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Politics

Madeleine Albright, 1st female US secretary of state, dies

Madeleine Albright served as secretary of state under President Clinton from 1997 until 2001.
Timothy Greenfield Sanders Harper Collins

Madeleine Albright, the first female U.S. secretary of state, has died of cancer, her family said Wednesday. She was 84.

President Bill Clinton chose Albright as America’s top diplomat in 1996, and she served in that capacity for the last four years of the Clinton administration.

At the time, she was the highest-ranking woman in the history of U.S. government. She was not in the line of succession for the presidency, however, because she was a native of Czechoslovakia.