An interview with Madeleine Albright

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To get what you want in foreign policy, according to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, you’ve got military force at one end of the spectrum. And at the other end are words of reason. Somewhere in the middle is diplomacy, economic sanctions, foreign aid, and…pins. Brooches. Madeleine Albright’s extensive collection of brooches. Some are delicate, some are gaudy. And the messages they carry are as terse as a State Department cable. You can hear what those pins have said in “Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat’s Jewel Box.” Secretary Albright stopped by our studios to chat with Marco Werman.

• More about the book
• New Yorker Magazine Slideshow

Madeleine Albright discusses a different piece of jewelry she owns:

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, and this is The World.  To get what you want in foreign policy, according to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, you’ve got military force at one end of the spectrum.  And at the other end are words of reason.  Somewhere in the middle is diplomacy, economic sanctions, foreign aid, and…pins.  Brooches.  Madeleine Albright’s extensive collection of brooches, in fact.  Some delicate, some gaudy.  And the messages they carry are as terse as a State Department cable.  You can hear what those pins have said in “Read My Pins:  Stories from a Diplomat’s Jewel Box.”  Madame Secretary, thank you for coming in.  They’re on display right now at the Museum of Arts and Design?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: They are.  And Marco, it’s great to be with you.  And I have to say, the show is fabulous and surprised me a little bit….  Since I, at home, keep these things in hanging plastic bags.  It all started because Saddam Hussein, I was ambassador at the UN.  We had a lot of sanctions, resolutions after the Gulf War.  There was a poem in their controlled press in which he called me an “unparalleled serpent.”  And I happened to have a snake pin.  So I wore that.  And then I thought, ‘Well this is fun.’  So, I then bought a bunch of other mostly costume jewelry, just to declare what my mood was.

WERMAN: Right, and it’s about messages, sending messages out to the public and other diplomats.  Did people get the snake pin?  Did they understand what it meant?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I think they did.  And finally they all got it, to some extent or another.  And they would look to see what I was wearing.  And then of course, I think people remember the first President Bush said, “Read my lips, no new taxes.”  So that’s why, when they said, “What are we doing today?”  I’d say “Read my pins.”

WERMAN: [LAUGHS]  Men are relatively limited in what they can use, dress wise, to express themselves.  We’ve got a suit and tie.  You must have discovered pretty early on that you had a whole arsenal of tools that men didn’t.  Was that empowering?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I think it was.  You know, there was a whole question mark about whether a woman could be Secretary of State.  And as you’ve probably noticed, there are more comments about what women wear, their haircuts, or whatever, than ever happens to a man. So I decided, I love being a woman, and decided I would wear bright colors and get some good clothes.  And so the pins were just an addition to that.

WERMAN: You know, you point out in your book men do wear pins, too, and we see them all the time.  Generals:  their power is kind of encoded with silk color pins on their chests in North Korea, loyalty to the leader, and the Communist Party via pins.  And of course, here in the US, we can’t forget the little flag pins.  And this was brought to bear on President Obama during the campaign when he was pestered about not wearing a flag pin, then he put one on.  It seems like there’s almost a small amount of pressure to wear the flag pin. What are your thoughts?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I think, I love to wear my Americana.  But I do it by choice.  And it’s really only in countries with dictatorships where people have to wear the face of the dictator, [PH] Kim Chanyo for instance, or Mao Zedong.  And I thought it was really silly.  I mean, President Obama was a patriotic candidate, he’s definitely a patriotic president.  And so to have that be some kind of a test of loyalty…. It’s one thing to wear things by choice, it’s another to force people to do it.

WERMAN: Let’s put you in the present, briefly.  If you had been in the room yesterday in Geneva with the Iranians, what pin would you have worn?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I have a great pin.  It is a dove and an eagle. And it really would in fact…I think, symbolize what’s supposed to be going on there, which is incentives and disincentives.  Of really offering some way the Iranians can come into the system, but making very clear that there is the strength of international unity to push them on some of these issues.  So that’s what I would have worn.  But we don’t know where this is headed.  Yesterday was actually a pretty good day in terms of what the Iranians had agreed to…inspections, and the possibility of bringing fuel in from outside and shipping some of their fuel out.  But as President Obama said, this is the beginning of the long road.

WERMAN: You were critical of foreign policy under President George W. Bush.  President Obama had promised, basically, a 180 degree turn from that, vowing to engage with people described previously as enemies.  Presumably, you support him in that?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Very much so. Because I think the issue here is, you have to talk to your enemies.  And there’s this misconception that talking is just “happy talk.”  I mean, I was in a lot of tough meetings where you’d deliver a very hard message.  You can’t do that if you do not have some kind of a relationship.  And so I fully agree.

WERMAN: There’s also the perception that if President Obama does engage with “so called enemies,” he’d appear weak.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I so disagree.  I know there’s this thing that “talking is appeasement, if you take responsibility for some bad action you’re apologizing…” I think that’s ridiculous.  What President Obama has done is really restore credibility to the American word.  To American character.  And so I think that you have to show the desire to at least listen and never forget your own national interests.  And I think that’s been happening, very much so.

WERMAN: Let me ask you, briefly, about Afghanistan.  What does Mister Obama do about this?  Because it has been, and is still arguably a haven for terrorists.  And yet can Mister Obama afford to put in   more troops to shut down that haven, especially when Afghanistan doesn’t take well to foreign occupation.  When Al-Qaida can and is training in other places?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: What is happening now, which I have to say is very good decision making, is President Obama is gathering his National Security advisors to go over the situation there and what General [PH] McCrystal has suggested.  And for me, he is the epitome of what I called for in my previous book, “A Memo to the President,” in which I said we needed a “confident” president rather than a “certain” president.  Because confidence allows him to hear all these different views.  And I think he will be looking at various parts.  But it is hard.  Because I think if we pull out, then I think there is that vacuum that was there before.  If we have a massive force, then as you point out, we become an occupation force.  And NATO has a very large role in this.  So there are a lot of questions.  And I think President Obama’s going about this in the right way.

WERMAN: As I look through certain pictures in this book, it seems like a more innocent time.  Here’s a picture of you with the Egyptian president, [PH] Hasseim Hubarrec at the signing of an interim agreement between Israeli Prime Minister [PH] Ahoud Bereck and Palestinian Chairman [PH] Yassir Arafat.  Now if we look at what’s happening in the Middle East today, President Obama lost round one, if you will, when he failed to get a freeze on settlements.  How big of a setback was this, do you think?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I think that he, in many ways, had a good round by bringing Prime Minister [PH] Netanyahu and [PH] Malamud Abas, the President of the Palestinians together in New York.  But again, I think this is one of the most difficult issues out there.  Senator Mitchell, as the envoy, has been on the ground.  And I think it’s very important to have somebody that does it on a day to day basis…. There, I think, will be some forward movement and more talks.  But it is very, very hard.  And I do think that the US has to be in a position where we are the party, the only party, actually, that can bring the Palestinians and Israelis together.  But this is a long slog.

WERMAN: While we’re talking about the Middle East, tell us about the pins you’re wearing today.  You have matching earrings to go with it.  Were these the gifts from [PH] Laya Ravin?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Yes!  What happened was, [PH] Laya Ravin gave me a gift…the widow of [PH] Itzak Ravin…she gave me a dove pin in order to show, obviously, that peace was very important.  And I wore it whenever we had a Middle East speech.   I like it a lot, and it is on the cover of my book I wrote about God and religion in foreign police, “The Mighty and the Almighty.”  And Archbishop Tutu, really one of the remarkable people, said, “Religion is like a knife.  You can either shove it into somebody’s back, or cut bread with it.”  And religion is like that.  And so that’s why I wrote about it in terms of foreign policy and the dove seemed like an appropriate symbol for that.

WERMAN: Former Secretary of Sate, Madeleine Albright’s new book is called “Read My Pins:  Stories from a Diplomat’s Jewel Box.”  Madame Secretary, thank you so much for coming in.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Thanks, Marco.

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