Madeleine Albright, who died last week aged 84, was remarkable. The daughter of immigrants from wartime Czechoslovakia, in 1997 she became America’s first female Secretary of State and the highest-ranking woman in the history of American government.
She was Jewish without realising it for most of her life. And she is the only person to have hypnotised me. (As far as I know, anyway.) It happened in 2018, at a conference at Harvard on the state of the transatlantic alliance. The attendees were mostly academic specialists and their earnest grad school protégés, with a spattering of NGO types. The guest stars were Nineties-vintage diplomats such as Albright and Sir Malcolm Rifkind. The buffet was as stellar as the guest list. It had cakes as well as sandwiches.
I was the only journalist in attendance. I was busily shovelling back the free cake when one of the organisers told me that I could interview Rifkind and Albright, providing I also interviewed some Dutch bloke called Bert. Sir Malcolm was a gent. We sat out in the sunshine, drinking tea as he chatted about the bad old days of the Yugoslavian civil wars and the bad new days of Russian meddling in Western Europe. Dutch Bert wanted to be interviewed indoors. I thought this a bit grand, but I humoured him as he rolled out yards of cliché like a political carpet salesman and I slowly realised that Bert was Albert Gerard “Bert” Koenders, the Dutch foreign minister.
Madam Secretary was the main event. Her bodyguards checked out me and the room and muttered meaningfully into their cuffs before they let her in. She hustled into the room like a busy hedgehog — she was 4ft 10in — as if she had somewhere more important to be. She didn’t, unless she’d missed the buffet, but old habits die hard.
She most definitely was still Madam Secretary: Americans get to keep the honorifics of office even when they’re cashing out afterwards. If you ever run into Bill Clinton, remember to call him “Mr President”, not “Bill” or “Big Dog”.
Albright’s blonde hair was coiffed and welded into a passable impersonation of a Cornetto, and she gave off a whiff of expensive scent and industrial solvent. My grandmother used to have her hair done like that for weddings. Why Albright was surprised to find out she was Jewish is beyond me.
She wore an elegant black pantsuit with a silver brooch of spectacular tastelessness: the head of the Statue of Liberty with two watches for eyes. I had been expecting this: the brooches were her signature move.
She called this ju-jitsu by jewellery “part of my personal diplomatic arsenal”. After the Iraqi papers called her a snake, she had worn a snake brooch to her next meeting on Iraq. As she parked her diplomatic arsenal across the table from me and poured a glass of water into a wine glass, I noticed that one of Lady Liberty’s watch-eyes was upside down.
I found out later that in 2009, Albright’s brooches had been exhibited at the Museum of Art & Design in New York. The exhibition was called Read My Pins. This brooch is called “Brooching It Diplomatically”: the upside-down watch was for her interviewers, so they would know when their audience was over.
The interview started off fine, but when I broached the tricky subject of the Yugoslavian civil wars and asked whether the Clinton administration had been a tiny bit slow off the mark in responding to the whole genocide thing, things got weird.
“The most important thing was to hold Nato together,” Madam Secretary said, very slowly and firmly. As she spoke, she nodded, also slowly and firmly, fixing me with her ice-blue eyes as she ran her fingertips up and down the stem of her wine glass.
“The most important thing was to hold Nato together,” she repeated as I felt myself slipping away, my vision narrowing down to her nodding eyes and her fingers weaving up and down the stem of the wine glass.
“The most important thing was to hold Nato together,” I repeated back to her like a zombie, then forgot what I was about to say. She smirked and nodded: another one down. It took the last of my willpower to wrench my eyes away from her gaze and croak out a softball question about Saddam Hussein. Lady Liberty’s upside-down eye freed me shortly afterwards. She was still smirking as we shook hands and she hedgehogged out of the room.
Albright was the most convincing interviewee I’ve ever had, though I do feel it’s cheating to hypnotise the interviewer. I remember nothing else from our meeting, other than a curious sensation of sleepiness and the conviction that it’s important to hold Nato together. Which it is, and which I’ve written a lot about in the American papers in the years since our meeting of minds. This leads me to suspect that she was a more effective Secretary of State than I thought.
