The Boss Lady of Foggy Bottom

"Foreign policy is not auto mechanics; it is an art. The tools we select must be weighed against a matrix of past commitments, present capabilities, future hopes, and constant values… In each instance we should seek to combine principle with pragmatism — to do the right thing and to do the thing right," she told a State Department forum in 1994 when she was the US envoy to the UN. "She is precisely the kind of woman everyone wished could have been in the room when the men were making their disastrous decisions about Vietnam," says Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory.

Her diplomatic pedigree is simply quite magnificent, and not just because she is the daughter of a distinguished Czech diplomat. She acknowledges that her father Josef Korbel is the main influence in her life, but she has served with some of the giants of American policydom. Among them: Adlai Stevenson, Edmund Muskie, Zbigniew Brzezhinski, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. She has taught in universities, worked her way up through the legislature and the executive, headed think tanks and been foreign policy advisor to presidential candidates, before becoming the boss lady of Foggy Bottom.

Madeleine Albright came to the US in her pre-teens, after her father fled there following his last posting in 1948 representing Czechoslovakia in the UN Commission for India and Pakistan in Kashmir. The communists had overthrown the Czech government and come to power. Josef Korbel was sentenced to death in absentia for crimes against the State. She has hated the communists since. While her father went on to become dean of international studies at the University of Denver, Colorado, Madeleine studied journalism and politics, both inside and outside the classroom. As a political science major, she campaigned for Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 presidential race, briefly edited a campus newspaper and even worked for Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Soon after, she met and married Joseph Albright, scion of a newspaper empire, when they were both interning at theDenver Post. Her own career took a backseat for a while as they settled down in Chicago. Addressing her as "honey", the editor of theChicago Sun-Times told her that neither theSun-Times nor its competitors would hire the spouse of aSun-Times reporter, and advised her to pursue another career. She not only took the advice with a vengeance, but appeared to devote the rest of her life to being as good if not better than men at the jobs she handled.

When Joseph Albright moved to the East Coast in 1961 (as bureau chief of Newsday), it gave Madeleine ample scope to shore her academic credentials. She studied law and government at Columbia University under Zbigniew Brzezhinski — who was later to become National Security Advisor to President Carter — and went on to do her Ph.D. on the Prague Spring.Soon after, Senator Edmund Muskie took her on as a Chief Legislative Assistant. And when Brzezhinski came to the administration in 1978, Albright came on board the National Security Council as a Congressional liaison with focus on foreign policy legislation.

A fierce, lifelong Democrat, the groves of academe sheltered her during the Reagan years. Her marriage to Joseph Albright came apart in 1983, but she flowered as a teacher and a policy wonk. She held high-power foreign policy pow-wow in her Georgetown home salon attended by brilliant eggheads — including a freshfaced governor of Arkansas named Bill Clinton. When the Democrats swept to power again in 1992, she was a shoo-in for a top job. Edmund Muskie, her mentor and family friend, plugged her for Secretary of State or a National Security Council job even at that time, but she had to settle for US ambassador to the UN.

Not that the post was something to be sneezed at. She went to New York with the rank and status of ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary. Even more important, she was a member of the National Security Council, and sat in on the biweekly conclave in the White House Situation Room known as the "principles meeting" along with the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of Defence, the Secretary of State and the Director of the CIA. She is the fist woman even to sit in on the principles meeting and she is now what is jocularly referred to as a "Principle Principle", comprising the troika of National Security Advisor and the secretaries of state and defence.

No one has ever said she was quiet or just listened at these meetings even as the UN envoy. In fact, it was at one of these meetings that her famous push for "assertive multilateralism" led General Colin Powell to blow his gasket. As Powell spoke of the strength of the US armed forces, Albright is supposed to have asked him what good were the forces for if they could not be put in to battle to achieve American objectives. In his biography, Powell says the statement almost caused him to have an aneurysm.But more recently, she has tempered her approach. Soon after the Powell episode, she told State Department employees in one address that "in seeking to further the full range of our interests, we will need — and we should use — every available foreign policy tool… We should not be boxed into rigid choices between force and diplomacy, economic and political, unilateral and multilateral. Nor should we be lured by what Emerson called foolish consistencies’ — a foreign policy that responds in the same way regardless of the circumstance will be consistent only in its failure."

The Indians, struggling to adopt a similar flexible approach, will sure be glad to hear this and will be even more delighted to see it in practice.