Madeleine Albright

Madeleine Albright was an American diplomat and political scientist who served as the 64th US Secretary of State from January 1997 to January 2001 — the first woman to hold that position. She was born Marie Jana Korbelová on May 15, 1937, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Her family fled Czechoslovakia twice — first in 1939 to escape the Nazi German invasion, and again in 1948 after the communist coup. The family settled in Denver, Colorado in 1949, and Marie Jana Anglicized her name to Madeleine.

She earned a Bachelor's degree from Wellesley College (1959) and a doctorate in public law and government from Columbia University (1976), where she studied under Russian-affairs scholar Zbigniew Brzezinski. She worked on Edmund Muskie's 1972 presidential campaign and on the National Security Council staff under Brzezinski during the Carter administration. Through the 1980s and early 1990s she taught at Georgetown University and worked on multiple Democratic foreign-policy campaigns.

President Bill Clinton appointed her US Ambassador to the United Nations in 1993 — her first major diplomatic post. Her Security Council work during the Bosnian War, the Rwandan genocide, and the Haiti crisis established her reputation as one of the most-substantive American foreign-policy figures of the 1990s. Clinton appointed her Secretary of State in his second term, and the Senate confirmed her unanimously in January 1997.

Her four-year tenure included the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (1999, in response to ethnic cleansing in Kosovo), the expansion of NATO eastward to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic (1999), the Belfast Good Friday Agreement (1998), and continuous Middle East peace-process work. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2012. She was a longtime collector of brooches, which she famously used as diplomatic-message accessories during meetings — the brooch collection is now exhibited internationally. She died on March 23, 2022, at age 84, in Washington, D.C., of cancer.

Her name Madeleine is the French form of Magdalene, ultimately from the Hebrew "of Magdala" — referring to the biblical Mary Magdalene. Madeleine has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names for decades.