Ms. ALBRIGHT

Breakfast with the FT:
Blast from the past

By Daniel Dombey


The first I see of the politician who was once the most powerful woman in the world is a slight figure walking up the steps of the Dorchester Hotel.

Madeleine Albright is returning from an interview with BBC radio. A small woman with whitish hair and a crisp blue blazer, she makes her way through the lobby. I linger behind, fiddling with tape recorders and notebooks.
That first glimpse of her is strangely poignant. Albright is a reminder of what now seems a more hopeful age, when solutions to some of the world’s most intractable problems appeared within reach.
During the eight years of the Clinton administration, when she served first as US ambassador to the United Nations and then as secretary of state, hopes ran high of a final deal in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a peace treaty with North Korea and US rapprochement with Iran.
In the end, none was achieved. Perhaps none was achievable. The Clinton years are now often remembered for the Monica Lewinsky affair and Albright for the forthrightness that led her to clash with Colin Powell, deride the Cuban government’s lack of “balls” and push for military action in Kosovo.
But, with Hamas in power in the Palestinian territories, Pyongyang boasting of its atomic weapons and tensions running high over Iran’s nuclear programme, things seem a good deal worse today.
When I finally make my way into the Dorchester Grill Room, she is slightly nonplussed by my request that she order breakfast. She doesn’t seem to have been informed of the FT’s strange interest in watching her eat. In fact, she must be rather confused as to what she is doing in the Grill Room at all, since she has already grabbed a bite before her radio interview.
This is all the more so since the Grill Room is a slightly weird place, with pastel-coloured murals of Scottish scenes and a menu that attempts to celebrate Britishness with dishes such as raspberry porridge and freshly baked stilton bread.
Despite describing herself as a “classic extrovert”, Albright sits rather stiffly on a huge throne-like sofa, her small frame dwarfed by the imperial red backrest that climbs half way up the wall. “I’m going to have to have coffee and water,” she says by way of beginning the conversation. “We’re on a totally different schedule but you have to have something delicious.”
After a little pleading from me, she agrees to play along and gamely saws some slivers off a couple of sausages, which she pronounces excellent. I manage half of a serving of scrambled eggs and salmon. Her assistant does marginally better than both of us, making solid progress on the clutter of patisseries on the table.
We talk about London, a city Albright first came to as a two-year-old when her family fled her native Prague in 1939. (They returned to Czechoslovakia after the war, but moved to the US after the communists took power.)
She says the second world war gave her a sense of “the importance of America’s involvement in international affairs and the goodness of American power”.
Ten years ago her parents were criticised in the press for failing to have told Albright that three of her grandparents were Jewish and had perished in Nazi camps. (She only learnt of their fate as she was taking office as secretary of state, after an investigation by The Washington Post.)
“The hardest through all of this was the allegations made about my parents, that drove me crazy,” she says. “They were the most loving, protective parents... People have no right to make judgments about people who they don’t know, who are not able to defend themselves and did nothing wrong.”
Albright’s father, Josef, is also a link with Condoleezza Rice, the current secretary of state, who was his favourite student when he taught international relations at the University of Denver.
In a passage hidden away in a footnote in her autobiography, Albright writes of her amazed reaction 18 years ago on learning that Rice was a Republican. “How could that be?” she asked the younger woman. “We had the same father.”
“I can’t say we have a relationship,” Albright says of Rice. “We have a bond through my father and I feel she has been very generous to talk about the importance that my father played in her life.”
But what does she make of how Rice is doing in her old job? “I think she probably wonders how things are going,” Albright says, alluding to Iraq. “Kosovo was a relatively short war, 78 days, and I worried every night as to whether we’d done the right thing... so I’m sure she worries about that.”
Albright herself seems to be affected by two frustrations. The first is that George W. Bush’s administration has in her eyes made the world a much worse place in which to live. The second is that she is not in power any more.
“We have damaged our reputation very badly,” she says. “Iraq may turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy, which by its very nature means that it is worse than Vietnam... It is in the middle of the most volatile area in the world.”
She has just published another book, The Mighty and the Almighty, about governments’ failure to take due account of religious feelings. Albright argues the USSR and the US underestimated the role of religion in places such as Afghanistan and Iran, and the world’s great powers still need to do much more to factor religion into their equations.
She is promoting the book at a hectic pace. The week after our breakfast she is scheduled to travel to Sweden, the Netherlands and Russia, returning to her Washington DC home only for a change of clothes.
“It’s taken me a very long time to develop a career and I’m not ready to give it up, so I do a lot of different things,” she says.
Indeed, she seems to have multiple careers. She works as a consultant, a professor at Georgetown University and heads an anti-poverty commission and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.
Such hyperactivity is nothing new. When she was secretary of state she was so busy that her daughter had to manage her life, scolding her for travelling to flashpoints in the Balkans and for spending too much on shoes.
Would she like to serve in office again? Sure, says the 69-year-old. “I loved being secretary of state - there was nothing better I did in my life... But you don’t get to go around twice as secretary of state.”
She reaches over the table and investigates a muffin. “I definitely can’t eat this,” she says after a semi-bite. “This is chocolate... Can’t have chocolate. Given up chocolate.”
Might she want a croissant, instead?
“No,” she says, a hint of steel in her voice.
She brushes away my attempt to bring up the Lewinsky affair as firmly as she did the chocolate muffin.
“As far as his policies are concerned, every passing day Bill Clinton will look like what he really is - a great American president,” she says. “A great force of nature... Unbelievably smart.” She remembers she would be irritated when he worked on crossword puzzles during briefings but how afterwards he would show he had taken in every word.
But didn’t his legacy fall far short of his promise? In his last year in office, despite hectic negotiations, there was no historic deal on the Middle East or on Korea.
In fact, her new book notes that the deal Clinton proposed for sharing out Jerusalem was uncannily similar to one suggested by Richard the Lionheart in 1192. Maybe many more centuries will have to go by before the region finds a lasting peace.
“The mistake we made was that while [Palestinian leader Yassir] Arafat could certainly make decisions about the size of the Palestinian state because he was their elected leader, he was not in a position to make the decisions about the disposition of the holy places because he wasn’t the only one within the Arab world who had responsibility for that,” she says. “And when we started calling people about it, it was too late.”
In retrospect, Albright says, Clinton should have gone to North Korea rather than spend the last days of his presidency at Camp David trying to get a Middle East deal.
Another regret is Iran. Clinton had hoped he could establish an understanding with the relatively liberal government of Mohammad Khatami in the late 1990s and once sought to shake Khatami’s hand at the UN. But mutual distrust and limits on the Iranian president’s power prevented any breakthrough.
Now Iran is involved in a face-off with the world’s big powers over its nuclear programme. Albright is as nervous as anyone else, and asks me whether Jack Straw, lately Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, was sacked for opposing military action.
She is very glum about the state of the world. To cheer her up, I foolishly suggest that western and central Europe is in reasonable shape compared with the divisions of the cold war era. She snorts in disbelief, pointing to Poland’s rightwing government and the continent’s failure to come to terms with large-scale immigration from the south.
It is a slightly sour note on which to end the breakfast. Albright gets up to go. “Please don’t say that I chose this table,” she says, pointing to the preposterous red sofa that is too regal for her taste. I promise not to. And then the former secretary of state leaves, still energetic, still wistful for the days when she had a real seat of power.
The Dorchester Grill Room, London
1 x orange juice
1 x breakfast cereal
2 x pork sausages
1 x scrambled eggs with salmon
2 x white toast
2 x coffee
Total: ₤55.30