Madeleine Albright

As the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of state, Albright helped shape American foreign policy through NATO's expansion and intervention in the Balkans during the Clinton administration. Born in Prague, she fled Czechoslovakia with her family after the 1948 communist coup, and only well into adulthood learned that her family had converted from Judaism and that several relatives had died in the Holocaust. She earned a PhD from Columbia writing on the Prague Spring before entering government, rising from UN ambassador to the top of the State Department in 1997.