Worried about exposing their daughter in Belgrade state schools to Marxist indoctrination, however, the Korbels sent Marie to a private school in Switzerland and changed her name to Madeleine.
When Communists seized power in Prague in 1948, Mr. Korbel was forced to resign and again became a wanted man. Unwilling to return to Prague, he joined a United Nations commission and sent his family to London and then on to America. The family was reunited in New York, given political asylum and settled in Denver, where Mr. Korbel became a professor at the University of Denver.
At the Kent Denver School, Madeleine Korbel founded an international relations club and graduated in 1955. At Wellesley College, she studied political science, edited the school newspaper and graduated with honors in 1959. She also became an American citizen in 1957.
On a summer internship at The Denver Post, she met Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, the grandson of Joseph Medill Patterson, who founded The Daily News of New York, and the nephew of Alicia Patterson, the founder and editor of Newsday on Long Island.
In 1959, Ms. Korbel married Mr. Albright and converted to Episcopalianism. The couple had three daughters, the twins Alice and Anne, and Katie, and were divorced in 1983. In addition to Anne, Ms. Albright is survived by her other two daughters, along with her sister, Kathy Silva; her brother, John Korbel; and six grandchildren. She lived in Washington.
Introduction to Politics
In 1962, Ms. Albright began postgraduate work at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, a Washington-based division of Johns Hopkins University. At Columbia University, she earned a Russian certificate and a master’s degree in international affairs in 1968 and a doctorate in 1976.
She got into politics in 1972, raising funds for the losing presidential campaign of Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, a family friend, who named her his legislative aide. After Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential victory, Zbigniew Brzezinski became national security adviser and recruited his former Columbia student, Ms. Albright, as congressional liaison for Mr. Carter’s National Security Council.