Madeleine Albright's pins reflect her diplomatic messages
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When then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright talked about the Middle East peace summit after appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Oct. 25, 1998, she wore a dove brooch and earrings given to her by Leah Rabin, widow of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. -
Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, See No Evil, pins by Iradj Moini. -
Madeleine Albright wore a jeweled flag when she met North Korean dictator Jung-Il.
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Madeleine Albright, the first female secretary of state, really knew how to stick it to Saddam Hussein.
After Ms. Albright, then ambassador to the United Nations, criticized the Iraqi dictator for refusing to cooperate with weapons inspectors after the Persian Gulf War, he had his minions call her a "serpent" in a poem published in the Iraqi press.
So, on her next trip to that country, Ms. Albright reached into her diplomatic tool -- er, jewel -- box and found her own serpent: a gold pin with the reptile coiled around a branch, which she wore on the visit.
Pittsburghers will be able to see that pin when "Read My Pins: The Madeleine Albright Collection" opens at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History on Tuesday.
Where: The Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Oakland. Runs from Tuesday to March 4, 2012. Originally organized by the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, it features more than 200 of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's jeweled pins and is the first project of the Carnegie Museum's newly launched Center for World Cultures.
Event: On Monday, Ms. Albright will speak at a sold-out lecture with the Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures series about the exhibition and her related book, "Read My Pins: Stories From a Diplomat's Jewel Box," which was published in 2009.
The exhibition -- and a sold-out lecture by Ms. Albright Monday night presented by Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures as one of its "Literary Evenings" -- inaugurates the museum's new Center for World Cultures, one of five strategic centers leveraging the museum's collections, research, exhibitions and public programming into more topical discussions and inquiry about current issues and dilemmas of the day.
It's fitting, perhaps, that "Read My Pins" is the center's kickoff show, because it combines the glitter, dazzle and variety of the 74-year-old Ms. Albright's vast pin collection with a real lesson into how visual cues can translate across cultures and affect foreign relations. There are 200 pins in this exhibit alone, none of them particularly valuable -- some Ms. Albright bought herself, some gifts from heads of state or children.
As diplomatic messages, they could be sharp (an enameled bee when conferring with Yasser Arafat), optimistic (a hammered gold sunburst when visiting Haiti), or patriotic (an enormous jeweled American flag when meeting North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il).
"At first it was kind of a game, but then it got to be more than that," said Ms. Albright, of her predilection for using pins as, she noted, "either a carrot or a stick" in a diplomatic encounter.
"I think it really started affecting conversations, at least in the beginning of a meeting," she said in a phone interview from her home in Washington, D.C., where she's a professor of international relations at Georgetown University.
"I love talking about foreign policy. I've done it my entire life. But I want to make it less foreign so that people can see its human side," she noted, when asked what she hoped to accomplish with this traveling exhibit. It has made seven stops prior to Pittsburgh, beginning in New York in 2009 and including the Smithsonian, the Clinton Library in Arkansas, and the Carter Center in Georgia.
Ms. Albright's pins mark the connection between her public and private self -- "there's this person who is the Madeleine Albright character, and then there's me" -- and her decision, when she became the first woman to be secretary of state, not to try to dress like a man.
This did backfire a bit when the most valuable pin in her collection, an antique American eagle, became unhinged when she was being sworn in as secretary of state in January 1997.
Still, "We need to be who we are," she said. "That means dressing appropriately, but emphasizing our feminine assets while having a little fun. And pins certainly make it very clear what your country's positions are."
Sometimes, as with the Russians, her pins would reflect warmth -- a gold spaceship brooch, for example, celebrated the two countries' space partnership. But another pin, shown on page 111 of her 2009 book "Read My Pins," is of an interceptor missile by metalsmith Lisa Vershbow.
Small, sharp angled, dramatic, it's the perfect accessory for those testy tete-a-tetes with the Russians when they balked at changing the antiballistic missile treaty.
"I was talking with the Russian foreign minister, and he looked at my pin and asked, 'Is that one of your interceptors?' and I said, 'Yes, and as you can see, we know how to make them very small, so you'd better be ready to negotiate."
Then there was the 1999 incident when the Russians bugged a State Department conference room, prompting the arrest of a Russian "diplomat" eavesdropping outside the building. At a subsequent meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov to deliver a "demarche" -- diplomatic parlance for a protest -- Ms. Albright wore an enormous bug on her shoulder by jewelry designer Iradj Moini.
Once she wore a piece upside down -- on purpose -- a jeweled bluebird. She'd bought the pin without any use in mind, and always wore it pointing upward, but on Feb. 24, 1996, she called a news conference to condemn Cuban fighter pilots shooting down two unarmed civilian aircraft over international waters between Cuba and Florida.
After leaving office in 2001, Ms. Albright didn't stop wearing pins -- although when she loaned many of them out for the exhibition, she found her personal stash depleted, "so people started giving me 'pity pins.' "
These days, though, "I'm just an ordinary citizen, and sometimes I get stopped by people when I'm not wearing a pin and they ask me why. Well, I've stopped wearing them when I travel because I don't want to have to do all that undressing for the security people."
Strangers haven't stopped trying to give pins to her, though. In 2006, she gave a speech at the D-Day Museum in New Orleans, an event delayed for a year by Hurricane Katrina, and at a reception afterward, a young man approached her with a box containing a diamond and amethyst pin that his father had given his mother for their 50th wedding anniversary.
"He told me that his mother had died as a result of Katrina, and both he and his father thought she would have liked me to have it."
She choked up, and, today, she calls it her "Katrina" pin, wearing it, she writes in her book, "as a reminder that jewelry's greatest value comes not from the intrinsic materials or brilliant designs but from the emotions we invest."
Those emotions include plenty of laughter as well as tears for this pioneering secretary of state.
There were practical reasons, for example, why Ms. Albright favored what some critics called her "big honker brooches": long necklaces tended to bounce around too much. Still, she was careful to place them high on the shoulder, "so they didn't look like pasties."
Once, though, South Korea's foreign minister made a comment intended to be off-the-record that he enjoyed hugging the U.S. secretary of state at meetings because she had "firm breasts."
After being asked to comment, Ms. Albright said, "Well, I have to have something to put these pins on."
Now that's diplomacy.
First Published December 11, 2011 12:00 am
