BLUNT BUT FLEXIBLE

General George Marshall's seems a curious portrait to adorn the Secretary of State's office in 1997, but the choice tells a lot about Madeleine Albright. The 1940s hero-diplomat crafted the ambitious economic plan that kept half of Europe on democracy's side. That world of us vs. them was swept away in 1989, but Albright still aspires to Marshall's "magic and very American approach," eager "to plant the seed" of democracy as he did. She has never forgotten how the people of her native Czechoslovakia, blocked by Stalin from joining the Marshall Plan, quietly absorbed American ideas even across a sealed border.

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