Seasons of Her Life: A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright

By Ann Blackman

When Madeleine Korbel Albright was sworn in as secretary of state in January 1997, she made headlines around the world. She was the first woman to rise to the top tier of American government and had a reputation for defining foreign policy in blunt one-liners that voters could understand. When her Jewish heritage was disclosed, people were intrigued by her personal story and wondered how it was possible -- if it were possible -- that she truly could have been ignorant of her past.
Veteran Time magazine correspondent Ann Blackman has written the first comprehensive biography of Madeleine Albright. The book reveals a life of enormous texture -- a lonely, peripatetic childhood in war-ravaged Europe; two harrowing escapes from her homeland, once from the Nazis, then from the Communists; her arrival in America; Madeleine's unhappiness as a teenager in Denver, always the outsider, the little refugee; her marriage into an old American newspaper family with great wealth.
When, after twenty-three years, the marriage failed, Albright was devastated. But in many ways, divorce liberated her to pursue a lifelong interest in government and international affairs. From Senator Edmund S. Muskie's office to President Carter's White House to a professorship at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, Albright gained experience and contacts. As a foreign affairs advisor to Democratic vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro and, later, presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, Albright positioned herself to return to government as President Clinton's ambassador to the United Nations and eventually to claim her ultimate prize -- the office of secretary of state.
With both insight and compassion, Blackman shows how the changing cultural mores of the last four decades affected Albright and other women of her generation: the self-doubt she experienced when, as a young mother in an era when real mothers didn't work, she decided to take a job on Capitol Hill; the problems she faced as a female professor who was not always taken seriously in the white man's world of foreign policy; the psychological transformation from spending most of her professional life as a staffer who wrote talking points for others to becoming a woman of consequence in her own right; the ups and downs of an ambitious, driven woman who still carries her share of insecurities, now concealed by a veneer of power and celebrity.
In writing this landmark book, Blackman drew on archival material in the United States, Britain, and the Czech Republic, as well as interviews with almost two hundred friends and colleagues of Albright and her family, including President Clinton, Czech Republic President Václav Havel, and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, She also spent many hours with Albright herself who, feet up in her Georgetown living room, offered startlingly frank and poignant comments on her life, past and present. The book is enhanced with twenty-five photos, many from the Secretary's personal collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribner
• Release date: Jul 14, 1999
• ISBN: 9780684864310

Book preview

Seasons of Her Life

A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright

Ann Blackman

Brooke Zimmer

SCRIBNER

1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020

A LISA DREW BOOK/SCRIBNER

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Copyright © 1998 by Ann Blackman

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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Designed by Brooke Zimmer

ISBN 0-684-86431-2

ISBN 978-0-684-86431-0

eISBN 978-0-684-86431-0

To Mike and Leila and Christof With love

Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction

PART I MADLENKA

1. Bohemian Spring

2. The Escape

3. Battlefronts

4. A Living Hell

5. Lists That Lie

6. Brutal Choices

7. The Defection

PART II MADELEINE

8. Starting Over

9. The Teenager

10. Dust on Her Shoes

11. Love and Marriage

12. The Korbel

13. The Demanding Professor

14. Crossroads

15. A Demanding Senator

16. The White House

17. Divorce

PART III PROFESSOR ALBRIGHT

18. On Her Own

19. The Golden Girls

20. Moving Up

21. Training Ground

PART IV MADAME SECRETARY

22. Madame Ambassador

23. The Brass Ring

24. Madame Secretary

25. Bombshell

26. Celebrity

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Documents

Author’s Note

Seasons of Her Life is based on interviews with almost two hundred friends and acquaintances of Madeleine Albright and her family. Many individuals were interviewed numerous times. Because people’s memories differ, I tried to rely on several sources for each anecdote. In many instances, I read quotes and passages back to the source, even if the person was not named, to check for accuracy and nuance. Where memories differed, I footnoted the disparity.

When quotation marks are used to recount conversations at which I was not present, at least one participant in the dialogue repeated the words to me as verbatim. In rare instances when information came from interviews conducted on deep background—meaning the source refused to be identified in any way—it is reported without attribution, but in every case the source was in a position to know the facts described.

In weighing information provided by officials in the Clinton administration, I tried to consider the motives and biases that are part of every political culture: of those who worked for Albright, wanted to work for her, did not get a job with her, had a spouse working for her, had a spouse who did not get a job with her, or, in some cases, of individuals who wanted the jobs Albright got.

Any errors that remain, either in fact or analysis, are mine.

Introduction

GEORGETOWN. New Year’s Eve, 1996. At the corner of 30th and N Street, inside the redbrick Federal mansion that Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert Todd once called home, a fire crackles softly at either end of the long, rose-colored living room. Tiny colored lights on the Christmas tree sparkle and dance off the eighteen-foot ceiling, and the silky voice of Ella Fitzgerald floats through the hallway. Guests are shoulder to shoulder, politicians and journalists, elegantly turned out in diamonds and black tie, toasting each other with clever, irreverent one-liners, clinking fluted, crystal champagne glasses shimmering with well-iced Moët & Chandon Brut. In the kitchen, Ernesto Cadima, crisp in his white jacket and chef’s toque, is tossing a ham hock and sautéed onions into the pan of black-eyed peas.¹

By 9:45, the annual party of Washington media stars Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee is well under way. Hollywood diva Lauren Bacall—Betty to her friends—has arrived. Colin Powell and Al Gore are en route. Their entrance will be noted, casually, of course. No elbowing and finger-pointing. Most of those in the room have met them before.

Just after 10:00 P.M., a 1992 bulletproof black Cadillac Fleetwood limousine, equipped with a secure telephone for conversations with the president, pulls up to the curb, followed by a black Chevrolet Suburban war wagon carrying four security agents. Out steps Madeleine Albright, the newly nominated secretary of state, radiant in black silk. As she enters the pine-decked hallway, all heads turn. Even before the butler whisks away her black velvet wrap, she is quickly embraced with hugs, kisses, and shrieks of joy.

Albright had not intended to come this evening. In fact, she had not accepted the highly coveted invitation until that very morning,² when a friend persuaded her to put away her black briefing books for a few hours, that it was important to be seen at places like this, to do a drop-by. Albright mulled it over. She had no other plans, but something rubbed her the wrong way. It was so damned typical of Washington, a city obsessed with power, fickle to the core, a climate where who’s up and who’s down changes faster than the weather. She had lived right here in Georgetown, only a few blocks away, for more than thirty years. Yet this was the first time that Sally and Ben had invited her to their fete, the first time she was thought of as part of their A-list. Albright told friends that she was not sure that she wanted to attend. This was the uptown crowd. Would she fit in?

The irony was delicious.

When Madeleine Korbel Albright became secretary of state on January 23, 1997, the white male establishment that has long dominated American foreign policy was taken aback. It was one thing to entertain the notion of a woman in charge, to put a woman’s name on the short list to placate the feminists. It was quite another for a woman to actually move into the spacious, seventh-floor office at the State Department, where even the secretary’s private clothes closet had been outfitted with a sock drawer for men.³

Clinton made a dramatic statement when he chose Albright for the number one cabinet position. Although women have made considerable progress in breaking into middle- and upper-management, very few make it to the top. Of the Fortune 500 companies, only two have women CEOs.⁴ Female executives hold high-level jobs, but all too frequently they are in departments that do not lead to advancement. There was another, more subtle irony to Clinton’s choice. For a significant number of middle-aged male WASPs, who consider American foreign policy their private province, the day Madeleine Albright became secretary of state will go down in history for one reason: It was the day they were beaten by a girl.

Despite criticism that Albright is not a visionary like Thomas Jefferson, the country’s first secretary of state, or a strategist like Dean Acheson in the Truman administration,⁵ she was, in other ways, more than qualified for the job. She had earned a Ph.D. in political science and international relations, worked on Capitol Hill, served in the Carter White House as a staff member on the National Security Council, taught foreign policy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and represented the United States as the American ambassador to the United Nations. She had established herself as an outspoken advocate of human rights, an issue of growing importance in the United States’ delicate relationship with China. And, having fled both Nazism and communism in her native Czechoslovakia, she understood the dangers of living in an oppressed society. She knows what it means when the powerful decide about the less powerful, and that when they divide spheres of interest among themselves, this always leads to wars and misfortune, says Václav Havel, president of the Czech Republic and a friend of Albright since they met in 1990.⁶

It is this visceral understanding of modern European history that distinguishes her from most American leaders. This is what Madeleine experienced personally, Havel says. So she is aware of the meaning of symbols like Munich, symbols of division that never lead to peace and stability. She knows all about appeasement, about democracy making concessions to a dictator. Albright knows firsthand what happens to a country when dictators raise their swords, tyranny reigns, and everyone in the apartment building heads for the air raid shelter.

Just as important to her selection, however, was the fact that Albright was the candidate with whom the Clintons—both Bill and Hillary—felt most comfortable. President Clinton realized that he had in her a dazzling speaker with unquestioned loyalty to the people she served, a natural politico who could handle the press while giving him credit for American foreign policy decisions and not seek acclaim herself, as Henry Kissinger had done under Richard Nixon. She was tough and strong on the issues that I thought were important, especially on Bosnia, President Clinton says. She supported what I did on Haiti. When we had to do difficult things that didn’t have a lot of popular support in the beginning, she on principle agreed with me. I could see she was willing to take … risks.⁷

Perhaps Albright’s greatest skill is her understanding of American politics, a game that requires a sharp eye, a well-tuned ear, and, inevitably, a sizable dollop of good luck. Too often in the past, foreign policy decisions were made by politicians with no experience or feel for diplomacy. Or diplomats shaped policy with little understanding of the wishes or culture of those people in whose name the policy was formulated. Albright is a rarity among our national leaders, a person who understands both American politics and foreign policy and how one affects the other. In this delicate operetta that combines the two, Albright is a master, the crystalline voice of justice and common sense. I thought she would be the person most likely to connect with the American people, to bring the message of our foreign policy home, Clinton said.⁸

This is not a book that analyzes Albright’s approach to American foreign policy. Rather, it is the life story of a woman whose climb to the top rung of American politics was as unanticipated as it was unconventional. While any serious biography about a secretary of state cannot ignore foreign policy, I leave it to others with far more expertise in world affairs to assess the official impact of her tenure. My mission was to follow the path Albright walked to shatter the glass ceiling and become the first female secretary of state; to understand how, in a society that treats abandoned first wives like driftwood, Albright blossomed after her divorce. Who is this woman? Where did she come from? How does she think? What makes her, among all the other brilliant men and women in America, stand out?

I began this book with no road map except the desire to trace Albright’s life, which I already knew had far more texture than that of most public officials. I first met her when I was covering the vice presidential campaign of Geraldine M. Ferraro, to whom Albright was foreign policy adviser. I interviewed her in my capacity as a Time magazine reporter when she was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She was once my guest at a White House correspondents dinner, and we have numerous friends in common.

My goal has been to show how the life of this secretary of state was shaped: growing up in wartime Europe, coming of age in 1950s America, marrying into a family with more money than compassion, and spending her working years, like countless mothers for whom she blazed the trail, trying to master the precarious dance between family and job, vocation and avocation.

Albright has had a complete life—husband, children, dog—what Zorba the Greek called the full catastrophe. She has known the security of loving parents, the comfort and rhythm of married life, the joy and challenge of raising children, the penetrating sadness of a stillbirth, the gnawing emptiness of her parents’ deaths, the pain and anger of divorce. Ironically, the divorce liberated her, firing a fierce ambition that propelled her to the top echelon of American government.

This is the story of a woman who cares deeply for her daughters and family, a generous friend who regularly opens her home, whether to a friend needing respite from a messy marriage or someone simply stopping overnight in the city. It is the story of a homemaker turned politician turned diplomat who thrives on friendships with women and enjoys the company of men.

Like many successful and driven people, Albright places great confidence in her skills and ability to get things done, but she is also a woman of abiding insecurities who needs constant reassurance. Offstage, friends find her surprisingly vulnerable, convinced that someone or something out there is going to bring her down. She is more obsessed with her image than almost anyone on the public stage today.

This need to prove that she is just as smart as men at the bargaining table is one shared by many professional women. Prominent men are considered smart until they are proven stupid, says Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. Women tend to be considered stupid until proven smart. The suspicion is that they do not deserve to be there.

Shortly after I started my research, Michael Dobbs, a veteran correspondent for the Washington Post and a onetime colleague of mine in Moscow, reported that Albright’s parents had been born Jewish and that three of her grandparents had died in the Holocaust.

The story created tremendous controversy. Albright was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, so the fact that she might have a Jewish heritage was interesting but not remarkable. What was astonishing was that she claimed ignorance of her ethnic history. The Czech-born secretary of state, who had spent her career studying the history of Eastern Europe, insisted that she had only recently learned that her parents might have been Jewish, that she knew her grandparents died in World War II, but that she had never asked how. Nor, she said, had her Czech-born father, Josef Korbel, ever discussed his own family history with his children, even though he spent the first part of his career as a diplomat in service to the Czechoslovak government and the latter part teaching and writing about Eastern European history. Albright’s assertion of ignorance stretched the imagination. It appeared that she was either extraordinarily naive or evading the truth. For a leader who had been in office less than two weeks, neither thought was reassuring.

Dobbs’ reporting opened new avenues as I tried to understand the family history and experiences that have shaped Albright’s life. As I traced her life from Prague to London, back to Prague and Belgrade, to Long Island, Denver, Wellesley, New York, Chicago, and Washington—from Georgetown to Capitol Hill, the White House to, eventually, Foggy Bottom—I found very few people who believe she was truly ignorant of her family heritage. In interviews in London and Prague with a dozen friends and colleagues of the Korbel family, not one thought it possible.

Yet almost to a person, those who knew and worked with Albright’s father say that, at every turn, he distanced himself from his Jewish heritage, that he was an ambitious, pragmatic man who thought that being labeled a Jew would be an obstacle to his career and his children’s future. The Czech government was not anti-Semitic, but it didn’t help to be a Jew in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the late Lev Braun, a BBC announcer and a Czech translator who worked with Korbel during World War II.⁹

Albright’s love and admiration for her father are well known. At her swearing in as secretary of state, she cited him as one who taught me to love freedom.¹⁰ But there is more to Körbel’s history than his daughter has discussed in public, hues of gray in a complex portrait of warring political ideals that she has painted more in black and white.

To understand Albright, one must understand Josef Korbel. Intellectually and emotionally, they are very much alike. As well as being an intelligent, gregarious, and witty diplomat who spoke six languages and had a reading knowledge of two more,¹¹ Korbel had an uncanny instinct for survival, an instinct that caused him to surrender his name, his citizenship, and his politics, and to bury his religious heritage.

Korbel seemed to want to forget not only his roots but even the Holocaust itself. While he wrote five scholarly books about modern Eastern European history, he barely mentioned the fate of Jews in World War II, the most horrific chapter in the period of his expertise. In his 1977 book, Twentieth-Century Czechoslovakia, the Meanings of Its History, published almost thirty years after he arrived in America, Korbel notes the existence of concentration camps almost as an aside and makes less than a dozen minor references to the Czechoslovak Jewish population that was virtually wiped out by Adolf Hitler. His longest reference is three sentences.¹²

In his later life, Korbel became a professor of international studies at the University of Denver, teaching European history and mentoring scores of students. He could not have had a more attentive pupil than his daughter Madeleine. It was Josef Korbel who taught her that a leader must articulate foreign policy in ways ordinary people can understand, that in times of crisis, citizens will not rally to the cause if they do not understand the impact it will have on their daily lives. Korbel was a loyal aide to Czechoslovak president Eduard Beneš and Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, but he was critical of their handling of the Munich accord because they did not explain it clearly to the Czech people. Korbel also thought Beneš would have been a more effective leader had he spruced up his appearance and looked more distinctive. His unprepossessing appearance deprived him of physical charisma, Korbel wrote.¹³

Consciously or unconsciously, Madeleine Albright absorbed these lessons well. Her father’s analysis of what happened at Munich became the essence of the kitchen-table politics she takes to America’s heartland at every opportunity. Her ability to reduce complex foreign policy issues to bumper-sticker slogans is one of her most celebrated qualities.

And unlike Beneš, Albright looks like a leader. Although short of stature and hardly svelte, she has learned to cultivate a distinctive look, using her signature jewel brooches, patriotic silk scarves, and a black Texas Stetson to make her presence known—and felt. Unlike Pamela Harriman, the late ambassador to France and doyenne of Democratic politics, who conquered a host of prominent and wealthy men in her bedroom before she invited them into her salon, Albright is not a femme fatale. Raised in an Eastern European tradition by parents who taught her that a woman can be both intelligent and delightful, she uses coquettish charm to elicit support from men without alienating other women.

Most important, Albright personifies values that we all celebrate. She is the immigrant who works harder than the rest of us to succeed, the physical embodiment of steely American patriotism. Despite her lifetime in Democratic politics and a reputation for bluntness, it is that patriotism, combined with her wartime experiences, that makes Albright acceptable to conservatives on Capitol Hill.

At the same time, Albright is the perpetual outsider: the Czech-born child in wartime London; the daughter of privileged diplomats in postwar Eastern Europe; the eleven-year-old refugee girl arriving in New York; one of only a handful of foreigners at a fancy private school in Denver; the scholarship student and self-styled Democrat among well-heeled Republicans and Yankees at Wellesley College; the daughter-in-law of a prominent and wealthy newspaper family that never really accepted her, even after she converted from Roman Catholicism to Episcopalianism to please them.

A sense of separation and distinction, and a striving for legitimacy, stretched through her life. In the sixties, when young mothers were expected to stay home to raise their families, Albright enrolled in graduate school to learn, of all things, the Russian language. As a young woman looking for a career, she did not choose teaching or nursing or art history, occupations deemed appropriate for women of her generation, but the arcane field of foreign policy, long the domain of Ivy League-educated men. In the early seventies, members of the Woman’s National Democratic Club asked her to advise them as to how to have more of an impact on national policy, yet they rarely invited her to join them after the meetings for an informal lunch with the girls.

*   *   *

In many ways, Albright has been and is a bridge, spanning generations, cultures, and party politics as few before her have been able to do. As a child, she was eager to meld her family’s Czech background with her new life in America; as a young mother on the board of Washington’s exclusive Beauvoir School, the National Cathedral Elementary School, she worked to improve communication between school officials and parents; as a career woman in the White House, she became a friendly link between her warring Polish mentors—Zbigniew Brzezinski, her boss at the National Security Council, and Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie, who had given Albright her first job on Capitol Hill. Now, as secretary of state, she has developed an unlikely and remarkable rapport with the conservative chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, whose cooperation, or intransigence, could spell success or failure for foreign policy in the Clinton administration. As she moved from country to country, culture to culture, language to language, war zone to war zone, school to school, marriage to divorce, academia to politics, slowly climbing the political ladder rung by rung, Albright reached out, eager to make friends, generous in sharing her wealth and contacts, all the while remaining enormously ambitious and focused on success.

Many people ask if Albright cooperated with me as I researched her life. The answer is no, and yes. When I began reporting in January 1997, Albright’s friends reacted with enthusiasm. But several weeks later, when the Washington Post published its story about her Jewish roots, Albright issued an edict that she, her family, and her closest staff members would not cooperate with any of those writing books about her. Hoping to change her mind, I wrote Albright, as well as her brother, sister, and two closest staff members. I asked them to reconsider, arguing that those who know her best would be the most likely to paint the most compelling portrait of who she is. For nine months, I received no response.

Yet as I began interviewing Albright’s friends and associates, it was clear that the secretary was monitoring my progress with an interested eye. On several occasions, her press secretary, James P. Jamie Rubin, told me Albright’s staff was reevaluating her decision not to cooperate with biographers, implying that if I wrote favorable stories about her for my employer, Time magazine, they might be more compelled to cooperate. I told Rubin that I had never written a news story for what it would get me or the person in the news, and I would not write a book that way.¹⁴

As time went on, Albright’s team began to soften. When I was putting finishing touches on the manuscript, they provided me with an extraordinary document, an eleven-page, single-spaced letter, penned in longhand by Albright’s mother, Mandula Korbel. The essay offers personal details of the Korbels’ married life, as well as details of their escape from the Nazis. Written in hesitant English, with many phrases crossed out, it is a poignant love letter to her deceased husband, a wife’s attempt to preserve on paper details of a life long since etched into her heart. Because women of this generation leave so few papers, their view of the world often goes unnoticed. Mandula Korbel’s essay makes it clear that the couple struggled harder than they ever let on to deal with the horror of what they left behind. Yet in the eleven pages, it is never suggested that one reason they left Czechoslovakia was because they were Jewish.

In the end, less than a week before the manuscript was due, I had three sessions with Albright, totaling about six hours. The first was on Saturday morning, February 7, at her house. The black Chevy war wagon with four security agents was parked outside. When an agent unlocked the front door to let me in, the secretary of state was on her knees in front of the fireplace, fanning logs until they flamed. A second session the following week took place in her inner sanctum at the State Department.

In each interview, Albright was enormously forthcoming and open about her life, eager to recount stories and determined that I get the facts straight. She was also aggressive, as well as dismissive of individuals who she suspected had said something negative about her. As my mom used to say, she is not breast of chicken. At one point, when I advanced a theory about men and women with which she took umbrage, she implored, Don’t write about yourself or other women. Write about me. When I repeated to her what innumerable aides have said—that if a story is 99 percent positive, she will focus on the other one percent—she looked me in the eyes and said without apology: So eliminate the one percent.

Albright had no opportunity to approve or reject any material used in the book. It contains disclosures she will dislike and judgments with which she will disagree. In the name of accuracy and at her request, I went over with her the facts of what she calls the Jewish business.

Six months after Albright became secretary of state, she visited her native Prague and, for the first time, confronted the raw proof of her family’s Jewish heritage. As she stood outside the Jewish Town Hall, her eyes filled with tears as she explained what it meant to her to see her grandparents’ names among the 77,297 Holocaust victims painted in red and black on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue. Identity is a complex compilation of influences and experiences—past and present, she said. I have always felt that my life has been strengthened and enriched by my heritage and my past. And I have always felt that my life story is also the story of the evil of totalitarianism and the turbulence of twentieth-century Europe.¹⁵

While the statement is a bit grandiose, it is also correct. And Albright has reason to be enormously proud of her personal history. She is part of a generation of immigrants, many of them optimistic, idealistic, and hardworking self-starters like herself, who are changing the face of America as it heads into the twenty-first century.

Hers is also the story of a woman who dared to dream, whose curiosity, ambition, and determination to master the rules of the game and explore new challenges distinguished her from her peers from childhood through middle age. She is an individual with a deep reservoir of intelligence, savoir faire, and common sense; a woman who takes advantage of the seasons of her life, decade by decade.

PART ONE

Madlenka

1 Bohemian Spring

There were so many possibilities in the newly developed Czechoslovakia for talented young people who wanted to be a part of building the real democracy under [the country’s founder, Tomáš G.] Masaryk and [its foreign minister, Eduard] Beneš. Joe wanted very much to be one of them.

—Mandula Korbel, personal essay

BOHEMIA, the ancient seat of kings, is splendid in springtime. Creamy white blossoms of towering chestnut trees stand proud and tall, straight as toy soldiers. Yellow flames of forsythia and lacy bushes of fragrant, violet lilacs line well-worn roadways that wind from village to village through sugar beet and rapeseed fields. Storks making their trip north from central Africa dot the skyline, and ravens begin repairing their twisted nests in church belfries.

By early June, bright red poppies and delicate strands of Queen Anne’s lace fleck the rolling countryside as far as the eye can see. Along the paths that lead through the low mountain range dividing Bohemia from Moravia, purple and yellow irises flutter in the wind like miniature flags raised to celebrate another winter gone by. The network of roads, in place since the thirteenth century, is lined with flowering trees: cherry, pear, walnut, and apricot—all originally planted in the eighteenth century by Austrian empress Maria Theresa. She also ordered a fish pond built in every village square, along with a bell, in case of fire.

On June 7, 1878, Arnošt Körbel, Madeleine Albright’s paternal grandfather, was born in the small country village of Kuncice, outside the town of Kýšperk, now called Letohrad. It is a centuries-old farming community, set in a pass between the Eagle Mountains and the Bohemian-Moravian Uplands, some ninety miles east of Prague.

Arnošt married Olga Ptácková¹ from the nearby town of Kostelec nad Orlicí. The couple had three children: a daughter named Markéta, the oldest; a son, Jan, who followed his father into the building materials business; and Josef, the youngest and most intellectual of the three. Born September 20, 1909, Josef was described on his birth certificate as Jewish and legitimate.² He was also left-handed.³

Josef was nine years old when World War I ended. On October 28, 1918, the Republic of Czechoslovakia grew out of the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and with it came the dreams of a nation for democratic rule. Witnessing the birth of democracy had a momentous effect on young Josef, who would identify himself with the national spirit of Czechoslovakia throughout his life.

The Körbels were prominent and hard-working, one of only about a dozen Jewish families in the town that, at the time, was home to about three thousand inhabitants. The umlaut over the o in their name, which was pronounced KUR-bel, suggests a German origin. Arnošt Körbel owned a neat, three-story row house that stood across the street from the Kýšperk railway station at No. 305 Tyršová.⁴ Built in 1909, the year Josef was born, it was one of only two houses on the street, which was lined with sturdy maples. A sign painted on the front advertised wares sold by the family business: tile, mortar, caulk, and sand. It was written entirely in Czech, which was unusual and showed that the family was fully assimilated into Czechoslovak society. A quarter of the population was German, and most Jewish merchants advertised in both languages.

Arnošt Körbel was a tall, outgoing chap with wide-set eyes, a straight nose, and a dimpled chin. He was a prosperous businessman who provided timber to Jan Reinelt’s match factory, the principal industry in the area. In back of his house, Körbel had a stable where he kept two teams of horses that he used to haul cartloads of wood from the railway station to the factory. Körbel was astute at marketing, and by working together, he and Reinelt sold matches as far away as Prague.⁵ Körbel and Reinelt were close friends as well as business partners. They sat frequently in the early evenings in Reinelt’s dining room, going over their books, which they kept in a long wooden chest. Carefully crafted from local oak, the chest still stands in the same place today.⁶

Vera Ruprechtová, Reinelt’s granddaughter, a chirpy, excitable woman with soft, curly hair and tiny, cornflower-blue eyes, still lives in the family homestead, where Körbel spent many hours discussing business. It is a large, ochre-colored house with high ceilings and long windows covered with bobbin lace curtains that hang from intricately carved wooden valances. The kitchen, heated with a small woodstove, also serves as Vera’s bedroom. In the dining room she keeps a table filled with family pictures, a shrine to days gone by. There is an aging photo of Arnošt, wearing a double-breasted suit and fedora, sitting in a wooden cart parked next to the house.⁷ Outside, an overfed brown bulldog named Dingo, friendly and outgoing like Vera, patrols the fence line, keeping watch over the family property. The house and chest are important to Vera, a touchstone with her family’s history.⁸

Clearly enjoying the momentary fame that comes with having known the Körbels, Vera Ruprechtová holds court in her kitchen, her thoughts tumbling out in no particular order as she lays out plates full of powdery Czech cookies called koláce. As she talks, she peels hot boiled potatoes to serve with stewed chicken legs and big bowls of creamy, sliced cucumbers. As was common in the war years, she insists on sending visitors back to the city with fresh country eggs.

Arnošt Körbel, she says, was like a member of her family. He was a thoughtful employer whose workers were grateful for the more than a hundred jobs he provided in the area.⁹ Religion did not appear to figure strongly in the Körbel family life, she says. Körbel celebrated the Christian holidays with the rest of the community, singing Christmas carols with his workers and accepting the loaves of Christmas bread they gave him as gifts. Vera did not know Körbel was born Jewish and did not think his workers did either. If he were Jewish, they wouldn’t have liked him as much, she says with a crisp conviction that suggests she feels the same way. There was nothing Jewish about him.¹⁰

Arnošt Körbel was insistent that his children get a good education. Josef’s fifth-grade report card for the school year 1919-20 shows that he was a fine student, getting all 1s and 2s in his subjects, on a scale of 5. His best subjects that year were the Czech language, civics, math, religion, and music. He was also a conscientious student. The report card shows that he missed only two days of school. It lists his religion as Jewish.¹¹

There was no secondary school in Letohrad, so at the age of twelve Josef Körbel began attending classes in the nearby town of Kostelec nad Orlicí, a prosperous community where he boarded. A serious student, Körbel was active in the cultural and political life of the school. He belonged to its theater group and, even at his young age, aspired to be a diplomat, newspaperman, or politician.

It was here that he fell in love with Anna Spiegelová, a student in the same school.¹² She came from a comfortable family. Her father, Alfred Spiegel, owned a general store. Her mother, Ružena Spiegelová, had given birth to Anna in 1910, at the age of twenty-three.¹³ They called their daughter by the Czech diminutive, Andula. The daughter of assimilated Jews, Andula was a pretty young woman, about five feet tall with brown hair and green eyes. She was energetic, a bit offbeat, quick to laugh at jokes made by those around her but not one to tell them herself.¹⁴ She was the kind of person who said exactly what she thought. When Josef once called Andula the most talkative woman in eastern Czechoslovakia, she slapped him. Andula was bright. When she was a teenager, her family sent her to study business secretarial skills at a school called Les Hirondelles (The Swallows) in Geneva, Switzerland, where Andula learned to speak French.¹⁵ Les Hirondelles was a family-run finishing school for girls from good families that wanted their daughters to become cultured brides for husbands of great promise. Situated in a residential part of Geneva overlooking the old town, the school encouraged the girls to have an active, but protected social life. Courses included languages, art history, music, world history, and letter writing. Good table manners and proper dress were encouraged. Students came from all of Europe, North and South America, England, and the Colonies. They were expected to get to know the world through friendship.¹⁶

In 1928, when Arnošt Körbel became the director of a building materials company,¹⁷ the family moved to Litice, which was five train stops from Letohrad. Josef, who by that time had completed secondary school, went to Paris for a year, where he studied French and liberal arts at the Sorbonne.¹⁸ On his return to Prague in 1929, Körbel began his training for life as a diplomat, studying international law and economics at the prestigious Charles University, one of the oldest schools in Central Europe. Because he knew that foreign languages would be an important tool for a diplomat, he studied German and French with private tutors during his vacations. He also made a point of spending time in the Sudetenland section of Czechoslovakia, where he could practice speaking German.¹⁹ He completed his doctorate in May 1933, then spent two months working for a law firm in Prague.²⁰ After obligatory military service as a lieutenant in the Czechoslovak army, Körbel worked briefly in another law firm. He also used this time to study English and Russian. On November 22, 1934, Körbel joined the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs.²¹ He was twenty-five years old.

Josef Körbel was a handsome man. He stood five feet nine inches and had thick chestnut hair. His jaw was square, like his father’s, with the same distinctive, dimpled chin. Körbel dressed like a gentleman, usually wearing a suit and dark tie, and he carried himself with his shoulders high. Women found him attractive.

On April 20, 1935, seven years after they met, Körbel married Andula, his high school sweetheart. The ceremony took place in Prague. On their marriage certificate, there was a blank to be filled in for each partner’s religion. Both gave the same answer: bez vyznání, or, roughly translated, without denomination²² or without confession. Josef called his bride Mandula—Má Andula, My Andula—a diminutive she kept throughout her life. She called him Jožka. The late Jan Stránský, a lifelong friend of the Körbels, who lived in Connecticut, called theirs an ideal marriage.²³ Mandula must have agreed. He was certainly a man worth waiting for, she penned more than four decades later, after her husband died. Very often I was wondering what I admired most in his personality. Was it his perseverance, which he probably inherited from his father … or did I love him because of his big heart, gentleness, unselfishness and loyalty to his family which he inherited from his lovely mother?²⁴

After they were married, the Körbels lived in an art nouveau apartment in Prague, where they had lots of friends. Josef was a junior diplomat with the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which kept him working long days at the office. Mandula spent her time keeping house and enjoying the city’s buoyant café society. Josef was the more intellectual of the two, but he appreciated his wife’s intuitive sense of people. She was not just compassionate, she was also street smart, and he depended on her.²⁵

In January 1937, Josef Körbel was assigned to the Czechoslovak embassy in Belgrade as a junior press attaché. It was a relatively minor position, but the exposure to the inner workings of a key embassy was good training for a young, ambitious diplomat. Mandula, who was six months pregnant, went with him. She and Josef began learning Serbian, the predominant language of the Balkans.

Shortly before she was due to give birth, Mandula returned to Prague, where her family could help care for the new baby. On Saturday, May 15, 1937, Marie Jana Körbelová was born in Prague’s Smíchov Hospital, not far from the Bertrámka homestead where, a century and a half before in a valley of vineyards, Mozart completed his famous opera Don Giovanni. It was a warm day, interrupted by an occasional rain shower. In the distance, still audible over the din of a lively quarter of the city, the silver melody of church bells rang on the hour from the towers of St. Václav Church. On their daughter’s birth certificate the Körbels again marked bez vyznání in the space reserved for religion.²⁶ The first child of Mandula and Josef Körbel was named after Mandula’s sister, Marie. Her grandmother called the baby Madla, which soon became Madlenka. Although the world would later know her as Madeleine Korbel Albright, she would be called Madlenka throughout her childhood.

Despite growing restiveness in the neighboring countries of Eastern Europe,²⁷ daily life in Prague was relatively cosmopolitan. The local cinemas featured Laurel and Hardy and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as well as Gary Cooper in Desire and Anna Karenina with Greta Garbo and Fredric March. Newspaper headlines trumpeted the civil war in Spain and political trials in the Soviet Union. On a lighter bent, there was a national contest to choose the first Czechoslovak airline stewardess.²⁸

When Madlenka arrived home from the hospital, her presence created the kind of excitement and attentiveness that usually surrounds the birth of a first child, the biggest addition to our happiness, not only to us, but to both our parents, her mother wrote years later. Madlenka was a good baby,²⁹ a healthy embodiment of all their hopes and dreams for a happy and successful future. Visitors were chosen carefully and asked to keep their stays short so as not to tire the proud new mother.³⁰

One of the first to arrive was Madlenka’s nine-year-old cousin Dagmar, known to the family as Dáša.³¹ She was the daughter of Josef Körbel’s sister, Markéta. Dagmar’s grandmother Olga Körbel brought Dagmar to the apartment. Peering into a bassinet, they saw a tiny baby tightly wrapped in soft white blankets with only her face and hands peeking through. She was like a little doll, the elder cousin said. Not surprisingly, Dagmar was disappointed that she was not permitted to hold the new baby in her arms. We were allowed to have a look and then we had to go next door, she said.³²

Dagmar attended primary school in Strakonice, a town about 80 miles (120 km) south of Prague, where her family lived before the war. For one hour a week she studied religion. I went to the Jewish class, and the local rabbi, whom I loved, had a row with my father, Dagmar said. "I had invited him to