Madam Secretary by Madeleine K. Albright

“This morning my heart aches, because we’ve lost a friend and our nation one of its finest and most loyal soldiers. When Powell passed away last year, she delivered one of his eulogies at the National Cathedral. She introduced me to General Powell when I co-founded With Honor, and she joined our first advisory board. I found it impressive and reassuring that they had become close friends. Many years later, as America’s own tribal political divisions drove a wedge in our democracy, I joined an event with her and Colin Powell. I’ve recently revisited this compelling book via Audible, which she narrates. She later wrote about this in a memoir, Prague Winter. Many of her relatives, she discovered, had perished in Nazi concentration camps. She thought she was Catholic when she fled Czechoslovakia as a girl at the outset of WWII. She had discovered an existential secret her parents had kept from her. In retrospect, this had become even more personal for her. Years later, she reflected to me (and many others) that our nation’s response to the Rwandan genocide was one of her greatest regrets. could do, but I believed we should be doing more. I felt angry and confused at our government. It anchored for me a lingering question that eventually propelled me to Kibera: how was it possible for teenage boys to kill innocent people with machetes?Īt that time, Madeleine Albright was U.S. In 1994, when I was 15, one night we watched aghast as a terrifying scene played out in Rwanda, a country I didn’t know existed.

Madam Secretary by Madeleine K. Albright