THE MANY LIVES OF MADELEINE

By NANCY GIBBS

By the time Madeleine Albright sinks into a wicker chair at a corner table in a quiet Georgetown restaurant, the circles under her eyes are dark and deep. She's running an hour late; she's skipped a reception at the Czech embassy. Her ambassador in Paris is dying. It has been a long day. The Merlot comes in a big glass.

When she is tired, she can slide, invisibly and gracefully, into auto-pilot, so she can keep on thinking even as she tells her stories. Her voice is at once warm and precise--her transitions seamless as she knits together bits of speeches, sweet childhood memories, op-ed arguments, motherly advice--so that even a recitation feels like a personal confidence, shared over dinner with a stranger and a tape recorder.

Here in the middle of her Star Is Born debut as Secretary of State, when the lights are brightest, Albright is the first to say that, yes, it's because she is a woman, but, she adds, it's also because of her story. She wears her biography like a brooch, a shiny tale of a refugee--first from Hitler, then Stalin--who fell in love with the country that saved her and fulfilled its promise of unlimited promise. But she has had reason to suspect for some years now that even she didn't know the whole story. And if she is distracted tonight, it may be because the story she has told and retold, the story that makes people cry when she is introduced at speeches, will by morning have been rewritten.

It was Albright's daughter Anne who told her that the Washington Post confirmed the rumors that have been spreading since Albright's name hit the headlines: that her parents were not raised as Catholics, celebrating family rituals of Easter and Christmas, as Albright had been told growing up. They were born Jews and converted. And her grandparents did not die of natural causes during the war. They died in the concentration camps.

It is fitting that her family secret is not about abuse or betrayal but about world history and diplomacy. And it is fitting too that the woman who grew up in four countries and speaks five languages now has an even more complicated identity. But for many Holocaust survivors who learn their family history as adults, the trauma lies not so much in the facts but in the fact that they were hidden. Albright, says her sister Kathy Silva, is the reincarnation of their father Josef Korbel. Albright studied what he studied. He set her standards for excellence, integrity and discipline. "A great deal of what I did," she says, "I did because I wanted to be like my father."

If it was hard to wrestle in private with his decision to rewrite the family history, it was harder to have to explain it in public, to defend her parents against the charge that their heroic story had been somehow airbrushed. Albright would tell a friend the night after the Post story broke that she felt shaken and somehow violated. The implications of the questioning--What did she know and when did she know it?--made it sound as though the story she was so proud of was somehow false, rather than incomplete. By the next day, she would be defending her parents to the New York Times, saying they "were the bravest people alive."

To be taken by surprise this way is an Albright nightmare. The revelation came just as she was enjoying the moment she had worked for--and her parents had prepared her for--her entire life, a life spent leaving nothing to chance. "There are lots of smart people who kind of slough off, and it eventually catches up with them," she says. She is the girl who organized her neatly underlined notes in college into 15 different colored notebooks. She rises before dawn and stays up late, reading everything. She rehearses sound bites so they sound unrehearsed. "I do not believe that things happen accidentally," she says. "I believe you earn them."

For a woman of her generation, who was told by her Wellesley graduation speaker that her role in life was to raise the next generation of educated citizens, becoming the highest-ranking female official in American history should have been triumph enough. But it is clear that Albright means to play a role unlike any Secretary of State before her--and is now consolidating the power she will need to do so. And, of course, no one is better suited to reinvent this role than a woman who, by design or default, has learned to reinvent herself so often.

STRATEGIC MOVES

The Sunday before the election last November, Senator Patrick Leahy, an old friend, sat across from Albright in the dining room of her apartment in New York City's Waldorf Towers. Secretary of State Warren Christopher had told Clinton privately that he planned to leave the job, and both Albright and Leahy knew it.

Leahy began playing the what-if game. What if you were Secretary of State? What would you do? He expected her to beg off the question as impolitic at this moment. Instead Albright spent the next 20 minutes giving him her worldview, almost as if she were rehearsing her testimony for a confirmation hearing.

Leahy returned to his hotel room that night and wrote in his diary, "This country would be well served if she were the next Secretary of State." What Albright did not tell the Senator that night was that she had prepared for that possibility very carefully.

And Bill Clinton, in his own way, had prepared for her. When he first took office, he made his foreign policy principles plain: he didn't have any. And that itself was almost a matter of principle. Three months into his presidency, he announced that "foreign policy is not what I came here to do." Christopher and his team were essentially custodians; all the hotshots were running domestic policy, and soon the State Department's budget was dropping and pieces of its portfolio were shifting over to Commerce and Treasury. Foreign policy became an extension of trade policy by other means: the bailout of Mexico, the passage of NAFTA, the concessions from China and Japan.

By the time Clinton was safely re-elected and considering his choices for his new team, he had learned to trust his instincts on foreign policy, thanks in part to successful interventions in Bosnia and Haiti. "He wanted the chemistry to be such that he would be his own chief policy designer," says a White House insider, "and that he would have people who would carry out his vision."

And so, in the beginning, there was the List. Albright was always on it; during her four years as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., she had treated CNN, as she said, as the 16th member of the Security Council and generally proved to be the Administration's most canny foreign policy salesman. And Clinton loves grand symbolic gestures. "You show him a glass ceiling, and he'll pick up a rock," says a senior aide. Her gender was not enough to guarantee her the job, but it certainly secured her place on the List.

Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan, who was interviewing candidates, warned Albright that lobbying for the job would backfire. "Did he tell you that he would take your case to the President himself?" Geraldine Ferraro asked her friend.

"No," Albright replied hesitantly.

"Then it's bulls___," said Ferraro.

Actually, by that point there wasn't much Albright could do, other than hope her investments would pay off. She had succeeded in winning over some crucial allies. When Hillary Clinton attended the U.N.'s women's conference in Beijing in September 1995, Albright spent the day with her. Albright "flew in, made a cameo appearance and then left," says a high-level participant. "I've known her for years, but it was the first time I was consciously aware of what a public persona she was." Albright also played tour guide when the First Lady visited Prague last July. "She advises her on international stuff, sends her memos and materials. Madeleine's great champion for this job was Mrs. Clinton. Knowing that, there was never any doubt in my mind she would get the job."

Another crucial convert was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's courtly porcupine, chairman Jesse Helms, who had signaled which candidates would never get past his committee. Aides say the North Carolina Senator always had a soft spot for Albright as a fellow full-throated anticommunist. He was delighted that she had ousted U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, loved her attacks on Cuba. But Albright wasn't taking chances. One day, as a favor to a friend, Helms called her in New York and asked if she would come to North Carolina to speak at a foundation luncheon.

"I'll come, but on one condition," Albright told Helms over the phone. "That you come with me and introduce me."

As the two whispered and joked on the dais, Elizabeth Fentress, the luncheon's organizer, says, "you might have thought they were old friends from high school." After lunch Helms draped his napkin over his arm like a waiter, grabbed the dessert tray from the center of the table and walked around to where Albright was sitting. "Madame Ambassador, may I serve you some dessert?" he said with a bow. By the time he escorted her to the airport that evening, they looked like they were on a date.

Within the White House, however, advisers joked about the "corporate board" lined up against her, like Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, as well as Jordan, who was on the transition team, and the new chief of staff and former investment banker Erskine Bowles. Albright's opponents argued that she was not "serious" enough, ill-prepared to manage the immense State Department superstructure and better at selling a strategy than forming one.

The "board" preferred longtime Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn or former Democratic majority leader George Mitchell. Al Gore favored Richard Holbrooke, the brilliant, arrogant implementer of the Bosnian peace accords. Nunn had heft, G.O.P. backing, big throw weight in Europe and the American South; and he was a creative thinker. But he was hardly a Clinton loyalist, having once declared that "Clinton has been a bright, young rising star in three different decades." Mitchell was competent but not exciting and had too many enemies on Capitol Hill. As for Holbrooke, he had the credentials and the media savvy, but the National Security Council team didn't care for his attention-getting style. With Albright, a senior nsc member said, "we get Holbrooke without the neurosis."

As Clinton was mulling over his decision, White House aides opposed to Albright's appointment leaked word that she had fallen to the second tier. "That was like, Kazzam!," says Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, a close friend. "It was an insult to all of us. And it gave us the opportunity to launch a full-court press." Mikulski lobbied Hillary Clinton over a veggie-burger lunch at the White House mess. Connecticut Representative Barbara Kennelly called Gore; Albright had always been his backup choice, and he was now concerned with transferring Clinton's support among women to his own political base. Albright herself had to move very carefully during this stage. She ran into Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala outside the White House mess. "Whadda ya hear?" Albright asked in a whisper. "Keep your head down and stay cool," Shalala whispered back. Albright nodded and kept her fingerprints carefully off any campaign on her behalf.

It was Clinton's comfort level that mattered most, and he had long favored Albright in one particular respect. He would always say about her, after any meeting on the subject, "she gives the best public articulation of my foreign policy of any person around." And she works hard to make it look easy. "People say to me, 'Oh, you sailed through your confirmation hearings,'" Albright says. "Well, I studied. My Christmas vacation was a little like college, when everybody went skiing, and I sat and studied." And she did one last bit of discreet politicking. Knowing that even with Helms in her camp she still had to get past the full Senate, she collared Washington wise man Ken Duberstein at a black-tie dinner for advice on how to approach young hard-liners like Republicans Rod Grams of Minnesota and Craig Thomas of Wyoming. His answer: retail politics. And so Albright went door to door and chair to chair and spittoon to spittoon in the Republican cloakroom until she had the support of everyone on the committee. By the time the Senators voted, she was back in her U.N. office, packing up the debris of four years of globe-trotting, watching the proceedings on C-SPAN. When the final tally was announced, she fell back in her chair, her arms thrown over her head, and let out a whoop. It was 99 to 0. "So who wasn't there?" she asked.

FIRST AMONG EQUALS

"My mind-set is Munich," Albright has often explained. "Most of my generation's was Vietnam." Albright's orientation is used to explain her willingness to confront bullies with force. But the Munich Conference in 1938 that gave Hitler the green light to annex one-third of Czechoslovakia carried many lessons beyond the dangers of appeasement, and one was surely that it is never wise to play from a position of weakness. Albright knew early on that you can't do a thing in foreign policy without power. So she didn't waste any time "establishing her presence," as an observer puts it.

Pentagon officials were politely told by the State Department that the traditional Monday meeting among the national security principals would not be acronymed on memos as the "BAC lunch," for National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Albright and Defense chief William Cohen. It would now be called the "ABC lunch," for Albright, Berger, Cohen. The pecking order didn't go unnoticed in the Pentagon.

As she worked to put her team together, she went after top draft picks but made sure they knew who was in charge. "Tell him I am the one appointing him to the job, not the President," she instructed an aide who was acting as go-between. "And I am the one to whom he will report." Next she launched something of a counterstrike at the Commerce Department, which had grabbed much of State's control over international trade and economic sanctions during the first term. Recruiting Commerce Under Secretary Stuart Eizenstat as her Under Secretary for Economic Affairs meant that he could stuff those issues in his briefcase and bring them back to State. Likewise, by tapping Thomas Pickering, considered the five-star general of the diplomatic corps, as her No. 3, she signaled that she would surround herself with high-powered people "to move the center of gravity on foreign affairs back to the State Department," as a senior White House aide explained.

As familiar as she was with the ways of Foggy Bottom, she was also going where no woman had gone before: into an office with its own gray marble bathroom outfitted "for the boys," she says, with suit racks and a long column of small, thin sock drawers. Her time is treated as a precious commodity, and she is learning shortcuts. Did Warren Christopher have any tips on how to save time with her personal routine? "He can't help me," Albright says. "I wear makeup." She brought from her U.N. office her pictures and awards, her Harlem Globetrotters jersey and signed basketball. She took down the formal portraits of Dean Acheson and Cyrus Vance, symbols of the soft-spoken diplomacy Christopher cherished. In their place she hung portraits of Thomas Jefferson, General George Marshall and her mentor, the late Senator Edmund Muskie.

The day after her swearing in, she ate lunch in the State Department cafeteria, then gave a press conference that yielded a conspicuously high turnout. She announced that within a month she would go around the world; it would be both a global victory lap and a stamping of her authority on the struggles upcoming, such as NATO expansion and the transfer of Hong Kong to China. Later that evening she was host at a reception for family, friends, political colleagues, diplomatic officials, office seekers and the media elite. They showed up in two shifts because the guest list was so long. And everyone showed up.

The Albright style would be different, foreign policy hands soon discovered. Christopher opened his day with a stiff-necked senior-staff meeting of just a few top aides in his personal office, which aides say always felt a little like church. Albright immediately opened the doors and moved the meeting into the larger conference room next to her office. Each place around the big oval table bears a small brass plaque to mark the world leaders who sat at the table for the 1983 G-7 summit. At the first meeting she took her place at the head of the table, at the seat bearing Ronald Reagan's name.

"You might find that it takes a while getting used to me," she told the powerful regional barons around the table. "I have to warn you I have a way of disregarding the bureaucratic structure and going to people directly. So I apologize in advance." Then she paused with a look on her face that said, according to officials who were present, "but get used to it."

There were nervous smiles around the room. Albright's reputation for ignoring bureaucratic protocol preceded her. As U.N. ambassador, she became famous for bypassing assistant secretaries back in Washington and telephoning desk officers to get expert advice on a foreign country. She could reach up through the power structure too; when she found herself at odds with fellow Security Council members, she was known to slip out to the nearest phone booth, call their foreign ministers back home directly and argue for a change of instructions.

Not a week passed before Albright began to "kick butt," as a stunned senior State Department official put it. Two of her first important policy meetings dealt with China, and someone leaked the sensitive debate to the press. She gathered the senior officials together and read them the riot act. "You have a choice," she said, looking each official in the eye. "You can have a good and trusting relationship with me. Or you can have an undisciplined relationship with the press." She was a master at working the media, after all, and no one was going to make an end run around the master. Within an hour, the phones were ringing throughout the building. Don't mess with her.

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS

Madeleine Albright learned how to throw everything out and start over almost from birth. Her life and career unfolded in chapters, each with its own plot line, but each propelling the next. The stress of dealing with premature twins in an incubator inspired her to study Russian as a distraction; her success raising money for her children's school led directly to raising money for her future mentor, Edmund Muskie. "Women's careers don't go in straight lines," Albright says. "They zigzag all over the place." Along the way Albright assembled the intellectual, political and social skills she would need when her moment finally came.

"The part I think about most in my childhood," she recalls, "is that we were constantly going somewhere else. I had to make friends very easily." Her father, an up-and-coming Czech intellectual and diplomat, found himself on a political hit list after Hitler invaded; in the days before he could manage their escape, he and his wife walked the streets of Prague, their baby daughter in their arms, careful to stay in public places until he got the fake diplomatic papers that let them make their way to London to wait out the war.

"I remember spending huge portions of my life in air-raid shelters singing A Hundred Green Bottles Hanging on the Wall," Albright recalls. "I remember when we moved to Walton-on-Thames, where they had just invented some kind of a steel table. They said if your house was bombed and you were under the table, you would survive. We had this table, and we ate on the table and we slept under the table and we played around the table."

Albright's mother Anna was born to a prosperous family and a comfortable life, educated, like Madeleine, in Switzerland. It was from her, Albright says, that she learned about resilience. Again and again, she would have to pack up just what they could carry and move her family to a new place, learn new customs, a new language. "Mother used to tell stories of how she had to buy pots and pans but didn't know what to choose because she had never cooked," recalls Albright's brother John. "She had no idea of what foods to purchase or in what quantity."

Albright's discipline and assiduousness, she says, came from her father. Josef Korbel was a formal man, a statesman turned professor, who learned to ski wearing his topcoat and tie. "He was a strict European parent," says John. Family routines were sacrosanct. Children were expected to be at the dinner table on time. "The most severe form of punishment was when our father wouldn't talk to us for a week." When Madeleine was invited to the prom in ninth grade, it triggered a family fight over whether she would be allowed to ride in the boy's car. Her father's compromise: she rode to the prom with her date, and her father followed them in his car. Then Josef drove Madeleine home when the dance ended.

Her father was the first of the intellectual mentors who sharpened her skills and toughened her hide. The other dominant figures, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Muskie, were known for their fierce, intellectual appetites and the grilling they put their students and colleagues through. Brzezinski, Albright's Ph.D. adviser at Columbia and later her boss at the National Security Council, could fillet an unprepared student in a second; he gave out so few A's that he wrote personal notes along with them. Albright became a favorite of his, and it was here, as one of the few female students in his class, that she learned she had to be better prepared than the boys to be taken seriously.

Muskie had a reputation as the hardest Senator on Capitol Hill to work for. He had an expansive intellect and a volcanic temper, which, Albright says, "he admitted to me he used as a device." His style with aides was prosecutorial. He would warn them in advance: "My rule is I want to know everything everybody else knows about this--and more." To work for him amounted to training with Jesuits, dissecting one's faith and then reassembling it. At dinner he'd even challenge an aide about his or her wine selection.

Apart from the intellectual equipment her mentors provided, Albright also learned to keep her wits about her as she acquired the essential diplomatic skill of making people who were uncomfortable with each other become comfortable with her. This was never clearer than when Muskie was Secretary of State and Brzezinski tapped Albright to work with him at the National Security Council. It was a low-level staff job, but "she was always at the center of things," recalls Richard Moe, then Vice President Mondale's chief of staff. She was the rare staff member who could work with both men and not get chewed up by the rivalry. At her going-away party, she recalls, "Muskie said that I was unique in that I was the only woman in the world to go from Pole to Pole."

It was during the 1980s that Albright reinvented herself from a faceless staff member into a political star. Once again the propellant was as much personal as professional. When her husband Joe Albright, after 23 years of marriage, suddenly announced himself in love with another woman, "it shook her up and made her re-evaluate her life," says her friend Winifred Freund. "But it contributed to her strength. Our generation of women never expected this to happen to them." For years Madeleine poured out her bitterness to friends, telling them that Joe Albright couldn't deal with a strong woman and that she never would have made much of her professional life had she stayed married to him. Finally, several friends told her to shut up about Joe, to get on with her life.

Albright took her years of experience at the White House and Senate and turned herself into one of the most popular professors at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. Many of her fellow professors, especially in the blue-blooded government department, may have looked down on her for her thin academic credentials. But the students loved her. "She was like a pied piper," says Peter Krogh, the dean who hired her. "Students flocked to her." They would vote her the best teacher in the School of Foreign Service for a record four years.

The Mondale and Dukakis campaigns were welcome intermissions from the classroom, in which she served as a foreign policy adviser and broadened her connections in the party. But there were three other critically important training outlets as well, whose imprint would become more apparent as she moved closer to the prize. The first was the Georgetown Leadership Seminar, an invention of Henry Kissinger's back when he was an ambitious young Harvard professor trying to make connections with up-and-comers around the world. Each summer about 75 government officials, lawyers, bankers, journalists and military officers from all over the world were invited to Georgetown for a week packed with sessions attended by heavyweights from the State Department, the Pentagon and foreign capitals. Albright never missed a minute of it and never forgot a name.

The second outlet: the Great Decisions TV program, with Dean Krogh as host, on PBS. Scholars and policymakers would debate the foreign policy issues of the day, so Albright got a chance to practice her one-liners in an off-Broadway setting. Though its audience was small, it did attract Washington's policy wonks, and Albright began to be noticed.

The final outlet opened up in 1989, when she took over the Center for National Policy. Bob Rubin, Mickey Kantor and Warren Christopher, all of whom would be in the Clinton Cabinet, served on the center's boards. Albright transformed the way policy papers were produced, demanding that researchers ground their analysis in polling and opinion surveys as well as in textbooks. She coined a word for it--"internestic"--combining international with domestic. The graybeards of diplomacy had to get their hands grubby with domestic issues, she believed, or no foreign policy initiative would succeed.

At the same time, Albright began another important ritual to incubate ideas and expand her network. She began playing host during dinners at her Georgetown home, to argue policy over cocktails and chicken-rice casseroles. "You never went to Madeleine's for the gourmet food," says a participant. "You went for the discussion." Among her regular guests were many of the people now sitting around the Cabinet and conference table with her.

By the time Clinton won in 1992, her profile in Washington made her a natural candidate for the U.N. job. Albright would joke later that someday she would write a book about her experience on the Security Council and title it Fourteen Suits and a Skirt. And she wasn't afraid to play off her gender. On Valentine's Day she placed sweets in red gift bags on the empty chairs of the 14 other Security Council members in the council room, each with a note attached saying how proud she was "to sit with 14 handsome young men." And during one tense round of negotiations over Haiti, Albright turned to the Chinese ambassador, who was being obstreperous, and pleaded, "It's Sadie Hawkins Day, and on that day men are supposed to do something nice for women." But Albright is the first to say the U.N. was the perfect final training ground for any future Secretary of State. Every meal during the week was booked for diplomatic functions. To line her pockets with ious that she would need in critical Security Council votes in the future, Albright made a point of visiting the home country of every Security Council member and having each U.N. ambassador show her off to his Foreign Minister. At one point in 1994, when France, China and Russia pushed for relaxation of the economic sanctions against Iraq, Albright flew to practically all the capitals of the remaining 11 Security Council members and, behind closed doors, showed them cia photos of weapons Saddam was still trying to hide. When she returned to New York, the Russian, Chinese and French ambassadors shelved the relief proposal after discovering they would be slam-dunked in a vote.

Her strong-arm tactics, particularly when it came time for her to lead the fight to oust Boutros-Ghali, won her rave reviews among the ever more conservative lawmakers watching from Capitol Hill; but her relations on First Avenue suffered as a result. Critics at the U.N. considered her too quick to shift blame if U.S.-backed policies failed, too camera struck, too often absent, too willing to run the U.S. mission as an outpost of the Clinton Administration rather than as a diplomatic mission. "Now she would say she was carrying out U.S. policy, but there are ways of doing it that don't leave people angry and upset," says international lawyer Rita Hauser, a friend of Boutros-Ghali's who has known Albright since the Carter years.

Albright always made a point to reporters that she had the job she loved; but from the beginning of her U.N. tour, she began consulting privately with her closest advisers on the next step. At one point she toyed with the idea of running for the Senate, thus following the path of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. She quickly gave up the thought because she didn't really have a home state she could run from.

Instead she booked a travel schedule that looked like a Secretary of State's. She made a special point of getting to know better her essential foreign policy partner, the military. She flew into Mogadishu when U.S. troops were there, driving through town in an armored personnel carrier and wearing a flak jacket. She toured Sarajevo in helmet and body armor. She spent free weekends with Joint Chiefs Chairman General John Shalikashvili, visiting U.S. troops overseas on peacekeeping duty. "You know what I discovered about myself that I did not know? It's that I'm not afraid," she says. "I've done what I need to for my family. My daughters are the greatest source of pride for me--but they don't really depend on me anymore. I have a great sense of freedom now."

Albright's main travel destination, however, was always Washington. She lived on the shuttle, loath to miss Cabinet or nsc-principals meetings that would allow her to help shape the instructions she would have to carry out. When it snowed, she took the train. Sometimes she drove. When it wasn't possible to do either, she participated through video conferences.

White House foreign policy meetings in the first Clinton term were famous for dragging on forever. Albright had a penchant for efficiency. During one Saturday White House video conference on Bosnia in March 1995, Albright finally became exasperated with the abstract seminar Anthony Lake and State Department diplomats were holding forth on U.S. policy in the civil war. "Gentlemen," she said, "it's nice to think about all these things we hope to do or wish we could do," they heard Albright interrupt from the screen. "But you better start figuring out what we're going to do and whether we're going to send in troops to enforce a cease-fire." By the end of that year, the U.S. would deploy troops in Bosnia. "She wasn't afraid to confront the tough questions," recalled a participant in that meeting. "But you just didn't do that in tea-and-crumpet diplomacy."

And up until recently, you just didn't do it in the Clinton White House either. "Clinton wasn't interested in substance," says an NSC member. "He was interested in the lead in the next morning's papers and in making sure that nobody got killed before Nov. 6." Albright shares Clinton's obsession with the next morning's headlines, and that's partly why she got the job. But she's also interested in re-establishing the importance of foreign policy in the minds of Congress and the American people--and, along the way, of "the primacy of the Secretary of State," as a knowledgeable White House aide put it.

Even her closest friends are not sure how she plans to wield her power. But any student of Munich--and any legatee of the Holocaust--must have absorbed this lesson of power: that failing to use it can be just as dangerous as using it unwisely.

--Reported by Ann Blackman and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by ANN BLACKMAN AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON