Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has passed away at the age of 84, her family announced on Wednesday.
“We are heartbroken to announce that Dr. Madeleine K. Albright, 64th US Secretary of State and the first woman to hold that position, passed away earlier today,” read a statement from her family. “The cause was cancer. She was surrounded by family and friends. We have lost a loving mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and friend.”
Born to Jewish parents in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1937, her name was Marie Jana Korbelová until it was legally changed in her youth. Her parents converted to Roman Catholicism when she was very young and she later said she did not know she was Jewish until her late 50s. Her father, Josef Korbel, was a Czech diplomat until resigning in 1948 following the communist takeover.
Albright’s family emigrated to the United States and she became a naturalized US citizen in 1957. She later studied and taught at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and made her leap into politics in 1978, when she was recruited as the National Security Council’s liaison to Congress by US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, her former teacher at Georgetown.
Albright was appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations in 1993 by US President Bill Clinton, and in 1997 she became the first female Secretary of State in Clinton’s second presidential term. After leaving office, she founded the Albright Group, a company that advised clients on international policy and global markets, and in 2012 was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President Barack Obama.
In a 1996 interview with CBS, Albright defended the Clinton administration’s economic sanctions against Iraq, saying that the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children under the age of 5 was “worth it.”
