Columbia Magazine


Courtesy of The White House
When she became a member of the Carter administration, Albright was reunited with National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, her former Columbia mentor.

In her 2003 autobiography, Madam Secretary, Albright writes: “Getting my Ph.D. was the hardest task I have ever faced on my own. It took thirteen years. I began when [my daughters] Anne and Alice were barely out of their cribs. When I finished, they were in high school. In between they taunted me, saying they shouldn’t have to finish their homework if I couldn’t finish mine.”

Her Columbia career began in the summer of 1963. She and her family moved from Washington, DC, to Long Island, where Albright’s then husband, Joseph Medill Albright, had been called to work at the family-owned Newsday newspaper. In Madam Secretary, she describes the great promise of that period in her life.

Our move there also proved beneficial to my academic career. I was able to continue my graduate work at Col-umbia University. In addition to working toward my Ph.D., I decided to try to obtain a certificate from the university’s Russian Institute, considered the finest in the country. This meant I had to take even more courses, so I drove into town three days a week. The rest of the time I spent being a Long Island wife, mother, and tamer of an overgrown garden. With help I made it work. [. . .]

My work at Columbia was demanding, and I often wondered why I had set such a hard course for myself. The answer was that I found it exhilarating. There couldn’t have been a better time to be doing Soviet studies. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis had demonstrated the life-and-death stakes involved in trying to understand the mysteries of the Soviet system, and I had the best professors from whom to learn. The faculty was a Who’s Who in Communist studies — Seweryn Bialer, Alexander Dallin, John Hazard, Donald Zagoria, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would later become President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, and my boss.

I first met Brzezinski when, as a young Harvard professor, he had come to give a lecture at Wellesley. In the interim he had published The Soviet Bloc, a perceptive analysis of how Stalin had put together his empire. He was still only in his mid-thirties but was already being quoted everywhere and was increasingly visible in policy circles. I thought it essential to get into a seminar he was offering on comparative Communism, itself a novel idea. With all respect to my other former professors, I judged it the best course I took in graduate school. The professor was challenging, the material totally new, and the students all thought they were the best. Brzezinski assigned lengthy readings in Russian without questioning our ability to understand them. Because he was a good friend of my friends the Gardners and I was older than most students, I was able to see his human side. To most of his students, however, he seemed unapproachable. He was brilliant, did not put up with blather, and while he spoke with a Polish accent, he did so in perfect, clear paragraphs. Even at this time there was little doubt he was going to play an important role in U.S. foreign policy.

On the first day Brzezinski asked for a volunteer to be the first to deliver an oral report. Silence. We all knew that whoever was first would have less time to prepare and no examples from which to profit. More silence. The smart thing was to wait, even if Brzezinski grew impatient. My hand shot up. Whether father or professor, I had to please. I’m not sure Brzezinski appreciated my “sacrifice,” but I never forgot it, and today there is a special place in my heart for any student of mine willing to do that first report.

At semester’s end I turned in my paper comparing how nationalism and Com-munism had developed in Yugoslavia and Vietnam, slipping it under Brzezinski’s locked office door with a note asking him to send me my grade. Dread hit me the moment the note was out of sight—the same dread that would strike many times in subsequent years when I worked for him in the White House: How had I spelled his name? “B-r-z-e-z. . .” or, God forbid, “B-r-e-z”? I’ve still got the note, which remained attached to my paper when I got it back. Brzezinski had given me an A minus, and I had spelled his name correctly.