LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Madeleine Albright : Representing the United States as World Looks to the United Nations

Soon after arriving at the United Nations in New York, Ambassador Madeleine Korbal Albright scoured the offices of the American mission to look for a work of art that she knew must be lurking somewhere. She finally put her hands on it--a bust of the most distinguished statesman to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. That bust of Adlai E. Stevenson now rests on a small bookcase opposite her desk, watching over her as she peruses official documents about infernal wars and consults by telephone with Washington in a job she never dreamed of having.

Albright, 55, a former professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and the divorced mother of three grown daughters, was a foreign-policy adviser to Michael S. Dukakis in his disastrous campaign of 1988 and a foreign-policy adviser to Bill Clinton in his triumphant campaign of 1992.

A specialist in Russian and East European affairs, she earned a doctorate in international affairs in the 1970s while raising a family and commuting part time from Washington to Columbia University in New York. She later worked for the Carter Administration’s National Security Council. After the Dukakis loss, she was named president of the Center for National Policy, a think tank close to the Democratic Party.

Most transition handicappers had put her down for the National Security Council, but Clinton surprised them by naming her as U.N. ambassador and making it a Cabinet-level appointment.

That made her the only foreign-born member of the Clinton Cabinet. Her father, a Czech diplomat, fled the communist takeover of his country in 1948, and became a professor at the University of Denver. When her appointment as ambassador was announced at White House ceremonies, Albright, in that session’s most poignant moment, said, “As a result of the generous spirit of the American people, our family had the privilege of growing up as free Americans. You can therefore understand how proud I will be to sit at the United Nations behind the nameplate that says, ‘United States of America.’ ”

Albright has a relaxed and informed manner that makes her sought after by TV talk shows. She does not, however, like to make news on her own and was reportedly upset recently when someone leaked her private memo to Clinton advocating the bombing of Bosnian Serbs. Although regarded as a foreign-policy wonk, she took on a different role several weeks ago when she represented the Democratic Party at the annual Gridiron Show of Washington correspondents and more than held her own trading one-line barbs with Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole of Kansas.

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Question: You really have three jobs: one, U.N. ambassador; two, member of the Cabinet, and, three, you’ve taken on the role of making speeches about the U.N. and U.S. policy toward the U.N. How difficult is it to do all three?

Answer: It’s only difficult in terms of the energy aspect of it, and the fact that they don’t all take place in New York City. But in terms of the substantive part of the job, I think they all go together extremely well. One strengthens the other, so let’s just take them in order.

The one about being U.S. ambassador to the U.N., I think, is, clearly, to have this job at this time is the luckiest and most fascinating thing that’s ever happened to me, because it is a moment when the United States government believes that working within the United Nations is good and positive and useful. . . .

My other job--you say Cabinet. But the truth is, the more relevant part in terms of day-to-day . . . United Nations action is my membership on the National Security Council. . . .

The first job already reinforces the second, because . . . I can come back and give the general mood of the Security Council. . . . I am bringing real information from a multilateral setting back into the inner groupings of the foreign-policy mechanism in Washington.

But again, the second also reinforces the first, because I can come back from one of those meetings and be able to give the people here a flavor of what is going on in our capital. . . .

The third part, about giving speeches, . . . President Clinton, as well as Secretary (of State Warren) Christopher, want very much to show the link between domestic and foreign policy. . . . If we are going to have support for American foreign policy--that it has to have--the public has to understand it. . . .

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Q: What about the problem of time? How do you judge if you’re putting too much time in Washington, too little in New York--the right amount of time?

A: The truth is, I won’t know that for a while. . . . I’m obviously spending the bulk of my time here. . . . But the Washington part will not be as intense later on, because at the beginning of an Administration, you go through policy-review processes. . . .

A recent weekend was fairly incredible. I was here until Friday at 11 o’clock at night. I got up at the crack of dawn and was reading, actually, and had already planned to go to Washington . . . when Ambassador (Jean-Bernard) Merimee (of France) called to say they wanted to have an emergency meeting of the Security Council.

Where should I be then? We decided that it was useful for me to be in Washington. Now I am blessed with an incredible staff up here. The deputy, Ambassador (Edward) Walker, he and I talked about this. We decided he was perfectly available to be over there while I went to Washington. What I didn’t expect was, when I came back at 8 o’clock at night--having worked all afternoon in Washington--the Security Council would still be going, and I was here until midnight. . . .

There is one part of my life that is a little harder to work out--and this is a funny kind of coincidence. Last week, . . . I accepted an award for being one of the outstanding mothers of the year. My daughters, whom I told, said, “Who voted?”

. . . It turns out this particular weekend was actually the only one that I had planned to spend with my kids--because one of my twins is having a baby. Somebody was giving a baby shower for her, and her twin sister was flying in from Seattle on the red eye, and my youngest daughter was coming up from Washington. I had thought, OK, this is one weekend I could do this. But the only time I spent with them was Sunday morning, from 9 to noon, when we went for a walk in Central Park.

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Q: Let me get you on policy for a minute, and talk about Bosnia. Some people here say it looks like the Clinton Administration is paralyzed on Bosnian policy. Is that a fair assessment?

A: No, absolutely not. What is happening is that--I think by all people’s assessment--we were dealt a very bad hand, the Clinton Administration, on Bosnia policy, having been pretty much left with a messy situation.

I can’t give you a number of hours, but clearly this has been a major issue that we have been seized with. We are in the process of an extremely serious policy review, where the President--who is somebody remarkably astute and careful about the way he analyzes things--is trying to acquire all pieces of information necessary for determining the direction in which the United States should go. . . .

So what’s going on is that you have a relatively new Administration sorting its way through an incredibly intractable situation and being very responsible to understand what the appropriate American role is in conjunction with our allies.

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Q: Do you have a feeling, if Bosnia does capitulate, that this would be on the conscience of the West?

A: I think it’s going to be a searing kind of event. . . . There is a sense we get of increasing public outrage at this but, at the same time, a desire to hold back active American participation. I think people are quite ambivalent about how they feel. Certainly, what I’ve noticed out on my speaking tours is we will get a close syncopation with the following two questions: “Don’t you think that the world cannot stand aside while this kind of thing goes on?” and “Please assure us that no American is going to be involved.” . . .

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Q: Do you see the U.N. getting more involved in the internal affairs of countries over human-rights problems?

A: . . . We are in a period where all the kind of ways that we used to talk about nation-states and sovereignty are changing. There are beginning to be very ill-defined questions about what’s internal and external. Theoretically, what we’re doing in Somalia is being involved in the internal affairs. . . . Fewer and fewer issues are specifically internal affairs. Those redefinitions are evolving. . . . . What is going to be harder are definitions of what are civil wars and what are cross-border wars, and how sovereignty defines all of that.

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Q: With all the emphasis on Bosnia now, do you feel there are major issues the Security Council had to ignore or not give enough time to?

A: The stunning part to me is how many issues the Security Council does do. If anybody had told me that the Security Council would meet this much in formal or informal sessions, I wouldn’t believe it. I have been telling the story that there were times, a couple of years ago, where there would be a phony meeting of the Security Council set up so that the president (of the Security Council) could have his picture taken once a month to show that it happened. Now, it’s constant. . . .

But what I am concerned about . . . is what happens in the non-CNN wars that we do take up in the Security Council? We have looked at Angola and we are beginning to talk about Sudan and we’ve talked about Mozambique. We’re about to go talk about Ngorno-Karabakh. . . . Those wars are not on CNN. The question is how the international community deals with that. The Security Council does talk about it. . . .

What I do regret, I have to tell you this, is I have been here since Feb. 1, and only once have I, twice, have I been officially able to emerge from the Security Council part of this. It is all-consuming.

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Q: You mean to go to the General Assembly?

A: Right. At the General Assembly committee on the climate change, I felt fabulous, because it was the first time we were able to deliver a really different Clinton message on climate. I remember people were kind of stunned.

First of all, it’s the first time, apparently, they’d seen the No. 1 U.S. ambassador. I gave a speech that was different, and in the course of it, even, people started sending me notes. So that was good.

Then, the other time I went into General Assembly--and we voted on the former Republic of Yugoslavia . . .

I keep saying this to everybody at the mission, that I would like to do more things to see the other members of the United Nations and to do something other than the Security Council. . . .

The other part I did want to mention, and I am overwhelmed--I think that is the right word--by the caliber of the people here as members representing their countries. Even though . . . we all might differ on some aspects of policy, a general sense that we are all involved in some precedent-setting activities of the Security Council. It’s a very high-level discussion and intense in terms of the sense that we’re involved in the next phase of the great experiment. . . .

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Q: Everybody talks about the U.N. as a sort of men’s club. You’re the only woman on the Security Council, the second American woman ambassador. How does that feel?

A: First of all, . . . it’s a great thrill to represent the United States. It’s absolutely stunning. And I’m sure that whether you’re male or female, you have the same feeling when you are representing the most powerful country in the world.

What I have found interesting--and maybe some of your women readers will identify with this--women very rarely walk into a group and decide to dominate it the first day or make their mark the first moment they walk in. I’ve talked to my women friends about this. It is our approach to life to kind of get the lay of the land a little bit, and see where things are. That is not what happens (at the U.N.), you can’t be like that and be the United States. . . . The other part, I think, as you’ve seen me on the road, I can be pretty tough, so it’s not a matter of being kind of a pushover. But there is an interesting sense about being the only woman.

There’s a sense doubly, I think, a tremendous sense of exhilaration about being a woman. There’s no question about that. Then the opposite sense, which is wishing there were more women there.