An appreciation: The headline Madeleine Albright never forgot, and the life she lived

• Madeleine Albright died on March 23 at age 84.
• In his eulogy, former president Bill Clinton described his final conversation with Albright.
• By the time Madeleine Albright died last month of cancer, she had become a cultural icon.

Madeleine Albright was eulogized Wednesday by two presidents in a cathedral filled with Washington's officialdom, but she never forgot what it was like to be dismissed simply because she was female. 

She raised a particular beef with me more than once. The issue was the headline in Long Island's Newsday when President Bill Clinton appointed her in 1993 to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "Ex-LI Homemaker Takes Center Stage," it read.

As she said to me: Really?

While I was covering the White House for Newsday then, I hadn't written the story, much less the headline. It was a case of searching too hard for the local angle and deciding that the fact she had once reared her family in Nassau County was the most relevant part of her distinguished resume. She relayed the headline with amused exasperation, an example of the way powerful women had too often been viewed and diminished. The fact that the former secretary of state could still recite it word-for-word years later signaled just how it must have once rankled.

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