#Memories madeleine albright streisand cracked
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Having fled eastern Europe from the horrors of the Nazi era and subsequent Soviet suppression, she abhorred dictators and authoritarianism. They ranged from the mundane to the menacing - including one of a snake. She often punctuated her otherwise conservative attire with a fancy brooch, often picked to send a message to her interlocutors. Madeleine Albright was a woman of conviction and determination who liked to say she told things like they were and not the way she might like them to be. Four years after Albright left government, Rice became the second female secretary of state and the first Black woman to hold the office. “But Madeleine, I'm a Republican,” she said Condoleezza Rice had replied. Albright once recalled asking one of her diplomat father's most gifted students at the University of Denver to serve as a foreign policy adviser on a Democratic campaign. Her rare political comments were almost always tame in nature. The closest anyone could recall was when she castigated the Cuban government at the United Nations for shooting down a civilian Brothers to the Rescue plane by saying it hadn't been “cojones” but rather “cowardice.” Or her studied and stern visage of annoyance, anger and aggravation when she learned that Clinton had lied when he swore to her that he had not had an inappropriate relationship with a White House intern. And not ever in lectures or other events of hers that I attended a decade earlier at Georgetown University, where she had been a professor of mine at the School of Foreign Service. 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.

#Memories madeleine albright streisand windows

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.

#Memories madeleine albright streisand cracked

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.

#Memories madeleine albright streisand full

The last full working day of Bill Clinton’s presidency ended with a dreary Washington winter afternoon.