Madeleine Albright was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937. Following the communist coup of 1948, her father — diplomat Josef Korbel — emigrated with his family to the United States, where Madeleine became a citizen in 1957. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1959, and earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1975, writing her thesis on the Prague Spring.

After working as an aide to Senator Edmund Muskie for two years, she served as a staff member on the National Security Council under Zbigniew Brzezinski. Later, as a member of the faculty of Georgetown University, she helped assemble then-President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. She was subsequently appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and in 1997 became Clinton’s Secretary of State.

Albright had lived under both communist tyranny and constitutional democracy. Her views were solidified, not only by formal education and years of public service, but by her lived experience:

“Democracies, as we know, are prone to every error from incompetence and corruption to misguided fetishes and gridlock. Therefore, it is astonishing, in a sense, that we would be willing to submit the direction of our societies to the collective wisdom of an imperfect and frequently disengaged public. How could we be so naive? To that fair question, we must reply: how could anyone be so gullible as permanently to entrust power — an inherently corrupting force — to a single leader or party? When a dictator abuses his authority, there is no legal way to stop him. When a free society falters, we still have the ability — through open debate and the selection of new leaders — to remedy those shortcomings. We still have time to pick a better egg. That is democracy’s comparative advantage, and it should be recognized and preserved.”

-Madeleine K. Albright, “Fascism: A Warning”

Such was the measure of our statesmen (and women) of yesteryear. We are losing them, one by one, to the natural cycle of life and death. And our world is so much the poorer for each loss.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
3/25/26