![]() ![]() Not in off-the-record encounters during her frenzied travels to locales that former secretaries of state had never ventured to - Kano in northern Nigeria Samarkand and Bukhara in Uzbekistan and perhaps most famously Pyongyang, North Korea, to name just a few. I had certainly never heard her use such coarse language. ![]() I had covered her for nearly three years as a State Department reporter for the French news agency AFP, and, while most people including the traveling press corps, knew well her political leanings, she had striven to mask them and was unfailingly polite to Democrats and Republicans alike. She often said that she had had her “political instincts surgically removed” when she became secretary of state. The remark was jolting because it was so unlike the Albright that I had known. I mentioned that the weather didn’t look great for the upcoming inauguration and she looked out the rain-spattered windows and remarked with a wry smile: “I hope it rains on those f – – – – – s’ parade.” Bush to the White House in just three days.Īlbright was a lifelong Democrat who had famously forsworn partisan politics during her four years as America’s top diplomat but had been increasingly frustrated by the nasty tone of the election dispute between Bush and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Al Gore. AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee knew Albright not only as America’s top diplomat, but also as a professor of his at Georgetown University.Ī bottle of obscure liquor - a gift to her from some foreign leader - was cracked open as stories were told, many about her historic trip to North Korea a few months earlier, some about her epic travel pace, her predilection for exotic shopping, but also the bitter fight over the 2000 presidential election that had just ended in a controversial Supreme Court decision that would bring George W. government.Įyes were only partially on the television in the room that was tuned to a replay of Albright’s final television appearance as a government official: on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which had been taped several days earlier in Chicago.ĮDITOR’S NOTE - Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright died Wednesday of cancer. Next door, in the office of her chief of staff, Albright had joined a small group to commemorate the end of her term as America’s first female secretary of state and her time as the highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. Wind-swept rain and sleet pounded on the windows of Madeleine Albright’s seventh-floor office at the State Department, obscuring her usually clear view of the Lincoln Memorial. The last full working day of Bill Clinton’s presidency ended with a dreary Washington winter afternoon. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. "I was afraid that it would fall on the Bible.This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. I had not fastened it properly," says Albright. "I put it on, and there I was all of the sudden with one hand on the Bible and one hand in the air, and the pin was just swinging in the breeze. The former secretary of state says that one of her own pins - an antique eagle pin with a complicated clasp - nearly sabotaged her at her swearing-in ceremony. (Albright's pin with three monkeys, which she wore when discussing Chechnya, was meant to draw attention to the fact that Russia took a "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" stance toward the Chechen atrocities.) On days when Albright felt she had to do "a little stinging and deliver a tough message," she wore a wasp pin.Īt one point, Russian leader Vladimir Putin told President Clinton that he knew what the mood of a meeting would be by looking at Albright's left shoulder. There were balloons, butterflies and flowers to signify optimism and, when diplomatic talks were going slowly, crabs and turtles to indicate frustration.Īfter the Russians were caught tapping the State Department, Albright protested by wearing a pin with a giant bug on it. "As it turned out, there were just a lot of occasions to either commemorate a particular event or to signal how I felt," she says. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |