THE BEAMING grandmother who stood beside President Clinton in the Oval Office of the White House last Thursday had a lot to smile about. She had just become the most powerful woman in US history.
At 59, Madeleine Korbel Albright has been named the first woman Secretary of State and will direct the country's foreign policy over the next four years. Under the Constitution she is fourth in succession to the presidency (but can never be president as she was not born in the United States).
She came to the US in 1948 at the age of 11, a refugee with her diplomat father from Czechoslovakia where the communists had just taken over. Earlier the Korbel family had been forced to flee to Yugoslavia from the Nazi takeover following the sell-out of Czechoslovakia in Munich.
These two traumatic events have defined the new leader of, American diplomacy. As she puts it herself: "My mindset is Munich; most of my generation's was Vietnam."
She has said: "I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight. For me America is really, truly, the indispensable nation."
For women she is now an inspirational figure. She combined marriage, motherhood and a professional career which has led her to the highest she can go. Her marriage to Joseph Albright, heir to a newspaper chain, ended abruptly in 1981 when he asked for a divorce leaving her to rear three daughters.
President Clinton was careful to insist that he had not chosen her because she was a woman but could not resist showing pride in what is being termed his "ground-breaking step".
"Am I proud that I got a chance to appoint the first woman Secretary of State?" he said. "You bet I am. My mamma's smiling down at me right now," he added referring to Virginia Kelley who died two years ago.
Women's organisations had lobbied hard with Vice-President Gore for better representation of women in senior posts and had Albright high on their list.
Patricia Ireland, head of the National Organisation for Women, said that Albright's appointment is "one of the historic moments" for women, a moment for people to "mark in their calendars".
The influence of Hillary Rodham Clinton is also seen in the appointment.
To her three daughters who were present in the Oval Office Albright said: "All I can say is that all your lives I've worried about where you were and what you were up to. New you will have the chance to worry about me."
They won't really have to worry. Madeleine Albright can take care of herself. As ambassador to the UN she made her mark as an outspoken proponent of US policy and a master of the sound-bite.
When she denounced the shooting down by the Cuban air force of an unarmed plane with Cuban refugee protesters, Albright shocked some diplomats by telling the Security Council this was "not cojones [testicles] but cowardice".
She was an unapologetic defender of the US policy of denying the Secretary General, Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a second term although she had praised his performance two years earlier. Critics believe that she persuaded the Clinton administration to gel rid of Boutros and then handled it clumsily but this has not done her any harm in Washington.
As a member of the Clinton cabinet in the first term, Albright was a strong supporter of using force to stop Serb atrocities in Bosnia. Her central European origins and hatred of dictatorships make her uncompromising where others waver.
She was on the receiving end of Serb anger last March when she toured the Croatian city of Vukovar and was surrounded by Serbs screaming "Kucko, kucko" (Bitch, bitch). She urged her aides to walk with dignity and return to the motorcade.
There are few who would have understood what she was being called. Albright understands some Serbo-Croat, speaks fluently Czech, French, and some Polish and Russian.
Her critics say she is not an intellectual, although she has a PhD in government, and has no "global Vision" for US foreign policy. The critics are men, of course.
One man who thinks she'll do well is Bill Clinton, who admires her "steely determination which has helped to advance our interests and our ideals around the world."
The world has been warned.