AS a woman and a former Czech refugee Madeleine Albright had made history by being appointed to the most senior post in President Clinton cabinet. If she had been a natural born citizen, she would also be third in line to succeed the US president.
The president agonised for weeks over the appointment as the stars of contenders such as George Mitchell rose and fell. Albright's star seemed in free fall when anonymous White House sources began describing her as "second tier".
The message was clear. Albright, even with her impressive foreign policy credentials, was not heavyweight enough for the most envied job in the United States after president. The prestigious post was for some male in a suit who would deal with the males running other countries.
The notorious "glass ceiling" or invisible barrier which keeps qualified women from ascending to the top of their profession was firmly in place where Albright was concerned. Or so many women's groups believed and they lost no time telling President Clinton and his aides what they thought of the "second tier" put down.
There was speculation that Hillary Clinton lobbied for Albright at the crucial time. Albright had accompanied Mrs Clinton on her tour of eastern European countries last year and they hit it off very well.
It was a difficult issue for the president, who has a good record on ending gender discrimination in public life and who had just been re elected with the help of almost 60 per cent of women's votes. But suddenly Albright's name was back in the ring and rising.
When he announced his choice of Albright, the president was at pains to deny her gender had anything to do with it. But when asked if he was proud of appointing the first woman to the post he answered: "You bet I am. My mama's smiling down at me right now."
Feminists who had lobbied for her were understandably delighted but realised that it would be unfair to Albright if people believed she got the job because she was a woman. The wide acclaim which greeted her appointment showed that this was not the case, but women now hope she will bring, a feminist perspective to US foreign policy as she did in her previous post as ambassador to the United Nations.
Her blunt condemnation of the attitude to women by the Taliban fundamentalist group which seized power in Afghanistan resonated. The Taliban, Albright said, would "essentially deprive women of all rights, except the right to remain silent, indoors, uneducated and invisible".
Albright's career could not be a more striking contrast to such a model. She combined marriage and child raising with education to PhD level, work as a foreign policy adviser and teaching stints. Her three daughters proudly watched as their mother was sworn in at the White House.
In the end the marriage suffered and died. One day in 1982 after Albright, then 45, had served in the President Carter administration, her husband, multi millionaire newspaper publisher Joseph Albright, told her "this marriage is dead" and that he was in love with another woman.
She has said that this was the "greatest setback" in her life. But she was left a wealthy woman, with a house in the fashionable Georgetown quarter of Washington, a farm in Virginia and a healthy investment portfolio.
From childhood she had become accustomed to sudden shocks. After she was born Marie Jana Korbel in Prague in 1937, her diplomat father Josef was forced to flee with his family from the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia.
After exile in London during the second World War, Josef was appointed Czech ambassador to Yugoslavia and Marie was sent at age 10 to boarding school in Switzerland where she acquired the name Madeleine. But then the communist takeover in Prague forced the family into another flight, this time to the US, where Josef found a university teaching post in Denver, Colorado.
Madeleine won a scholarship to the prestigious Wellesley College, where she was followed years later by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Earlier Madeleine had won the Rocky Mountain Empire United Nations contest by reciting all the UN member countries in alphabetical order.
On graduating from Wellesley, she married her college sweetheart, Joseph Albright. Over the next decade, while she raised her "three daughters, she rose at 4.30 a.m. to work on her master's thesis for Columbia University.
HER doctoral dissertation on the role of the press in the 1968 Prague Spring was supervised by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was later to be an influential contact when he became President Carter's national security adviser and got her a post on his staff.
Another important contact was Senator Edmund Muskie, on whose campaign as a Democratic presidential candidate Albright worked in 1972. Later she became his legislative assistant, building political contacts in both parties.
In the 1980s Albright taught in Georgetown University and held political salons in her nearby home which were frequented by an ambitious Arkansas governor called Bill Clinton. She tutored him in foreign policy issues and introduced him to Washington movers and shakers.
In 1993 he was able to repay her by appointing her to the UN, although not as his first choice - said to be Ron Brown, who opted for Commerce Secretary instead. At the UN she found herself as "the only skirt among 14 suits on the Security Council". She was also the only ambassador who could speak French and Czech fluently and Russian and Polish fairly well.
She was not too popular with the suits and was nicknamed "Queen of the Mean" for her outspoken presentations of US policy and her penchant for TV cameras.
Her unrelenting campaign to oust the Secretary General Dr Boutros Boutros Ghali, isolated her at the UN but in the end she succeeded and helped ensure the succession of the US favoured candidate, Koffi Annan of Ghana. Even her critics acknowledged her double success.
She could be brusque with journalists who treated her differently from male ambassadors and let her frustration surface in an interview. "When I work, I really work. I rub my eyes and my make up comes off and I stick pencils in my hair. So I've given up. If some days my hair doesn't look great or some days I look overdone, so be it. Or if I wear a red suit and one of the female reporters says I look like a fat little red ball, that's her, problem."
She used to hold a monthly lunch for the seven other women ambassadors out of 185. Albright also showed her sensitivity to the sufferings endured by women caught up in wars, such as rape. Her friend Senator Barbara Mikulski says that Albright "not only understands what happens to, women in war and in sweatshops - and in brothels, but she can articulate it in foreign policy terms".
Even that American hero, General Colin Powell, felt her lash when as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff he clashed with her over US armed intervention in Bosnia, which she was pushing for. In his memoirs he recalls her, asking at a cabinet meeting "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Powell writes that "I thought I would have an aneurysm" as his doctrine of military intervention only as a last resort was challenged by Albright.
She shocked the suits at the UN but delighted her boss President Clinton with her repartee at the UN when the Cuban airforce shot down an American civilian plane, killing anti Castro protesters. "This is not cojones [Spanish for testicles or "balls"]. This is cowardice."
Clinton called it "probably the most effective one liner in the whole administration's foreign" policy."
Albright has described Saddam Hussein as a "dime store bully". When a demonstrator outside the UN shouted at her in Serbo Croat, "Why are you so awful to the Serbs?" the multilingual Albright answered, "Because they are awful."
In her new post, some observers detect a second Madeleine Albright who seems more restrained in campaigning for human rights and less prepared than colleagues to offend China and Saudi Arabia. Where once she saw little need to tinker with NATO she will now push vigorously for its enlargement.
Now she occupies a powerful post which only last summer, she confided to a journalist, seemed "totally impossible" for her. As the president looked on approvingly during her swearing in last week, Albright recalled that "my life reflects both the turbulence of Europe in the middle of this century and the tolerance and generosity of America throughout its existence".
In another time, she said, "the only way I might have found toe influence foreign policy was by marrying a diplomat and then pouring tea on an offending ambassador's lap".
Now she can bawl off the offenders while a male aide offers them tea.