On July 26, 1997, Madeleine Albright was confirmed as the 64th Secretary of State of the United States — the first woman to hold the position, and at the time the highest-ranking woman ever in U.S. government.

Albright was born Marie Jana Körbelová in Prague in 1937. Her Jewish family converted to Catholicism and fled the Nazi occupation; after the war they returned, then fled again when the Communists seized Czechoslovakia in 1948. She grew up in the United States and did not learn until 1997 — the year she became Secretary of State — that three of her grandparents had died in Nazi concentration camps.

She had been U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations since 1993, where she was known for bluntness. When Boutros Boutros-Ghali resisted U.S. positions on Bosnia, Albright was the primary voice for intervention. When asked in 1996 whether the deaths of half a million Iraqi children from sanctions were worth the policy goals, she said on television that "we think the price is worth it" — a statement she later described as the greatest mistake of her career.

As Secretary of State she traveled to more countries than any previous Secretary, pressed for NATO expansion, and managed the Kosovo intervention. She died in 2022.

When asked what it meant to be the first woman Secretary of State, she said: "It's my hope that I am the first, not the only."