Second paragraph of third chapter:
The young women who entered Wellesley in the fall of 1955 (the class of’ 59) were either the last of the silent generation with its contingent of bright, dutiful daughters prepared to join the ranks of well-educated, bright, dutiful wives or the first class of women eager to be taken seriously in the workforce and recognized as independent individuals, not just appendages to their much sought-after husbands. Actually, they were both; in any case, I was both. I was preparing myself for a career in journalism or diplomacy, while I wanted to get married as soon as possible to the perfect partner. The notion that there might be a contradiction between these two aspirations didn’t occur to me. So I concentrated on my studies and worried about my social life.
My closest encounter with Madeleine Albright was in Banja Luka in the summer of 1997, when she descended on the Bosnian Serb capital with the full force of the State Department to visit the local leader, President Biljana Plavšić. The US government took over the central Hotel Bosna for the day; I was among the crowds that watched as the official motorcade took the Secretary of State from the hotel to the President’s offices in the main government building, the Banski Dvor. But the Banski Dvor is literally across the road from the Hotel Bosna, the front doors being less than 100 metres apart; the American motorcade was literally longer than the distance it needed to travel. It was a strange sight.
Anyway, this is a fascinating if rather long first-person account of life on the way to the top, and then at the top, of American politics. Though born in Prague in 1937, her family fled to the USA after the Communist take-over in 1948 and she settled down to become a smart American in an immigrant family. Her father, formerly a zech diplomat, became a political science professor; she followed in his footsteps, but also managed to catch a superbly well-connected journalist husband, which can’t have done any harm as she rose in DC.
A side hobby of fund-raising got her the attention of Democratic veteran Ed Muskie, who hired her for his Senate team in 1976; Zbig Brzezinski then snagged for the the National Security Council in the Carter presidency. The Democrats were out of office for the next twelve years, though she was involved as a senior foreign policy adviser in the unsuccessful 1984 and 1988 campaigns. Finally, a victorious Bill Clinton appointed her as ambassador to the United Nations in 1993, and Secretary of State in 1997, shortly before my near brush with her in Bosnia. She was also closely involved with the National Democratic Institute, my employers in Bosnia, though she had stepped back from it while in office. The book was published in 2002, very soon after the end of the Clinton presidency.
The circumstantial detail of her life before Washington is all very interesting, but like most readers I was fascinated by the insider accounts of Washington (and New York) policy-making. The Rwanda genocide, the Bosnia and Kosovo wars, the escalation against Saddam Hussein (which was firmly bipartisan in Washington in those days), relations with China and Russia, and above all the ins and outs of the Middle East from the high point of the Oslo accords in 1993 to the failure at Camp David in 2000, are all lucidly described; I am more familiar with some of these than others, but had no difficulty in following the thread. She is pretty clear on her own motivation, which usually coincided with US policy – though not always; she happily confirms that she tended to be on the hawkish side regarding the use of force, particularly after Rwanda.
There is a particularly moving chapter where, newly appointed as secretary of state, she discovers that her parents were Jewish and that three of her grandparents, who she remembered from her own childhood, had been killed in the Holocaust (one grandfather had died in 1938). Her parents had brought her up as a Catholic and she had no idea of her personal connection. Having been delving into my own family history of late, I know the feeling of genealogical surprises, though I don’t think that anything quite like that is lying in wait for me.
Anyway, it’s a lengthy book, but I found it enlightening. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a woman writer. Next on that pile is Winter, by Ali Smith.
