Madam Secretary: A Memoir [Paperback]

Ms Albright is an articulate, intelligent yet unpretentious writer. You feel the author is sitting with you conversing about her journey from a humble start as an immigrant from Czechoslovakia to becomming the highest ranking woman in office. I also liked the fact that despite some painful experiences the undertones of this book were positive and optimistic throughout. I suppose you must always have hope to work in politics otherwise you cannot strive to move forward.

Some of her stories in office are hilarious, like when she brought Yasser Arafat home from a break from some intense political negotiations between Israel and Palestine. Her grandson ran screaming into the house upon seeing the President of Palestine, let's just say he didnt find him to be too aesthetically pleasing to the eye :) Others are very touching like when she discovered only a few years ago that her grandparents were sent to concentration camps and how she could (if at all) reconcile this fact with her successful and safe life when she still had family living in Czechoslovakia throughout those difficult times. The guilt and the gratitude she must still feel to this day.

She made politics interesting for me and showed me that the people you see making huge descisions in the world are also human beings and not just distant faces on the television.

Thank you Ms Albright for writing an inspirational moving and touching book, I enjoyed every chapter. My only complaint is that I would have loved to read more and more about your life.

Madeleine Korbel Albright was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1937. Her father was an official in the Czech government-in-exile who fled to London, where she remembers enduring the blitz. Her father served in several diplomatic posts after World War II and when the Communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948 he sent his family to the United States, where he ended up running the School of International Studies at the University of Denver (where one of his prize students was Condolezza Rice). On the personal side of the ledger Albright talks about her marriage to "Newsday" scion Joe Albright, which ended in divorce, raising her three daughters, and learning late in her life that her Jewish grandparents had died in Nazi concentration camps. Earning her doctorate from Columbia, Albright worked her way from being Edmund Muskie's senior legislative assistant to work for National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brezinski in the Carter Administration. When the Democrats returned to the White House in 1992, Albright moved into the upper stratosphere of American diplomacy where she proved herself to be a Wilsonian moralist whose hero was Dean Acheson.

In the most important parts of her memoir Albright provides commentary on all of the foreign policy crises with which she was involved, from Rwanda and Serbia to North Korea and Iraq, with NATO's humanitarian intervention in Kosovo being the episode that stands out most in my mind as the one she wants to present as being paradigmatic of what the Clinton administration was trying to accomplish in terms of foreign policy. Not coincidentally, it was also the specific policy on which she was the biggest advocate and primary architect. She does not make the explicit argument, but when you read of how her family came to the United States the policy seems a logical extension of her personal story. Clearly the goal was to avert a humanitarian catastrophe and not as sign of support for the Albanian guerrillas.

You will also find Albright's views on the national and world figures with whom she had to deal, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Vaclav Havel, Vladmimir Putin, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, Yasser Arafat, Slobodan Milosevic, and even Kim Jong-Il. Of course, a recurring theme of Albright's book is how she had to prove herself in the male-dominated world of power politics, which lends a certain power to the scene where she describes waiting for the phone call from President Clinton where he told her he wanted her to be his Secretary of State. Albright consistently places the emphasis on presenting her side of the record rather than going out of her way to defend particular policies and actions. Her position on American foreign policy is clearly implicit in her accounts, but she does not go out of her way to be an advocate.

Obviously this volume will be a primary document for assessing the foreign policy of the Clinton administration. Albright comes across as being candid and self-efacing, while also provided insights into the goals of the Clinton foreign policy. Having long ago grown tired of the public statements of any and all government officials, it was refreshing to read what it was like to play this came from someone who was actively involved and has never been burdened by being an elected official. Ome of the biggest compliments I could pay to Albright would be that this memoir comes across as being written by a real person. She might have been a diplomat, but she was not a politician (an assessment that I think applies to her successor at the State Department as well). Of course she touches on issues, such as terrorism and relations with Iraq, that are of even more importance today. "Madame Secretary" includes a pair of 16-page color and black & white photo inserts and a chronology of Albright's personal and political life. This 562-page volume will be of interest to not only Albright's personal admirers, but anyone interested in the machinations of American foreign policy in the past decade (especially if they have read Michael Dobbs' "Madeline Albright: A 20th Century Odyssey," the obvious companion volume for a presumably more objective look at the same subject).