An appreciation: The headline Madeleine Albright never forgot, and the life she lived

Madeleine Albright was eulogized Wednesday by two presidents in a cathedral filled with Washington's officialdom, but she never forgot what it was like to be dismissed simply because she was female.

She raised a particular beef with me more than once. The issue was the headline in Long Island's Newsday when President Bill Clinton appointed her in 1993 to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "Ex-LI Homemaker Takes Center Stage," it read.

As she said to me: Really?

While I was covering the White House for Newsday then, I hadn't written the story, much less the headline. It was a case of searching too hard for the local angle and deciding that the fact she had once reared her family in Nassau County was the most relevant part of her distinguished resume. She relayed the headline with amused exasperation, an example of the way powerful women had too often been viewed and diminished. The fact that the former secretary of state could still recite it word-for-word years later signaled just how it must have once rankled.

It also underscored how her life had spanned dramatic change, and how much she had been part of that change.

"It was a different era," Albright told me the last time I sat down to interview her in 2019. Then she added with a wry smile: "You know, I put up with a lot."

Indeed.

'She turned the tide of history'

"In the 20th and 21st century, freedom had no greater champion than Madeleine Korbel Albright," President Joe Biden said in the opening eulogy at the National Cathedral, calling her "a force of nature." She argued to a series of commanders in chief that the United States was the "indispensable nation," one that had an imperative to pursue an assertive role in the world on behalf of democratic values. "With her goodness and grace, her humanity and her intellect, she turned the tide of history."

In his eulogy, Clinton described his final conversation with Albright, two weeks before she died. She dismissed his inquiry about how she was feeling. "Let's don't waste any time on that," she told him. "The only thing that really matters is what kind of world we're going to leave to our grandchildren."

That was a question, Clinton added, that "is kind of up in the air."

Hillary Clinton had championed Albright to become the first female secretary of state, and Albright had championed Clinton to become the first female president. Albright's promotion worked out, making her for years the highest-ranking woman in American history. She happily turned that distinction over to Nancy Pelosi when she was elected Speaker of the House in 2007.

But Hillary Clinton's failure to win the White House in 2016 was a particular disappointment for Albright, who died without any woman rising to the nation's most powerful position.

"She didn't just help other women," Hillary Clinton declared from the pulpit. "She spent her entire life counseling and cajoling, inspiring and lifting up so many of us who are here today."

Then she referred to one of Albright's favorite sayings, one that had created her a bit of controversy in the 2016 presidential campaign. "So the angels better be wearing their best pins and putting on their dancing shoes" in heaven, Clinton said. "Because if, as Madeleine believed, there is a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women, they haven’t seen anyone like her yet."

Madeleine Albright, in her words: The importance of calling out wrongs

Obituary: Madeleine Albright, groundbreaking secretary of state and feminist icon, dies at 84

Brooches that sent a message

By the time Albright died last month of cancer at the age of 84, she had become a cultural icon. She was known not only for her foreign policy but for her propensity to send pointed messages with her collection of striking brooches and for her TV cameos on “Gilmore Girls” and “Madam Secretary.”

That was a long way from the commencement address at her graduation from Wellesley College in 1959, an entreaty for the all-female class to marry and raise "interesting" children.

After she earned graduate degrees in international affairs from Columbia University, she worked for Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie's failed presidential bid in 1972 and became a legislative aide on the Maine senator's staff. Her former professor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, recruited her to be one of just two women on the National Security Council staff in the Carter White House.

When she went to Muskie to discuss the job offer, he scoffed, "A woman can't do congressional relations." She was "so mad and hurt," she told me years later. And she proved him wrong.

Her experience in world conflict was more than professional. She had a refugee's understanding of the fragility of freedom. Born in Prague, her family fled first the Nazis and then the Communists before landing in the United States.

She was moving into new offices of her consulting firm, the Albright Stonebridge Group, when I sat down with her in 2015. Leaning against the wall, waiting to be hung, were the White House commission naming her secretary of state and the Presidential Medal of Freedom presented by President Barack Obama in 2012.

And the framed, original passenger manifest of the SS America from the voyage that brought her family to the United States in 1948.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Madeleine Albright, eulogized by presidents, changed history's path