A Conversation with Madeleine Albright

good evening I'm Tom Putnam director of the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and on behalf of Tomic knot executive director of the Kennedy Library Foundation and all my library and foundation colleagues I thank you for coming and acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library forums lead sponsor Bank of America Raytheon Boston Capital the Lowell Institute the Boston foundation and our media partners the Boston Globe and WBUR let me begin Madam Secretary by welcoming you back to the Kennedy Library we are always honored by your presence I should note to the audience and on her first day as a former Secretary of State only hours having left the State Department for the last time in her official role Madeleine Albright traveled to Boston to pay a personal visit to a dear friend yet at our invitation she also chose to make her first out of office appearance and an impromptu press conference here at this institution which honors the memory of John F Kennedy one of our country's favorite sons as part of her brief remarks at afternoon she noted that JFK's internationalist views and vigorous foreign policy were similar to her own our problems are man-made JFK stated in his famous speech at American University therefore they may be solved by man the sentiment that helps capture in part Madeleine Albright's determined spirit the one census she might have found a more gender neutral manner to convey the thought welcome to our fraternity Henry Kissinger remarked to her when she became Secretary of State Henry she replied it's not a fraternity anymore Madeleine Albright served as our 64 Secretary of State the first female to hold that post and at that time the highest-ranking woman in our country's history and recognition of her achievements President Obama recently announced that he will soon bestow upon her the Medal of Freedom our nation's highest civilian honor to reach such Heights she traveled quite a path beginning as a young girl fleeing from along with her parents her native home of Czechoslovakia the story that is told in her fascinating new book Prague winter a personal story of remembrance and war which is on sale in our museum store this captivating memoir which is receiving rave reviews provides a fresh lens through which to view the unfolding of world war 2 while also describing her own family's gripping escape to England survival during the Blitz and the loss of relatives who were left behind at war's end when her family moved to the United States she once stated because of my background I grew up interested in foreign policy and each time I moved to a new school I had always start an international relations Club and make myself president but despite all that I never ever dreamt I could be Secretary of State and it was not because I was particularly modest but that I had never seen a Secretary of State and a skirt after her graduation from college and then marriage she launched her career as an aspiring journalist having turned down her first job offer to work as a come on girl at a tattoo parlor soon she was raising three daughters while studying for her doctorate it took 13 years to finish that degree resulting in her children asking why they had to do their homework where clearly their mother was ignoring hers first as a foreign policy advisor to Senator Ed muskie and later as a member of President Carter's National Security Council staff she began her trailblazing career as a diplomat which would lead among others to efforts to end the war in Bosnia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and an a valiant Albia unsuccessful effort to bring peace to the Middle East after which she commented as only she could quote if women leaders had acted the way Yasser Arafat and a hood Barak did during those negotiations at Camp David they would have been dismissed as menopausal our moderator this evening who I would wager has never been described as menopausal his Nicholas burns currently a professor of diplomacy at the Harvard Kennedy School professor burns served in the United States Foreign Service for 27 years during which times he served as the Undersecretary of State for political affairs US ambassador to NATO and to Greece and State Department spokesman serving under secretary Albright but perhaps most importantly at a pivotal moment in world history he was the highest ranking US official who was also a member of the once long-suffering minority the fans of Red Sox Nation the year the curse was finally reversed to close my introductions I often look for the right quote from President Kennedy and in this instance there are many to choose from but it seems more appropriate in relation to this powerful new memoir to quote the czechoslovak patriarch Thomas mushrik love of one's neighbor of the nation and of humanity imposes upon everyone the obligation to defend oneself and resist evil constantly at all times and in all things mushrik was one of Madeleine Albright's father's heroes and we can only imagine how proud Joseph and Anna Korbel would have been had they lived to see their daughter be jeweled and be skirted become Secretary of State and lead the world and resisting evil and our troubled times and yet perhaps we can imagine it for his Americans we all take pride in her accomplishments and dedication to defending those rights we hold dear and so claim her as our own and as one of this nation's most favorite daughters please join me in welcoming Madeleine Albright Tom that was a beautiful brilliant introduction thank you very much for it ladies and gentlemen good evening I'm Nick burns friend and admirer of Madeline Albright and I'm really honored to be here I had the chance as a diplomat to work for secretary Albright for the first eight months of her time as Secretary of State as her spokesperson in those days we still called this job spokesman but we've quickly changed it and then as her ambassador to Greece and I just wanted to say about secretary Albright in my career I saw lots of public service no one finer than Madeleine Albright in expressing our American values her life our commitment to democracy and her life which is a commitment to human freedom as well and she tells this story in this beautiful new book Prague winter is exemplary and I think she's one of the finest public servants we've ever had in this country and so the honor of the Medal of Freedom the highest award the president of the United States can give is merited - congratulations Madeleine thank you very much we thought we do we talk here for a little bit I'll ask secretary Albright questions about the book about her upbringing about her family's flight to the United States and life here but first the most difficult question tell us about your PIN well first of all I'm really delighted to be here again I love coming here and Tom thank you that was a fabulous introduction and I'm very grateful to you and to everybody at the Kennedy Library and delighted to be here and I just did a little video about what President Kennedy meant and he definitely was the inspiration for people my age and continues to be so so thank you well the pin this is a head of the Statue of Liberty and it fits the theme because when we came to the United States in November November 11th 1948 from Czechoslovakia we sailed by the Statue of Liberty and it was truly an arrival that was so important because it changed my entire life and the life of my family and when people say what is the most important thing that ever happened to you I said becoming an American hands down there is no question about that so this is the symbol of coming to America it's a great story and secretary Albright has actually written a book called read my pins because as Secretary of State and ambassador of the United Nations she wore pins depending upon the world situation and whom she was going to meet that day so when you met with the Iraqis well it all started actually with the Iraqis what what happened was I became ambassador to the United Nations right after the Gulf War and bar you were there you know my instructions were to make sure that the sanctions regime stayed on in Iraq and my instructions were to say perfectly terrible things about Saddam Hussein constantly which he deserved he did invaded Kuwait and so after a while a poem appeared in the papers in Baghdad comparing me to many things but among them an unparalleled serpent and I happen to have a snake pin so I wore it when we were dealing with Iraq and after a while you know how the pictures of ambassadors they leave the Security Council meeting and go and meet the press and all of us in the camera zeroed in and said you know why are you wearing that snake pen and I said because I was compared to an unparalleled serpent and I thought well this is fun so I went out and I bought a bunch of costume jewelry to reflect what we were going to do on any given day so on good days I wore flowers and butterflies and balloons and on bad days I wore various kinds of bugs and carnivorous creatures and you were there one of the times that I did this was the Russians have actually bugged the State Department and we found the person sitting outside listening and so the next time I met with the Russians I was huge bug fully understood we're gonna talk a little bit about the book Prague winter any chronicles the experience of the Czech people and Czechoslovakia from 1937 to 1948 and of the Korbel family and you you weave history and personal remembrance recalling your father's letters and what he was writing as a Czech diplomat at the time what an extraordinary first part of your life your country was carved up at Munich by the Nazis with the acquiescence of Britain and France your country was invaded and taken over and dismembered and wiped off the map by Adolf Hitler who visited as part of what he felt was his crowning achievement you had to flee to London with your family during the Blitz you were under Nazi bombs during the Battle of Britain then your country was liberated and you had these brief years where Czech freedom and democracy had returned only to see Stalin appear on stage and snuff out those dreams and this is the first 10 to 11 years of your life that had to inform your whole life story and your career as a public servant what was the major impact that you feel from those years well it's very hard to kind of unpack to figure out what really influenced you but the the I think as I analyze it it that democracy is very fragile and freedom is very fragile but what it taught me was which is the real message of the book which is despite terrible stories that human beings are very resilient and are able to rise up and make a difference and that is definitely the story of my parents my father was a Czechoslovak diplomat he had his first diplomatic assignment was as press attache to Belgrade then he was recalled and the Nazis marched in and he was able to escape my mother wrote about how it said probably with a little bribing and the nurses are going to arrest him they were going to he was on a list and as were most Czech diplomats that were members of the Benesch group and so they reassembled in various places but the real government-in-exile with the fort with president Benesch went to london and so my parents made their way there and got there in the late summer of 1939 and he then became a part of the what was known as the government in exile and broadcast over BBC into Czechoslovakia all through the war the thing that I really learned I think is the importance of standing up for what you believe in from my parents understanding that being patriotic is a very important characteristic as a positive feature but not if it curdles into hatred of some other group and understanding that major powers have role in defending small countries not giving them up the other thing I was thinking about is we were talking about this I learned to adjust very quickly I mean I was by the time I was 11 I I was bilingual I grew up speaking Czech and learned English and was sent to Switzerland to learn French and we my father after the war was the Czechoslovakia ambassador to Yugoslavia so I also learned serbo-croatian what I didn't speak when I got here was American and and I learned and I think this is one of the things I learned since we were riding November 11th Thanksgiving was very soon and I remember we were all singing we gathered together too and I was asking somebody was asking for God's blessing and I thought who's asking and from then on I asked and so the bottom line is is that I think all the moving around and everything made me very adjustable and makes it very easy for me to make friends but I think the main kind of philosophical thing that I learned is that one has to stand up to evil right and the watershed event of the 1930s and Hitler's rise to power and European dominance was Munich and Munich was all about Hitler meeting with the British and French and without a single check in the room deciding the Czechoslovakia first the sedate and land would be taken away and then the entire country would be dismembered as a diplomatic we all learned about Munich as students there what fundamental lessons did did you take for Munich that applied later to your tenure as Secretary of State well the thing that I think is interesting is I really I always studied Munich and for writing this book I even went much deeper into it all and there are many aspects to it that I think are applicable in some form or another to what is going on first of all I hadn't focused on what a scarring activity World War one was on the British and the French particularly what is interesting it also was the war that created Czechoslovakia there had been no Czechoslovakia before World War one it was part of the austro-hungarian Empire and as a result of Woodrow Wilson's of fourteen points Czechoslovakia was formed and it was a country that was deeply tied to the United States first of all Thomas Gehrig maverick was a very interesting man as the first president he married an American her name was Charlotte Gehrig he took her maiden name as his middle name when they got married the last quarter of the 19th century I mean pretty feminist right I quite amazing the Czechoslovak Constitution is modeled on the American one with an exception it has equal rights language in 1918 and there were lots of ties between Czechoslovakia and the United States and yet for a number of different reasons the United States did not come forward and participate in the Munich Agreement at all and the British and French scarred by World War one basically that's the most famous usage of appeasement they fed the Beast and they in fact did give up portions but there's another lesson in Czechoslovakia was a country that was composed of two major groups the Czechs and the Slovaks but there also is a very large German minority and the German minority did live in what was called su Dayton Germany and while not everybody was anti Czech there was a group there that kind of fostered dislike of the government in Prague and was used by Hitler as kind of a fifth column so there are many lessons of that but the thing that I found was there is always the Munich analogy and I think that it was very clear when well you and I were working for instance on Bosnia life is very peculiar the fact that my father was ambassador to Yugoslavia meant that I understood what yoga slavi is it was falling apart meant and I could understand serbo-croatian so when we all had meetings and and I understood what was going on there in terms of minorities living within larger countries that were dominated by a central government and also I think generally that major powers had some responsibility towards the others this is a gross simplification but some of the other people making decisions at the time had what we called the Vietnam syndrome which was basically not to get involved and that you got stuck in the quagmire we all you know always the quagmire and so there was the argument kind of between those with the Munich Syndrome and those with the Vietnam syndrome one of the ironies of this discussion is that a young 21 year old son of the American ambassador to Britain visited Prague just after the Nazi takeover and he wrote a book called why why England while England slept and that is John F Kennedy his first book and was about appeasement it was about not standing up to dictators do you think looking back and you deal with this in the book if Chamberlain the UK prime minister and a la da the French Prime Minister had stood up to Hitler they had stronger military's combined than the Hitler did in 1938 could they have prevented the dismemberment dismemberment of your country well I believe so I think that what had happened was that there had already been a little bit in the feeding of the beast with giving up the Saarland which is something the part between france and germany and there had been Hitler had risen and people did not even though he'd written mine Kumpf they had not focused on what his overall plan was but I think if there have been one of the things Nick that as diplomats we had all talked about is deterrence and if you really stand up whether you can deter you didn't get the feeling that that was going on I hesitate to say this in this particular place but individuals do make a difference and ambassador Kennedy was a problem ambassador Joe Kennedy who was reporting on some of the things that we're coming out of England was not was not advocating that the United States get involved at all when he was replaced by ambassador Winant the situation changed a bit individuals make a difference and if Churchill had been in office he's except for Chamberlain I think this probably would not have happened the other part that there's a lesson that comes out of this is that leaders cannot engage in wishful thinking chamberlain thought that hitler would change roosevelt thought that stalin would change and so decisions have to be fact-based not on wishful thinking right you recall in the book the czech motto and you'll correct my check probably to vitae beat Asia New Jersey beach AZ thank you truth shall prevail so your country was finished by Hitler and Stalin victims of both you came to this country as a Czech born citizen of this country did you always believe that truth would prevail that some day your country would be liberated as it was in the Velvet Revolution I I did you know there were lots of kind of myths and fairy tales and stories that my parents read to me at the time and they were always the stories that you know if things really got bad Good King Wenceslas st. Wenceslas would come back and find the sword that's buried in the middle of Charles Bridge and save everybody and we kept saying like when how bad did they have to get but the bottom line is I think there was the sense that in fact ultimately truth would prevail truth did prevail with Vaslav Havel and that was his motto truth always and and it's very interesting I've obviously he's one of the major fascinating things and unexpected in my life was that I became we became very good friends and so I was rereading power of the powerless and he basically was talking about the importance of not living a lie truth was the most important part and so it's very much a basis of the kind of thing that I grew up with you saw in your earliest years maybe maybe your earliest memories where the was the blit the Blitz and the Battle of Britain your family stayed there for a number of years before you went back to to Czechoslovakia for that brief period and you recall and talking about this the title of the Czech national anthem where is my home you must have been asking yourself that question asking your pair that question is you went from one place to another but never back home the truth is that my parents did something amazing which was to make the abnormal seem normal so I always felt that my home was wherever they were but I know that for them whereas my home was one of the major aspects of their lives and they were of a very interesting generation just to go back again here this country had begun in 1918 my parents my father was born in 1909 my mother in 1910 and so they came of age as this new country was being put together and it was the only functioning democracy in Central Europe at the time and they were and and as Tom said Thomas Masaryk was really the hero he would I don't know how many of you I have pictures of him in the book he looks the role of being the president of the country but also people said he looked as though he could be President of the world I mean he were very dignified person and a humanist and somebody who had believed in the formation of this country and people like my parents were czechoslovaks it was part of their DNA to really be new patriots of this magical country and to really do everything they could to make sure that democracy worked and prospered and so for them it really was a golden place and I think they never wanted to see some of the things that had been going on the my father died in 1977 when obviously not much was happening my mother unfortunately died about three weeks before the Velvet Revolution so that was sharp so they never obviously went back and and in many ways they wanted to make a new life in America and they there was speculation you know people would come to my father he was very he was much younger than most of the emigres so he was a he was Czechoslovakia's youngest ambassador when he became ambassador to Yugoslavia and when he came to the u.s. he didn't really get very involved in kind of diaspora politics but basically people said to him well you certainly would have been foreign minister if things were normal and he said it never was normal and I never do what ifs and being a professor in a free country is the best job I ever had right Madeleine the first part of your book chronicles the loss of your country to Hitler but then we've talked the loss of your country to Stalin in 1946 47 48 if Britain in France were culpable in the loss of your country to Hitler what could the United States have done differently President Truman secretary Atchison to have saved Czechoslovakia the democratic country after World War two well what I think is interesting is to link these two things what did happen here this country was very specifically pro-american as I described before it also was not anti Russian maybe because it didn't have a border with Russia but but basically of the Slavic countries it was my Surak was distrustful of Lenin but it did not have kind of the Polish anti-russian aspect what did happen and this is one of the things that goes to show how complicated history is the Czechs czechoslovaks were counting on an alliance with France which had been signed in 1935 that actually said that if there was an aggression that France would come to their defense and the Russians made an alliance with the Czechs saying that if the French came to save them they would also come in so what happens is that they the French and the British do nothing in order to stop the Nazi advance and the Russians say well we would have come in if they had and they kind of worked off that propaganda for a very long time saying you were let down by the West there was a hiatus which is a little complicated for them which was the molotov-ribbentrop pact they Nazi the German Russian and german-soviet Alliance for two years on 39 screwed up their history a bit but but the bottom line is once that was over and Russia was invaded all of a sudden there was really a sense that the West had and Bennish had this issue the West had let them them down and the Russians had been willing to defend them so during the war when we were all allies the deal was made in terms of the dividing line of what the so what the Red Army would liberate and what happened was that the American army came within 45 miles of Prague they were in Czech resistance army Patton's army they were in posing they have gotten very far when the decision was made not to proceed and Czechoslovakia was liberated by the Red Army now there are many aspects to this a lot of people blame Patton or they blame Eisenhower the sad part is the instructions have been made earlier and were made in Washington and I think some of this has to do with the wishful thinking and there was a sense that I don't think they saw the threat of the Soviet Union in exactly the same way but the threat in my life is that when America is not present which it wasn't in Munich terrible things happen when America came into the war it reversed in new we won and when the Americans made a deal that actually seated a part of the world to quote the enemy it destroyed another country again and so I do think that it was a very complex time in terms of how we dealt with the Soviet Union and it's one of those other what-ifs right another aspect of this book which is extraordinarily powerful and very personal is the fact that when you became Secretary of State in December 96 January 1997 you were informed in a series of letters than a series of articles by our mutual friend Michael Dobbs that members of your family had perished in the Holocaust and that your grandparents three of them had perished and that you had a Jewish background which you had been unaware tell us that story it's a remarkable story well I was raised a Roman Catholic and became an Episcopalian when I got married and I think kind of I've talked about this a little bit in terms of my parents coming to America and putting everything behind them they wanted to start a new life and this is the issue of where is your home in many ways you know you were a very small nuclear family my two siblings and I my parents and we my father when he finished his last post which was as the Czechoslovak representative to the UN to deal with Kashmir just to go how long that problem is he's dead I'm old and the issue is as bad as it ever has been the bottom line is he came to the United States and defected and asked for political asylum and then at that stage I now understand how this works the Rockefeller Foundation found him a job at the University of Denver we had no idea where Denver was the map didn't look to map and started driving and my mother said I thought they called it the Mile High City how come we're not going up maybe we're going the wrong direction but anyway I they wanted a new American life and I'm more than anything wanted just to be an average American teenager I lost my British accent and and tried very hard my father wanted to fit in Colorado which meant fishing but he fished in a coat and tie so it was so but the bottom line is is that they so that was my background and what happened was when I became a public figure as ambassador to the UN I all of a sudden started getting letters from people some of them just asking for money or visas and some check from the Czech Republic and then people mmm saying that they had known my family but they had none of them ever had the facts right I mean you had somebody who'd say I was very glad to go to high school with your father in nineteen fifteen which would have been impossible or the names and dates and everything but what happened in like November 96 all of a sudden I got a letter from somebody that had everything right all the dates and the names and said we know that you they were both very fine Jewish families so this was exactly at the time that I was being vetted for Secretary of State and I was in the White House counsel's office and they asked all the normal questions about taxes and nannies and all kinds of things and then they finally said is there something that you think we should have asked you about yourself that we might have not known and I said well you know I've just gotten this information that I might be of Jewish background and they said so what the president is not anti-semitic and so over the holidays I talked to my children about it and they thought it was very you know interesting and in many ways complemented already what they knew of a very complex story and my youngest daughters married to a Jewish man and so it was was a fascinating addition to the story then Michael Dobbs what happened as you know Washington Post Washington Post you can't talk to the press between the time that you're named and the time that you're confirmed and he wanted to do a profile of me and so we gave him names of people you probably were the person that you know we kind of transmitted names and the day I was confirmed he came to my office and started handing me documents and said do you realize that this person died in the concentration camp these are the cards that they had describing what transport they were on I just kind of I was just stunned it's one thing to find out you're Jewish which is fascinating and complex but to find out that people that were related to you or died in the concentration camps and the only way I can describe it is that it's as though I was asked to represent my country in a marathon and just as I'm about to leave somebody gave me a very heavy package and told me to unwrap it as I ran and what happened is we're talking about having been the first woman Secretary of State my youngest granddaughter now says so two years ago when she turned seven she said so what's the big deal about grandma Maddie being Secretary of State only girls our Secretary of State but at the time people didn't think it was possible so I had to prove I could be Secretary of State and deal with all this so I asked my brother and sister to go to check to the Czech Republic and begin to look into all this and that's how we began the to find more things out and then I couldn't go until you and I went we went in Prague in 97 and it was NATO related and we and I had the opportunity to go to the pinkest synagogue and see my grandparents names and and so I wanted to go back to the story and really put it together more one of the things that really leaps out left out of me in this book is your remarkable parents and you were so fortunate in in your parents you say in the preface of the book that you're able to go back in recent years and look at your father's letters and your mother's letters did you learn anything about them that you hadn't known before because in reading their their personal testimony of all these years well first of all I mean it's interesting that one can learn more about one's parents but I certainly did my mother who developed her own English and she had such wonderful expressions we still can quote them she somebody was trying to sell her a very long term magazine subscription and she was heard to say on the phone I don't want that because I will be long in the underground or we had to change the price of the house they were selling from 33,000 because she'd say 73 to 29,000 so the she wrote a very interesting kind of story about my father which I we found just on yellow paper and with her grammatical mistakes but very pointed in terms of explaining why they had left and why what it was like to be married to him and my father and this really surprised me I in a box in the in my garage I knew that he had been writing a novel and which was very strange because he was a a diplomat and a historian and a had written many many books but all nonfiction and I looked at this and it is one of the saddest things I think I've read it it describes the story of a young diplomat who goes back to Czechoslovakia to look for his family and he doesn't find anyone and what happens in it he meets somebody tries to he was looking for his family and he finds this man and asks some questions and the man doesn't answer him and he realizes that the man is deaf and mute and that then and so I think that God what I got out of that is that he knew that there were no words to ever describe what had happened which to me explains why I was never told any of this right there's a fact about your father that a lot of people aren't aware of it when when we interviewed secretary condi rice our mutual friend here about a year ago about her book about her parents she talked about I'd like you to talk about it and the fact is your mentor was your father and condi rice is mentor was your father but this is a truly amazing kind of coincidence of life story as I said my father had gone out to the University of Denver and he was a professor and ultimately became Dean of the Graduate School of International Studies and when he died in 1977 he was a pretty big deal by then and there were lots of tributes and flowers and among them was a ceramic pot in the shape of a piano with leaves and things I said to my mother where did this come from and she said wells from your father's favorite student Condoleezza Rice and so what had happened was her parents were associated with the University of Denver she was a music major hence the piano and she had taken a course in international Asians from my father he had persuaded her to be an international ations major she dead to her masters at Notre Dame and was working on her PhD dissertation with my father when he died so this african-american woman from Alabama music major wrote her PhD on the Czechoslovakia Terry so in 1987 when I was working for my long string of losing Democratic presidential candidates at that time my good friend Michael Dukakis I my job Michael my assignment was to say to find foreign policy advisors I was kind of the chief honcho of that and I called up condi I thought perfect a Soviet expert woman teaching on the west coast and I said condi I'm working for this great governor michael dukakis who is going to be the president United States and would you be an advisor and she said Madeline I don't know how to tell you this but I'm a Republican I said condi how could you be we had the same father we did learn slightly different things from him but I think what is amazing is the fact that this emigres diplomat did train to women's secretaries of state and now the school at the University of Denver is called the Korbel school and our good friend Chris Hill is the Dean of it yes that's a wonderful story um we want to ask all of you to think of some questions I have one more and then we have microphones here please step up to the mics and we'll go through that in a minute but one final question that that merges your personal identity the lessons you learned from your parents with your foreign policy career when I think of you I think of you as the great defender of freedom was Tom's tribute to you which was absolutely correct you stood up more than any other public official the 1990s to say what was happening in Bosnia and Kosovo to the Muslim populations was wrong and we had to fight it and fight it with a military intervention has saved a lot of lives a lot of Muslim lives from the Serb armies where did that come from did it come from the Blitz did it come from what happened to Czechoslovakia that had come from your mother and father but you certainly have it it's what you're most known for and it expresses American values best well I mean you never quite know but I do think that all those things played a role I think the following thing and I so remember what the moments at time what this was before I went to the United Nations what we saw were this was after the Gulf War and this is why what happens is important we had the United States had won the Gulf War and with pride president first president Bush felt about that and what happened all of a sudden Yugoslavia started falling apart and the issues were would we do something about it and your former boss and my good friend Jim Baker was Secretary of State and he basically felt we didn't have anything that we cared about in that area and that the Europeans should take care of it this was happening in Europe Europe wanted to take care of its own problems and that they should do that he said we don't have a dog in that fight he did say that yes and so we came in and at that point I was helping Bill Clinton run for president and he in fact said I am gonna do something about this when I am president well life never quite works out exactly the way you think he came into the office and it was it's the economy stupid and it was gays in the military and colon Powell was chairman the Joint Chiefs and he was and he's a great friend and we talked about this a lot he was the hero of the Western world and we were all in our principals meetings and I would come from New York where I saw more diplomats from different countries than anybody else by the way Michael Dukakis loved the UN and said that he would make me ambassador to the u.s. he deserves the original he does and so I would come back to the principal's meetings and say these are terrible things that are happening we've got to do something about it and it is now well known but I will tell the story again because it is the Vietnam syndrome versus the Munich Syndrome is I would say we have to do something about it and : Powell there I was a mere mortal female civilian arguing with the hero of the Western world and the truth is the Pentagon can brief better than anybody and : Pal is the best briefer of anyone I've ever seen and we'd have these three-dimensional maps and he'd have a red pointer and he would say I can lead you up you know we can do this and we can do it but it will take 500,000 troops and Kostas iliyan dollars and take 30 years and what are you going to say to Sargent slept Jack's mother when he dies as a result of stepping on a landmine and I said what are you saving this military for and he got very mad at me he wrote a book and books are always a problem because they come out it takes a while he left and we did go into Bosnia and we saved a lot of people so all of a sudden I get a call from a reporter and they say so what do you say to what general powell said about you and I said What did he say he said that you practically gave him an aneurysm with your points about using the military and that he had to patiently explain to you that we these weren't toy soldiers so I called him up and I say : patiently and he said yeah I had to explain it to you patiently you understood nothing and so he sent me his book and he said would love admiration etc and he signed it patiently : then I sent him back a note with love admiration etc and I signed it forcibly Madeleine this is the issue and this is how the two things come together what happened was the Chamberlain said why do we care about people in some faraway country with unpronounceable names your country my country and what was happening in the former Yugoslavia it was a faraway place with people with unpronounceable names and I felt that we did have to do something and of what people what I'm proudest of is what we did in Bosnia and what later went our Secretary of State we did in Kosovo and I think and there isn't a day that somebody doesn't come up to me that's Kosovo and says thank you for what you did and there's a whole generation of little girls in Kosovo whose first name is Madeleine we have to ask this question secretary Albright and I were talking just before he came on about Syria and whether we could see links between Munich 1938 appeasement of a dictator Hitler and Syria human freedom is on the line in a faraway country called Syria what how do we think about our obligations as Americans well I think again this is one of those one of the things that comes out of my book at least for me is that these decisions are unbelievably hard they're not all black and white they may seem that way in a particular way and simplifying things but they really are hard and I also despite the things that I've said about da la da and Chamberlain I don't think people in high-level posts sit in their offices trying to make stupid decisions I think they are weighing things from their own perspective so I think the Syrian issue is very very complicated but if somebody's going to compare it to Munich nobody is appeasing Sadat Assad what is going on is that nobody's feeding the beast the way that they were giving pieces of countries away to Hitler so and also the other thing that is evident is that the Alliance structures are working or the United Nations is systematically imposing a set of very tough sanctions I teach at Georgetown and I say this may you as a diplomat you may find this insulting but I say foreign policy is just trying to get some country do what you want that's all it is so what are the tools and so I teach a course called the national security toolbox and what is interesting in Syria were systematically going through that toolbox we tried bilateral diplomacy we're doing multilateral we have very tough economic sanctions I'm disappointed in the and the Russians and the Chinese on this but there is a very strong international approach to this of tightening the pincers around Assad and we have not taken the military option off the table I never believed in taking a military option off the table but I think we're doing the right thing there is no appeasement going on and we are doing what we can in terms of giving non-lethal assistance Turkey we're working very closely with Turkey on a series of issues but it's very tough and one of the other things and again to link things I said that the British and French were very scarred by the First World War I think our country is very tired by Afghanistan which was a war that I believe was necessary to fight but should have ended earlier and Iraq a war where we should not have gone and so the bottom line is as we are tired we want to give you an opportunity we have about 35 minutes there are two microphones here but I thought only right to ask if governor Dukakis wanted to ask the first question or say a word about Madeleine not to put you on the spot no Syria no yeah I once yeah my first political campaign was to work for his victory in 1974 as governor so thank you for I do have to say hi first met governor Dukakis when he was chairman of the platform committee at the Democratic convention in Denver in 1976 the best governor in America and I was really honored to work for you Michael and kitty amazing people and I have rarely met such great public servants and citizens and really good friends it's thank you for being here would you mind just bringing that mic to Missa to caucus yeah that would be terrific yeah as it hey doesn't rain yeah thank you I just came back from a three-week trip to a truck to hungry Germany and France where my mother lived and she had a very auspicious beginning she was adopted she was an illegitimate child of an Irish father and a Hungarian Jewish mother but she didn't know that and her nanny was her mother but she was not allowed to know that until she was eight and a half years old and I found out inadvertently when I was 17 years old furious that I didn't know the real truth but I thought about you Madeleine all through this trip because we went back to her school in Germany to the Odebolt school we heard from that school all of the things that she did she went to nursing in Social Work school in Germany and she met my dad in Berlin he was a musician who could not get into the Boston Symphony Orchestra because he only had a New England music education and he needed a foreign education and a wealthy pianist paid for him to go to the Berlin conservatory and so my mother's adopted mother and her benefactor met on a boat going to Berlin and decided to have a dinner party and that's how they met but it was Michael did all of this genealogy we were missing one little section from France and we have people who are willing to work on that and we'll we'll get to the bottom of this at some point but getting those pieces to there has been a very emotional part of the last last two wits and it's been wonderful well that that's I remember when a lot of this was coming out when we were all together and I think we all in many ways have to piece our genealogy together more complicated than any of us ever know and it's good when it's a happy story and it's I I was appalled to find out that 24 members of my family had died in the Holocaust and so I have even more maneuvered to my parents and the fact that they saved me from all of this and so what is my motivation everybody else paid forward and I'm trying to pay back thank you please well I loved hearing about your the seven year old granddaughter with little of course girls can because I have a seven-year-old daughter who says they can and they run for president and what's the big deal my friend Rebecca traced her wrote a wonderful book girls don't cry about when Hillary Clinton was running for president Sarah Palin and and and the perception of women in power and she in the end of that book said maybe America wasn't ready yet to see really powerful women be in charge and right as I was reading her book the texts from Hill's meme started that have you seen the text from hills thing that you know it's her on the plane and yes yeah they're sunglasses and it started by these two young men and who love the fact that she's kind of you know cool and and stuff and so I'm wondering about do you feel like the perception of women in power has changed in part because of you and Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton how do you think it's changed in this country and how do you think the United States having secretary of states that are women has changed the perception of women leaders around the country first of all I think it is interesting that there are countries that have women presidents and we're not one of them and I that it really was a huge issue it's hard to believe it now but it really was a huge issue as to whether Nick you know whether I could whether a woman could be Secretary of State partially people said a woman couldn't because Arab countries would not deal with a woman well it was interesting the Arab ambassadors that the UN got together and said we've had no problems dealing with ambassador Albright we would have no problem dealing with secretary Albright and in my first meeting when I went to the Gulf Cooperation Council I did arrive in a large plane that said United States of America on it but the bottom line I had no problems I actually had more problems with the men in our own government and frankly not because they were all male chauvinist pigs but because they I had had such a long career I had done so I was you know the world's perfect staffer I had made so much coffee and Xerox so much I've been a carpool mother I knew their white the husband's wife etc and some of them thought they should be Secretary of State so it was not an easy aspect in it I do think that the perception has changed I do think various aspects have not Conde I was criticized for what I wore and what my hair looked like condi was criticized for wearing boots or whatever Secretary Clinton is working very hard and just because she wore sunglasses was whatever you know I and so that kind of thing goes on I do think that more and more women are in high-level positions and are being respected and I will try to not to be too political here but the bottom line is what's going on now in terms of women's issues and this campaign is something that we have to look at very very carefully this is not just about contraception and right to life this is about what is a woman's place in society and all of us that have worked hard need to understand that it's never a done deal and that we need to make clear that this country and nope any other country cannot operate if more than half of the people the resources are not politically and economically empowered and we can talk about other countries but we need to talk about our own and we have to make sure that women continue to be respected in this country please first I'd like to say I'm very grateful that my great-grandparents came to the United States from Romania and Ukraine long before all those things happened and I have grown up my family has grown up without that scarring and without that tremendously convoluted history but that's one of the things I'm curious about if there was no Czechoslovakia before Woodrow Wilson demanded that it be created when Czechoslovakia finally won its freedom from the Soviet system it fairly rapidly split into two countries was there ever really a Czechoslovakia it's a really good question and again without sounding too much like professor Albright mass Erick was a very interesting character because he was a Czechoslovak his father had been a Slovak his mother was a Moravian which is another part of it which is but is mostly checked and so he was the epitome of it and there was the creation of this country that was Czechoslovakia and then there was a very large German minority as I said and some Hungarians at at the on the southern part so that there were the minority issues but and these are the things you know I was saying that I grew up with this vision of this golden country where everybody loved each other well as I saw later that was not true and the Slovak Sall ways felt as if they were the minority group and were condescended - there were differences between the Czechs and the Slovaks in the following way the Czechs were under the Austrian part of the austro-hungarian Empire and the Slovaks under the Hungarian and were the the bohemian part was much more industrialized than the Slovak part and during the Communist period there were there was the sense that Slovakia was really being taken advantage of in many many different ways in 9 in 1991 I was doing a post-communist Eastern Europe and I was doing focus groups and what was interesting was I was in in Slovakia and we were with a focus group and I we asked the question would you prefer to be number one in ice hockey as Czechoslovakia or number 12 as Slovakia and the answer was number 12 is Slovakia and that was you know these were ordinary people and made it very clear that there was that nationalist feeling what is interesting is that the Czechs and Slovaks now get along better than when they were part of what country thank you very much yes sir thank you for being here and I've seen you each time and hope you come back a lot but my question is the change of pace perhaps I'm 82 but never in my life have I seen the kind of divisive nough sanity in Washington that we see today I think it began with the tea party and I wonder if you could address it to some extent as well as what might be the result of this in a few years I agree with you I think it is very damaging there are a lot of people that are writing a lot about American history and in fact that there were fisticuffs on the floor of the Senate at various times in the 19th century and even early 20th and that people did not get along I come from a different aspect I worked for Senator Ed muskie who was a great senator and who was somebody when I was working for him they had just begun the budget committee process and he made very clear that the only way we could get anything done was if we worked with the Republicans and so he worked with Senator Henry Bellmon of Oklahoma and they developed a very good relationship and developed a new process I learned a lot from him and while you all may find this hard to believe I actually got along with Jesse Helms and there were we disagreed on most fundamental things but we agreed that we need to make the process work and when I first went to see him he said Ms Madeline we're gonna make history together and were it not for him we wouldn't have been able to expand NATO I mean Nick Nick was a part of all of this and and if you look at if there are any tapes of this he and I you know he kept winking at me and I would thank him and and we did manage to get along and it does not work if we do not have those kinds of relationships what has happened is that all of a sudden and we've been talking about appeasement all of a sudden the word compromise has taken on that connotation which is ridiculous democracy is about compromise and I'm chairman of the board of the National Democratic Institute which does a lot of democracy work abroad and we kind of talk about nuts and bolts of democracy and the importance of a loyal opposition which allows for accountability and and choice for voters and so we're somewhere telling people what to do and compromise is important they say yeah like you guys so we are in bad shape I really do believe that and I find it stunning that I just I mean I there's no secret I'm a big d Democrat so I'll just go along here that all of a sudden when the president is talking about getting money for student loans and the Speaker of the House thinks it's interesting to say yeah we'll give him student loans but we'll take it out of the health care that's some staffers sitting somewhere saying yeah this is how we're going to get them today with just a very clever trick and and making it impossible people ask me what is the biggest national security issue it's what's going on in the economy and unless we begin to recognize that we have to work together we are in very deep trouble I don't know what we do I think that I believe very strongly that the president is going to lead a very positive campaign but if you have people that don't believe in government it's very hard to do and I wish that what we could do in this campaign would be to have a grown up discussion about what is the role of government in the 21st century in the most powerful country in the world we're not going to have that discussion unless we all have it because we can't operate without a government is the way that I Madeline's actually I want to ask you a follow-up to that I want to link what you just said to foreign policy we had secretary James Baker at Harvard a month ago we honored him as our great negotiator mm well he had run five presidential campaigns he'd been Secretary of Treasury chief of staff and President Reagan and Secretary of State he must have repeated four or five times in the day he was with us that we've got this horrible problem of governance that there is no longer a center to American politics that we have just split to the polls left and right and he reminded us that President Reagan was very eager to compromise with with Tip O'Neill from Boston Matt from Cambridge Massachusetts and that that tradition of compromise has been lost let me link it to our field if if the president in Congress do not agree on a budget and tax reform deal we're gonna be taking over a sequestration basis over a trillion dollars out of the defense budget which I think will our military and we're not fully funding our diplomacy doesn't American power rest on our eke economy but also our ability to fund a first-class diplomacy in military and are we in jeopardy I think we are absolutely and when the Director of National Intelligence goes up to testify and he's asked what is the biggest threat to the United States he says exactly the loss of our economic power and the necessity of funding it what is very difficult here is to try to explain that it actually takes money in order to be able to get other countries to understand our foreign policy and to work and a lot of it I mean what the defense budget is pretty big and in our budgets and our budget I mean the comparison is like something like six hundred billion to sixty billion and it is pretty tough in terms of doing foreign policy but there is more and more close relationship between the Defense Department and the State Department but funding our government and the way we operate is absolutely essential and it's tough one of the things that I always so crazy is that people think but first of all I would never link the words foreign and assistance together and but I think that if you ask people how much they think we give to foreign assistance a part of our budget people will say 25 percent it's about 1 percent and it is basically a force multiplier once we really put it in but it's tough and I think it does make a difference and also it isn't just the money it's the fact that let me just say this we look really stupid at this moment that we can't get our act together most powerful country and everybody is arguing and I consider I don't think I have to repeat many times how proud I am to be an American and that it really is a great model but we have to act like it's the power of our example and we are not doing that at this moment thank you I agree with you yes sir secretary I'm very very proud to have been in American during the years you've served the way you have and you've done a wonderful job there is one area that I wonder if you could shed some light on this is the the very day that the news stories are the conviction of Charles Taylor as a war criminal by the ICC and I'm wondering how the American diplomacy toward the ICC has evolved first of all let me say that one of the things that he was convicted of was the operation in Sierra Leone and of cutting off people's arms and I I went to Sierra Leone when I was secretary and I will tell the story and I will answer the question is I went to one of these places where people were sitting there according to whether they had lost their legs or their arms they had begun by cutting off people's hands so that they couldn't vote because they needed their finger prints and I picked up a little girl who was like three years old and she had one of her arms have been cut off for no reason whatsoever and she was playing with a truck with a good arm that she had I used to talk about her mom uno is her name and I was telling the story and all of a sudden I was in Washington this woman came up to me and she said you do realize that mamuno has been adopted by an American family and she lives in Washington and so mamuno this girl now who's 14 plays basketball with her one arm and but it's a sign of something that I've got in the book which is the duality of human nature though they're within people the barbarity to cut off people's arms and the goodness of adopting a child and making all the difference in the world to get to your particular question one of the issues has been is how do you assign individual guilt for crimes and again one of the things we learned out of Bosnia was to set up the war crimes tribunal the first time since the Nuremberg trials that there was going to be an international system to make sure that individual guilt was assigned and collective guilt did not exist and so I one of the first votes I took up the UN was to set up the war crimes tribunal there then it not was it was only about the former Yugoslavia and then it was enlarged to deal with Rwanda and then the International Criminal Court came up as a segue to all of it and I very much believed in the International Criminal Court and felt that we needed to participate in it we had very long negotiations on it one part that happened and continues to be an issue is that we are not very happy to have our military that is all over the place tried by an international court and I always thought that was a red herring because the truth about the way that the wrong treaty was set up is that if you have a functioning national system that takes care of crimes you do not have to submit them to the International Criminal Court but it is something that people feel uncomfortable the u.s. being a part of we are now more interested in some of the record that the International Criminal Court is developing and are more supportive of it but that's the negotiating history of it thank you thank you very much yes hi if you saw the Kony 2012 campaign that was put out by Invisible Children um me that went viral and it was it was a big to-do in just a couple days and I was wondering it and it didn't really get the facts right so I was wondering what role do you think social media has in shaping people's views about our foreign policy and it does it have negative you are a positive view well first of all the the story here is the Lord's Resistance Army has been a hideous operation for a very long time and it's a misnomer it has nothing to do with the Lord they believe in I mean they say they believe in the 10 commandments but don't understand any of them and the bottom line is that they have been a hideous group that has trained child soldiers and but it was interesting in terms of the way it went viral and this has something to do with part of just to bring it back to the story one can say that people did not know what was happening to the Jews during World War two and that the information wasn't there I think I would not be one of the people to say it but there are those that can say that we now have information about everything that's going on everywhere and the question is what do we do about it and so one of the things that I for a long time have been involved in it's all evolutionary when the peacekeeping operations began it was a way to deal with some of the things that we began to know were going on in the former Yugoslavia issues of the court and all kinds of aspects and then the Canadians who I think are really very good international citizens came up with a next step of that which was that if there were peacekeeping operations there also had to be something called human security to protect the people that this was not just about conquering territory and that then evolved into another concept called responsibility to protect if you know I mean to go back to the issue is that it is the responsibility of a leader of a country to protect his people and his territory if the leader does not do that then who who does it and so this doctrine came up about responsibility to protect r2p and so the international community then has to do something about it if we know something about it and what was happening in Libya was done under the auspices of responsibility to protect and in all of this social media plays a huge role because all of a sudden the information is out there and so it changes the whole idea about what we do to try to prevent and do something about it Madeline your book is all about what happens when good people are silent and don't intervene to oppose evil at the beginning of your life Hitler and Stalin we have the Arab uprisings over the last year and a half and and the US has intervened we intervene politically in Egypt we intervene militarily in Libya but we've not intervened in Bahrain where Shia have been shot and we've not intervened in Syria so these are extraordinarily difficult decisions we can't intervene everywhere how do you as secretary of state advise a president when do we intervene when do we not well I think again and this is the hard part and I always hesitate to say this is that foreign policy is not consistent values are consistent and I we know what we wish we could do but you do have to look at every situation individually and try to figure out what the answer is how you balance the this always sounds very clinical but the costs and benefits of it what I call the due ability doctrine if you can actually make a difference to do something and which we could in Libya we could and it was different I mean and I mean the locate there's so many differences between Libya and Syria and there you know what the serious situation is desperately serious there's no question about it because of the sectarian aspects of Syria and its location but my what I've been saying is just because we can't do something everywhere it doesn't mean we don't do anything anywhere and so what you have to do is find the places where you can make a difference but I know you could be very critical people criticize the Clinton administration basically why did we do something here and not something there but basically you have to look at what's doable right we have time just for a couple more questions we're gonna wrap up at 7:35 and then there will be a book signing downstairs time right right next door yes please very briefly be good thank you I learned in history in college that when the greatest dangers to democracy if you don't have a strong middle class you can't have a democracy and it's just better that my question goes back to hugly when I was in college I was very very young idealistic about the students were too and Hungary revolted against the colonists and we waited three light states to come and I have to go back it just was very disappointing that we didn't understand but now hopefully a Moser and Y's are still idealistic I still the ropa it looks like they're hiring site that if we had God then it could have been a nuclear war and I know this may not be the most it may not be the same situation but I just I just wonder what you think of that where your our proximity to the Czech Republic I hope you see very very strong-minded and you must be to be in your job but I hope you will work in the future years to put more emphasis on diplomacy than being the placement to the world because I don't think we can sustain that and if I can just so ever you're referring to President Eisenhower's decision not in Hungary in 1956 that was the question yeah well I I do think that in the to my toolbox that obviously one has to work through and we're here diplomats that we need to give more emphasis to diplomacy not everything can be done by force the Hungarian situation 56 was very complicated in the following way is that we gave hope to the Hungarians that we would come in and then didn't that was the the real issue I'm not sure would have led to nuclear war but that was the struggle and I do believe that one needs to try everything I am not against using force I am for peace but I'm not a pacifist and so there are times that one has to use force but it should not be the first tool that one picks up and diplomacy is very important and I fully agree with you that democracies need a middle class and mantle in this has not come up - but you would agree with President Obama that we ought to exhaust diplomacy on Iran before we think absolutely and and what that's what is so interesting if I can just take a minute because I do teach this and we're looking at it as a case study is that the toolbox is being really used very well on Iran it's a combination of diplomacy and economic tools without taking the use of force tool off the table I think it's a mistake to completely take it off the table but I think that it's not something I mean the repercussions of using force are so dramatic that you have to be really careful and something that I never thought I'd do little mud linka was to raise my hand to send Americans to war it is the most difficult thing that anybody ever has to do so I agree with you on that we have three people who want to ask questions maybe you could each ask your questions briefly and then that'll give you a couple of minutes and we'll and we'll call it a night so wonderful to see you thank you for being here I love the political discourse but I have a different kind of question I'm a family therapist and I'd like to know if there is a tradition or an activity that your parents and your siblings did together that you particularly like if you've carried that onto your own family and I asked this question of mr. Khrushchev who was here in the late 90s he came to speak and he said that his family got together for Sunday dinner and his father would fire political questions at them and without missing a beat he then said and he never banged his shoe on the table my landlords are escaped from Kosovo in the middle of the night and they love you dearly and we all want to wish you happy birthday thank you yes to be here in your presence tonight you're one of my role models um but beyond that I wondered if you could talk a little bit about Israel and Palestine in the future of the two-state solution there you know in 30 seconds or less which will challenge the final question yes sir I have a question um I'm a Vietnam veteran and I was able to be come home from Vietnam because people in the street we're out in the streets and forced the government to change and bring the soldiers home now you stated that you were against the yawn length of the Afghanistan war now my question is what do you do to help bring the soldiers home faster than what's gonna happen so family activities resolving the israeli-palestinian crisis and ending the war perfectly I think I'm gonna go backwards on the questions let me say I feel very strongly about the veterans coming home and I think that President Obama has laid out a plan and that is the right approach and then and and I think that that is systemic there will be questions as to whether we came back too soon or too late and Afghanistan is not going to be a perfect place when we leave and so there will be a lot of questions that go with it I do I want to add something to this I feel very strongly about being sure that the returning veterans are properly respected that was not true on the Vietnam what happened was there was a student at Georgetown who was a returning vet and had written an op-ed about saying he was very glad to be back in school but hadn't felt that he completely fit in and so I I found him and I got him into my class and we were talking and so I generally have thought about what we can do to make sure that the returning vets feel comfortable getting an education that we need to try to figure out how to make it easier for them to get into college that taking SATs and various things is not exactly easy to do after you've been in Afghanistan and Iraq and that the universities have to do something about it I graduated from Wellesley and so did Secretary Clinton 2/3 of the women's secretaries of State and there's an Albright Institute at wells and there is an Oprah and where you have been very kind to come but basically I think we're going to be working specifically on trying to help women vets come back and get an education and reintegrate but I think we all owe it to the veterans to make them comfortable as they come home and give them jobs and reintegrate them into our society on the Middle East there is a solution we came very close to a solution during the Clinton administration we all know what the answer is and I happen to believe a two-state solution is the only way to go and that what it takes is political will of the parties and of the United States and and I think that there is a way to do this but politics is playing a very strong role in this in all the places and we could spend a long time on it but it is my belief that in President Obama's second term there will be a lot of work done on this issue on the Family Therapy is funny you should ask because what did happen is because we were a nuclear family when we came to the United States and just had each other in many ways it was lovely but also torture because my parents there we were in Colorado and every Sunday my father and mother would stick the three kids in the back of the car and say we're going to the mountains for family solidarity and when you grow up you kind of think it's interesting to look at nature but you know saying isn't that a beautiful tree doesn't get you very far and then what we would do would be to go mushrooming which was a very Czech thing it's actually a miracle that we're not all dead so that was our family solidarity we did also only talk about foreign policy at home that definitely was part of the upbringing but we also and just to end this on this particular note of Who am I as I said my youngest daughter is married to a Jew and my grandchildren those grandchildren are being raised Jewish so this year in Aspen we celebrated Hanukkah and saying check Christmas carols to the candles which really is a little confusing thank you

Channel: JFK Library

Views: 12,931

Rating: 3.4615386 out of 5

Keywords: Madeline Albright, 1937-1948, Ambassador Nicholas Burns

Id: gVdH9g5YR2Q

Length: 86min 19sec (5179 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 11 2012