'Madam Secretary'

When Madeleine Albright was sworn in as secretary of state in 1997, she became the highest-ranking woman in the history of the United States.

Albright, however, was no neophyte to politics, or to Washington. Before becoming secretary of state, she was U.S. representative to the United Nations. And before that, she had worked in the campaigns or offices of Walter Mondale, Geraldine Ferraro, Michael Dukakis and President Jimmy Carter.

Now, she takes us behind-the-scenes of her fascinating career in her just-released memoir, "Madam Secretary."

Albright talked about her new book and key moments in her life, such as immigrating from Czechoslovakia, discovering her family's Jewish roots and dealing with the Monica Lewinsky affair, on The Early Show.

Read an excerpt from "Madam Secretary":

One
Heroes and Villains

I didn't want it to end.

Hoping to freeze time, I thought back to the phone ringing one December morning and the words, "I want you to be my Secretary of State," and to the swearing-in ceremony where my eagle pin came unstuck. I thought of little girls seeking autographs on a triumphant train trip from Washington to the United Nations in New York; of Václav Havel's face, warm and wise, as he placed a red sash on my shoulder and a kiss on my cheek; and of names enshrined on the wall of a synagogue in Prague. I thought of buildings in Kenya and Tanzania reduced to rubble; of coffins draped with the American flag; and of President Clinton in a rumpled shirt, with glasses perched on his nose, pleading the cause of Middle East peace.

I thought of the countless meetings, some in grand palaces in the middle of the night, others in remote villages where nothing grew except the appetites of young children yet people still laughed and lived in hope. I thought of the cheering of crowds, joyous in Kosovo and Central Europe but robotic in North Korea, and of women and girls sharing their fears in a refugee camp a few miles from the Afghanistan border.

The sound of tape being pulled away from giant rolls broke my reverie. We had been so busy, we hadn't started packing until well after dark. Now boxes and bubble wrap were everywhere, sitting amid stacks of books, discarded bags of pretzels, and mementos gathered during a million miles of travel and almost three thousand days of government service. Staff members were scurrying about, preoccupied with sorting, wrapping, sealing, and labeling. Silently I withdrew into the small inner office of the secretary of state, my office for a few hours more, and went instinctively to the window.

It was the view I would miss almost as much as anything else. Circles of light on the National Mall surrounded the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. Between them, obscured by the January night, were the haunting bronze figures commemorating America's engagement in the Korean War, and the silent yet eloquent black marble of the Vietnam wall. Across the Tidal Basin I saw the dome marking our nation's memorial to Thomas Jefferson, America's first Secretary of State, and across the river the more distant glow of the eternal flame at John Kennedy's grave in Arlington National Cemetery. I felt intense gratitude for each day I had been given to build on the tradition of honor and sacrifice celebrated in front of me.

I may not have wished it to end, but the clock was ticking and there was much to do. I went to my desk for the last time, focusing on a piece of stationery I had centered there. "Dear Colin," I wrote. "We have been working hard and hope when you arrive in the office it is clean. It will, however, still be filled with the spirit of our predecessors, all of whom felt representing the United States to be the greatest honor. So I turn over to you the best job in the world. Good luck and best wishes. Madeleine."

Madeleine wasn't my original name. I was born in Prague on May 15, 1937, in a hospital in the city's Smíchov district. In Czech, smíchov means laughter but there was little of that in Czechoslovakia during the year of my birth. It was an ominous time. I was christened Marie Jana, the first child of Josef and Anna Körbel, but I wasn't called that. My grandmother nicknamed me Madla after a character in a popular show, "Madla in the Brick Factory." My mother, with her special way of pronouncing things, modified it to Madlen. Most of the time I was called Madlenka. It took me years to figure out what my actual name was. Not until I was ten, and learning French, did I find the version that pleased me: Madeleine. However, despite all the language and country changes of my youth, I never altered my original name, and my naturalization certificate and marriage license both read "Marie Jana Korbel."

To understand me, you must understand my father. To understand him, you must understand that my parents grew up in what they thought was a golden place. Czechoslovakia was the only functioning democracy in Central Europe during the period between the two world wars and was blessed with a wise leader, peacefully competing political parties, and a sound economy.

The new democratic republic had been born at the end of World War I, when my father was nine years old and the entire map of Europe was reshaped. Germany and its allies had been defeated. Among those allies was the Austro-Hungarian empire, which had dominated Central Europe for three centuries and was now dismantled. Fifty-one million people of diverse nationalities suddenly found themselves in new or rearranged countries in accordance with President Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination.

From its beginning the new country of Czechoslovakia was linked to the United States. Its creation was actually announced in Pittsburgh in 1918. Its president and the author of its Declaration of Independence was Tomáŝ Garrigue Masaryk, an intellectual born of a Slovak coachman and a Moravian mother, who enthusiastically embraced the principles upon which America's political system was based. Masaryk had also married an American, Charlotte Garrigue, and taken the unusually progressive step of adopting her maiden name as his middle name.

The birth of any country presents challenges. In Czechoslovakia there were many economic and social problems, including sensitivities between the more industrially advanced Czechs and the predominantly agrarian Slovaks. There were also tensions that would steadily worsen involving the ethnic German minority in what was known as the Sudetenland, a region that curls along Czechoslovakia's lengthy border with Germany. But Masaryk was not an ordinary president.

He was a leader of strong humanist and religious convictions, and under his guidance Czechoslovakia truly did become a golden place, with a free press, quality public education, and a flourishing intellectual life. Although Masaryk died when I was four months old, in every other sense I grew up with him. My family spoke about him often, and my father was deeply influenced by Masaryk's profound faith in democracy, his belief that small countries were entitled to the same rights as larger ones, and his respect and affection for the United States.

My father's recollections of the 1920s and early 1930s show the pride and exuberance he felt. "As other European countries went through political and social upheavals, unstable finances, and one by one succumbed to fascism," he was to write, "Czechoslovakia was a fortress of peace, democracy, and progress. We university students gulped the elixir of liberty. We read avidly national and foreign literature and newspapers, we attended every opening night in the National Theatre and National Opera; we wouldn't miss a single concert of the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra."

Prague had been a cultural mecca for centuries, and for young intellectuals like my parents it was an irresistible magnet. My father, growing up in the small town of Kyšperk, had dreamed of moving to the great city, of going to the places where Mozart had performed and sitting in cafés where Franz Kafka had conceived his ideas. He wanted to be avant-garde — to read Karel Čapek's utopian fiction and buy paintings by Čapek's brother, Josef.

There was not even a high school in Kyšperk, so at the age of twelve my father had to go to school in the larger Kostelecnad Orlicí nearby. He was a hardworking student, and always active in political and cultural life. He knew at an early age that he wanted to be a diplomat, newspaperman, or politician and planned accordingly. What he had not planned for was falling in love.

They met in high school. My mother was a little younger and quite pretty. She was petite, with short brown hair worn flapper style, and dimpled cheeks. My father had a strong, serious face and wavy hair; my mother used to say he got more handsome as he grew older. According to my father, when they met he introduced himself by saying that she was the most talkative girl in Bohemia, so she slapped him. Her name was Anna, a nickname for which was Andula, but from the time she was in high school she was known as Mandula, a contraction of my father's name for her, Ma (My) Andula. She called him Jožka. Her parents, apparently not thrilled with the relationship, sent her away to a finishing school in Geneva. If this was a move to break them up, it almost worked. My mother wrote much later in a short essay on a yellow pad that I found at the time of her death," Jožka was certainly a man worthwhile waiting for for seven years, before he was ready to get married." She then added— and crossed out—"but I was not always so passioned. Couple times I was thinking of leaving this." (Even after more than four decades in England and America, my mother's English was heavily accented and she had her own version of grammar and idiom.)

She continued, "Very often I was wondering what was I admiring most in his personality. Was it his perseverance which he probably inherited from his father, who from a little shopkeeper became a shareholder and director of a big building company, or did I loved him because of his good heart, gentleness, unselfishness and loyalty to his family, which he inherited from his lovely mother?" Whatever it was, she never stopped adoring him.

My father completed his education as rapidly as possible, studying German and French with tutors during school vacations, then spending a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, perfecting his French and getting a sense of the world beyond Czechoslovakia. At the age of twenty-three, he received a doctorate of law from Charles University in Prague, the oldest in Central Europe. Following fourteen months of obligatory military service, he was accepted by the Foreign Office and, in my mother's account, "after few months when he had to work without pay we could get married."

The wedding took place on April 20, 1935. My mother, as was typical of the women of that era, did not have the university degrees my father had. However, she shared his cultural interests and was delighted to join in any adventure that led her out of the countryside and into Prague. They moved into an art deco apartment done up in black and white, and were soon part of the city's café society. The following year my father was appointed press attaché to the Czechoslovak legation in Yugoslavia, and my parents were on the move again, this time to Belgrade. Yugoslavia was still a kingdom, and the fact that my father was an ardent democrat prompted him to befriend leaders of the democratic opposition, with whom he met frequently but discreetly.

"Maybe because we were young and happy," my mother wrote of the time in Belgrade, "we have sometimes ignored the dark clouds which were forming on the political sky around us. We all were aware of it, but were hoping that somehow it will pass without catastrophe." The young couple was optimistic enough to start a family—which brought me into the picture—but "catastrophe" was not far off. "The time of our personnel happiness was far too short," recalled my mother. "Hitler was too strong and too aggressive and the Western Democracies at that time too weak and so the little Democratic Republic of Czechoslovakia was the first to suffer, and with it the millions of innocent people."

The foregoing is an excerpt from "Madam Secretary," by Madeleine Albright. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from Miramax.