NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Madeleine Albright, the first female U.S. Secretary of State, has died from cancer, her family announced Wednesday. She was 84.
"We are heartbroken to announce that Dr. Madeleine Albright, the 64th U.S. Secretary of State and the first woman to hold that position, passed away earlier today. The cause was cancer," the family wrote in a statement.
"We have lost a loving mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and friend," the statement continued, as well as a "tireless champion of democracy and human rights."
Former President Bill Clinton appointed Albright as ambassador to the United Nations and later nominated her as secretary of state.
She pushed for NATO expansion eastward into the former Soviet bloc and pressured the Clinton administration to intervene in Kosovo, ushering in a post-Cold War model for U.S. intervention abroad predicated on humanitarian intervention rather than containment.
She worked to make the U.S. the sole global hegemonic power in the years following the fall of the USSR and predating the rise of China as a superpower.
With the U.S. acting as the sole global economic hegemon, Albright pioneered the use of sanctions as a diplomatic weapon against the nation's enemies.
She implemented crippling sanctions on Iraq in an attempt to punish Saddam Hussein. The sanctions, which barred essentials like food and medicine from entering the country, caused widespread starvation that killed over half a million children, according to a United Nations report.
Born in 1937 in Prague, Albright's family fled the Nazi occupation of what was then Czechoslovakia in 1939.
Raised Roman Catholic, she would later learn of her Jewish ancestry in 1997 when she discovered three of her grandparents died in the Holocaust.
Her family returned to Prague after World War II, but her father, who was a diplomat, opposed the Communist government that replaced the Nazi puppet regime, and the family emigrated to the United States in 1948. Albright became a citizen in 1957.
She was an international affairs academic before the Clinton administration tapped her to work in government.
In 2012, former President Barack Obama awarded her the Medal of Freedom, the U.S.' highest civilian honor.
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