Do we like them?

Do we like Madeleine Albright?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A trailblazer who backed democracy and women, held back by contested calls on Iraq sanctions and Rwanda, and thin on LGBTQ+ record.

Madeleine Albright was born in Prague in 1937, and her family fled Czechoslovakia in 1939, less than two weeks after Nazi Germany invaded. She learned of her family's Jewish heritage only later in life. That childhood of fleeing fascism and then communism shaped everything she did afterwards.

She worked on Edmund Muskie's 1972 presidential campaign, became US ambassador to the UN, and was tapped by Bill Clinton as Secretary of State in 1997. The Senate confirmed her 99-0, and she held the job for four years. She pushed hard for military action in Kosovo, which fans see as stopping ethnic cleansing and critics see as warmongering.

The line that dogs her is from a 1996 60 Minutes interview. Asked about reports of Iraqi children dying under sanctions, she called it a very hard choice but said the price was worth it. Critics have thrown it at her ever since, including in the pieces that ran when she died. The 500,000 figure came from the interviewer's question and is itself disputed.

On Rwanda, a Salon piece argues that as UN ambassador in 1994 she helped block stronger UN action, and she later called it a great regret. That is one side of a heated argument, from a partisan outlet, so take it as a claim rather than settled fact. In 2016 she told a rally there was a “special place in hell” for women who don't help other women, then walked it back.

On the harm test, we found nothing from her against LGBTQ+ people, migrants or the planet, and that is a gap in what we could read rather than a clean bill. Her late-career writing was aimed squarely at authoritarians. In Fascism: A Warning she called Trump “the most anti-democratic leader that I have studied in American history”, while saying she did not call him a fascist.

The good stuff is real. She broke a glass ceiling that had stood for over 200 years and spent decades mentoring women, and she apologised in 2019 for mocking Mitt Romney's Russia comments. Nothing new has turned up on her lately, as she died in 2022. Where you land depends on whether you weigh the Iraq and Rwanda calls above or below her democracy work.