MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: A 20th Century Odyssey.

• Author: Hirsh, Michael
• Position: Review

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: A 20th Century Odyssey By Michael Dobbs Henry Holt, $27.50

How Madeleine Albright's past shapes American foreign policy

Madeleine Korbel Albright is surely one of the most sympathetic figures ever to occupy the office of U.S. secretary of state. A refugee from Hitler and Stalin--and, in a strange way, from her family's Jewish past--Albright adopted her new homeland with all the zealous patriotism of the converted. Becoming an American was "the big, defining thing in my life," she tells Michael Dobbs in his doggedly reported, insightful new book, Madeleine Albright: A 20th Century Odyssey. Indeed, it is somehow telling that Albright, who arrived in America at age 11, quickly lost her foreign accent and later, as a policy-maker, became a Wilsonian moralist whose hero is WASP wise man Dean Acheson. On the other hand Henry Kissinger, who was just four years older when he immigrated, retained his Bavarian growl and turned into a Realpolitician with a fondness for Metternich.

A loyal wife and doting mother, Albright floundered after her patrician husband, Joe Albright, stunned her in 1982 with the news that he was in love with another woman. Then she recovered and, showing the steeliness of character that Slobodan Milosevic has lately experienced, became a Democratic foreign policy adviser and organizer, raised three daughters, and ambitiously clawed her way to the top of the Washington hierarchy (leaving, in the process, amazingly few tracks). Today Albright has legions of friends in Washington and New York. She is, in person, funny and charmingly self-deprecating. And she is unquestionably a fine, deeply humane person--if a bit thin-skinned about criticism. In one especially vivid account, Dobbs describes Albright's futile attempts, as U.N. ambassador, to get Bill Clinton to intervene in Rwanda. Later, at her Senate confirmation hearing as secretary of state, Albright poignantly talked of her trip to the killing grounds, where she saw hundreds of skeletons--including "one that was only two feet long, about the size of my little grandson." (She was confirmed 99-0). Compared to the phlegmatic Dean Rusk, the dull and retiring Warren Christopher, and the dour John Foster Dulles (whose subordinates used to joke that "white wine should be served at the exact temperature of his blood"), Albright has been a delightful and inspiring public personality.

It is all the more discomfiting, therefore, to have to conclude that what may be...