Another Monday, another zoom lecture. Today’s lecture was a fabulous one “Virtual Election 2020 U.S. Foreign Policy Forum” with the amazing Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Dr. Richard Haass who is the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, and hosted by Juju Chang from ABC News and Nightline.
Some serious topics were discussed aka China and Russia, but one fun part was when Secretary Albright talked about how she had been on the TV shows “The Gilmore Girls” (I remember seeing her on that episode), “Parks and Recreation”, and “Madam Secretary” where she, Hillary Clinton, and General Colin Powell guest starred. Also fun was her comment on how she worked for a President that was a reader and assigned his staff books – she was told to read A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin. She was also wearing a fabulous brooches/pins.
Here is the background on the brooches/pins. Secretary Albright brooch/pin wearing was due to a newspaper poem which called her an “unparalleled serpent.” So she had a snake pin and wore it when they talked about what was going on with the sanctions on Iraq and the press picked up on this brooch/pin wearing. Then she decided to wear them to reflect what she thought they were going to do on any given day. So she went out and bought a lot of costume jewelry. On good days wore flowers, butterflies, and balloons and on bad days carnivorous animals, like spiders or bugs. Today’s pin was an owl for wisdom. Her collection has been traveling to different museums as they are part of the story of American foreign policy and she is donating them to the new National Museum of American Diplomacy.
