edmund Muskie from 1976 to 1978 and then on the National Security Council staff under Zbigniew Brzezinski until 1981. In 1982 she joined the faculty of Georgetown University, where she taught Eastern European studies, and she advised Democratic presidential and vice-presidential candidates on foreign policy.

After Bill Clinton's election she was US ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 1997 and then secretary of state from 1997 to 2001, the first woman in that office. She was a leading advocate of NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, and in 2000 she met Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang. After leaving office she founded the consulting firm that became the Albright Stonebridge Group, taught at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. She died in 2022.