Recently on Wednesday, February 15th, several Pine Crest Students traveled with Mr. Kranstover, Mrs. Ledbetter, and Mr. Nesselroth to attend a lecture given by former U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright at Florida Atlantic University’s (FAU) Boca Raton Campus. The students in attendance were juniors Sarah Braver, Maria DeCasper, and Alan Stanford; sophomores Seren Nurgun and William Keiser, and freshman Ismail Ercan. The lecture which was held at a sold out 2,400 seat auditorium, was sponsored by the Alan B. Larkin Symposium on the American Presidency, a series of lectures put on by the FAU Department of History.

During Secretary Albright’s lecture, she reflected upon her early years and what stood out. What many people do not know about Madeleine Albright is that she was actually born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 (during the rise of the Third Reich) and was a refugee for most of her childhood. She moved from her homeland to many foreign nations like Switzerland, former Yugoslavia, and Britain many times throughout a period of eleven years. She described the best moment of her life that occurred when she came to America at age 11 as a refugee. She said, “I believe that the combined effects of World War Two, moving countless amounts of times from country to country as a refugee, and my home country’s government (Czechoslovakia) turning to communism really took an effect on me. When I arrived in the U.S., where democracy reigned, I felt a great weight lifted off my shoulders and I knew had found a permanent home.” She did not have a hard time fitting in with American kids like most refugees did, however, because she already spoke three languages by this point in her life. (English, French, and Czech) She would eventually learn Russian while raising her children in the years to come.

Upon arriving in America, Albright’s dad, Josef Koerbel, once a politician in Czechoslovakia, obtained a job at the political science department at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. He would become the dean of the international studies program and would teach future Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice! Josef’s occupation and involvement with global affairs stimulated Madeleine’s interest in foreign relations and diplomacy. As a high school student, she founded her high school’s international relations club and was its first president in 1955. She would go on to graduate and major in political science from Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

Albright spent the next few years becoming a journalist and starting a family alongside her husband, Joe, who had major ties within the journalism business. His aunt, Alicia Patterson, founded Newsday, a daily newspaper in New York. However, Albright was deterred from her journalistic dreams due to newspapers’ anti-nepotism policies. She did not want to bring down her husband’s career just for her own.

Instead, Albright went back to college while nursing her twin daughters, Anne and Alice. She decided at this time to attend Columbia University in New York, a several hour drive from where she was living in Washington D.C. It was here that she was enrolled in a course given by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would later be her boss at the National Security Council at the U.N.! She went on to receive her master and doctorate degrees in public law and government from Columbia.

It was not until now that Albright became involved in politics. It was true that she had political aspirations but “at the time, any high political position was a no women zone,” she described during her lecture. However, after fundraising for her daughter’s private school, she caught the eye of Senator Edmund Muskie’s fundraiser’s cochairman. He was impressed by her work ethic and the results of her fundraiser so he invited her to chair a fundraiser for the Senator who was running for the presidential nomination of his political party. Although Senator Muskie did not end up receiving his party’s nomination, Secretary Albright now had made important contacts within the Democratic Party and had established a friendly relationship with the senator.

In 1978, Zbigniew Brzezinski contacted his former student and offered Albright a job as a congressional liaison at the National Security Council. This was a major milestone in Albright’s career and her new position placed her in the center of the national political arena.

Four years later though, after President Carter lost his re-election bid against Ronald Reagan, Albright was out of a job. Instead of wasting precious free time, she took advantage of this opportunity to write her first book, Poland: The Role of the Press in Political Change. She also became a professor at Georgetown University, where she became director of the Women in Foreign Service Program and the research professor of international affairs in the Foreign Service school.

Following these decades of work as a college professor and helping senators and national security advisors in Washington D.C., Secretary Albright’s hard work paid off when she was appointed by President Bill Clinton to a very prestigious job. She was to be a United Nations (UN) ambassador, representing the United States at the U.N. She was also now part of Clinton’s National Security Council as well since the U.N. ambassador post had been upgraded to cabinet status. During her four year tenure from 1993-97, she learned how to be stern and unyielding on critical topics but diplomatic as well. One of her best accomplishments, against almost all odds, was getting the necessary amount of votes from the U.N. Security Council to send American troops to Haiti, to bring peace to the nation. Another thing that impressed many people, including President Clinton, was when she successfully replaced Secretary General Boutros-Ghali, who was using his position for promoting his own views, and replaced him with Kofi Annan, a strong advocator of wholesale organizational reform.

President Clinton was obviously impressed by what work Albright had done at the U.N. and he selected her to become the 64^th Secretary of State in 1997, after Warren Christopher, the former Secretary of State retired. This was an enormous honor for Albright; she became the first woman Secretary of State in the over 200 year history of the United States! She knew foreign policy like the back of her hand, as she had dealt with foreign nations at the U.N every day for four years. Still, Albright knew how risky President Clinton’s gamble on selecting her had been. She would often be representing the United States in the Arab countries in the Middle East where women are often second-class citizens. “I needed to be rock solid whenever I visited a foreign country,” she described during the lecture. “I had to send a message that I was serious.”

On top of earning the Arab countries leaders’ respect, she would have to negotiate with them and often get them to favor and support America’s point of view on any issue. “Diplomacy is like billiards, not chess, as it is commonly compared to,” she described during the lecture. “Every action or event disrupts or affects everything around it, like when the cue ball ricochets off all the other balls, and the whole pattern on the table is rearranged. In chess, one person’s move does not necessarily affect the whole board’s picture.” Albright surpassed all expectations yet again during her four years as Secretary of State. She was a very vocal advocate of civil and women’s rights, and publicized the benefits of democracy to all of the countries that she visited. Albright even earned the title of “a deadly serpent” by the Iraqi media.

Secretary Albright also joked around during her lecture, showing her infamous “funny side,” which made her well known among colleagues at the United Nations. She recounted a story about getting recognized at an airport while getting patted down at security.

“As I am getting patted down,” she recalled, “the security guard suddenly stopped. ‘Oh my gosh!, he gasped, ‘You are Secretary Albright! I cannot thank you enough for helping out my home country Bosnia. May I take a picture with you?’ ‘Sure!’ I replied. Afterword, a woman who was behind me in line, was wondering why I was taking a picture with the security guard. ‘Why were you taking a photo with a security guard?’ she questioned me. ‘I helped out Bosnia while I was Secretary of State.’ I replied. ‘Secretary of what?’ she asked, ‘Bosnia?’” The crowd erupted with laughter.

Secretary Albright’s lecture at FAU was an amazing experience for these Pine Crest students and faculty to attend in person. It’s not every day that we can be ten feet away from a former secretary of state!

Secretary Albright is currently a professor at Georgetown University, an author of four NY times’ bestselling books, and has been named to Time Magazine’s 75 most influential women of all time. She believes that the American “people need to renew their faith in themselves and their government,” in order for our economy to fully recuperate.