Joseph Medill Patterson Albright
Quick Facts
Biography
Joseph Medill Patterson Albright (born 1937) is an American businessman and news publisher. He is the former husband of Madeleine Albright.
Life and career
He was born to Jay Frederick Reeve (1893–1956), a lawyer, and his wife, née Josephine Medill Patterson (1913–1996), a reporter and airplane pilot. His parents divorced in 1944, and his mother married painter Ivan Le Lorraine Albright in 1946. Joseph and his sister Alice were adopted by their mother's second husband, and their surname became "Albright". Two additional children were born to this second marriage, Adam and Blandina (known as "Dina").
Albright is the scion of a media empire, the grandson and namesake of Joseph Medill Patterson, founder of the New York Daily News who had rivaled William Randolph Hearst in the 1930s. His great-great grandfather, Joseph Medill, owned the Chicago Tribune and had been elected mayor of Chicago. His aunt, Alicia Patterson, founded Newsday.
Albright attended Williams College. He met Madeleine Jana Korbel when she spent a summer working at the Denver Post. They married in 1959 after Madeleine's graduation from Wellesley College. They had three children: Twin girls,Anne and Alice, and youngest daughter Katie. After he left Madeleine for another woman, the couple divorced in 1982. Albright remarried Marcia Kunstel; they own Flat Creek Ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.