"Her razor-sharp ability to define American interests set her apart from other Democratic foreign policy thinkers early on," says Tom Oliphant '67, a Washington columnist for the Boston Globe and a friend of Albright.

"She's one of the few people who knows how to combine policy and politics," says Council on Foreign Relations President Leslie H. Gelb, who worked with Albright in the Carter administration. "Most of the policy wonks don't know how to speak publicly or build political support. Madeleine does."

Albright also comes well prepared for the job, Burns says. "She has more foreign policy experience than most people who have become secretary of state, and she can speak five languages. No other secretary, in my memory, could speak more than two."

Albright speaks Russian, Czech, Polish and French, allowing her to converse comfortably with diplomats in some of the world's hot spots.

While politics and diplomacy have dominated her professional career, Albright has worn several other hats in her life. To those who know her well, Albright is at once a refugee, a mother and a teacher, as well as public official.

The Early Years

Albright was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia on May 15, 1937 to Josef and Anna Korbel. As the daughter of a Czech diplomat, Albright got her first lessons in diplomacy very early on. She also got her first experience with tyranny when Adolf Hitler and the German army overran her country and her family fled to England.

In the days before the family escaped, the Korbels would walk the streets of Prague, carrying their baby daughter, careful to stay in public view, until forged diplomatic papers allowed them to make their way to London.

Life in England, especially during the incessant bombing of the Battle of Britain, was no picnic.

"I remember when we moved to Walton-on-Thames, where they had just invented some kind of steel table," Albright told Time Magazine. "They said if your house was bombed and you were under the table, you would survive. We had this table, and we ate on the table and we slept under the table and we played around the table."

Following the war, Albright returned with her family to Czechoslovakia. Her father resumed his career in the diplomatic corps and was a rising star until the communists took over in 1948. Again her family fled, this time seeking asylum in the United States, where her father became a professor at the University of Denver.

As compelling as the story of Albright's early life is, recent reports show that her family's story is even more tragic. In February of this year, shortly after she took office as Secretary of State, the Washington Post published detailed accounts of Albright's ancestry, accounts even Albright says she did not know.

According to the Post, Albright's parents were Jewish and only converted to Catholicism in the 1930s to avoid persecution. As such, many of Albright's relatives, including her grandparents, are believed to have died in the Holocaust.

Albright was caught off-guard by the Post's findings, saying her parents had raised her consistently as a Catholic and she had never considered the possibility that she might be Jewish.

"Clearly this is a bittersweet time for me," Albright told reporters in early February while asking for some privacy to look into the revelations.