Madeleine Albright, the first female U.S. secretary of state, has died of cancer, her family said Wednesday. She was 84.
Albright remained outspoken through the years. After leaving office, she criticized President George W. Bush for using “the shock of force” rather than alliances to foster diplomacy and said Bush had driven away moderate Arab leaders and created potential for a dangerous rift with European allies.
“It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent,” she told HuffPost Living in 2010. As secretary of state, Albright played a key role in persuading Clinton to go to war against the Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic over his treatment of Kosovar Albanians in 1999. In her U.N. post, she advocated a tough U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the case of Milosevic’s treatment of Bosnia and NATO’s intervention in Kosovo was eventually dubbed “Madeleine’s War.”
Powell, who died last year, recalled in a memoir that Albright’s comments almost made him have an “aneurysm.” As an outspoken Democrat in private life, Albright often joked that she had her “political instincts surgically removed” when she became secretary of state. True to that, she formed an unlikely friendship with arch-conservative North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms to increase funding for the State Department and U.S. diplomacy and oversaw a radical change in Washington’s handling of Cold War-era messaging.