Madeleine Albright died from cancer Wednesday at the age of 84.
The first female U.S. secretary of state was, at the end of the 20th century, one of the most powerful people in the world — a geopolitical force, crafting and executing policies that touched millions of people and shaped the course of world history.
She maintained a connection to Aspen throughout her life.
Her meteoric ascent to the height of international relations began with displacement, according to Dan Porterfield, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute.
“Her family had to flee Czechoslovakia, as it was then referred to, twice — once from Nazi occupation and then a second time from Soviet occupation,” he said. “She had this experience of vulnerability, of peril, of cultural dislocation, very early in her life. … In a sense, she lived the extraordinary historical dramas of Europe in the midcentury, and she brought that awareness into her entire life.”
Her father, an accomplished political scientist, was at odds with the Soviet regime. The family moved to the United States in 1948.
She recalled the story seven decades later at an Aspen Institute event in 2018.
“It was a time that the Rockefeller Foundation was finding jobs for central European intellectuals,” Albright said. “They found a job at the University of Denver. We had no idea what Denver was.”
The family’s introduction to Colorado came about the same time the Aspen Institute was getting off the ground.
"They were using local professors as resource people,” Albright recalled. “So I started coming up here when I was a teenager.”
The rich intellectual dialogue in Aspen stood in stark contrast to the suppression of free speech in her homeland.
“Her father came to the Aspen Institute's programs in Aspen and brought her during some of her formative youthful years,” Porterfield said. “She always had that association of Colorado and of Aspen as places of possibility — of tolerance, inclusion, dialogue — and the possibilities of people of goodwill, together, to construct a better world.”
Albright became an Aspen Institute board member in 2002, after serving as secretary of state during President Bill Clinton's second term, from 1997 to 2001.
“I just flat out have to say the only board I wanted to be on was the Aspen Institute board,” she said in 2018. “So I'm really delighted to be a part of this family.”
According to Porterfield, she was also an avid supporter of community organizations and local businesses in Aspen.
"She believed in localism,” he said.
She was an eager educator, teaching more than 2,000 students at Georgetown University and making time to mentor young people.
“We at the Aspen Institute benefited from that tremendously,” Porterfield said. “She invested her own personal time in our fellows, our staff, our interns and the greater Aspen community.
"She was one of our greatest board members, one of our greatest champions, one of our greatest inspirations. We were so proud that Aspen, Colorado, was her home base — and that the Aspen Institute was her home community.”
