Madeleine Albright, First Woman to Serve as U.S. Secretary of State, Dies at 84

Her own experiences with authoritarian governments during her formative years shaped Ms. Albright’s approach to the world and meant she paid particular attention to issues in Eastern Europe. Her native Czechoslovakia fell under the sway of first Adolf Hitler, then

Joseph Stalin,

leading her family to flee the country.

“She was so smart, so well-informed and level-headed,” former President Bill Clinton said on CNN Wednesday. Mr. Clinton said he talked to Ms. Albright two weeks ago. “She spent the entire conversation talking about how Ukraine had to be defended,” he said.

A facility with languages—she spoke fluent Czech and French, and conversational Polish and Russian—enhanced her ability to build rapport with foreign counterparts. She remained friendly with Russia’s Yevgeny Primakov, a former intelligence chief who served as foreign minister and later prime minister, despite challenges in the relationship between their countries.

Ms. Albright penned a remembrance of Mr. Primakov in Foreign Policy upon his 2015 death, recalling their conversations about the state of U.S.-Russian relations.

“The challenge was bridging the divide between our approach to post-Cold War European security and Russia’s,” she wrote. “He loved his country. Yet he was pragmatic. He believed in the importance of solving difficult issues in U.S.-Russian relations. I miss that time.”

Her own personal experience with fascism made Ms. Albright a more effective diplomat, said James Rubin, who served as State Department spokesman under Ms. Albright.

Serbian leader

Slobodan Milosevic

committed genocide in Bosnia and would have done the same in Kosovo but for U.S. intervention, Mr. Rubin said. Ms. Albright “played a decisive role in gathering the forces of the West to stop a genocide before it happened and to not dither for years the way we did in Bosnia,” Mr. Rubin said.

As the first female secretary of state, Ms. Albright established a pattern that quickly became familiar: Two of the next three people to hold the post, Condoleezza Rice and

Hillary Clinton,

were women.

At the time of her appointment, Ms. Albright was the highest-ranking woman ever in the U.S. government; she later described her initial trepidation and facing sexist opposition not from foreign counterparts, but from Americans, although she expressed pride that other women followed her into the top diplomatic post.

While campaigning for Mrs. Clinton during the 2016 presidential race, Ms. Albright drew criticism for saying, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” Some prospective Democratic voters took umbrage at Ms. Albright, who was invoking an adage she had frequently used over the years.

Before becoming secretary in January 1997, Ms. Albright served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and was a member of then-President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council.

Born Marie Jana Korbelová on May 15, 1937 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to Czech diplomat Josef Korbel and Anna Spieglová, Ms. Albright was raised in and around London, as well as Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and was educated in Switzerland before her family immigrated to the U.S. in 1948.

She…