Madeleine Albright
“I was taught to strive not because there were any guarantees of success but because the act of striving is in itself the only way to keep faith with life.”
Since Thomas Jefferson in 1790, the United States has had seventy-one Secretaries of State. The Secretary of State is appointed by the President and carries out their foreign affairs policy. This influential position was consistently filled by male advisors until Madeleine Albright in 1996 when she was nominated to be the first female Secretary of State by President Clinton. She was sworn in as Secretary of State on January 23, 1997, becoming the sixty-fourth Secretary of State.
Albright was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, but moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1948 following the communist coup. After becoming a United States citizen in 1957, she attended Wellesley College and received a B.A. in Political Science. In 1976, she earned a Ph.D. in Public Law and Government from Columbia University.
After finishing her education, Madeleine Albright served as Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie’s chief legislative assistant until 1978. Her career in Washington continued to grow, and she became a member of both President Carter’s White House Staff and the National Security Council until 1981. President Clinton appointed Albright as the Ambassador to the United Nations in 1993, where she served until she was elected Secretary of State in 1996.
As Secretary of State, Albright focused on stability in Central and Eastern Europe by promoting the expansion of NATO into former Soviet Union territory and supporting the expansion of free-market democratization in developing countries. She also ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, which aims to eliminate weapons of mass destruction by eliminating the development, production, retention, and transfer of chemical weapons by State Parties. She served as Secretary of State until 2001. Eleven years later, President Obama awarded Albright the Presidential Medal of Honor for her contributions to the United States.
