More honest than most
Jonathan Mirsky
MADAM SECRETARY: A MEMOIR by Madeleine Albright Macmillan. £20, pp. 562, ISBN140503369X It is a mark of the excellence of this memoir by the highest-ranking woman in American history, exSecretary of State Madeleine Albright, that it could not have been written by a man. Imagine Douglas Hurd saying that the happiest years of his life were with a spouse who dumped him for a younger woman and that if he could have kept his wife he would have given up a public career. In his recent memoir, in fact, Mr Hurd skates past his divorce, while the serialisation of her book and recent interviews with Ms Albright have mentioned barely anything else. Or imagine a male foreign minister saying, after days and nights of negotiations with the Israelis and Palestinians, 'I had eaten so much junk food in nine days I had trouble fitting into my clothes. Fortunately I had a loosefitting jacket. A good dose of makeup helped cover the circles under my eyes. There was no hope for my hair.'
Five hundred and sixty-two pages of such vulnerability — Ms Albright confides that 'I had always needed someone to reaffirm my worth' — would cloy. But most of this book, about a woman who was born in Prague in 1937 and 'well into adulthood was never supposed to be what I became', focuses on her 'stealth career'. This career did not start, and then relatively humbly, until 1976, when she was 39 with three children and she was hired as the senior legislative assistant for Senator Edmund Muskie. In 1983 her husband left her for another woman. 'I was forty-five years old, having spent more than half my life with [her husband] Joe. I had never lived by myself. I was an adult unmarried woman.'
Another non-male characteristic, notable for those of us waiting for our leaders ever to admit failure, is the apology. Naturally, where she can, Ms Albright recounts her successes, of which there were many. But she can say she is sorry. In 1996, she was asked by a television interviewer if she thought half a million dead Iraqi children were a price worth paying for sanctions.
1 must have been crazy. I said the following: 'I think it is a very hard choice but the price, we think, the price is worth it. My reply had been
a terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy, and wrong.
What would it take for Jack Straw or Colin Powell to confess that? Or take something really horrible: in 1994, the US, like other big powers, failed to act in Rwanda, and 800,000 people were massacred. Washington balked because 18 American rangers had just been killed in Somalia. Fearful of another Black Hawk Down disaster, the Americans actually urged that the international forces already in Rwanda should be drawn down or removed. And yet, as Ms Albright admits, while Somalia was anarchy, Rwanda was 'planned mass murder'. Even more unusually, Ms Albright acknowledges that NG0s, such as the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch, 'were right, not later when it was easy to see, but at the time when their warnings — if heeded — could have made a difference'.
My only serious criticism of this book is that Ms Albright wrote it 'with' her speech writer Bill Woodward. Why? I have heard her speak; she is eloquent; she tells good jokes. (At the international women's conference in Beijing in 1995, as a foreign delegation passed by holding its sign, a Chinese official said, 'Please, can you tell me? Where is this place called Lesbia?'). Much of the time her own voice, as in all such 'with' books, is submerged in a deadening blandness. This is most evident when she describes the big issues in which she was a key player: Iran, Iraq, IsraelPalestine, Bosnia, Kosovo — sometimes several at once. According to Robert Suettinger, a White House official at the time, China policy during Ms Albright's term as Secretary of State was in the hands of the National Security Council; this probably explains why she says very little about dealing with the Chinese. She omits, for example, that on 24 February 1997, the day of Deng Xiaoping's cremation, she was an official guest in Beijing, although not invited to the memorial service the next day. Nor does Ms Albright write that she represented the US in Hong Kong on 30 June 1997 when the city was handed back to China.
Of course what we really want in a highpowered memoir like this one is fly-on-thewall stuff, not what we can read in the papers. Here, what I assume to be Ms Albright's authentic voice is vivid. In 1993, when she was the ambassador to the UN, the Iraqis tried to murder ex-president George Bush; it was decided in Washington to retaliate by launching missiles against targets in Baghdad. In a notable understatement, she writes, 'This led to a tricky diplomatic assignment for me on the day of the strike.' On a weekend, alone, she visits the Iraqi ambassador to the UN at his New York residence, where he welcomes her and offers tea. 'So, what brings you here today?"Well. I'm here to tell you we are bombing your country because you tried to assassinate former president Bush.' This makes the ambassador so angry Ms Aibright fears for her safety and flees. It must be said that the evidence for this assassination attempt is flimsy.
Then there was the day in 1998 when President Clinton, facing impeachment, tells his cabinet that he had lied to them about Monica Lewinslcy. When the rumours arose earlier that year a White House aide — vilely — asked some of them, including Ms Albright, to tell the press they believed Mr Clinton, which they did. In September 1998, the President spoke first, avoiding eye contact and saying he would have to atone for the rest of his life, adding that 'he had been in a rage for the past four and half years'. Ms Albright wondered silently whether he had apologised and what he had been angry about. As the senior official she replied first — and, in my opinion, funked it. It was a sad time, she said, the President had admitted he had done wrong, and 'now we all had jobs to do'. Another, braver female cabinet member told the President that what he had done was inexcusable and that it was more important to have the right morals than the right policies. Mr Clinton admitted that it was important to be a good person but — and here we arrive at the essence of the man — 'if her logic prevailed, the nation would have been better off if Richard Nixon had been elected in 1960 instead of Jack Kennedy'. The atmosphere changed. The men in the room began forgiving the President and quoting the Bible; after the meeting broke up with handshakes and hugs, one of the participants told Ms Albright that she had just witnessed 'a "southern thing", part religious meeting, part encounter session, and part revival'. For the Secretary of State the whole thing was 'uncomfortable, cathartic, weird and typical'.
Perhaps the most notorious event in Ms Albright's time as Secretary of State was her discovery that she was of Jewish background; three of her grandparents and many other relatives had been killed in the camps. She had been told only that they had died in the war. Her parents, who had become Catholics, had concealed this from their children, they now think, to protect them from suffering. Brought up a Catholic, Ms Albright converted to Episcopalianism to please her husband's snobbish family. After the news of her Jewishness became public many accused Ms Albright of lying when she said she hadn't known. Some of her best college friends, who were Jews, said they had had no idea she was a Jew. The national director of the AntiDefamation League wrote, 'In Poland every single day Jews surface who thought they were Catholics all their lives.' Ms Albright points out that many Czech Jews were utterly secular, ignored Jewish observances, and celebrated Christmas and Easter.
I believe Ms Albright on this matter as I do everything else in her unusually honest book. My own secular family, although
Jews, were as goyisch as any non-churchgoing Episcopalian, celebrating religiouslyempty Christmas and Easter, visiting churches to admire their architecture, and walking past synagogues. Like Ms Albright, my sister and I discovered only when we grew up that we had relatives who had died in the Holocaust. As Ms Albright says in her revealing book, The facts had been there all along — not even buried deep or hard to find. I just had not looked.'
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