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America’s imperial farewell to Madeleine Albright
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Pallbearers
carry the casket of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for her
funeral at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington © WILL
OLIVER/EPA/Shutterstock
When
Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton’s first US secretary of state, passed
away, someone made the cruel joke: “How can you tell?” Christopher was
known for being unexcitable. The same quip would not work on Madeleine
Albright, Clinton’s second secretary of state, who never failed to be
memorable — all five feet of her. I had the privilege of attending
Albright’s funeral at the Washington National Cathedral on Wednesday.
Other than royal weddings, which have never been my cup of tea, no-one
does such pageantry quite like the Americans.
Sometimes I recoil
from the undertones of American self-congratulation. Though I was not
invited to George HW Bush’s funeral, or John McCain’s, I watched both on
TV with one ear blocked. There was too much “only in America” sentiment
for my liking, which for those two figures was certainly overstated. In
Albright’s case, however, the Americanness of her tale is
irrepressible. As almost every speaker observed, including Joe Biden,
and both Bill and Hillary Clinton, Albright arrived in New York as a
refugee on the SS America and left this life having become America’s
first female secretary of state. That, alone, would fill a eulogy.
But
as Albright’s very moving farewell progressed, it occurred to me that
her story is almost mainstream for America’s senior diplomatic jobs. The
German-born Henry Kissinger was the first immigrant to become a US
secretary of state in 1973. He welcomed Albright to the fraternity in
1997. (“It’s not a fraternity any more,” she replied.) Then came Colin
Powell, who was raised in the Bronx by Jamaican parents who had recently
arrived in the US. Albright gave a eulogy at Powell’s funeral in the
same venue last year.
As it happens, I was supposed to be meeting
Albright some time in April for the biography I’m researching of
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser.
Brzezinski was known universally as Zbig (people had trouble with
pronouncing both his names). Albright had already been generous with her
time to talk about her Polish-born mentor, who plucked her from
relative obscurity as a Capitol Hill staffer to join his team in 1977.
Albright was warned that “Zbig” would make her feel “Zmall”. That
obviously never happened. But they shared a characteristic that is
common among recent arrivals — Powell had it too: impatience with
bourgeois self-obsession.
This quality is perhaps best expressed
in their reaction to 1968, which was the height of counterculture
movement on US campuses, and the year that Soviet forces marched into
Albright’s native Czechoslovakia. As the “Prague spring” was literally
being crushed by tanks, American students were railing against
oppression at US universities, including Columbia, where Zbig taught and
where Albright did her PhD. Neither of the foreign-born figures had
much sympathy with the protesters, who Brzezinski saw as suburban brats
with no grasp of the meaning of the word freedom.
At one
celebrated encounter, which Albright relished retelling, Brzezinski was
forced outside his faculty building to engage with a sea of radicals.
They had managed to find a live pig on which they had daubed “Zbig” and
were yelling “A pig, a pig for Professor Zbig”. Brzezinksi told them he
had a few minutes to take questions “then I have to go back to my office
to plan some more genocide”. According to Albright, members of the
dean’s office, who were nowhere to be seen, failed to call the police.
Instead, a local animal protection group complained about the
protesters’ mistreatment of livestock. How could the students react
against that?
I mention this because there is something
quintessentially American about foreign-accented professors telling
their trust-fund students they have no idea how privileged they are. It
is worth pointing out that I know a number of foreign-born Ivy League
professors who are equally impatient with today’s campus spirit, which
appears suffused with the idea that free speech is harmful and even a
facet of privilege. Perhaps it takes a foreigner to argue America’s case
to the world as well as teaching the world to America.