The first woman to serve as United States Secretary of State has passed away.
Madeleine Albright's family shared the news in a short statement on Wednesday, saying the 84-year-old died after battling cancer. "We have lost a loving mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and friend," the statement said.
Albright was born in Prague as Marie Jana Korbelova, coming to the U.S. in 1948 as a refugee.
Speaking to the Chad Hartman Show on WCCO Radio, the Star Tribune Editorial Board's John Rash, who previously interviewed Albright, spoke about her pioneering role in U.S. Government and foreign affairs.
“She was a pioneer because she was the first female Secretary of State,” Rash said. “And yet she was rooted in deep traditions, in terms of believing America to be the indispensable nation, believed very strongly in multilateral alliances. She used to speak of assertive multilateralism to describe her philosophy. She understood very well almost exactly what we're seeing right now. Her family, of course, had fled Czechoslovakia to escape Nazism and then eventually communism. So she knew what happened when America and other Democracies were unable to assert that kind of approach to the rest of the West, let alone the world. She did it all with very blunt language at times, that actually went over, I think, quite well with the American public.”
President Bill Clinton chose Albright as America’s top diplomat in 1996, and she served in that capacity for the last four years of the Clinton administration.
At the time, she was the highest-ranking woman in the history of U.S. government. She was not in the line of succession for the presidency, however, because she was a native of Czechoslovakia.
Albright received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.
“She was surrounded by family and friends,” her family announced on Twitter.
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