Madeleine Albright

Born in Prague in 1937, she fled Czechoslovakia after the 1948 communist coup, her diplomat father resettling the family in Denver. She became a U.S. citizen in 1957, graduated from Wellesley, and earned a PhD from Columbia in 1975 with a thesis on the Prague Spring. She worked for Senator Edmund Muskie, then joined the National Security Council under Zbigniew Brzezinski until Carter left office in 1981. She taught at Georgetown through the 1980s and advised Democratic campaigns on foreign policy. After the 1992 election she helped assemble Clinton's National Security Council, then served as UN ambassador before her appointment as secretary of state in 1997. She held the post until 2001, later chairing a consulting firm, teaching at Georgetown, and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. She died in March 2022.