Madeline Albright was the first woman to be the United States Secretary of State. She held the position from 1997 to 2001. She was also the country’s representative to the United Nations (1993-97). She died on Wednesday in Washington. She was 84. The cause was cancer, her daughter Anne said.
She was counselor to President Jimmy Carter and a foreign policy adviser to three presidential candidates: former Senator Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota in 1984, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts in 1988, and Mr. Bill Clinton in 1992. She was also the campaign foreign policy adviser to Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run for vice president. She was a professor at Georgetown University. Her last book, Hell and Other Destinations: A 21st-Century Memoir, written with Bill Woodward, was published in 2020.
She grew up as a Catholic but learned late in life about her Jewish heritage. She re-examined her beliefs and decided to remain Catholic. As a child, she studied the catechism, prayed to the Virgin Mary, and even fantasized about becoming a priest (she wrote, “even a Catholic girl can dream”). She obtained a deep sense of morality but in college, her religious beliefs were eroded by lecturers who talked about the Bible as a form of literature, a historical saga.
After the bombing of the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001, she came back to thinking about God, religion, and foreign policy. In 2006, I talked with her about this turn toward religion. Each time we talked, her basic decency and intelligence just radiated out from her.
We started talking about the fact that she had a different bird pin for the cover of each book that she had published. One had an eagle and her book The Mighty and the Almighty. Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs (published in 2006) had a dove.
Secretary Albright liked that I noticed this. She explained that indeed it has some deeper meaning for her.
“The dove is great story because it was actually given to me by Leah Rabin, the wife of the prime minister of Israel. Then, she gave me a necklace with doves.
She said it takes a lot of doves to make peace in the Middle East. She gave me that pin so I think it is pretty perfect for this book.“
I said, “You mentioned to me that since 911, you realized that your earlier views on religion and foreign affairs had been stuck at an earlier time.”
Secretary Albright pointed to 911 as a breakthrough for her to think about religion again.
She said, “This has been an evolution of some kind, and let me just go through it a little bit.
I was raised as a Catholic and married an Episcopalian and found out that I had a Jewish background. So, it has made me think about all that a lot. That has certainly been evolutionary. I have never had any reason to doubt a lot of the things that I grew up with. But it has been such a mixed story that it is hard for me to say which part.
But as somebody who has been a practicing diplomat and as somebody who has studied national security affairs for most of my life, I was basically part of the school of thought of people who felt that the issues that we were dealing with were complicated enough without bringing God and religion into it.
But what I have learned — and 911 was kind of the epicenter of it, is that we either are going to make religion a force for peace, or it will remain a source of conflict.
We were trying to sort out why did 911 happen and clearly there were many questions about what the sources of the problem were. Religion to some extent has been blamed for it. But it became evident to me how little understanding there is of the force that religion really does play in how policy is made.
I had been asked to go speak earlier right after 911 at a church in St Paul, Minnesota. And there I began to think about the themes of religion. [It was House of Hope Church, pastored by Linda C. Loving.]
But the idea really of writing a book about the role of religion in foreign policy came out of the Yale speech.
I thought, I am doing the book from the perspective of a problem solver, somebody who wants to see what common ground there is to deal with the increasingly complex issues that we are involved in. And so, the book is done from the perspective of a kind of challenge to our policymakers to make sure religion can be a force for peace instead of divisiveness.
It made me think of a lot of different aspects of what role religion can play in bringing people together and that it has to be viewed in a positive way.
It basically put me back into re-reading some of the statements made by leaders, President Bush primarily, to see how he and the rest of the leaders saw religion as playing a part in all of it.
And some of it frankly, in terms of what people were saying, was really exacerbating some of the divisions. What is it that our enemies really wanted and were they using religion as a way to motivate people to create more of a gulf?
I went back over my own thoughts.
I then pursued the idea of religion’s role in foreign policymaking at a commencement at Duke. The head of the theology department there, whose name I can never pronounce, Hauerwas, was very critical and said basically that a Christian couldn’t be Secretary of State.
And he was saying that because of the use of force. That made me think through another whole level of it.
I think there was obviously a whole new thought process not only in our country but in other countries, about the role of religion.
I had been involved with a number of attitude surveys that the Pew Center for the People and the Press have put out. They really asked questions on the role of religion in a variety of countries. Their surveys showed that America is as religious a country as any.
I can step back a little bit and see how it jives with American foreign policy issues. So, it is a new look for me.
I do believe that Jesus is the Son of God. But I don’t want to see any belief that I have in religion as one that shows disrespect for another by saying that it is the only way. You need to learn and understand your own faith deeply and learn enough about other faiths to respect them. And so I am respectful of other ways that people view their relation to God.
I don’t believe in complete relativism because that means that there are no basic values. And I don’t believe in total absolutism because then that doesn’t allow enough growth and understanding of other people’s views.
I think the thing that I find, and I really appreciate your questions, going back to the question of the absolute and the relative, I don’t’ have all the answers, I don’t pretend to have all the answers. And I am not saying that everything that I am saying is right! What I am doing is trying to delve beneath the kind of normal subjects that American diplomats have been used to dealing with and try to give a new dimension to it.
