RIP Madeleine Albright

Graylight · 2022-03-23T16:32:58-04:00

Politics - RIP Madeleine Albright (Quote) Business Insider (8 replies).

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who fled Czechoslovakia as a child before later becoming America's top diplomat, has died. She was 84.
Albright's family said in a statement that the cause of death was cancer.

"She was surrounded by family and friends. We have lost a loving mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, and friend," her family said in the statement.

As the first female Secretary of State, Albright became the most powerful woman in American history in 1997. It would take another decade for Nancy Pelosi to secure the speaker's gavel and another 15 years before Vice President Kamala Harris' election. Unlike Pelosi and Harris, Albright was not in the presidential line of succession.

Business Insider

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beckyromero · 36-40, FVIP

"In early 2000, I became the first senior U.S. official to meet with Vladimir Putin in his new capacity as acting president of Russia. We in the Clinton administration did not know much about him at the time — just that he had started his career in the K.G.B. I hoped the meeting would help me take the measure of the man and assess what his sudden elevation might mean for U.S.-Russia relations, which had deteriorated amid the war in Chechnya. Sitting across a small table from him in the Kremlin, I was immediately struck by the contrast between Mr. Putin and his bombastic predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.

"Whereas Mr. Yeltsin had cajoled, blustered and flattered, Mr. Putin spoke unemotionally and without notes about his determination to resurrect Russia’s economy and quash Chechen rebels. Flying home, I recorded my impressions. “Putin is small and pale,” I wrote, “so cold as to be almost reptilian.” He claimed to understand why the Berlin Wall had to fall but had not expected the whole Soviet Union to collapse. “Putin is embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness.”"

- Madeleine Albright

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/opinion/putin-ukraine.html

Graylight · 51-55, F

@beckyromero A very thought-provoking account. Thank you for posting.

SomeMichGuy · M

@beckyromero Clearly, Albright had some of the political prescience, in her time, which Churchill had in his.

The Owl was a very astute observer.