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June 1999 - Volume 31 Issue 6

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: A 20TH Century Odyssey By Michael Dobbs Henry Holt, $27.50

Madeleine Korbel Albright is surely one of the most sympathetic figures ever to occupy the office of U.S. secretary of state. A refugee from Hitler and Stalin--and, in a strange way, from her family's Jewish past--Albright adopted her new homeland with all the zealous patriotism of the converted. Becoming an American was "the big, defining thing in my life," she tells Michael Dobbs in his doggedly reported, insightful new book, Madeleine Albright: A 20th Century Odyssey. Indeed, it is somehow telling that Albright, who arrived in America at age 11, quickly lost her foreign accent and later, as a policy-maker, became a Wilsonian moralist whose hero is WASP wise man Dean Acheson. On the other hand Henry Kissinger, who was just four years older when he immigrated, retained his Bavarian growl and turned into a Realpolitician with a fondness for Metternich.

A loyal wife and doting mother, Albright floundered after her patrician husband, Joe Albright, stunned her in 1982 with the news that he was in love with another woman. Then she recovered and, showing the steeliness of character that Slobodan Milosevic has lately experienced, became a Democratic foreign policy adviser and organizer, raised three daughters, and ambitiously clawed her way to the top of the Washington hierarchy (leaving, in the process, amazingly few tracks). Today Albright has legions of friends in Washington and New York. She is, in person, funny and charmingly self-deprecating. And she is unquestionably a fine, deeply humane person--if a bit thin-skinned about criticism. In one especially vivid account, Dobbs describes Albright's futile attempts, as U.N. ambassador, to get Bill Clinton to intervene in Rwanda. Later, at her Senate confirmation hearing as secretary of state, Albright poignantly talked of her trip to the killing grounds, where she saw hundreds of skeletons--including "one that was only two feet long, about the size of my little grandson." (She was confirmed 99-0). Compared to the phlegmatic Dean Rusk, the dull and retiring Warren Christopher, and the dour John Foster Dulles (whose subordinates used to joke that "white wine should be served at the exact temperature of his blood"), Albright has been a delightful and inspiring public personality.

It is all the more discomfiting, therefore, to have to conclude that what may be shaping up as the biggest U.S. foreign policy mess of the 1990s--and, perhaps, a debacle that will someday rank with the Bay of Pigs--must be laid at Madeleine Albright's door. I refer, of course, to the Clinton administration's virtual war in Kosovo. One of the problems of U.S. foreign policy under Bill Clinton, who has been a domestic president from the start, is that it has been fractionalized. While Albright has done much to rescue state from the funk that Christopher left it in (in the first term even Ron Brown's Commerce Department was taking over its turf), too often U.S. foreign policy seems a discordant orchestra with no conductor. Under an informal division of labor, Albright handles Europe; National Security Advisor Sandy Berger does Asia (including, to his growing regret, China); and Strobe Talbott, the old Russia hand, deals with Moscow. Except for the Treasury Department, that is, which in the wake of financial contagion now runs half of the Russia relationship and virtually all of U.S.-Japan policy (except for the Pentagon's piece, of course). Then there is a skein of specialist ambassadors, like Dennis Ross on the Middle East, who are pretty much left to their own devices. While Berger, an old friend of the president's, seems to have Clinton's ear more than the secretary of state does on many issues, overall the organizational chart looks like a game of Twister.

This makes it hard, on the whole, to judge Albright's performance, except when it comes to the Balkans. There's no question that the United State's Kosovo policy has been largely Albright's baby, at least since Richard Holbrooke's U.N. nomination became bogged down in an endless ethics probe last year. It was Albright who, in a relentless lobbying campaign beginning in January, persuaded Clinton and NATO that it was time to take it to Milosevic, resulting in the hard-line "NATO peacekeepers-or-NATO bombs" ultimatum which led to war. And there's no question that, during the course of the negotiations, she (and everyone else) miscalculated the reactions of both the Kosovars and Milosevic, as well as the pressures the Serbian people would place on him not to let Kosovo go, despite all the warning signs. One can only wonder what must be going through the secretary's mind every day as NATO's antiseptic air war continues while Kosovars are hounded, killed, and raped on the ground. The administration insists that it's not over yet. But make no mistake: Averting a humanitarian catastrophe was the central rationale for being in Kosovo. There was never any other strategic reason to go to bat for Albanian guerrillas. And that catastrophe has already happened. The United States went to war, it appears, on the riskiest of bets: either that Milosevic would allow a province that was crucial to his political survival to be occupied by foreign troops, or that for the first time in history air power alone would prevail. And yet, almost unbelievably, the administration had no contingency plan if these bets didn't pan out; it didn't even put a humanitarian peacekeeping force in place on the borders. NATO, whose expansion Albright has lovingly cultivated, now finds its credibility badly threatened in its 50th anniversary year.

Albright hardly deserves all the blame for these miscalculations. Let's be fair: Dean Acheson had Harry Truman behind him. Albright has Bill Clinton--a man who, endlessly splitting the difference on almost every policy he touches, apparently believes in bloodless war. It is the interaction between the two of them, I believe, that is crucial to understanding the mistakes of the Kosovo conflict. Dobbs, the Washington Post reporter who broke the story on Albright's Jewish origins in 1997, goes into fascinating detail about Albright's family history and her Munich-nurtured world view, which has led her to push for a more activist approach to the use of U.S. power. Since reading the book I have developed a kind of Dick-and-Perry theory about Kosovo. While Clinton and Albright may have intervened in Kosovo with the best of motives, their thinking and styles were so mismatched that together they created a chimera of a policy. If Albright, the woman who famously upbraided Colin Powell in 1993--"What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" she told him--had had her way in the Balkans, intervention would have been early, severe, and swift. That might well have kept Milosevic in check. If, on the other hand, Clinton hadn't been distracted by impeachment and had thrown himself into the Kosovo affair in January--as he did at last October's Wye Mideast talks--he surely would have hatched a Holbrooke-style compromise with Milosevic. Such a patchwork solution, arguably, might have worked to avert the worst of the humanitarian tragedy, even as late as March. (Even the ragged cease-fire of last fall was better than what we seem to be ending up with.) The disastrous disconnect occurred when Clinton tried to conduct a timid, post-Vietnam war to enforce his secretary of state's World War II-engendered hard-line diplomacy. This produced the worst of all policy tools: an ultimatum with few teeth. (Clinton even announced to Milosevic just how few teeth he had in his March 24 speech, when he foreclosed ground troops.) Indeed, given the limits of U.S. interests in the Balkans, it is tempting to conclude that something very like a Munich--a partition--was needed here. Let's face it: Milosevic didn't have the intention or capacity to rampage, Hitler-like, through Europe. All he ever wanted was his rump Yugoslavia, where he employed Hitler-like tactics, but a negotiated settlement might have kept the lid on his ethnic cleansing campaigns. And Albright, because of the personal history that Dobbs documents so well, was probably the least likely person to employ such a negotiating trick.

Unfortunately, most readers of Dobbs' book will have to tease out such conclusions for themselves. It has all the virtues of the classic reporter's book: accurate, detailed reporting, including one phenomenal section in which Dobbs manages to recreate the transports that took Albright's relatives to the camps. But the book also has most of the usual defects of the genre--mainly, a lack of historical context woven into the biography, which did so much to distinguish predecessors like The Wise Men and The Power Broker. Much of the book deals with the issue of how much Albright knew or didn't know about her Jewish lineage--an interesting question, but neither here nor there when it comes to understanding her significance as U.S.'s top diplomat. Indeed, Dobbs devotes just 42 pages of his 466-page book to Albright's time as secretary, and just 19 pages to her four years as U.N. ambassador. One telling anecdote in this back section, which almost seems an afterthought, came in 1993. Shortly after being named U.N. ambassador, Albright gave a major policy speech at Georgetown in which she declared, "We do not win when we bomb our enemies into the ground, because we only create new generations of malcontents." That, it turns out, was very good advice. One would like to know why, when it came to Kosovo, she didn't take it.

Michael Hirsh is diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek.