Albright's Old World Ways : Is the Secretary of State --Accustomed to Seeing Things in Black and White-A Cold Warrior Caught in the Wrong Decade?

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Two recent scenes from the life of Madeleine Korbel Albright: Independence, Mo., the home of the Truman Library, part of the iconography of the American Century. Albright--the most media-savvy secretary of State since Henry Kissinger--has fussed over every detail of this event. With a triumphant flick of her pen, she signs three former Soviet satellites into NATO, the mighty alliance created by Truman and his secretary of State, her personal hero and model, Dean Acheson. To a standing ovation, Albright holds the treaties aloft like trophies, her aquiline face beaming. She wipes away tears and in a triumphal speech yelps, "Hallelujah!" The signing is at once a coda to the cold war and the culmination of Albright's personal journey. A child of Munich (she was a toddler in Prague when Neville Chamberlain gave Czechoslovakia away to Hitler), she saw her homeland lost a second time to the communists. Now, as America's top diplomat, she has brought the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary into the fold on the eve of NATO's 50th anniversary next month. For Albright, says a close aide, the Mar. 12 event was "pure joy."

Scene Two: Rambouillet, France, late February. Standing atop a makeshift podium in a musty school gymnasium, taking questions, an exhausted Albright looks downcast, ashen-faced. After some of the hardest, most grueling negotiations of her life, U.S. credibility seems in a shambles. Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic has defied an American ultimatum to call off attacks on the renegade province of Kosovo. Even the Kosovar …