The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

by Samantha Power

As a liberal arts major who had no particular knack for foreign languages, I still worried I had little to contribute. But I had managed to assemble the chronology, and I was seeing up close the vast number of ways researchers, columnists, journalists, government officials, and aid workers were involved in the enterprise of American foreign policy. All seemed to be struggling with how to define the US role in the world now that the Cold War was over, as well as how to manage a sudden flurry of nationalist and independence movements.

I waited until the Foreign Policy editorial staff had headed home and the cleaners had completed their nighttime rounds on the floor. Once the suite was completely deserted, I walked into the office of Charles William Maynes, the journal’s editor, picked up several sheets of his stationery, and then hurried back to my desk. Hands shaking, I began typing a letter impersonating the unwitting Maynes. I was committing a fireable offense, but to me it felt like a felony. All these years later, I still feel terrible for having violated the trust of a program that was giving me so much. But determined to get to Bosnia, I went ahead and wrote to the head of the UN Press Office, asking that the UN provide Samantha Power, Foreign Policy’s “Balkan Correspondent,” with “all necessary access.” I had a guilty conscience, but I also had what I needed to obtain my press pass.

I visualized a vast team of forensic specialists conducting an exhaustive verification process—including a call to Foreign Policy asking Maynes to confirm the contents of “his” letter. In reality, the UN official responsible for laminating the badges had simply taken an extra-long lunch break.

Watching Fred in action, I was struck not by the grandness of the enterprise, but by the tedium and the minutiae necessary to coordinate the pilots, the crewmen, the forklift operators, the engineers, and the drivers. The orchestration of every movement consumed him—any lapse in the assembly line could spell disaster. “If we don’t get the details right,” he observed to me when a mix-up brought the exercise to a halt, “people are going to die.”

He planned to travel to Sarajevo the next day. “You should come with me,” he said offhandedly. My heart leaped. Now that I had made it to Bihać and back, I had crossed the Rubicon and visited a war zone. Though it was irrational, I was now less afraid. If I were to accompany Fred, I thought, I could give readers back home the inside story of America’s humanitarian “MacGyver.” I would have full access, and in showing what just one person could do, I could show how much more the United States could be doing. I telephoned Mort with excitement, but he was having none of it. “You’re coming home,” he said. “You work for me.” I was twenty-three years old and hardly indispensable at Carnegie, so his adamancy surprised me. Only when I got back did Mort’s devoted secretary share why he had been so firm. “He was worried sick about you,” she said. While my boss had introduced me to a humanitarian cowboy, he did not want me to become one.

I finally settled upon, “The most jarring sound in Bihać, a Muslim enclave of 300,000 in the northwest corner of Bosnia, is not the reverberation of machine-gun fire, but the splashing and chatter of children playing in the Una River.” Two weeks later, attending the US Open tennis tournament with Mum, I called U.S. News from a pay phone at a prearranged time. The foreign editor told me that he planned to run the piece. I pumped my fist and gave Mum a thumbs-up. During the call, her expression had been as tense as it was when she was watching her favorite tennis players during their final set tiebreakers, but at my signal, her whole bearing relaxed. When U.S. News faxed me the edited draft, however, I was horrified by their changes, which I felt misled readers. “They oversimplified my oversimplification!” I complained to Mum and Eddie that night. The next day, I delivered a long exposition contesting what the editor had “done” to my prose. I was surprised to discover that he was not wedded to his edits. “I just didn’t have space for what you gave me,” he said curtly. “Make it right. But I need it quickly.” In the end, U.S. News ran my 478-word article in a box alongside a much longer piece by their regular stringer.

Seeing my name in print in a mainstream newsmagazine felt like the greatest triumph of my life.

This whole section is a lot to unpack

I sent my clips—the Daily Jang op-ed and the newly published U.S. News article—to Bam Bam, then ninety-eight years old and still a prolific pen pal.

But as I exited the store, toting my new Toshiba laptop, I was racked with self-doubt. Was she right? Would I fall flat on my face, run out of money, and return home in defeat? Worse, would I allow myself to get sucked into life as a war correspondent and end up getting killed? Mort was initially skeptical of the move, but knowing he didn’t have a job to offer me after my internship ended, he came around; indeed, he dedicated an entire afternoon to telephoning all the newspaper editors he knew to tell them I was going. He also connected me to the foreign editor of National Public Radio (NPR), who told me, as U.S. News had done, that she would take my calls if I had a story idea.

Mentors be mentoring. 👀

Unlike many of those applying, English was my first language, and I had the benefit of learning US history in school. Still, I felt relieved when, in the fall of 1993, I learned I had passed. Mum and Eddie had been sworn in as Americans the previous year, and, because they had made no fuss about their naturalization ceremony, I didn’t think to invite them to the courthouse in Brooklyn to see mine. However, the other new Americans participating treated the day like the momentous event that it was, donning their finest suits and dresses and surrounding themselves with family.

Looking around the courtroom, seeing emotion ripple across the faces of those whose hands were raised, I was struck by what America meant as a refuge, and as an idea.

All of us gathered that morning had reached the modern Promised Land. We weren’t giving up who we were or where we came from; we were making it American. I hugged an elderly woman from Central America on my left, and a tall man from Russia to my right. We were all Americans now.

The Irish people are a famously emotional bunch, but tend to avoid displays of sentimentality. Frank McCourt, who spent his childhood in Ireland, wrote in his magnificent memoir Angela’s Ashes: If I were in America I could say, I love you, Dad, the way they do in the films, but you can’t say that in Limerick for fear you might be laughed at. You’re allowed to say you love God and babies and horses that win but anything else is a softness in the head. When I read this passage a few years after my move to the Balkans, I dog-eared the page, as I felt it unlocked one of the mysteries of my childhood in which love was tacitly communicated but almost never directly expressed.

I telephoned NPR, using the number the foreign editor had given me before I left Washington. I tentatively asked the person who answered if she would be interested in “something” on a cease-fire between Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats that had just been brokered by US diplomats. The voice on the other end seemed practiced in fielding calls from strangers. “Sure,” she said, to my shock. “How about a forty-five-second spot? We will call you back from the studio within the hour.” Before I had a chance to inquire about specifics, I heard a dial tone. I turned to Laura, who was sitting cross-legged on her couch, writing her own story on a laptop. “What’s a spot?” I asked. When NPR called back, Laura said, they would conduct a sound check and then would expect me to do three things: get listeners’ attention with my opening, describe my nugget of news, and efficiently conclude. I practiced and practiced, ducking into the bathroom so Laura wouldn’t hear my affected inflections. I found the sign-off the most difficult: “For NPR, this is Samantha Power reporting from Zagreb.” I just could not believe that NPR would want me to say this; they barely knew me! But Laura insisted it was standard. When the phone rang, I tried not to let my nervousness show and successfully delivered the “spot” on my third try. I telephoned my mother later that evening, but she beat me to my news. “I nearly crashed my car on the way home!” she told me, clearly overjoyed and amazed by the speed with which I see...

This is a big moment for anyone!

Not long after, Fred Cuny passed through Zagreb and welcomed me to the region by inviting me to dinner with a few of his friends. He told us that his team had completed the dangerous operation at Sarajevo Airport. “We got our time down to seven minutes!” he boasted, explaining that the specially designed equipment they had snuck into the city was already filtering and chlorinating previously undrinkable river water. When he and his team opened the pipes for the first time, he recalled, they were accidentally doused in five hundred gallons of water. He described a jubilant scene of soaked engineers, arm in arm with Bosnian staff who laughed merrily as they imagined what running water would mean for their families and neighbors. I was in awe of what Fred had done. By improvising a water system, he had helped blunt the impact of one of the cruelest tactics in the Bosnian Serb siege. He had also enhanced his relevance in Washington, giving him more sway in the ongoing debate about whether the United States should use military force to try to end the carnage.

Weird spy shit

While Westerners were not targeted nearly as frequently as they later would be in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, journalists, aid workers, and diplomats still faced serious risks, and could easily be hit in “wrong place, wrong time” incidents. I could tell myself Fred knew the ropes and I would be safe with him. But any feeling of security in Bosnia was deceptive. Who lived and died in the war was viciously random.

Back in 1992, in the early months of the war, Sarajevo residents had opportunities to be evacuated and become refugees. But many stayed because they expected that the war, which they had never believed would happen in the first place, would end quickly. Others remained because, irrespective of whether they were Muslims, Croats, Serbs, or Jews, they knew that the Serb extremists’ primary goal was to destroy the spirit of tolerance and pluralism embodied in the city’s multiethnic character. “If we leave, they win,”

While some Western officials talked about the conflict as if it were historically preordained—“they have been killing one another for centuries”—the lives of the young people before the war were not dissimilar from those of the average young American. They would meet up for an espresso or a beer after work, and would dance at raves or to the music of popular bands like U2. The values they learned were the same as those we had been taught. Mosques, Catholic churches, Orthodox churches, and a synagogue dotted the downtown. One in every five marriages in Bosnia (and one in three in Sarajevo) had been ethnically mixed.

When I drove with Stacy Sullivan of Newsweek to UN headquarters for the daily press briefing in Sarajevo, we typically passed a cluster of photographers in an expectant scrum at the entrance to the main road, which was known as Sniper Alley. The still and video photographers had their cameras ready, knowing that someone was likely to get shot by a Bosnian Serb sniper as he or she made a mad dash across this exposed portion of road. Elizabeth Rubin, a writer with Harper’s who would become a close friend, once saw a woman who managed to survive the crossing yell back at one of the perched photographers, “No work for you today, asshole. I made it alive.”

This. All day this.

While Sarajevans had once thought of Western journalists as messengers on their behalf, they had now begun to see us as ambassadors of idle nations.

Three years into their agony, Sarajevans were joking, “If you run, you hit the bullet; if you walk, the bullet hits you.”

I called Eddie and told him about the conversation. “If I work for Holbrooke,” I exclaimed, “I can eliminate all the middle men!” What I meant was that, in order to influence US policy, I would no longer need to convince editors to accept my stories. I could make my case directly to the top decision-makers in government. Eddie loved the idea, and, in a spontaneous burst of lyricism, immediately launched into one of Shakespeare’s best-known monologues, from Julius Caesar: There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.

Western reporters like me were unable to get access to Srebrenica in the days that followed. The best we could do was speak with alarmed UN officials and Bosnian government sources, and report what was being broadcast on Serbian TV—primarily, images of Mladić in the town, carting Bosnian Muslim men and boys away on buses while assuring them, “No one will harm you.” Still in Sarajevo, I began reporting unverifiable claims that Muslim prisoners like those we saw on TV were in fact being executed. On July 14th, I wrote an article in the Boston Globe titled MASSACRES REPORTED NEAR SREBRENICA, which relayed the Bosnian government’s allegations that hundreds of prisoners had already been murdered. I also quoted an eyewitness saying that “while the TV cameras were there, the Serbs were good. Then the media disappeared, and the soldiers started taking people off the buses.” The whereabouts of some 10,000 people were unknown.

I picked up the Sunday New York Times at the bottom of my Somerville stoop. There, in the upper left-hand corner, was a huge headline: SREBRENICA: THE DAYS OF SLAUGHTER.3 A reporting team had spent weeks preparing a special investigation that contained previously unpublished details of the systematic murder of Srebrenica’s men and boys. As I sat reading—clenched in what felt like a full-body grimace—I understood what writers reflecting on the Holocaust meant when they described the human capacity to “know without knowing.” I had covered the fall of Srebrenica and had read all of my friend David Rohde’s articles about it. Laura, who had left journalism to attend graduate school, had spent her summer working for Human Rights Watch, gathering the testimonies of people who had survived the massacres. Yet my reaction to the Times exposé confirmed how wide the chasm can be between holding out hope that something is not true and actually absorbing devastating facts in all of their finality.

Nonetheless, I felt at sea. My law school classmates and I were of a generation that had unquestioningly embraced the slogan “never again.” Yet I was sure very few of my peers were actually aware of the Times investigation that had sent me spiraling, and even those who had seen it would probably have considered it “too depressing” to read. Powerless to affect the fate of men already killed, I decided that I could at least raise awareness on campus about what had happened.

What struck me was that neither the US officials speaking nor the journalists listening drew a connection between the slaughter being perpetrated in Rwanda and McCurry’s appeal to act in the face of genocide. This disconnect seemed to illustrate the perplexing coexistence of Americans’ purported deep resolve to prevent genocide, and our recurring struggle to acknowledge when it is happening in our midst.

I watched Claude Lanzmann’s devastating nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah for the first time.

Oh my. A genuine event for anyone who does!

I also took advantage of Harvard’s wide course offerings and signed up for classes across the university, including a seminar on Holocaust-related literature and film and a broader course called “The Use of Force: Political and Moral Criteria,” taught by Professor Stanley Hoffmann, a legendary scholar of international relations, and Father J. Bryan Hehir, a Catholic priest and theologian. After reading the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Michael Walzer, we were asked to apply their ideas to the war in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, and the 1992–1993 US intervention in Somalia. The course introduced me to a range of questions I hadn’t considered before but that would help shape my thinking for years to come.

How do the moral and religious traditions of nonviolence coexist with the moral imperative not to stand idly by in the face of suffering? How does one (particularly one who lacks sufficient information) measure the risks of action and inaction before deciding what to do? What would it mean if any country could take upon itself the decision to use force without any rules? Who should write these rules?

My thinking was powerfully influenced by Philip Gourevitch, an American writer who had traveled to Rwanda in 1995 and then published a series of haunting articles on the genocide in The New Yorker.5 Gourevitch’s first article about Rwanda, which I read during the Hoffmann–Hehir course, began, unforgettably: Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-tech—performed largely by machete—it was carried out at dazzling speed . . . the bloodletting in the former Yugoslavia measures up as little more than a neighborhood riot. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust.

I had a pretty clear recollection of being in Sarajevo in April and May of 1994, hearing about massacres in Rwanda, and assuming—just as many were doing at the time about Bosnia—that they were part of a long cycle of recurring “tribal” violence. Only when I read Gourevitch’s work did I begin to appreciate the top-down, organized nature of the killings.

Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the US Ambassador in Constantinople during the Armenian genocide, had sent blistering cables back to Washington,

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who fled to the United States in 1941, had invented the word genocide, convincing himself that if such a crime had been understood and outlawed earlier, the world might have prevented the Holocaust—which killed his parents and forty-seven other family members.

William Proxmire, an idiosyncratic senator from Wisconsin, stood on the floor of the US Senate 3,211 times—over a span of nineteen years—appealing to successive presidents and congresses to ratify the ...

I had heard the saying “You don’t read a book; a book reads you,” but the truth of these words did not sink in until I traveled the country and began meeting people who had read “A Problem from Hell.” Many had marked it up with yellow highlighters or plastered it with Post-it Notes for quick access to the parts they found most important. Activists told me they were reading the book to think through how they could better influence Washington decision-makers on a host of different issues. Synagogue congregations grappled with the book’s invocation of the false promise of “never again.”

Obama said he wanted to help spearhead the development of a fresh, affirmative vision for the Democratic Party. He was reaching out to foreign policy thinkers like me, and to former US diplomats, he said, because he wanted to brainstorm with people from different backgrounds about America’s role in the world. He was doing the same with health care experts, environmentalists, and economists to spur his thinking on domestic policy.

On foreign policy, he had been inspired by the program built by Indiana Republican senator Richard Lugar and Georgia Democratic senator Sam Nunn, which over two decades had help secure and eliminate more nuclear weapons than those in the combined arsenals of China, France, and the UK. Obama and Lugar would go on to work together to pass a bill that expanded funding for nonproliferation initiatives, but the spirit of bipartisanship that animated the Nunn-Lugar partnership—and that appealed to Obama—was rapidly fading.

I occasionally sat behind Obama at Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in a row of seats allocated for Senate aides so they could answer their members’ questions. As the senators engaged witnesses, they seemed less interested in changing minds than in scoring points with the media, special interest groups (who I was shocked to learn actually wrote many of the senators’ questions), and, on a good day, their constituents back home. “Here we go again,” Obama told me as we entered one hearing in which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was testifying. “We will faithfully pretend to be asking questions, but we will instead give statements. She will faithfully pretend to answer our questions, but will instead answer questions we didn’t ask so as to deliver talking points we’ve all heard before. And the hearing will end, and we will walk out of here, calling it ‘democratic accountability.’ ”

I had mostly been spared the petty office dynamics that many people deal with every day. I had also never been so proximate to “power,” which seemed to have earned its reputation as a corroding force. I still don’t know whether I was being undermined because my relationship with Obama existed independently of the normal office hierarchy, because I was a woman, or some combination. Regardless, I realized that sharing the same general political loyalties does not mean that people are kindred spirits. And I now knew that I would need to keep up my guard.

I saw that my child-self had not been a capable agent in a grown-up world; I finally recognized that I had been helpless. For the first time in my life—at the age of thirty-five—I began grieving over the monumental loss and rupture that I had experienced. And I started to stop seeing that loss as my fault. I also came to understand just how unwittingly determined I had been to never be vulnerable to such a loss again.

The loudest applause of the day went to Obama. I had sent him an email with a few ideas for his speech. But after looking out at the swelling crowd—a heartening sight to a former community organizer—he started with Scripture: In the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 24, Verses 11 and 12, it reads as follows: Rescue those being led away to death, Hold back those staggering toward slaughter! If you say, “But we knew nothing of this!” Does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it? Will he not repay each person according to what he has done? Obama proceeded to take note of how tempting it often is to look away, and how complex modern challenges can seem: There are problems in the world that sometimes seem overwhelming. There’s so much misery, so much want, so much conflict and cruelty, so much violence. And at times there’s lack of moral clarity. We look across the span of the globe and we can’t always tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. We don’t always know what the proper course of action is. And so we’re sometimes tempted to withdraw into our own private lives, our own private struggles and ambitions, our own private gardens. But this is not one of those times. Today we know what is right and we know what is wrong. The slaughter of innocents is wrong. Two million people driven from their homes is wrong. Women gang raped while gathering firewood is wrong. Silence, acquiescence, paralysis in the face of genocide is wrong.

“I know that if we care, the world will care. If we bear witness, then the world will know. If we act, then the world will follow!” he said. “And in every corner of the globe, tyrants and terrorists, powers and principalities, will know that a new day is dawning and a righteous spirit is on the move, and that all of us together have joined hands to ensure that never again will these kinds of atrocities happen.”

I got a call from Ben Rhodes, Obama’s twenty-nine-year-old foreign policy speechwriter, who was at his wits’ end as he tried to mobilize support for his boss’s positions.

Jesus. Everyone is young 👶

In 2004, I had followed the primaries the old-fashioned way—by watching debates and reading national polls to figure out who was “leading.” But now that I was immersed in a campaign, I realized that victory would have little to do with these metrics.

SOMETHING SHIFTED IN OBAMA during the final days before the Iowa Democratic Caucus: for the first time, he seemed to be having fun. Having survived what he called the “public colonoscopy” of almost a year of campaigning, he could finally focus on the two dimensions of the contest that he had a real knack for: grassroots organizing—and winning. The campaign’s ground game in Iowa was breathtakingly comprehensive. Seeing the young campaign staff’s relentless efforts during a trip to Iowa, I commented in my journal, “something is building, something unstoppable, something deeply affirming.” Plouffe and Iowa state director Paul Tewes had deployed 159 field organizers to all of Iowa’s 99 counties, a strategy that was then unheard of. These paid staff were supported by 10,000 volunteers—all for a state where only 124,000 caucus-goers had participated in the previous Democratic primary. Tewes and his team were so thorough that the campaign contacted one undecided voter—in person, on the phone, and through mailings—a whopping 103 times.

My back pain had been worse than ever that year—so bad that it felt like I was spending more time at the chiropractor than anywhere else. Elliot Thomson, a close law school friend, had long believed that my back pain stemmed from psychological and not physical ailments. When I told him how bad it had gotten, he mailed me a copy of John Sarno’s Healing Back Pain, which I read cover to cover. Sarno argued that pain of the sort I had been experiencing could stem from a failure to grapple with deep distress that then gets “somatized”—lodged or manifested—in the body as physical pain.

Obama also offered some parting counsel: “Don’t fuck this up.”

Evergreen advice

At around 7:30 p.m., we were in the backseat of a friend’s car driving to the Iowa Events Center, where we expected to watch the results trickle in on the big screen over the course of a long evening. To our surprise, we heard on the radio that MSNBC had already projected Barack Obama as the winner. Some 240,000 people had turned out to caucus, nearly double the number from 2004. Cass and I could hardly process what we were hearing, but we embraced and raced inside to wait for Obama to appear. I emailed him from my BlackBerry, “Um, congratulations on changing everything forever.”

In a single night, Americans in one of the whitest states in the country had changed our understanding of what was possible. The resounding triumph had also underscored how large a difference young people make when they turn out. Many years later, Obama would say of his Iowa caucus victory, “That’s my favorite night of my entire political career . . . a more powerful night than the night I was elected President.”

Ensconced among Iowans, campaign volunteers, and donors, Austan and I began to lead our section in a series of unsophisticated chants. “Give me an O!” I shouted. Austan wrapped his arms above his head in the shape of an O. The bleacher roared, “OOOOOOOOO!” The next morning, a picture of us making the large O sign and shouting at the top of our lungs was splashed on the pages of the Des Moines Register. We looked like drunken members of a fraternity rather than senior advisers to a potential president, but the photo captured the exaltation of the night.