Madeleine Albright, former U.S. secretary of state, dead at 84
CBC
Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as secretary of state for the United States, has died at the age of 84.
Albright's family said in a statement that Albright died Wednesday. She had been diagnosed with cancer.
"She was surrounded by family and friends," her family announced on Twitter.
"We have lost a loving mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and friend."
Born in Prague in what is now the Czech Republic, Albright emigrated to the U.S. as a child. She served as President Bill Clinton's secretary of state, the 64th in the nation's history, from 1997 until the end of Clinton's second term.
Albright succeeded Warren Christopher as secretary of state, having previously served the Clinton administration as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
In one of her last public appearances, Albright was among those to eulogize the man who succeeded her as U.S. secretary of state, Colin Powell.
"His virtues were Homeric – honesty, loyalty, dignity and an unshakeable commitment to his calling and his word," Albright said at a ceremony for Powell on Nov. 5 in Washington.
Years earlier, she once exclaimed to Powell, then the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?"
Powell recalled in a memoir that Albright's comments almost made him have an "aneurysm."
More recently, she authored an opinion piece published in The New York Times last month, calling Russia's decision to invade Ukraine a "historic error," and recalling her first impression of Russian President Vladimir Putin after meeting him in 2000 as "so cold as to be almost reptilian."
"Mr. Putin has charted his course by ditching democratic development for [Joseph] Stalin's playbook," Albright wrote.
She frequently appeared as a guest to offer commentary on world events, including CBC News.
"When I was in office, we had no better relationship than the one with Canada," she told CBC's Power & Politics in 2018.
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