"She understands she is a public figure," Burns said at the time. "But this is a very emotional issue for her and she prefers to deal with it herself."

Education and Motherhood

As a student, Albright was disciplined and serious-minded. Following in her father's footsteps, she exhibited an interest in foreign affairs. In eighth grade she won a United Nations contest for being able to name all the current U.N. member nations. In ninth grade she founded an international relations club and became its president.

Josef Korbel ran a strict household. Routines were sacred, which meant the children were expected to be at dinner--on time. An invitation to the prom in ninth grade sparked a family fight between Albright and her father. At issue was the question of whether she could ride in her date's car. Her father decided she would ride with her date and he would follow in his own car.

In 1955, Albright came to Massachusetts to attend Wellesley on a scholarship.

"I met her the very first day," says Emily MacFarquhar, a fellow member of Wellesley's class of 1959. "Of course, I couldn't tell then she would be secretary of state, but she was certainly bright, intelligent and hardworking."

Albright first looked at journalism as a possible career. She and MacFarquhar worked for the Wellesley News their first year and Albright got a summer job working for the Denver Post. It was there that she met her future husband--Joseph Patterson Albright. The grandson of the founder of the New York Daily News, he was the heir to a newspaper empire.

At Wellesley, Albright's Democratic political roots began to form. "I remember standing with her on street corners in Boston campaigning for [Adlai E.] Stevenson in '56," MacFarquhar says.

"People would ask her why she was a Democrat," MacFarquhar says, "She would always point to Roosevelt and Truman."

Albright graduated in 1959 with a degree in political science. She married Joe three days later.

In 1961, Albright gave birth to premature twin daughters. To distract herself from the stress of seeing them in an incubator, she studied Russian.

Six years later she gave birth to another daughter. For the next 10 years, Albright stayed busy raising her children, fundraising for their elementary school and continuing her own education.

By 1976 Albright had managed to earn both her masters degree and Ph.D. in Government from Columbia University by getting up at 4:30 a.m. and studying whenever she could. At about the same time, she got involved with former Maine senator Edward Muskie's re-election campaign, and that led to a job on the Democrat's staff as chief legislative assistant.

The Career Takes Off

In 1978, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former president Carter's national security adviser, hired Albright to work as a congressional liaison on his staff at the National Security Council. Brzezinski had been her Ph.D. advisor at Columbia.

"That job was basically briefing Congressmen and Senators on foreign policy...putting things in understandable terms" MacFarquhar says. "She, of course, relied on her good people and communication skills."