VOICE OF AMERICA

Madeleine Albright has never been the type to sit by her phone knitting, waiting for guys to call, unless the guy is the President and the date is with History. And so she was pleased last Tuesday when the phone rang and it was Clinton on the line. They talked for a while. He asked about the health of her friend Czech President Vaclav Havel, who has lung cancer. Clinton mused about the messy U.S. effort to unseat Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Then there came a pregnant pause. And then he thanked her and hung up.

When word spread, as it does, that the chronically coy President had called Albright, she started getting congratulatory messages from friends. Sheepishly, she had to tell them she hadn't got the Call. It wasn't until 48 hours later, early Thursday morning, that Clinton came on the line to ask her to be his next Secretary of State. And from that moment on, a friend says, she has been "walking 12 inches above the ground."

It was necessary and predictable that Clinton would insist he hadn't picked Albright because she is a woman, or because Hillary likes her, or because women's groups keep reminding him that they did much to get him re-elected. So it was left to her friends and admirers to revel in the idea of a Secretary of State who sorted out the future of Bosnia while cuddling a grandchild on her lap, who knits and cooks and wears red suits and goes antiquing with Barbra Streisand, who keeps a miniature broom in her office sent by a critic who called her a witch for supporting sanctions on Saddam Hussein, who passed out bags of cookies decorated with hearts to members of the Security Council on Valentine's Day. "I like this appointment better than anyone else," says Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan's U.N. ambassador. "This really represents a breakthrough."

Clinton likes the appointment too, for lots of other reasons. In Albright he has found an iron-willed, deeply political, media-savvy advocate for his foreign policy, whose lack of strategic vision matters less to him than her muscular instincts and ability to talk like the popular professor she once was. When he was trying to make up his mind whom to choose, he kept recalling a conversation with Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, who lobbied hard for Albright. A lot of diplomats may grasp the complexities of Bosnia, she told the President, but only Albright could explain why we were there in a way that Mikulski's late mother the grocer could understand.

The first U.S. ambassador to the U.N. to have her own Website, Albright understands communication to the point that she calls CNN "the 16th member of the Security Council." She also understands politics well enough to have so charmed Senate Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Jesse Helms that he was among the first to applaud her appointment. And she understands the world like a refugee, a multilingual, multicultural warrior for human rights and democratic principles. "At last," says a former diplomat in the Reagan and Bush State Departments, borrowing from Albright's well-known diatribe against Castro last year, "we have a Secretary of State with cojones."