In 1959, Madeleine K. Albright was told by her graduation speaker at Wellesley that her role in life was to raise the next generation of educated citizens.

How times have changed.

Today, as the first female secretary of state and highest ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government, Albright will deliver the keynote address at Harvard's 346th Commencement.

She has some big shoes to fill.

Her speech comes exactly 50 years after then secretary of state George C. Marshall used Harvard's 1947 Commencement to announce the U.S.'s post-war recovery plan for Europe.

Expectations are high, and the national spotlight will be on, but all signs indicate that Albright has been looking forward to the chance to commemorate Marshall's historic announcement.

"She's very honored to give the Commencement address at Harvard on the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan," says State Department Spokesperson Nicholas Burns. "She's a child of that era and has a deep sense of history."

University officials also noted Albright's enthusiasm about giving today's speech.

"The idea of speaking on the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan was very exciting to her," says Provost Albert Carnesale. "You could feel the twinkle in her eyes over the telephone."

A Stellar Record

While her speech may not turn out to be as historic as Marshall's, some high level officials say Albright, who was confirmed unanimously for her job by the Senate, is already on track to becoming a first-rate secretary of state.

"She has a strong sense of mission, and she's strong in her convictions," says Samuel R. Berger, President Clinton's national security adviser. "She certainly has the potential to be one of the really great secretaries of all time."

For most of America, Albright, 60, is the new face of foreign policy for the Clinton administration. Since moving up from her former post as Ambassador to the U.N. in January, she has drawn a sharp contrast to the dry, lawyerly style of her predecessor, Warren Christopher.

Unlike Christopher, the mediasavvy Albright excels at taking center stage. One of her first moves as secretary was taking a widely-publicized world tour. She stopped in nine countries in 10 days, including Russia and China.

She backs up her high profile with two unique traits: the ability to succinctly summarize even the most complex foreign policy issues and the political know-how to gauge questions of foreign affairs through the lens of domestic politics.

"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.

"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."

With the Democrats out of power in the 1980s, Albright quickly shifted gears and divided her time between academia and Washington's political scene.

Peter F. Krogh '58, then dean of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, hired Albright as a professor in international affairs and as director of the Women in Foreign Service Program.

"She was an excellent faculty member," Krogh says. "With lots of energy and enthusiasm, she was like a pied piper."

The classes she taught were hugely popular, and she was named best teacher in the School of Foreign Service for a record four years.

As she built her academic career, Albright gradually turned her Georgetown home into a thinktank, where she constantly hosted meetings and dinners with Democratic foreign policy makers.

In 1982, though, Albright was thrown a curve when her husband of 23 years filed for divorce.

She did not want the divorce, and a few of her close friends have since told the media that she felt some bitterness for several years afterwards.

Excluding the setback of her divorce, the 1980s saw Albright's star on the rise. During the 1984 presidential election she pitched in to help the Democratic ticket by acting as foreign policy adviser to vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro.

In 1988, she stepped up to play the same role for Michael Dukakis, an assignment that put her in contact with then Ark. governor Bill Clinton, who came to Boston to help Dukakis with the presidential debates.

In 1989, Albright took over the presidency of the Center for National Policy. Robert Rubin '60, Warren Christopher and Mickey Kantor--all of whom would later serve in President Clinton's Cabinet--were among the members of the center's board. In that position, she prodded researchers to ground their analysis by using polls and opinion surveys to gauge domestic reaction.

Life in the Administration

When Clinton won in 1992, Albright's reputation in Washington made her an easy pick for ambassador to the United Nations. She made the most of the cabinet-level position by making a strong effort to be present at important meetings where the Clinton administration formulated American foreign policy. That, of course, meant frequent trips on the New York-Washington shuttle.

At the U.N. Albright developed a reputation as being straightforward and a hard bargainer. She consistently pushed to get America involved in the peace process in Bosnia.

In high level meetings she would frequently interrupt those debating abstract policy points in order to maintain a general focus.

"Madeleine is political in the best sense of the word...she knows how to get things done," Oliphant says.

She also caught the attention of national media with occasional broadsides, like when she railed at Fidel Castro for shooting down two American civilian planes in early 1996.

"This is not cojones," Albright said. "This is cowardice." At other times she referred to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as a "slow learner" and told corrupt Haitian generals, "You can leave voluntarily and soon or involuntarily and soon."

Some critics have said these types of statements make Albright a loose canon in the world of diplomacy. Other critics say she is too quick in committing the U.S. military.

Her close friends, however, say the one-liners and sound bites are carefully scripted and well-rehearsed.

"She's very conscientious and has the capability of being either tough or charming, depending on what's needed," Berger says.

As for her willingness to commit the nation's armed forces, Burns says Albright makes her mind up carefully. "She is very respectful of the military and weighs the danger of risking American lives...ultimately, though, she believes the military is there for a purpose."

"Looking at Bosnia in June 1997, it appears she was right," he adds.

Albright is keenly aware of the importance of the modern media in developing foreign policy. The first U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. to have a Web page, Albright often referred to CNN as "the 16th member of the Security Council."

"Being clear and cogent is one of her distinguishing characteristics," Oliphant says. "She has the ability, through the media, to define a situation."

The Future

It has been less than six months since she became Secretary of State, yet Albright is already making her mark on the historic post.

Christopher used to open his day with a small senior staff meeting of just a few aides in his personal office. Albright moved the meeting into a larger conference room, telling the participants that she preferred to avoid the bureaucracy and go to staffers directly. In fact, her disregard for normal protocol was well-known at the State Department because as U.N. ambassador she frequently called desk officers directly to ask for specific information on foreign countries.

Albright's philosophy toward foreign policy is somewhat different as well.

"My mind-set is Munich," she has often said. "Most of my generation's was Vietnam."

With this statement, Albright not only means to convey the dangers associated with appeasement but also the general difficultly of negotiating from a position of weakness. She realized early in her foreign policy career that nothing can be accomplished without power.

Oliphant says he sees three positive signs from Albright in her first months as secretary of state.

"In April, everyone was saying she had to go to the Middle-East," he says. "Secretary Albright said no. There's no point in going until the two sides agree to start talking again."

Secondly, in Bosnia, "she has stood her ground against [Secretary of Defense William] Cohen on the involvement of U.S. troops, especially in the last few weeks," Oliphant says. "She's committed for as long as it takes."

Thirdly, Oliphant says, "Albright has been extremely consistent on her insistence of support from Capitol Hill. That shows she's laying the groundwork necessary for a successful tenure."

Albright is not afraid to make tough stands or ask hard questions. Given her communication skills, she may well be in a position to ameliorate the growing indifference many Americans feel toward foreign affairs. Albright attracts attention and people who have cared little about world affairs, tend to notice her