The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

by Samantha Power

My view was that the way governments treated their own citizens mattered, and could have a direct impact on American national security interests. Countless studies showed the importance of the rule of law to sustained economic development, and the strong causal links between government repression and civilian susceptibility to radicalization and extremism.2 Nonetheless, it was rare for participants in NSC meetings to identify respect for individual dignity as central to a country’s long-term stability.

The past was prologue: those who had conceived of policies in a certain way were ill disposed to try something new.

If ever I sounded self-conscious that I was not working on “big-ticket” foreign policy challenges, Holbrooke would snap me out of this myopia. “Stop it, Sam,” he would say. “Do good where you can do good. The people in those countries don’t give a damn how high a priority what you do is to anybody else. They don’t have another hope besides America.”

PRESIDENT OBAMA LIKED TO QUOTE from a scene in The Departed where Mark Wahlberg and a fellow cop are on a stakeout. When the other policeman loses the man they are tracking, an enraged Wahlberg begins yelling at the officer, who indignantly shouts back, “Well, who the fuck are you?” “I’m the guy who does his job,” Wahlberg responds. “You must be the other guy.”

Obama once told me, “Better is good, and better is actually a lot harder than worse”—a message he has expressed often since leaving office.

Declan worried aloud whether there would be enough of his mother to go around when a new baby came. Yet he still rested his head against my growing tummy, and, once we learned it was a girl, whispered to her, “Hi Rían, it’s your brother. I will see you soon.”

And indeed, after she was born, everything about her seemed rooted in an irrepressible desire for life.

Former UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld may have best summed up both the UN’s track record and its promise when he said it was created “not to lead mankind to heaven but to save humanity from hell.”