Former Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright
Interview
Notes from Evan Smith
"They say that politics and public policy is a man's world, even today -- in case you're wondering about the recent convulsions over who the president plays golf with, there's plenty of history there. Yet consider this fact: Three of the last four Secretaries of State -- three of the last four top diplomats sent around the globe to represent the interests of the United States with conviction and grace -- have been women. The current occupant of the job, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is an experienced hand, a student of governance at all levels, with an abundance of steel in her spine. Her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, was cool, collected, and poised -- an eager abetter of her boss's grand plans to export democracy and fight terrorism far and wide. But before both of them, this week's guest became the first woman ever to lead Foggy Bottom, as the State Department is known. Madeleine Albright arrived in this country after her family was twice forced to flee their native Czechoslovakia, first from the Nazis and then from the Communists. Her teen years were spent in Denver, and she attended Wellesley University, majoring in political science. She later studied international relations and Russian at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University, in New York. She began her career in government as chief legislative assistant to Senator Edmund Muskie, of Maine, in the early seventies. She later served as the National Security Agency's congressional liaison in the Carter White House, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in the Bill Clinton's first term, and Secretary of State in President Clinton's second term, where her focus stretched from Bosnia to the Middle East. Today she is chair of Albright Stonebridge Group, a global strategy firm, a principal of Albright Capital Management, an investment advisory group, and the author, most recently, of Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat's Jewel Box". - Evan Smith, Texas Monthly Talks, Broadcast 11.12.09