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      Madeleine Albright obituary

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      Madeleine Albright obituaryDiplomat and scholar of international relations who served as the first female US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who has died of cancer aged 84, was the first woman to hold the office of secretary of state of the United States. It fell to her to cope with the painful dilemmas presented for the US by the breakup of Yugoslavia and the rise of Islamic opposition in the Middle East.While she fulfilled the role in the administration of President Bill Clinton, she could not take the place that office usually confers as third in succession to the president because she was not a “natural born citizen” of the US. Like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, secretaries of state in the Nixon and Carter administrations, she had been a refugee from Europe. Like them also, Albright came to the job not via business or politics but through an academic background in the study of international relations.Like Brzezinski, her professor at Columbia University, she was the daughter of a diplomat. Her father, Josef Korbel, took refuge from the communist government of his native Czechoslovakia, becoming a professor at the University of Denver. She was brought up a Roman Catholic and became an Anglican after her marriage, but when Albright became secretary of state, she received letters telling her that her parents were Jewish, and a Washington Post journalist, Michael Dobbs, after painstaking research, convinced her that this might be true. This caused a good deal of comment, some of it critical of her having concealed her ancestry. The truth seems to be that she was genuinely ignorant of her Jewish heritage.She concluded that in the Czechoslovakia of the 1930s, where Jews were often seen by Czechs as part of the German minority, her parents, Josef and his wife, Anna (nee Spieglová), thought she would have a safer life if she were seen to be Czech. Three of her grandparents subsequently died in Nazi concentration camps.Eldest of three children, she was born Marie Jana Korbelová in Prague. Her family took refuge from the Nazis in Switzerland, where she was educated at the Préalpina Institut pour Jeunes Filles on Lake Geneva. Madeleine was a French version of her Czech name.During the second world war, her family moved to London, which became the headquarters of the Czech government in exile, and Madeleine was brought up first in Kensington Park Road, Notting Hill, then in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, and Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. Later, the Korbels returned to Prague, but in 1948, when the communists took over there, they moved to the US.In 1957 she went to Wellesley College, near Boston, one of the elite women’s colleges. There she became an American citizen. When working a summer vacation shift at the Denver Post, she met a scion of one of the most powerful American newspaper dynasties of the time, Joseph Albright, descendant of the founder of the Chicago Tribune. They married in 1959.If Madeleine had been born with a silver spoon, Joe Albright’s spoons were of the rarest platinum. His family was at the heart of American business, political and social life. At different times his relatives owned the Tribune, the Washington Times-Herald, the New York Daily News and Long Island’s Newsday, and they traded properties with William Randolph Hearst. Madeleine Albright took a master’s degree, then a doctorate in international relations at Columbia University, New York, where Brzezinski was one of her teachers. From 1976 to 1978 she worked as a legislative assistant to Senator Ed Muskie, a Democrat, of Maine. In 1978 she was recruited by Brzezinski to do congressional liaison on the national security staff at the Carter White House. After Jimmy Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980, she went to the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, where she undertook a study of the new politics of eastern Europe.In 1981, when her husband left her, Albright threw herself into the academic, political, social and fundraising worlds in Washington. In 1982 she began to teach at Georgetown University, and she worked on the election campaign staffs of Geraldine Ferraro, Democratic candidate for vice-president in 1984, and of Michael Dukakis, presidential candidate in 1988.Albright, with her considerable expertise in both domestic and international politics, and her ability to speak several foreign languages, was a natural choice for Clinton, when he was elected president in 1992, to choose as US ambassador at the United Nations. There she soon demonstrated charm and competence, occasionally tarnished by a certain proneness to accident. She miscalculated badly when she advised that Slobodan Milošević, the Serbian nationalist leader, would cave in after brief bombing during the Kosovo crisis.More seriously for her reputation, when she was asked on NBC television by the journalist Lesley Stahl about the alleged death of half a million children as a result of sanctions imposed on Iraq, Albright responded that “we think the price is worth it”. The remark portrayed her as hardbitten, which was far from the case. The sanctions policy had been in place long before the Clinton administration, but the comment was not forgotten.By the time of the Clinton administration, a female secretary of state was, if not exactly an idea whose time had come, at least not unthinkable, if the woman were well known and well liked in the Washington Democratic establishment. It is said that Clinton asked Albright if she was happy as ambassador to the UN; she replied that she was, but that she would rather be secretary of state. Clinton appointed her in 1997, at the beginning of his second term.When George W Bush was elected president in 2000, Albright slipped back comfortably into her role as a popular member of the establishment, greatly in demand as a speaker at conferences. She founded the Albright Group, to give political advice to corporate giants such as Coca-Cola, Merck and the insurance behemoth Marsh and McLennan, as well as a private equity firm, Albright Capital Management. In 2003 she joined the board of the New York Stock Exchange, and twice in 2006 she was invited to the White House to advise Bush. In the 2008 election she was in the Democratic camp as an adviser to Hillary Clinton in her campaign for the presidency, and again in 2016 – she told the Guardian: “I think she would have been a remarkable president”.In 2012, when she published Prague Winter, partly an account of the politics of central Europe in the run-up to the second world war, partly an account of her discovery that she was Jewish, reviewers and readers seemed much more interested in how she could not have known that she was Jewish than in her political thought or career. She was awarded the presidential medal of freedom by Barack Obama later that year.She is survived by her three daughters, Anne, Alice and Katherine, and six grandchildren. Madeleine Albright, diplomat and political adviser, born 15 May 1937; died 23 March 2022 TopicsUS politicsUS foreign policyBill ClintonHillary ClintonobituariesReuse this content More

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      Bob Dole: soldier, politician and Republican of the old school

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      Bob Dole: soldier, politician and Republican of the old school The senator and presidential pick was a political animal for sure – it is sad that his belief in service, decency and compromise should come to seem so remote0In the Apennine mountains in 1945, Bob Dole was hit by fire from a German machine gun. Through sheer force of will, endless hours of strengthening, an experimental drug and the extraordinary kindness of a doctor who performed seven operations for free, Dole was able to rebuild his life. His right arm had limited motion. His left suffered numbness. It was painful to write. A signed note from Dole is a treasure.Bob Dole, giant of Republican politics and presidential nominee, dies aged 98Read moreBeating the governor of Kansas to win a Senate seat in 1968, he rose to Republican leader. When Gerald Ford selected him as his running mate in 1976, his initial impression on Americans was a bit sharp: “Democrat wars” was the most famous line from his debate with Walter Mondale. But he recovered and spoke of “hard choices”, basically code for reducing the federal deficit.He called himself the “heartland candidate” and that was true. His speech accepting the nomination for president in 1996 was roundly criticised for its line about “a bridge to the past”. In response, Bill Clinton proposed a “bridge to the future”. But Dole had a point. That glance to history was essential: “Whenever we forget its singular presence, it gives us a lesson in grace and awe.” Few were quite sure where Clinton’s bridge was going – or when it might be completed.Dole offered a moral vision. “What is more important, wealth or honor? Only right conduct distinguishes a great nation from one that cannot rise above itself … All things flow from doing what is right.” This was sincerity, not sentiment. Rare indeed the politician who could say with integrity, “I do not need the presidency to make or refresh my soul. For greatness lies not in what office you hold, but on how honest you are in how you face adversity and in your willingness to stand fast in hard places.”His was an older Republicanism, one that said: “If there’s anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion, then let me remind you, tonight this hall belongs to the party of Lincoln. And the exits which are clearly marked are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise.” Ever the party loyalist, he called himself a “Trumper” but also “sort of Trumped out” – and he flatly rejected the lie of electoral fraud in 2020.His voice calls out in today’s deep troubles: “Is the principle of unity, so hard-fought and at the cost of so many lives, having been contested again and again in our history, and at such a terrible price, to be casually abandoned to the urge to divide?”In their debate, Clinton said, “I like Bob Dole. You can probably tell that.” Dole asked viewers to check his website, a first for presidential candidates. His wry humor and distance from hoopla struck a chord with some Gen X voters.Running against peace and prosperity is hard. Ross Perot’s second bid did not help. Yet Dole pressed on, loyal to the party and the ticket he led. Then he moved on.Losing “hasn’t been all bad”, he said. He did a commercial for Viagra – but only after he could vouch for it following prostate cancer. Addressing stigma was his life’s work. If speaking up could help, why not risk the jokes?He could happily discuss deficiency payments for farmers for hours – that’s what senators do – and to him that sort of thing mattered more than personal revelations. Referring to himself in the third person was mocked, but one knew where he stood.When he was introspective, one had the sense the past, of good people making a living on the unforgiving prairie, was never far away. There was an earthy honesty too often missing in politics today but popular when it appears: “Facts are better than dreams and good presidents and good candidates don’t run from the truth.”The charge of being an intellectual lightweight was unfair. Dole just didn’t agree with some of the new Republican intellectuals. The man whose father ran a creamery knew budgets had to be balanced, a lesson learned on the prairie, where “a man is very small, and if he thinks otherwise, he is wrong”.The Americans with Disabilities Act was his proudest accomplishment. Strongly committed to civil rights, he worked with former rival George McGovern to develop an international school lunch program and received the World Food Prize. A lion of the Senate, his cross-party friendship with Daniel Inouye, also grievously wounded in the second world war, is a telling reminder of what Washington once was.Dole may remind British readers somewhat of Denis Healey. As the Guardian wrote in its obituary of Healey, “it is rarely enough in politics to say: ‘I’m here if you want me.’ Always wanting to ‘do something rather than be something’, Healey was too busy to be a faction-fighter or plotter.”The White House losersRead moreFor Dole, “honorable compromise is no sin. It is what protects us from absolutism and intolerance”.It was said Dole wanted to be president in case decisions needed to be made – a reminder of another Kansan, Dwight Eisenhower. After all, he might have reasoned, the big issues were decided – democracy, decency, honour, economic opportunity, civil rights, a strong defense, support for allies – but the small decisions mattered too. Why not Bob Dole to make them honestly?The substance of those decisions would generally have been wise and, as with Eisenhower, likely bolder than expected. A Dole presidency would have reset the country for the new millennium: less talk, more action, less fluff, more substance.He carried a pen in his disabled right hand. As in 1945, he was always ready for work.
      John S Gardner is a writer. He was special assistant to George HW Bush and deputy assistant to George W Bush
      TopicsUS politicsRepublicansSecond world warUS CongressUS SenateBill ClintonfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Bob Dole obituary

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      Bob Dole obituaryLongstanding Republican leader in the US Senate who lost the 1996 presidential election to Bill Clinton0In late 1995, one of the US’s shrewdest political observers, Michael Barone, wrote of Senator Bob Dole that he “towers over everyone else in the political landscape, even the president”. Less than 12 months later, Dole, who has died aged 98, had given up his prized leadership of the Republican-controlled Senate to run one of the most inept presidential campaigns in modern US history. It ended with his hard-won reputation as a master politician in tatters and his opponent, Bill Clinton, becoming the first Democratic president to be voted a second term for 52 years.By the time Dole felt obliged to surrender his Senate seat in a desperate effort to revive his flagging campaign, he had represented Kansas on Capitol Hill for 36 years, the longest Republican incumbency of his generation.He served first, for eight years, in the House of Representatives. His election in 1960 had come after a long apprenticeship making himself known to all levels of the deeply conservative society of the rural midwest. He reached Washington only after service in the Kansas state legislature and eight years as a county prosecuting attorney in his small home town of Russell. Elected to office as a staunch conservative, he retained that view for the rest of his political life.As a young man, he had been hit by a shell during wartime service in Italy. The shoulder injury, from which he nearly died, became the overriding influence on the rest of his life. The determination he had mobilised to fight his disability was harnessed to his political career and early on he revealed two characteristics that were to mark his campaigning style – readiness to fight a deeply partisan battle and the acerbic wit he often employed to further his cause.During his four terms in the House of Representatives Dole carved out a solid enough reputation to secure him victory when he ran for the Senate in the watershed year of 1968, amid the turmoil of the Vietnam war and the social cataclysm set off by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. It was a good year for the Senate Republicans, who gained seven seats from the Democrats, but they still did not control the chamber.Dole soon found himself mounting a vigorous defence of Richard Nixon as the new president settled in to face a hostile Congress. It was plain that the two men had much in common, both politically and personally. In short order Dole was fighting the Democrats’ effort to stop US military action in Cambodia and coming under fire for procedural manoeuvres that the chairman of the Senate armed services committee said “bordered on the ridiculous”.It won him enough points in the White House, however, for the president to appoint him chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1971, his first rise to national prominence. He carried out the role assiduously, building up the party in preparation for the 1972 re-election battle, until obliged to fall on his sword in 1973 when Nixon needed something for George HW Bush, newly replaced as UN ambassador, in the post-election reshuffle. That proved an unexpected blessing for Dole as the Watergate scandal unravelled and Bush found himself forced to defend the indefensible.It may have been this relative obscurity that narrowly saved the senator’s bacon after Nixon’s unprecedented resignation. He had to fight for his seat in a deeply hostile mid-term election which saw the Democrats in Congress achieve a large enough majority to override any presidential veto, the first time that had happened for nearly 40 years.Two years later, the 1976 general election found the unelected President Gerald Ford under siege not only because of the circumstances of his arrival at the White House and his decision to pardon Nixon but because his own Republican right thought him too soft. He won the party nomination by a majority of only 4% over Ronald Reagan and, in an effort to appease his opponents and unify the party, chose Dole as his running mate.It was a disastrous move. Dole’s combative style in the campaign soon had the country in a furore, particularly after he had characterised the century’s two world conflicts as “Democrat wars”. Jimmy Carter squeaked into office with just 50.1% of the popular vote – a margin of 1.6m in a total of just over 80m – and Dole was widely blamed for the outcome.However, as the country swung to the right in the Reagan years, Dole’s reputation recovered. He was chairman of the Senate finance committee during the White House tax-cutting campaign of 1981 and demonstrated his exceptional skill at managing the intricate legislative process.But he was far from happy about the budgetary consequences of the measures and successfully manoeuvred an offsetting bill through the Senate the following year in an attempt to stop the federal deficit ballooning uncontrollably. The clumsily named but effective Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act led the then fiery young congressman Newt Gingrich to dub Dole “the tax collector for the welfare state”.But, generally speaking, Dole’s legislative record was poor: he was a manager rather than an innovator. As leader of the Senate Republicans for more than a decade his unrivalled talent, of inestimable value in a constitutional structure designed to reduce intransigence to deadlock, was to wheel and deal until common ground had mysteriously surfaced from the party quagmire.Among the fruits of his efforts were such laws as those extending food stamp relief for very poor people, the 1982 Voting Rights Act, and important new federal support for disabled people.But his lack of specific ideological aims repeatedly undermined his wider ambitions. His first bid for the presidency ended abruptly in 1980 with a derisory vote of 607 in the New Hampshire primary. His second attempt in 1988 appeared at first to be going far more smoothly until George HW Bush’s spin doctors successfully induced Dole to lose his temper during a televised debate in New Hampshire and snarl at his opponent “stop lying about my record”. Bush romped through the subsequent primaries.In 1996 Dole secured the Republican nomination but seemed wholly unable to mount a credible campaign against an ostensibly vulnerable Clinton. The president had a poor legislative record and there was a host of allegations of sexual and financial misconduct. But Dole’s electioneering was marked by poorly delivered speeches whose content baffled many of his audiences. He seemed to have no clear electoral strategy and constantly reshuffled his staff in the effort to develop one.In the final stages, with the opinion polls swinging steadily towards the Democrats, even his own party gave up the fight to sit resignedly awaiting the inevitable defeat. That dismal 1996 campaign persuaded only 49% of eligible voters to turn out (the second lowest figure in US history) and Dole’s failure to address issues important to female voters proved to be critical. While he and Clinton each secured 44% of the male vote, Dole could attract only one third of women’s ballots.Born in Russell, Kansas, Robert was the son of a small dairy retailer, Doran Dole, and his wife Bina (nee Talbott). There were few indications in his early life that he would emerge from the pack. His formative years were spent in that disastrous period of the 1930s when poor farming methods had turned the Great Plains into a dust bowl and the Depression had limited the few alternative ways of making a living. Government relief was the only lifeline for many families, a deeply traumatic experience for homesteaders whose principal creed was self-reliance.The six members of the Dole family kept going by moving into their basement and renting out the rest of their house to an oil prospector, but they were obliged to pinch and scrape for years. Doran gave up the dairy business for the more secure post of managing a grain storage unit and his mother sold sewing machines door-to-door.Robert, who had shown himself a formidable athlete during his school career but not much of an academic, nonetheless gained the financial support of a local banker to enrol at the University of Kansas. He wanted to become a doctor but the US was pitched into the second world war and the 18-year-old student found himself in the US army, fighting in Europe.On 14 April 1945, three weeks before the end of the European campaign, he was leading an assault on a German machine gun position in the Po valley in Italy when a shell smashed his spine and tore his right shoulder apart, leaving him temporarily paralysed. On his return to Russell, local people raised a fund to send him to Chicago for treatment by one of the leading neurosurgeons of the day, Hampar Kelikian. During the three-year course, for which the doctor refused payment, Kelikian became one of Dole’s closest friends and eventually persuaded the young man that he would have to cope with the permanent disablement of his right arm.The occupational therapist brought in to train him for this disability, Phyllis Holden, became Dole’s first wife in 1948, and they had a daughter, Robin.Under the spur of the doctor and the therapist, Dole settled down to cope with the pain he would endure for the rest of his life. He resumed his university career but diverted to a law degree. Since he was still unable to write with his left hand, his wife sat with him to take lecture notes and write out examination answers to Dole’s dictation.To outsiders the young man seemed to overcome most of his physical problems, but this was really because of a great deal of backstage manoeuvring. As he embarked on his political career his wife padded his suits to disguise his injured arm and shoulder and arranged for his food to arrive ready cut at public functions. Dole took to carrying a pencil permanently in his right hand to avert the agony of anyone trying to shake it.In 1950, at the age of 27, he became one of the youngest state legislators in the history of Kansas. In an overwhelmingly Republican state he naturally ran as a steadfast conservative. He also began to show the obsession with every aspect of politics for which he later became renowned. He was far from the favourite in the 1960 Republican primary for the first congressional district, covering about three-quarters of Kansas, but eventually won the election, embarking on a Washington career that would last nearly four decades.After standing down as a senator, and his defeat in the 1996 presidential election, he did not seek public office again. It was a sad ending at the age of 73 to a career in which he had served his country well in war and in peace. Many of his most significant contributions were made well away from the public eye. In the words of one of his staff, “people never just knew what Bob Dole achieved late at night in the Senate”.He wrote a number of books, including a memoir of his second world war experiences, One Soldier’s Story (2005). The only former Republican nominee to endorse Donald Trump, he was awarded the Congressional gold medal in 2018 for his service as “soldier, legislator and statesman”. In 2019 Congress made him an honorary colonel.His first marriage ended in divorce in 1972. Three years later he married Elizabeth Hanford, who – as Elizabeth Dole – became a leading political figure in her own right, serving in the administrations of Reagan and Bush Sr, and later as a senator. She survives him, along with his daughter. Robert Joseph Dole, politician, born 22 July 1923; died 5 December 2021TopicsUS politicsRepublicansUS CongressBill ClintonRichard NixonGeorge HW BushSecond world warobituariesReuse this content More

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      Bill Clinton says he is ‘glad to be home’ after hospital admission

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      Bill ClintonBill Clinton says he is ‘glad to be home’ after hospital admissionFormer US president releases video thanking staff at California hospital where he was treated for infection01:08Associated PressThu 21 Oct 2021 06.21 EDTFirst published on Thu 21 Oct 2021 06.18 EDTBill Clinton has released a video saying he is on the road to recovery after being hospitalised in southern California for six days to treat an infection unrelated to Covid-19.Clinton, 75, who arrived home in New York on Sunday, said he was glad to be back and that he was “so touched by the outpouring of support” he had received while in hospital last week.An aide to the former US president said he had a urological infection that spread to his bloodstream but was on the mend and never went into septic shock, a potentially life-threatening condition.Clinton thanked the doctors and nurses at the University of California, Irvine medical center.Clinton has faced health scares in the years since he left the White House in 2001. In 2004, he had quadruple bypass surgery after experiencing prolonged chest pains and shortness of breath. He returned to hospital for surgery for a partially collapsed lung in 2005, and in 2010 he had a pair of stents fitted in a coronary artery.He responded by embracing a largely vegan diet that resulted in him losing weight and reporting improved health.TopicsBill ClintonCaliforniaUS politicsHealthnews More

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      Bill Clinton released from hospital after infection treatment

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      Bill ClintonBill Clinton released from hospital after infection treatmentFormer US president was admitted to California hospital on Tuesday with an infection unrelated to Covid Associated PressSun 17 Oct 2021 11.19 EDTLast modified on Sun 17 Oct 2021 15.35 EDTBill Clinton was released Sunday from the Southern California hospital where he had been treated for an infection.The former US president was released around 8am from the University of California Irvine medical center.Clinton, 75, was admitted Tuesday to the hospital south-east of Los Angeles with an infection unrelated to Covid-19, officials said.Clinton spokesperson Angel Urena had said on Saturday that Clinton would remain hospitalized one more night to receive further intravenous antibiotics. But all health indicators were “trending in the right direction”, Urena said.An aide to the former president said Clinton had a urological infection that spread to his bloodstream. In the years since Clinton left the White House in 2001, the former president has faced several health scares.In 2004, he underwent quadruple bypass surgery after experiencing prolonged chest pains and shortness of breath. He returned to the hospital for surgery for a partially collapsed lung in 2005, and in 2010 he had a pair of stents implanted in a coronary artery.Clinton has responded to worries over his health by embracing a largely vegan diet that has seen him lose weight and report improved health.TopicsBill ClintonUS politicsCalifornianewsReuse this content More

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      Bill Clinton to remain in hospital as he recovers from urological infection

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      Bill ClintonBill Clinton to remain in hospital as he recovers from urological infectionFormer president to remain in California hospital at least another night, his spokesperson said Friday ReutersFri 15 Oct 2021 20.48 EDTThe former US president Bill Clinton’s health is improving but he will remain in a California hospital for at least another night to receive antibiotics intravenously for a urological infection that spread to his bloodstream, his spokesperson said on Friday.The 75-year-old Clinton, who served as president from 1993 to 2001, entered the University of California, Irvine, medical center on Tuesday evening after suffering from fatigue. He spoke with Joe Biden on Friday.Clinton’s spokesperson Angel Ureña said that Clinton’s white blood count has decreased, indicating his health is improving.“All health indicators are trending in the right direction, including his white blood count which was decreased significantly,” Ureña said on Twitter. “In order to receive further IV antibiotics, he will remain in the hospital overnight.”Since his admission to the intensive care unit at the hospital, Clinton has received fluids along with antibiotics, his doctors said.His wife, a former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, was at the hospital on Thursday and Friday, and the two read books and talked about politics, Ureña told Reuters.It remained unclear when Clinton would be released.Biden said Clinton would likely go home soon, though it was not clear whether he would be released on Saturday or later.“He is getting out shortly. … Whether that’s tomorrow or the next day, I don’t know,” Biden told reporters in Connecticut. “He’s doing fine. He really is.”On Thursday, Ureña said Clinton was “up and about, joking and charming the hospital staff”.Clinton has dealt with heart problems in the past, including a 2004 quadruple bypass surgery and a 2010 procedure to open a blocked artery.The Democrat served two terms in the White House, overseeing strong economic growth while engaging in bruising political battles with congressional Republicans.TopicsBill ClintonUS politicsCaliforniaDemocratsReuse this content More