Public Officials and the Press: Madeleine Albright

Her ex-husband, Joseph Albright, was a newspaper family heir ... his great-great grandfather Joseph Medill had built up the Chicago Tribune, and his grandfather, Joseph Medill Patterson, founded the New York Daily News. He eventually became a reporter and told her in 1982 that if he won a Pulitzer for his series on snub-nosed revolvers, he would stay married to her and if not, they would divorce. He didn't and they did.

Yet even Mrs. Albright complains of mistreatment by the press. She tells of a question by Lesley Stahl on "60 Minutes" in 1996 that she feels was deceptively phrased and meant to entrap her.

"We have heard that half a million children (in Iraq) have died" as a result of UN sanctions supported by the USA, Stahl asked, even though medicine and food were not embargoed. Stahl continued, "I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright replied, "I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it."

Reflecting afterward, she said her reply had been "a terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy and wrong." She said, "I had fallen into a trap." What should she have done instead? "I should have answered the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaws in the premise behind it."

In 1997, news broke that 1) she was Jewish and hadn't even known it, and 2) three of her grandparents died in the Holocaust. During the resulting furor, she said afterward, she didn't mind the press treating her family history as news ... "that was part of the price of becoming a public figure" .. or of asking straightforward questions or writing straightforward articles. "But it did not stop there."

Some critics said "it was 'impossible for me not to have known about my heritage. Others, including columnists I knew well, said it was 'peculiar' I didn't know or 'odd' that the secret had not been passed from mother to child, or that it seemed that I had 'not wanted to know' or shown a 'lack of curiosity.'

"The clear insinuation was that I was a liar."