Ian Williams

Nation, Review of A Woman for All Seasons.

March 15 1999

Ian Williams

Flirtatious and ferocious at the same time, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stamps the world stage over Kosovo threatening fire from heaven if Milosevic does not agree to peace terms. Just as over Bosnia, she may even believe it all. Unfortunately, the Serb leader is much better informed. He knows that, whatever the public differences, Belgrade and Washington are united in wanting to avoid NATO strikes. Albright’s public grandstanding is a necessary part of the charade in which the US acts scary and the Serbs act scared.

With her ability to be stridently parochial and insular in six different languages, Albright is perfect for this administration. Never one to let substance interfere with a good sound bite, she has reinvented herself whenever it has been advantageous to her ambitions.

But does she really merit a biography on the scale of Seasons of Her Life? Albright’s predecessor, Warren Christopher, whose previous public record had some substance and whose actual performance in the state department was no more insubstantial than Albright’s, even now does not have a biography in print, so why is she so honored? Or, as Ann Blackman sums up the problem, (p14) “What makes her, among all the other brilliant men and women in America, stand out?” Almost inadvertently emerging from Blackman’s own hard work is that Albright would be outstanding for her mediocrity in any such gathering, well meriting the nickname Madeleine “Halfbright” that State department staff gave her after appointment as US Ambassador to the UN.

However, she would also stand out for her burning ambition – and for her intensive cultivation of the social and political connections of the kind available to someone who benefited from a generous divorce settlement after what Albright herself described as a “Cinderella marriage” to a millionaire. Blackman puts it, that “Albright’s greatest appeal is that she is just like us, only wealthy”! This has unconscious overtones of Hemingway’s put down of Scott Fitzgerald’s “The rich are different from you and me,” - “Yes, they have more money.” But it really sums up the secret of Albright’s success more aptly than any neo-feminist version of progress from the log-cabin kinder kuche and kirche to political glory.

By becoming the first woman to head the state department, Albright had become a cult figure among some of the more superficial feminists. This was ill merited for several reasons. Those of us who followed the careers of Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi may take some convincing that the absence of “cojones” in itself guarantees wisdom, let alone virtue or empathy. Even so, these redoubtable women, monstrous political warts and all, were elected despite their sex. Blackman’s account makes it clear that Albright was appointed to public office because she was a woman, not despite of it. “Frankly, he wanted another woman in the cabinet” Blackman quotes a wisely anonymous source. (p233) In fact, for Albright “cojones” did help, since her use of the word at the United Nations over the downing of the Cuban exiles flight, helped lock her in the media eye as a staunch anti-communist – and an electoral asset for Clinton in Florida.

Blackman’s bibliography cites Albright’s PhD dissertation, her MA submission for Columbia, one from Wellesley, and a mere four memorable public speeches, significant for their carefully crafted sound bites rather than their insights. Certainly no male so underqualified would have even been on the short list – and nor would a better-qualified woman without Albright’s social connections.

Blackman’s journalistic integrity rescues this book from the obsequious and hagiographical gushing that it occasionally skirts. However it creates a constant dissonance between content and delivery. For example, she asserts that Albright “has made sure that women’s rights are a central priority of US foreign policy,” (p305) but then goes on to report that there has been no great leap forward in the number of women ambassadors on her watch. She quotes a close friend (p161) as saying, “Gender didn’t hit her in any real way until she got to the United Nations. Feminism wasn’t an important cause for her until recently.”

In fact, it was not so much a cause, of course, as a stepping stone to be trodden on en route to her goal. For example, Blackman reports that while Albright was nominally in charge of the US delegation to the International Women’s Conference in Beijing, she disdained actual attendance, except in so far as she could share Hillary Clinton’s plane for the brief flying one day visit. Significantly, the book is as silent as Albright was herself about the adventurously copulative Clinton’s sacking of surgeon-general Jocelyn Elders, (another, but more neglected black and female first) for her statement at the UN that masturbation did not carry risk of AIDS. In a more political vein, Albright’s first move on arrival at the UN was to push out April Glaspie the former charge d’affaires in Iraq who was carrying the can for the Bush administration’s confused signals to Baghdad at the start of the Gulf War. Glaspie was serving her penance in the US Mission to the UN. In short, sisterhood may have been a powerful force in getting Albright appointed, but it is not a concept she has practiced much herself.

It is not just women whom Albright has felt to be beneath her notice. Blackman also records that her heroine was not going to attend the Copenhagen UN Social Summit at all, considering the war against global poverty too soft a subject. Until, that is, Al Gore announced he was going, and Albright, then UN Ambassador decided to hitch a lift with him. As Blackman says, she “understood that if she were to have any chance at higher office, she would need to spend time with people who could influence the decision.” (p251) Brown-nosing becomes almost a Pooteresque art-form in these pages, which occasionally read like Diary of a Nobody in the third person, as they record Albright’s delight at getting this invitation, or mortification at being left off that list.

As if sensing the spuriousness of the feminist path to glory, the second stripe of honor is the outsider’s struggle to get in. Despite the log cabin to State Department rubbish that she and her spin meisters have woven, it is clear that Albright came from a relatively affluent and privileged background. No amount of spin can transform a privileged upper middle class up-bringing, with governesses and Swiss private schools, into a life of deprivation.

Few people would regard being the daughter of a college professor and having to take a scholarship to Wellesley as swimming against the social stream. Like Margaret Thatcher, Albright acquired her political launching pad by marrying into money. Thatcher went directly into elected politics. Albright used her alimony settlement to consolidate herself as a Georgetown hostess, whose rabidly hawkish Cold War sentiments, seemingly picked up from her hero-worship of her Czech émigré father, could always find a popular echo in Democratic movers and shakers. Albright was an outsider of her own creation, since she had set herself on being rich, WASP and Wellesleyan and remade herself in this image, renouncing Catholicism for a comfortable episcopalianism.

At least we are spared any hint of a radical past. Albright, it seems was a proto-Neo-Con from the beginning. During the sixties, when Blackman stereotypically us that “antiwar radicals who grew their hair long and smoked pot,” and “Black power advocates sporting ‘afros’” (p150) besieged College Presidents, Albright found the demonstrations at Columbia “a pain in the neck.” Ms Albright, who by inference we deduce neither wore an Afro nor smoked the demon weed, struggled with her postgraduate work, and wrestled with dilemmas of leaving the children at home with the house-keeper.

Interestingly, and once again reflecting the dissonance between the commission and the contents, the body of Blackman’s text takes seriously Albright’s amazing amnesia about her Jewish ancestry and the price her grandparents paid, while recording in the introduction that she found “very few people who believe she was truly ignorant of her family heritage.” As Blackman herself says, it “stretches the imagination.” Within months of her appointment as Secretary of State she was revealed as someone who was either amnesiac to the point of premature Alzheimer’s, or who was pathologically covering up her own family history. On the face of it, neither is an optimal characteristic for running the foreign policy of the world’s only superpower.

While Blackman offers a few tentative paragraphs to show that a mere constitutional amendment would allow Albright to run for the White House, she fails to consider what the effect of these revelations would have been if they had surfaced before her appointment. From discussions made public at the time, Albright might have found herself as scoring more negative points for over-fulfilling the Jewish quota with the beancounting White House than positive points for womanhood.

There is much in this book with the ring of truth – but what rings out loudest is the sound of silence when it comes to examining the record of Albright’s public life as opposed to her personal history. Blackman disclaims any attempt to analyze her subject’s approach to American foreign policy in favor of following “the path that Albright walked to shatter the glass ceiling.” Would it be conceivable for a biographer of Henry Kissinger to write about his struggle with his Austrian Jewish origins in an administration that was frequently tinged with anti-semitism – and not mention Vietnam or Cambodia?

Yet in Seasons of Her Life, Blackman gives almost as much prominence to Albright’s presidency of the trustees of the Beauvoir elementary school in DC – an affluent private establishment not much patronized by the majority population of the District – as she does to her career at the UN. In one way this is reasonable, since it was the nearest thing to public office she held before becoming US ambassador to the UN in 1993.

There is much talk of facials, hairdos, dating and dresses, but not one single mention of Rwanda. In fact, in 1994 Albright fought single handedly in the Security Council to stop any UN reinforcements whatsoever going to Kigali while somewhere between half a million and a million Tutsis were being massacred. All agree that loyalty to Clinton has been one of her virtues. She was never more loyal than with this championing of Presidential Directive 25, which ruled that the US would veto any UN peace-keeping operation that did not directly benefit American interests. Her pride in her Czech origins is continually stated, but in this case it was, ironically justified. “The crocodiles in the Kagera River and the vultures over Rwanda have never had it so good,” Karel Kovanda, the Czech ambassador to the UN reprimanded his colleagues on the Security Council, and by implication one in particular, in an attempt to get reinforcements for the tiny UN contingent in Kigali.

In other examples of diplomacy by sound bite and photo-op, Blackman reports, for example, that Albright went to Somali to wear a flak-jacket with US troops for the cameras, and that she had decided Boutros Ghali should be fired because of the UN failure there. However, she does not mention her heroine’s role in pushing the UN to fight a vendetta with Somali Warlord Farah Aideed, which could be regarded as the cause for the debacle. Even less does she mention that the key incident in which the Rangers were killed was an American operation initiated and carried out without even informing, let alone consulting, UN forces on the ground.

Blackman gives the dubious credit for sacking Boutros Ghali to her heroine without really explaining why she did it. Perhaps closer examination would have led her to examine the most likely hypothesis – that, Salome-like, Albright danced in front of Jesse Helms with Boutros Ghali’s head, in return for promises of easy confirmation as Secretary of State from the Senate Foreign Relations Chairman.

Blackman fails to explore what is on the face of it, a highly unlikely yet continuing alliance between Albright and Helms. In fact of course, both of them share an intensely parochial and reactionary view of the world. Perhaps the most germane comment is the cable home from former British Ambassador Sir John Weston, who in best “Yes Minister” style alerted the British foreign office to the failings of the new Secretary of State.(268) “She is not always good at accepting the need to apply to the United States, the same standards and expectations that she requires of others…. There is a mildly irritating tendency to create a fixed position and then to look around for others to save her from the detailed consequences of it… Her reaction to being exposed or brought under pressure from sudden turns of events are sometimes tetchy, verging on the panicky.”

It is perhaps significant that Weston has retired from the Foreign Service. Most of the other diplomats who were privately so dismissive of her joined the fawning chorus of congratulations once she became Secretary of State. The same process was obvious in the media, where her career was written up as if she were some combination of Metternich and Mother Theresa.

In fact, most of the press who covered her at the UN had as little time for her as she had for them. Her spin-man would go straight to Washington to get the pliable coverage he wanted, by-passing the New York staff. From her arrival at the UN, it was obvious where her ambitions lay, and her media effort was directed solely at the State Department. However, she had been told that it did not do to look too eager, so everyone was supposed to conspire in pretending that it was not so.

I must confess an interest here. Not long after she took over, her spokesman Jamie Rubin bell, booked and candled me from the US Mission in 1994 for writing a profile of her in The New York Observer, which referred to her “barely concealed ambitions to be Secretary of State.” He complained that I had not recorded his denial of any such ambition, and she and her staff have a strong view of the proper role of journalists – as stenographers whose task is to write down every word.

When the Washington Post’s Michael Dobbs revealed his findings about her family being massacred during the War, Blackman records that Albright’s response was to call Katherine Graham (p276) who wisely realized that it was too late to do anything about the story. Rubin’s response was to spoil Dobbs’ scoop by leaking his results to other outlets who could assure a more sympathetic, if not sycophantic, stance. Later, one press occasion was canceled in Belgrade simply because Dobbs was the pool reporter.

Blackman records that she asked Albright about the prevailing State Department doctrine that if someone wrote something ninety nine per cent positive and one per cent negative about her, she would focus on the one per cent. The champion of free speech and the American way of life told her chillingly “ So eliminate the one per cent.” (p19)

It is to Blackman’s credit that she has significantly exceeded the one per cent. While most of her editorializations are in the traditional Washington mode of never attacking a possible source and the impressive negative percentage is always ascribed to others, I’d be surprised if Blackman ever gets another exclusive interview. In Washington, access is what stenographers get, not investigators.

Blackman’s integrity and resourcefulness shows through the pink cotton wool padding. I only wish she had adopted the persona of the little girl revealing the insubstantiality of Empress Albright’s new clothes, and dug a little deeper. She could have explained just why Albright is the perfect embodiment of this administration’s content-free foreign policy where one deranged Senator from North Carolina, or a campaign donation from a banana magnate has more weight than all of America’s allies put together, let alone the rest of the world.

ENDS ENDS

Share This