Hell And Other Destinations



Madeleine Albright: Hell and Other Destinations Thursday, May 14, 3PM PDT, Online Madeleine Albright, Former U.S. Secretary of State, Author, Hell and Other Destinations: A 21st Century Memoir In Conversation with Dr. Gloria Duffy, President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club Part of The Club’s Good Lit Series, Underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation In 2001, when Madeleine Albright was. Apr 14, 2020 POEHLER: What made you title it Hell and Other Destinations? ALBRIGHT: Well, there are really three reasons. First, all you have to do is look at the news. If we don’t wake up soon and start doing things differently, hell is precisely where we’re headed. Featuring black and white photographs throughout, Hell and Other Destinations reveals this remarkable figure at her bluntest, funniest, most intimate, and most serious. It is the tale of our times anchored in lessons for all time, narrated by an extraordinary woman with a matchless zest for life.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright joined me this morning to discuss her new book “Hell and Other Destinations”:

Audio:

Hell and Other Destinations reveals this remarkable figure at her bluntest, funniest, most intimate, and most serious. It is the tale of our times anchored in lessons for all time, narrated by an extraordinary woman with a matchless zest for life. Hell and Other Destinations: A 21st-Century Memoir. 4.03 Rating details 1,730 ratings 276 reviews. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albrigh reflects on the final stages of her career, and working productively into your her decades in this revealing, funny, and inspiring memoir.

Transcript:

HH: Playing Respect, because that’s a chapter title in a wonderful new book, Hell And Other Destinations by the prolific author and former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. Madame Secretary, welcome back to the Hugh Hewitt Show. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

MA: Well, great to be with you again, Hugh. Really fun. Look forward to the questions.

HH: Well, I’ve got to tell you I recently signed an eight year extension to do this show. I’m 64, and they said what, are you nuts? And I said well, you’ve got to read Madeleine Albright’s book, because nobody retires after they read this book.

MA: Definitely, you can’t retire. No, it would be a great loss.

HH: Well, I want to focus on where we agree. We agree, for example, that Marlene Malek is a rock star. That’s your quote. And I love the fact that your new memoir is suffused with bipartisan amiability.

MA: Well, I so believe in it. And it’s been the basis of a lot of my politics and action. And I hope I have proven it, because I do have a lot of Republican friends. And believe it or not, I was friends with Jesse Helms, as you well know. So…

HH: I love the story of getting on the Acela with General Powell and coming down from New York, but you’ve blown his cover. I now know what to look for. I’ve run into Dick Cheney on the Acela, so I’m not surprised. But most people don’t realize that former secretaries of State take the train.

MA: Definitely. I mean, it actually moves and gets there.

Hell And Other Destinations

HH: You have also been prolific in retirement like my first boss, Richard Nixon. You say your next book’s going to be Reveille for moderates. And by the way, I would encourage you to write that. I don’t think it’s really Reveille for moderates, do you, Secretary Albright?

MA: Well, I do think that we don’t need extremes. I am a centrist. And so you know, I do think that we need to find unity, and compromise is not a four-letter word. So I think that it’s important to kind of think about what can be done when we work together.

HH: I agree with you on that. I want to ask you about one thing in particular, though. You received the Medal of Freedom, and congratulations then and now. And you not only got that wonderful honor deserved, but you got to get it at the same time Bob Dylan did. That’s kind of unique, because he’s a Nobel Laureate.

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MA: It was, no question, but it was complicated, because he was being very, we were all there together, and he kind of came in late, and it was fascinating. But it was fun to be on there with him. And the whole thing, I have to tell you one funny story. John Glenn got it at the time, and we were all practicing on the stage. And he said something about well, how do we get down to get the medal? And I thought my God, you went to the Moon and we have to tell you how to do that?

HH: John Glenn, great Ohioan, first man in space. We love him for that. Tell me about, you know, I make little notes as I read a book. I noted that you gave the commencement address at your grandson, Daniel’s, high school commencement.

MA: Yeah.

HH: That’s got to be nerve wracking. What did you tell him?

MA: Well, I’ll tell you what I do when I do high school graduations. I do a survey of the students, and they don’t know that I’m doing it, because I ask questions about where, what their plans are and where they’re going, and then I can in fact talk about them, which is the important part about a commencement. So I kind of told them about what they could do and had to do in the future, and I so believe, I have to tell you, I’ve written in the book, and various talks about it when I talk about what I’m doing, I teach. And I have said, by the way, there’s never a book or speech that is given that doesn’t quote Robert Frost. So one that I like is the older I am, the younger are my teachers. And so I’m counting on the young people, so that’s what I kind of, I laid it on their shoulders.

HH: Well, it’s a pressure-filled moment. Now to something that I found astonishing and startling. On Page 315, the New York Times actually calls you for commentary and fact-checks on an advance obituary. This is both funny, ironic, and deeply appalling. But…

MA: I tell you, it was funnier than you think, because I had just been on a long trip. And I get out of the car, and I say to the person traveling with me, I’m dead. I’m feeling dead. And so then I get into the house, and there’s this phone call. And I thought hmm, okay, maybe I predicted something at that very moment, but it was funny.

HH: All right, before, I’ve got some serious stuff to talk with you as well, but I want to talk about WSB. You and I have Harry Rhoads in common, the Washington Speakers Bureau. You lift the curtain a little bit on what it’s like to be a speaker moving between venues, going through kitchens, exiting side doors. You haven’t stopped doing that, have you?

MA: No, I haven’t. And I love doing it, and I think Harry is terrific, and WSB, you know how fabulous they are and helpful.

HH: Yeah.

MA: And I think things are, it’s a little harder to do things at the moment, but they are looking at virtual stuff, and I love doing it. And I get to meet an awful lot of people that I wouldn’t have met otherwise. And as you can tell from the book, I’m an extrovert. I’m trying to learn to be an introvert. I’m not doing very well. But I love the questions people ask, and so it’s been a lot of fun, as I know you think it is, too.

HH: Yeah, Hell And Other Destinations is going to be another bestseller. I love the fact that you sort of condense Prague Winter, which I have not read, I’ve read your other, your memoir, but I haven’t read Prague Winter. I am almost certain that you and my wife are related, because there aren’t that many Czech Jews who get to the United States by one way or the other, or families as Jewish, Czech-Jew families. And I just thought it was great that you induce people, or you incentivize people to go off and read Prague Winter, which I didn’t really know much about until I read Hell And Other Destinations.

And

MA: Well, it’s interesting. I, basically, this is the third part of kind of my memoirs. I started out with Madame Secretary, and by the way, I truly do believe that people that have been in high office have a responsibility to write their memoirs, to kind of talk about what happened and the record. Everybody sees it from their own perspective, but then researchers can see it. The second was Prague Winter. And I went back into my background much more, and thought about what I learned out of my, from my parents, being a refugee twice. And so I thought it was important and then talk about what it was like to be a child during World War II. And it really, obviously, I didn’t even know how much it had affected my life in terms of my parents’ capability of dealing with something they couldn’t control. And so to me, it’s similar in some ways to what’s happening now, which is they couldn’t control when the bombs fell. They could only control their own behavior. We can’t control the virus. We can control our own behavior. So I keep looking for lessons, and so I think Prague Winter gives some. My Jewish story is fairly complicated, as you know, I didn’t know about it until 1996-’97. And so I’ve been putting that piece of my life story together.

HH: It is complicated. It’s fascinating. I agree with you on memoirs, by the way. I’ve had Secretary Kerry, Secretary Clinton, Secretary Rice, Secretary Powell as my guests. I haven’t been able to track down Jim Baker, yet, and I’ve only met George Schultz in person. But I do believe secretaries of State, you actually told Secretary Clinton that it was a better job than being president, because you didn’t have to worry about domestic politics.

MA: I said it even worse than that to her. I said and you don’t worry, have to worry about health care, and she said I love health care.

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HH: Yeah, she did. She’s a wonk. When she was on the show, she agreed with me on an unusual choice of book, World Without Mind by Franklin Foer. You do a lot of work with Silicon Valley through Albright Stonebridge. Are you concerned about concentration of information in the valley in the way that she and I are?

MA: Well, I think it’s a real issue, because it’s the tool, by the way, what is so fascinating is how we all have been entranced and captured by all the new ways to communicate. And I do think that there need to be ways to try to figure out what is going on, how to have, deal with privacy issues, how to deal with a variety of how things get on the social media. But I have to say I am guilty of plagiarizing a line from Silicon Valley which works so well to explain what’s going on in the world, which is people are talking to their governments on 21st Century technology. The governments listen to them on 20th Century technology, and provide 19th Century responses. And so that’s why there’s not as much faith in institutions as we need for a functioning democracy.

HH: Now Secretary Albright, the toughest question, or actually the most difficult. You are a diplomat. It oozes through the book, a professional diplomat, the UN, Foggy Bottom, your teaching at Georgetown. You’re very diplomatic about the People’s Republic of China in Hell And Other Destinations. Has your assessment of them changed in the aftermath of the stories coming out about this virus?

MA: Well, I’m very, you know, that what is clear to me is that China is, has an awful lot to answer for in response, and including in the initial coverup and its continuing lack of transparency, and frankly, the failure to cooperate fully with American and international medical authorities, and then also to shift the blame in the crisis. But I think the important part, and this is the diplomat part, I mean, diplomacy is a state of, it’s a craft, a state of art. And what you have to be able to do is tell it like it is, which I did when I was in office, and then also try to figure out where there are things we have to cooperate on, because the virus doesn’t know borders, or climate change doesn’t, and then where we compete, where we really talk about what they’re doing in the China Sea or how they are going around the world giving away things that may or may not work, a number of different things. I think that it’s important to understand, but I think that the relationship with what is more and more called the rising power, we have to figure out what our shared interests are, because in order to defeat the virus, and do everything else, so it’s a, what is often a statement, it’s complicated, which is an irritating statement, but it is.

HH: Oh, yeah, I have that in my notes. On Page 168, you always say to media interviews, it’s complicated. But I like that. Let me close by, on a high note, or actually a self-interested note. One of my hats is to run the Nixon Foundation, and thus to bring exhibits. I hope Read My Pins exhibit travels. I know it’s now safely ensconced at the State Department museum. But I thought it enchanting how you put that together. I didn’t know the story of the origin. I didn’t know Saddam Hussein started the whole pin thing.

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MA: Yeah.

HH: Or, but does that exhibit travel?

MA: Well, it’s not traveling, but it did travel. And I spent some time in the Nixon museum, and I think that it’s really important. The reason I even put it together, not for the greater glorification, but because they all have foreign policy stories.

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HH: Yes.

MA: And so I think, and that’s why I decided that I would give it to, the State Department has a new diplomacy museum that I would do that. And so I think that it’s important for people to, it’s a tool. I saw it as a diplomatic tool. And it was fun to begin, and it kind of got to be a thing. Today, just so you know, you can’t see me, but I have on a V pin, and the story with that is that during World War II, when we were in London, my father broadcast for BBC. And I’d listen to BBC. I was a little girl. And it was all began with the kettle drums doing the first notes of Beethoven’s 5th. And that is Morse code for victory. And so that’s why I’m wearing a V pin.

HH: Well, I am going to appeal to my friend, Secretary Pompeo, that he release the Read My Pins exhibit to Yorba Linda. I think it should just travel between the presidential libraries, because people would come and see it. Madeleine Albright, congratulations on another fine book, Hell And Other Destinations, in bookstores everywhere. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Madame Secretary.

MA: Good to talk to you. Terrific. Thanks much. Bye.

HH: Thank you.

End of interview.

Just out: Hell and Other Destinations by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

“For nearly twenty years, Albright has been in constant motion, navigating half a dozen professions, clashing with presidents and prime ministers, learning every day. Since leaving the State Department, she has blazed her own trail—and given voice to millions who yearn for respect, regardless of gender, background, or age.”

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  • Albright, Madeleine (Author)
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  • 384 Pages - 04/14/2020 (Publication Date) - Harper (Publisher)

Hell And Other Destinations Madeleine Albright

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