Madeleine Albright will not like this splendid biography of herself by the journalist who unearthed her Jewish origins just as she reached the summit of her American odyssey by being appointed the first woman Secretary of State in US history.
His exhaustive research leads him to conclude that her "surprise" at learning of her Jewish roots was not genuine. He believes she had evidence from at least the ending of the Cold War, but ignored it. "There are simply too many contradictions and inconsistencies in her story for it to be believable." It is a harsh judgment and a disturbing aspect of what is otherwise the American Dream come true - but Mr Dobbs presents a convincing case.
As an odyssey, this life is like an adventure story as we follow the twists and turns of how Madeleine Korbel arrived in the US at age 11 with her penniless Czech parents and has risen to become Secretary of State. Her story is an inspiration to all immigrants, but above all to women in America about how determination, hard work and luck can get you to the top in spite of male opposition and prejudice.
Once you get there, often the only way is down as the begrudgers get to work - and Washington has plenty of them. Albright at present is taking heavy criticism for her handling of the build-up to the Kosovo crisis; but she is a fighter and history may yet record that she was largely instrumental in the ultimate destruction of Slobodan Milosevic, whose treatment of the Kosovar Albanians recalls the treatment of Europe's Jews in the Holocaust.
Belatedly, Albright discovered that she narrowly escaped the Auschwitz gas chambers as her Jewish parents fled to war-time London when she was an infant and escaped the fate of most of their relatives. In London, her diplomat father, Josef Korbel, decided to jettison the family's Jewish origins and he and the family converted to Catholicism.
In 1948, Korbel, now Czech ambassador in Belgrade, and his family had to flee again, this time from the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. Madeleine was 11 when she arrived in the US believing she and her parents were Catholic asylum-seekers. Thanks to her father's diplomatic contacts, the Korbels were able to grow up in comfortable circumstances in Denver, where he helped establish a college for international studies.
Madeleine won a scholarship to the prestigious Wellesly College in the East, met and married Joseph Albright, the heir to a newspaper fortune but had to convert to the Episcopalian faith to satisfy her anti-Catholic in-laws. After 23 years of marriage and rearing three daughters, she was left in shock when her husband told her one morning in their Georgetown home that "this marriage is dead and I'm in love with someone else."
In time, Madeleine Albright got over the trauma of the divorce and came to see it as a "huge turning point" which set her on the path which would take her to the most senior post in President Clinton's cabinet.
The divorce left her financially independent - but she had already launched herself on a political career working for Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie and then for President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had overseen her Ph.D when a professor in Columbia University.
While cultivating valuable Washington contacts, she improved her academic credentials with a stint at Georgetown University, and her Democratic credentials working for Geraldine Ferraro's vice-presidential campaign in 1984 and as foreign policy adviser to Michael Dukakis in his failed Presidential run in 1988. This was when she got to know the rising young Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, whom she was to help in his own campaign. When he reached the White House in 1992, her reward was ambassador to the United Nations. She did not get on with the Secretary General, Dr Boutros-Boutros Ghali, who disparaged her privately as a "poor little girl out of her league."
He under-estimated the woman who helped ensure that he would not be reappointed to a second term. Jamie Rubin as Albright's press secretary, helped undermine the Secretary General, according to Mr Dobbs, by means of damaging leaks to the media. Rubin, who is now Albright's spokesperson in the State Department, is seen by Dobbs as an influential "image-maker" who is "extraordinarily adept at securing favourable media coverage for his boss."
Dobbs, while admiring her "steely" determination, sees flaws in her professional performance as the country's chief of diplomacy. Tony Lake, who was Clinton's first national security advisor, found her "excessively ideological" according to Dobbs. "Madeleine had a view and was able to articulate it well," Lake said. "Her weakness was working it through and translating it into real policy terms in ways that would help convince others."
Lake, incidentally, favoured George Mitchell as Secretary of State over Albright, according to Dobbs. But she got the job after President Clinton was lobbied heavily by the women's lobby, indignant at hearing Albright put down by the male establishment as "second tier". Dobbs sees a parallel for the Albright saga in the fictional "great Gatsby". "Like Gatsby, she has sought to escape her past, or rather remould it to suit her convenience. It is fitting that the past should have caught up with her at the very moment she achieved her greatest ambition."
This book, which has just been published in the US, is available from Internet bookselling outlets and through the Irish Times book service at 1850 30 60 60.