Madeleine Albright, who fled the Nazis as a child in her native Czechoslovakia during World War Two then rose to become the first female US secretary of state and, in her later years, a pop culture feminist icon, died on Wednesday at the age of 84. READ:
Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright , ca. 1997. US Department of State/Wikimedia Commons
She once upset a Pentagon chief by asking why the military maintained more than 1 million men and women under arms if they never used them. The United States responded by working with NATO on airstrikes that forced an end to the war but only after it had been going on for three years. Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani said on Wednesday she was “deeply shocked by the loss of Kosovo’s great friend,” adding that the intervention “gave us hope, when we did not have it.”
Born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague on May 15, 1937, she and her family fled in 1939 to London when Germany occupied Czechoslovakia. She attended school in Switzerland at age 10 and adopted the name Madeleine.