THE BROOCH AS DIPLOMATIC TOOL Madeleine Albright, the first female US Secretary of State, was famed for her fierce and uncompromising negotiating skill, her love of brooches and for combining the two. She passed away in late March aged 84. Albright ran the US Department of State from 1996 to 2001. Just like Queen Elizabeth, who has a fondness for choosing her jewellery to make a political point, Albright wore her brooches as “diplomatic tools”. She once told a GIA symposium that she owned hundreds of them and that she preferred to call them “her pins.” It began in 1997 when, as US Ambassador to the United Nations, Albright was highly critical of Saddam Hussein. Hussein’s poetin-residence called her “an unparalleled serpent.” At her next encounter with Iraqi officials and with every meeting thereafter, Albright wore a snake brooch, even though, as she explained at the time, she did not like snakes. After Hussein fell, she wore a snake brooch with a dagger through it. Vladimir Putin confided to Bill Clinton that Russian diplomats routinely checked to see which brooch Albright was wearing. On the first day of difficult discussions involving nuclear arms, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov looked at her arrow-like pin for the day and inquired, “Is that one of your interceptor missiles?” She replied, “Yes, and as you can see, we know how to make them very small. So you’d better be ready to negotiate.” During a meeting about the Middle East, she wore a dove pin given to her by Leah Rabin, the widow of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995. After Cuban fighter pilots shot down two unarmed civilian aircraft, Albright wore a blue bird pin with its head pointing down, a symbol of mourning for the four Cuban-Americans who were killed. Albright chose her jewellery as a reflection of her mood, and readily admitted most of her pieces were costume jewellery. “I have bought jewellery everywhere,” she said, speaking to the Smithsonian Institution which arranged an exhibit of her pins. “On good days, I wore flowers and butterflies and balloons, and on bad days, all sorts of insects and carnivorous animals. When people said, on the [United Nations] Security Council, ‘What are we going to do today?’ I said, ‘Read my pins.’ ” As she matured and pins became part of her diplomatic persona, Albright grew to like larger and bolder, even crazier, pieces. Diplomats from around the world gifted her with brooches to celebrate their negotiations. As a longtime fan of Star Trek, Albright had space themed pins and brooches that she said signified hope. As a jazz fan, she had enough musical instrument pins to assemble a jazz ensemble on her shoulder. She became so renowned for her brooches, she wrote a book entitled Read My Pins. Albright received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour, from President Barack Obama on May 29, 2012. She served as the US’s permanent representative to the United Nations from 1993 to 1997. Prior to 1992 was a member of president Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council and White House staff. In 2021 she was appointed Chair of the Defence Policy Board, a group tasked with providing the Secretary of Defence with independent, informed advice and opinion concerning matters of defence policy. 46 jewellery world - <strong>April</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
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