The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

by Samantha Power

Studying the manual, however, is not the same as flying.

I had gone from being an outsider to an insider—from being a critic of American foreign policy to a leading representative of the United States on the world stage. From within government, I was able to help spur actions that improved people’s lives. And yet we were failing to stop the carnage in Syria. I was at risk of falling prey to the same mode of rationalization I had assailed as an activist.

We make sense of our lives through stories. Regardless of our different backgrounds and perspectives, stories have the power to bind us. In my Irish family, being able to tell a lively story has always been a means of fitting in and drawing people together. As a war correspondent, storytelling was the most effective tool I had to bridge the vast space between those suffering the wounds of distant conflict and my American readers. As a diplomat, when foreign officials refused to budge in negotiations, I would try to shake up stale debates by sharing authentic, firsthand stories about the many people who were being affected (for good and bad) by our decisions. And as a woman in national security and the mother of two young children, I used stories to make bearable the tensions inherent in balancing a demanding career and a fulfilling family life.

Some may interpret this book’s title as suggesting that I began with lofty dreams about how one person could make a difference, only to be “educated” by the brutish forces that I encountered. That is not the story that follows.

When she tried to apply to the University College Cork’s medical program, the registrar told her she lacked the background to manage the curriculum. Undeterred, my mother registered anyway. When she got home, one of her sisters lit into her because of the lengthy program’s cost. My mother responded by dumping her plate of bacon, cabbage, and mashed potatoes on her sister’s lap. But she marched back to the college and, livid but shamed, changed her registration to the shorter Bachelor of Science program. After earning that degree, she went on to pursue a PhD in biochemistry in London. But caring for patients was what my mother had always wanted and would never stop wanting; while writing her dissertation, she finally decided to apply to medical school. Thirteen years after first attempting to enroll, she achieved her lifelong dream of becoming a medical doctor. Yet in that courtroom years later, my mother was forced to answer for her career—for being “so educated”—because she was trying to move with her children to the United States, a country she had never visited, in order to get advanced training in her area of specialization, kidney transplantation.

Mum gave people she met a quality of attention that I would come to associate with the most gifted politicians. When making a new acquaintance, she would cock her head to the side and peer earnestly at the other person, digging for details and drawing connections across time and space. She laughed with her whole body, or—if someone’s tale was a sad one—sagged with the weight of the other person’s anguish. I never knew my mother to have an ulterior motive as she listened; she was simply curious and intensely empathetic. She had no airs and eschewed sentimentality, conveying her love not through expressive words—which to her would have sounded maudlin—but through intense, affectionate focus.

Although I must have occasionally experienced boredom or loneliness down in the basement, when I think of that time, I only remember my father, the first man I loved, loving me back. While many Hartigan’s regulars seemed to leave thoughts of their families behind when they entered the cocoon of the pub, my father brought me with him. I was his sidekick. I could find him any time I needed him, with a long row of drained pint glasses beside him. Instead of shaking me off when I bounded up the stairs, he often picked me up and sat me down beside him. I grew preternaturally comfortable chatting with adults and people of different backgrounds,

I craved harmony between them. On one family vacation, I interrupted lunch to present them with a fifty-pence piece I had been saving. “Whichever of you doesn’t argue with the other will get this,” I declared. “I will be watching, keeping careful track.” But my early efforts at diplomacy did not succeed.

I would listen as the arguments grew nastier and as plates from the kitchen were hurled. When I got out of bed to spy from the landing atop the stairs, I would alternate between straining to decide who was at fault and blocking my ears with my hands so I could make out nothing but the sound of my heart pounding—a sound so deafening I was sure my parents could hear it below. Sometimes, I would get down on my knees beside my bed, make a hasty sign of the cross, and then try to drown out the noise by saying as many Hail Marys and Our Fathers as it took for the din to subside.

Despite the turbulence around me, I thought life was good.

My father battled Mum in an Irish court, trying to gain sole custody of us. Each depicted the other as unfit to raise kids: my father because he drank too much; my mother because she worked too much and was having an affair. My father didn’t help his cause when he appeared in court once after “a liquid lunch,” giving my mother more ammunition for her claim that he was incapable of taking care of two children. When my father lost in the lower court, he appealed the case, which made its way to the Supreme Court. Once again, the court ruled in her favor. My dad didn’t prepare properly, and his itinerant career left him unable to demonstrate that he had the means to financially support his family.

Given Irish tradition and the stigma associated with separating from one’s spouse, it is remarkable that she was awarded custody. But the state attached three conditions if Mum wanted to take us to the United States. First, my brother and I were to be raised Catholic. We were to continue attending Mass and studying religion so that we would receive the sacraments (communion and confirmation for my younger brother, confirmation for me, and regular confession for us both). Second, my mother would home-school us in the Irish language. And finally, we were to return to Ireland to stay with my dad during the summers and over holidays like Christmas and Easter. I did not experience the news of moving to America as a bombshell announcement. Mum must have casually introduced the idea, herself not then expecting that the move would be permanent. We boarded a plane bound for the United States in September of 1979.

When Mum, Stephen, and I landed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I was dressed for the occasion in a Stars and Stripes T-shirt.

Omg.

For my part, I knew that my mother had left my father behind in Ireland. But that she had left him for good—that they would never again even argue over dinner together—had not entered my nine-year-old consciousness. It wouldn’t for a very long time.

Mum had shipped several Dunlop tennis rackets, her squash racket, her most important medical reference books, and my maroon Raleigh bicycle. She would go to great lengths to reassemble the bike—only for me to quickly disown it as out of fashion in a neighborhood where dirt bikes were all the rage.

Oof

As the drinks flowed among friends, he played the role of the old Irish seanchaí, who offered jokes and tall tales.

Eddie had been raised in a strict, staunchly nationalistic household, and had attended an Irish school where even calculus was taught in “the medium”—the Gaelic language. The Irish nationalism around him was so intense that, if a boy in his school mistakenly used his head on the Gaelic football field (as one does in the “English” sport of soccer), the match would be suspended, and the ball confiscated. Rugby and soccer were seen as sports for Protestants and Anglophiles. Despite his cerebral day job, Eddie could get choked up singing Irish rebel songs or reciting Irish insurgent Robert Emmet’s last words before he was hanged by the British in 1803.

Years later, I would hear Irish novelist Colm Tóibín speak about how, growing up in Ireland, there was simply nothing worse than “being boring.” “You could be smelly, you could be ugly, you could be fierce dumb,” he said, happily, “but you could not be boring.” This had been the sensibility in our home in Ireland, and so it came to be in America as well.

I knew about the United States came mostly from American exports like The Incredible Hulk and Charlie’s Angels.

This is plenty

My freckles suddenly seemed to stand out against the backdrop of a complexion that had seen more rain than sun.

My Sunday “brekkie” of rashers, black and white pudding, and burnt sausages became an American “breakfast” of bacon and eggs. My “wellies” gave way to “snow boots.” The older kids weren’t smoking “fags” behind school, they were merely sneaking “cigarettes.” And if we needed medicine, we no longer got it from the local “chemist,” but from the “pharmacy.”

Mum adapted to her new life, showing no discernible nostalgia for the country she left behind. Despite her deep empathy for others, she focused far less on exploring her own feelings. When I pointed out this inconsistency when I got older, she either changed the subject or just ended the conversation with a dismissive “Arragh sure, I can’t be bothered.”

THE MAIN CONSTANT between Ireland and the United States was God. In Dublin, though some of the nuns at school terrified me, being a Catholic was a source of comfort, and, I suppose, an affirmation of my Irishness. Given the unpredictability of my home life, I was soothed by the familiarity of the prayers and hymns. When Irish television and radio paused three times a day (at six a.m., noon, and six p.m.) to broadcast the slow and steady chimes of the Angelus bell, I had felt calm—not unlike the effect of the call to prayer I had heard five times a day in Kuwait.

The United States was the first place I had been that didn’t seem to want its people to pause and reflect during the day.

I ducked into the bathroom during tense moments, got down on my knees, and prayed for a change of fortune. I remember telling God that I knew from television that the Pirates’ players did all kinds of work in the community for vulnerable people. I tried to bargain with Him, pledging to treat my five-year-old brother better in exchange for a late-inning double off the wall, each time rounding out my prayers by softly singing the Irish National Anthem.

Omg. This image. 🥺🤣💔

In my mind, Ireland was still my home. But this new place felt a bit like a wonderland. And while I was looking forward to my first trip back to Dublin, which I would take in December of 1979, I was going to gobble up all things American for as long as I could.

He wanted us around, he explained, and thought it was a grave injustice that the courts had allowed Mum to take us so far away.

When Mum didn’t show up that day or the next, I happily settled back into my father’s Hartigan’s routine, with my brother by my side. I loved being back home.

For all the novelty that America offered, I had missed even the rain of Ireland.

“Look at this,” my mother said, gesturing to the scene inside. “Do you really think this is an environment for children?” When Mum insisted that we were leaving, I walked a few steps toward her. My dad told me to come back, and I froze. Stephen, who had followed me to the door, shuffled forward into Mum’s embrace. But I stood between my parents, paralyzed by the impossible choice.

My mother’s voice grew sterner as she told me to get into her nearby car, its engine running. I did as I was told. And before I had fully processed what was happening, we were driving away. I turned to look out the back window—a scene I later saw reprised in Hollywood movies—and in the doorway I saw my dad, deflated, watching our car depart. He grew smaller and smaller until we turned the corner and he vanished from sight.

Over the next few days, my father and a friend from Hartigan’s, a member of the Irish parliament, began calling my mother, threatening to secure an injunction to prevent us from leaving the country. As their warnings grew more convincing, Mum began to worry that another legal battle would delay our return to the United States, where she was expected the following week to resume work. In a panic, she asked my uncle Garry, her brother-in-law and the high-spirited family fixer, to drive us to Shannon Airport. The nighttime drive was harrowing. Uncle Garry ran red lights and drove so far over the speed limit that I felt we were in a car chase. Mum’s constant checking of the passenger-side mirror was a telling sign that the grown-ups were worried. Only now—forty years later—do I realize the meaning of that frenzied drive: although she was in the right, my mother must have had no faith that the Irish courts would see the situation similarly. If my dad had appeared before a judge sober while we were still in the country, she could have lost us.

Uncle Garry bought Stephen and me heaping Irish breakfasts.

Once we were back in our suburban Pittsburgh home, Mum telephoned Dad to tell him that he couldn’t be trusted to put our welfare first. Not only was he drinking too much, she said, but he had effectively threatened to kidnap us. She couldn’t take time away from work to chaperone our time together, she informed him, so if he wanted to see us, he would need to fly to America.

No longer the awkward new girl with the Dublin accent and the pleated skirts, I developed a fresh set of friends. Their families brought me to barbecues in the summer and skiing and ice-skating in the winter.

Although she said my dad had forfeited the custody agreement, my mother fulfilled the rest of its terms by taking me to Mass and continuing to teach me Irish. Nothing was worse than being summoned on a sunny day to improve my Gaelic. “Mum,” I would declare, “this makes no sense. Even if I lived in Ireland, I wouldn’t speak this language. And in America it is even more useless.” This logic did not move her. She forced me to review flash cards and write out sentences as if I would soon be back at Mount Anville, taking an exam.

I buried myself under the covers—the duvet quilt from my old bedroom in Dublin—and shivered with a feeling of cold so deep that it felt as though my bones were being chilled from the inside.

When she opened his unlocked front door, she was overcome by the smell of what would turn out to be my dad’s decomposing body amid the stench of vomit and human waste. The derelict, filthy house—my former home—retained only the beds upstairs and the piano in the living room. The rest of the family belongings had been stolen or pawned off—even the kitchen cutlery and our toys. Susan bravely made her way upstairs and found my deceased father, dressed in a suit as if ready to head out on the town. He was lying not in his bed, but in mine.

When I left Ireland, I left my dad; I didn’t visit my dad; and thus, he died. Had I not left, or had I at least returned to Dublin regularly, he would still be alive. In my chain of logic—or responsibility—my mother didn’t really make an appearance. To this day, despite various therapists’ insistence that I must be repressing anger toward her, I don’t fault Mum for what happened. I have read widely on how children are quicker to blame themselves than to acknowledge their parents’ flaws and bad decisions.

Mum knew our father—his virtues and his vices—as only one who had loved him deeply could. It had taken her years to reach the point where she was able to disentangle herself from him and their marriage. She knew that children can almost never give up on their parents, and she did not want Stephen’s and my image of Jim Power—large and luminous—to be replaced by something diminished. Years later, Susan would tell me about my dad’s emaciated condition in the final two years before he died. “Jim was no longer staring at the abyss,” she recalled. “He was in the abyss.”

“You and Stephen were all he talked about,” she said. “The doctors won’t ever say it, but he died of a broken heart.”

Of many of the worst conversations I had with my dad after the divorce, I would have to regularly remind him of his culpability for some genuinely malevolent things in his life. He was going to end up entirely alone. I wasn’t wrong then. Even if I pity him now ... a pity no less than what the author is taking us through in this section with her dad.

My print dispatches demonstrated little natural talent. My first published article in the Yale Daily News, appearing in September of 1988, had begun: “Volleyballs aren’t the only things high up in the air this week for the women’s volleyball team; so are expectations and spirits.”

This ! This copy. All day, everyday. 👻😨

Another article had described how the campus a cappella group Something Extra had sung the national anthem before that weekend’s Yale–Cornell women’s basketball game. I then proceeded to observe that “the Blue were well aware that it would take ‘something extra,’ or rather, ‘something extra-ordinary’ for them to win.”

😵

Tank Man’s subsequent actions received less attention, video footage showed him taking an even more remarkable risk: he climbed onto the tank’s turret and spoke with the soldiers inside. After he stepped down and the tank attempted to move past him, the man moved with it, daring the soldiers to run him over. A few minutes into this grim dance, men in civilian clothes dashed onto the road and hustled Tank Man away. The convoy barreled ahead; the man disappeared. He has never been identified. An untold number of Chinese students—likely thousands—were killed that summer in the government crackdown. I did not respond to these events by suddenly proclaiming a newfound intention to learn Mandarin and become a human rights lawyer. But while I knew little about the protests before they started, or even about China itself, I could not shake my discomfort at having been contentedly taking notes on a Braves game while students my age were being mowed down by tanks.

Eddie thrust an article from a little-known publication called The National Interest into my hands. Authored by Francis Fukuyama, and titled “The End of History?,” the article argued that with fascism and communism soon destined to land in the dustbin of history, economic and political liberalism had won the ideological battle of the twentieth century. “The West,” Fukuyama concluded, had triumphed.

In June of 1990, Schu and I set out to see firsthand the region where the demand for democratic accountability had helped bring an end to communist rule. But before venturing east, we traveled to Amsterdam, where we visited the Anne Frank House. I had read about the Holocaust in high school, but it was during my travels that summer that the horror of Hitler’s crimes hit me deeply. Just as observing Tank Man—a single protester—had helped me see the broader Chinese struggle for human rights, so too did visiting Anne Frank’s hiding place bring to life the enormity of the Nazi slaughter. I learned a lesson that stayed with me: concrete, lived experiences engraved themselves in my psyche far more than abstract historical events.

I did not focus on the fact that she and her family had been deported on the last train from Holland to Auschwitz. Nor had I been aware of the stinginess of America’s refugee quotas, which prevented Anne’s father from getting the Frank family into the United States.

We watched as she asked her young daughter to place her first democratic ballot in the box. Tatjana choked up as she talked about the exhilaration she felt regarding her country’s political future. Again, I was struck by the importance of dignity as a historical force. “What was horrible about the communist rule,” Tatjana told us, “was that the man in front of you ordering you around was very stupid, and you had to listen to him.” Even amid jailings and torture, these smaller humiliations ground people down.

I also began to suffer bouts of what Schu called “lungers.” Whether on campus or on our travels, every few weeks I would find myself struggling to breathe properly. I could identify nothing tangibly wrong, and I never rasped for breath or experienced asthma-like physical symptoms. I just felt, moment to moment, as though my lungs had constricted and I simply could not take in enough air.

Same

The war raged unabated. Four US diplomats—George Kenney, Marshall Harris, Jon Western, and Stephen Walker—had already resigned to protest what they saw as the weakness of the US response to the Bosnian war, the largest wave of resignations over US policy in State Department history. I read about these men in a lengthy Washington Post profile and was gripped by their testimonies. Jon Western, a thirty-year-old intelligence analyst, had sifted through hundreds of photos and videos of what he recalled as “human beings who look like they’ve been through meat grinders.” As he told the Post, the intelligence he needed to consume for his job described preteen girls raped in front of their parents, a sixty-five-year-old man and his thirty-five-year-old son forced at gunpoint to orally castrate each other, and Serb torturers who made Muslim prisoners carve crosses in each other’s skulls. Western and the other US officials who resigned had initially tried to change policy from within, but having made no headway, had finally quit. They felt they could no longer be part of a US government that wasn’t doing more, reasoning that they could at least draw media attention to what they saw as America’s moral abdication.