The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

by Samantha Power

By the following week, unable to keep down solid food since my name appeared in the headlines, I had lost seven pounds—along with the ability to think about anything other than myself. When Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York, became ensnared in a prostitution scandal, I opened the New York Times to see a large pull-quote from Spitzer’s call girl that read: “I just don’t want to be thought of as a monster!” When I saw her defense, I tossed the newspaper aside. “Cass,” I insisted, “I have changed the way we talk. Now everyone is saying ‘monster.’ It is the new definition of the most terrible thing you can be.”

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I awoke one morning to find Cass on his laptop, his eyes welling with tears. After reading about my resignation, an Irish doctor named John Crown had realized that I was the daughter of a man he had once watched hold forth at Hartigan’s. In an essay in the Irish Independent, he wrote intimately of the sociology and poignancy of the pub scene: Dr. Jim Power was the intellectual alpha male of the Hartigan’s herd, a fearsomely formidable pub debater and commentator on the human condition, with a brilliant if acerbic turn of phrase, a man who saw off challenging younger bucks, leaving them staggering into the bush with one swish of his tongue. Sitting regally on a stool reading The Daily Telegraph, he would deflate egos, demolish myths and dispense well-informed editorials on the affairs of the day. Those who knew Jim recognised the melancholy that many separated fathers have, the sadness of separation from children . . . I think that Ireland could never have allowed [his daughter] to thrive and grow the way that America did. Sad for Jim, but thank God she emigrated. There was a richness to this description of my father that pierced (and pierces) me.

“I love sitting next to Samantha. And it occurred to me that, if she married me, I would be able to sit next to her for the rest of my life.”

ON NOVEMBER 4TH, 2008, Cass and I sat on plastic chairs in a white tent in Grant Park, Chicago, among Obama’s friends, advisers, donors, and a host of politicians and celebrities. Just outside—in the same spot where police had mauled protesters at the Democratic National Convention forty years before—240,000 people of all races, religions, and generations watched the election results on a Jumbotron showing CNN.

OBAMA HAD MADE CLEAR to Cass and me that he would want us to join his administration if he managed to win. The memory of my struggles in the Senate office made me wonder whether I—who had flown solo my whole career before that fateful dinner with Obama in 2005—could find a place in a huge bureaucracy, having to constantly jockey for access.

Cass tried to console me. He insisted something would work out, quoting Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who wisely wrote, “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

In one of my many dreams during this period, I was overjoyed because I was about to interview for a job with Clinton at the State Department. As the meeting time approached, I looked frantically for my car keys, but couldn’t find them. After rushing to the State Department in a cab, I was told that the meeting had been moved to her office on Capitol Hill. When I got there, I realized that although I was already half an hour late, I needed urgently to use a restroom—as pregnant women often did. The bathrooms had long lines of women beside them, and, as I waited, my cell phone rang, telling me I had to get to the meeting or it would be canceled. When it was finally my turn for the bathroom, I stepped forward, inching past a woman who had just arrived. As I walked by, she began whacking me with her handbag. Doggedly continuing forward, I heard her fall behind me. When I turned, she was lying on the ground and jabbing her cane upwards at me, saying, “You, missy, will pay for this. I recognize you. You are Samantha Power. I am going to tell all the newspapers that you hit an old lady trying to go to the bathroom.” This was my mental state as I waited for a job offer.

I still had to get the formal okay from National Security Advisor Jones, who would be my new boss. As I awaited my interview with him, I drove to the FBI field office in downtown Boston to be fingerprinted for the investigation that was required before I could obtain a security clearance. I also started making my way through a mountain of government paperwork. I had to complete forms for ethics, medical history, and financial disclosure, but it was the SF-86, the national security background questionnaire, that stunned me with its breadth. The form had twenty-nine separate sections, each with a detailed subset of questions. It also came with a bold warning that those who submitted false information could be charged with a federal crime and face up to five years in prison.

CASS and I boarded the US Air Shuttle in Boston, ready to take up our new life in the nation’s capital. Mum and Eddie would be meeting us in DC so we could attend the Inauguration together. I was struck by the Americanness of it all. When they came to the United States three decades before, could Mum and Eddie have imagined that their adopted country would elect an African-American President? Or that their daughter would get to work at his White House?

And, as if on cue, I heard Obama’s voice beckoning someone down the hall. Jones was a six-foot-four former Georgetown basketball forward and decorated Vietnam War veteran who had risen through the ranks of the military to become a four-star general. He kept his hair trimmed short and had the lean physique of someone still ready to suit up for battle. Although he cut an imposing figure, he was wonderfully informal as he escorted me into his office. “Pretty cool here, isn’t it?” he said. His shelves were already lined with photos of his grandchildren and dozens of “challenge coins” bearing the insignia of the various US military detachments he had served in or visited over the course of a forty-year military career. I had first heard about Jones from Fred Cuny, who had spoken glowingly about the general’s provision of US military protection to Kurds in Northern Iraq after the Persian Gulf War. As we sat down at Jones’s conference table, I mentioned that Fred had helped inspire my early career choices. Jones broke into a broad smile and, for the next ten minutes, talked about their partnership and the gaping hole left by Fred’s death.

“Yes,” she said warmly. “But I want to warn you, the space is really small.” I said I didn’t care how big my office was, reminding her that I had worked out of a backpack for years as a reporter, requiring only a notebook, pen, and laptop. But then I hesitated. “Is it a lot smaller than the other Senior Directors’ offices?” I inquired. There was a long pause. “For now, yes,” she said. Something similar happened when the NSC Human Resources Department informed me of my salary. I did not question the figure they presented, knowing that I would take a pay cut from working at a private university. The following day, however, I learned from a male colleague, also a Senior Director, that he would be paid five thousand dollars more than me. Instead of demanding a pay raise, I emailed Lippert, saying I had learned of the two salary tiers for Senior Directors. I asked what I would need to do to earn the higher pay. Lippert called immediately, and, since I wasn’t home, apologized to Cass. He said the mix-up would be corrected, which it was, but I wondered if I was experiencing bad luck or something more deliberate.

And one never knows!🕵️‍♀️

My office in the EEOB was located inside a SCIF—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. This meant that I worked inside the equivalent of a room-sized safe. If I was the first to arrive in the morning, I had to enter a combination by rotating a palm-sized dial on the heavy door.

Cool!

Senior Directors were the core of the President’s NSC staff, and we held roughly the same “rank” as Assistant Secretaries at the State Department. We prepared background papers and talking points, and we offered advice to President Obama, National Security Adviser Jones, and Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon on what the United States should do vis-à-vis particular countries, emerging threats, and sudden crises. On key matters, we would lay out before the President the pros and cons of pending choices. These “decision memos” were liable to cover everything from whether to provide Pakistan additional military assistance to whether Obama should meet with the Dalai Lama over Chinese objections. The NSC had “regional” Senior Directors for every part of the world, “homeland” Senior Directors for threats like natural disasters and cyberattacks, and “functional” Senior Directors for issues that cut across different parts of the globe, such as nuclear nonproliferation, climate and energy, and international economics. As the functional Senior Director responsible for multilateral affairs, I advised the President on US relations with international organizations, especially the United Nations. My portfolio was broad. On a typical day, I might review a UN Security Council draft resolution ratcheting up sanctions against Iran or I might assess whether the United States should support deploying UN peacekeepers to a conflict zone. I also got Jones’s permission to serve concurre...

In theory, my human rights role meant that I would be able to generate discussion within the NSC and across the government about possible US actions to combat political repression, anti-Semitism, crackdowns on religious minorities, human trafficking, or mass atrocities. In practice, however, I needed support from the appropriate regional Senior Director when I wanted to influence policy toward a particular country where abuses were occurring.

Because of “optics”—a term that I heard constantly—I even needed sign-offs from regional Senior Directors to hold certain meetings. For example, if I hoped to see a critic of the Egyptian government to learn about worsening conditions in the country’s prisons, I first had to check with the Senior Director responsible for the Middle East. My colleagues were sometimes concerned about the “message” that holding meetings with dissidents would send to governments whose cooperation the United States sought.

My first months on the NSC in some ways reminded me of moving to the United States thirty years before. I had once again arrived in a foreign land.

I was exposed to a whole new bureaucratic lingo. I had to anticipate “pushback” from constituencies that I had never even known existed. I saw government officials “foot-stomping” points they felt strongly about. When the President was meeting with another head of state, we had to agree in advance on what “the ask” and “the deliverables” would be. When the bureaucracy was mired in gridlock, one hoped for an “action-forcing event” like a high-level official’s testimony before Congress or an upcoming meeting with a foreign minister that would create pressure to make a decision.

The gendered metaphors made my skin crawl. In advance of laying out the full scope of our strategy for Iraq, “we needed to show some leg” to foreshadow what we were about to do, or we needed to go in “open Kimono” and be fully transparent. When we landed on an option in the middle, avoiding a hard choice, we might find ourselves “half-pregnant,” a phrase I’m embarrassed to say I heard myself using while more than half-pregnant.

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WORKING AT THE NSC seemed a little bit like conducting an orchestra. I had one very important power: I got to choose the “music” within my area—that is, the issue on which to spur a government-wide debate about what the United States should do. I then chaired meetings in the Situation Room,* gathering people from the intelligence community, the State Department, the Defense Department, the Treasury Department, USAID, and other agencies to explore whether we could agree on a desired strategy.

When a decision was especially important or we could not reach consensus about next steps, Donilon would convene the “Deputies,” the number-two officials of each government agency, or Jones would gather the “Principals,” the heads of the agencies like Secretary of State Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. When Obama wished to discuss an issue, he would summon the Principals or relevant NSC staff so as to hear competing perspectives and offer direction.

If the White House was going to issue a statement (for example, to condemn a crackdown on protesters in a foreign country), an NSC country specialist would write the first draft. He would then circulate it by email to others on the NSC for edits. Among the recipients would be members of our press team, lawyers, and liaisons to Congress. Every NSC official who was seen to have “equity” in a statement had to be “looped in” so that they could “chop on,” or edit, the words that went out into the world under President Obama’s name. I was stunned by the number of cooks in the kitchen—and not at all surprised by how blandly the resulting White House statements often read. Anything sharp or interesting was likely to be edited out somewhere along the line.

I was chastised several times during my first month because I sent material directly to Lippert and Donilon without first getting approvals from other Senior Directors, who had their own views on the topic. This sin of bypassing colleagues with equities was termed a “process foul,” and being guilty of it felt akin to committing a crime. Over time, however, I came to appreciate the importance of fidelity to “process”—especially when colleagues tried to send the President material that didn’t offer a perspective on how a decision might impact human rights. I saw early on how few voices in high-level government discussions highlighted the nexus between human rights and US national security.

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.

Was I senior enough to guide the rest of the administration on an issue that didn’t warrant the President’s attention? Who among the other Senior Directors did I need to consult? If one of my colleagues disagreed with my approach, who would break the tie? How would our guidance eventually be dispensed to US diplomats out in the world? These questions would take time for me to sort out.

I had thought the President would provide us with direction. But it turned out that with the crashing economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all the active plotting by terrorists, he was concentrating primarily on high-stakes issues. On other foreign policy matters, Obama would be briefed on what we were doing and would sometimes tell us to change course. But he understood from the start that he would not be able to do his job if he did not delegate.*

Early on, Susan (now Ambassador Rice) warned me: “Don’t let anybody there roll you, Sam.” I wasn’t familiar with what it meant to be “rolled,” so she helpfully clued me in. “Act like you are the boss,” Susan counseled, “or people will take advantage of you.”

Susan was said to have a “black belt” in bureaucracy, and, determined to accelerate my learning, I jotted down her advice in the government-issued green notebook I carried with me everywhere.

In “A Problem from Hell,” I had highlighted the work of Albert Hirschman, the Princeton economist who published the landmark book The Rhetoric of Reaction in 1991. Hirschman’s thesis was that those who didn’t want to pursue a particular course of action tended to argue that a given policy would be futile (“futility”), that it would likely make matters worse (“perversity”), or that it would imperil some other goal (“jeopardy”). Senator Obama and I had talked about Hirschman’s work, and I had admired Obama’s ability both to identify the constraints the United States faced and to think creatively about ways we could transcend those barriers. Now, though, endowed with powers he had never had before, he seemed less inclined to believe the United States could get its way.

I wondered whether people would be reluctant to speak during meetings I attended. “Will people think I’m just a reporter masquerading as a bureaucrat?” I asked Cass. He answered with typically astute behavioral wisdom. “People tend to think about themselves,” he told me. “It is highly unlikely your colleagues are thinking about you at all.”

I never knew how to address rumors of my culpability. If I marched into the offices of my higher-ups to discuss a suspected leak, I feared it would suggest guilt. But if I waited for the accusations to be leveled in person, I would be waiting a long time. Government, I discovered, was a lot like high school: people tended to dish on their peers behind their backs rather than to their faces.

Multiple NSC officials needed to approve my trips, and my early requests were almost always denied. When I asked to join a State Department delegation in a dialogue with the Burmese government, for example, I was told I couldn’t go because the presence of someone seen as close to President Obama might inflate expectations of a breakthrough. After a proposed trip to the UN offices in Geneva was deemed “nonessential” and declined on budgetary grounds, I offered to pay my own way. The NSC administrative official looked at me incredulously. “If you are representing the United States government,” she said, “the government must support the trip.” “Yes,” I said, cluelessly, “but you are saying the government won’t cover my trip, and I still want to go. It’s worth it for me to use my own money.”

If you had tracked only Fox News, which distorted Cass’s writing, you would have thought President Obama had nominated a radical, Marxist, animal-rights activist who would use his perch at OIRA to ban hunting and prohibit meat consumption.

Haha. Always with the same tired fibs.

BOTH OF US MISSED controlling how we spent our time. And early on, we didn’t feel that we were accomplishing what we wanted. As we walked to the car at night, we would assess how we had fared during the workday with the shorthand of whether we were “respected” or “not respected,” and whether we were “effective” or “not effective.” I would typically tell Cass that I had landed, yet again, in the lower left-hand quadrant: “not respected, not effective.”

I had felt my blood boil confronting Bosnian Serb militiamen for the crimes they were committing. But now, holed up in a fully secure office with the blinds perpetually drawn, my universe shrank.

After meetings, an NSC colleague would send around what was called the Summary of Conclusions (SOC) to all those who attended, memorializing what had been agreed upon. If the SOC omitted, for example, my nonconcurrence on whether we should recognize a flawed election somewhere, I was almost as enraged as if I had personally witnessed a soldier rough up an election monitor.

Having worked at the White House three months, I had observed that government habits and processes tended to be institutionalized reflections of human nature. In life, when we feel uncomfortable about something, we often prefer to avoid discussing it. In government, because there is so much going on, it is especially easy to escape unappealing conversations. Indeed, even when people fully intend to make time to debate a vexing issue, they often get consumed by the crises of the day. On the Armenian genocide, the key players had little incentive to schedule a meeting since any White House deliberation would be both unpleasant and jeopardize the status quo. Given Obama’s plan to remove US troops from Iraq, and Turkey’s importance to regional stability, they were extremely reluctant to upset business as usual. The matter was simply treated as decided.

After describing what the Hungarian authorities and the Nazis had done to his family, Wiesel found a way to close out his remarks with a proclamation of faith. “In the final analysis,” he said, “I believe in man in spite of men.” He continued: I still cling to words, for it is we who decide whether they become spears or balm, carriers of bigotry or vehicles of understanding, whether they are used to curse or to heal, whether they are here to cause shame or to give comfort. The power of words. I wondered how President Obama was hearing what Wiesel was saying, and whether he felt any fresh tug to use a word that mattered to so many who had lost so much.

He talked about the range of factors that made the Holocaust possible, including “the willingness of those who are neither perpetrators nor victims to accept the assigned role of bystander, believing . . . the fiction that we do not have a choice.” I was struck by how strained Obama already looked just three months into the job. A key part of his message had always been that one individual could change lives. Now he was the leader of the free world. With a pen-stroke, he could pardon a person on death row, send American soldiers into battle, or right a historic wrong. He asked, as one does on such occasions, “How do we ensure that ‘never again’ isn’t an empty slogan or merely an aspiration, but also a call to action?” And he answered, inconveniently in light of the Armenian Remembrance statement that the White House would issue the next day, “I believe we start by doing what we are doing today—by bearing witness, by fighting the silence that is evil’s greatest co-conspirator.”

In just the short period during which he had been in office, Obama had made high-risk decisions that were helping turn the economy around. He was putting in place desperately needed regulations to lower carbon emissions and developing a plan that would eventually provide health insurance to more than 20 million Americans.

He had three and a half years left in his first term and no guarantee of a second term. I had never been given an opportunity like this, and I could not count on ever getting one again.

When I am asked today what it was like working in the national security world as a woman, I don’t have a simple answer. Although Obama had appointed more women to cabinet-level national security roles than any president in history, his NSC was the most male-dominated place I had ever been in the United States. Men held the positions of National Security Advisor, Deputy National Security Advisor, Homeland Security Advisor, NSC Chief of Staff, Strategic Communications Advisor, and speechwriter. During that first year of the administration, this top NSC tier was supported by twenty-six Senior Directors—and only six of us were women. I was fortunate never to experience sexual harassment of the kind I knew many other women had endured.* And while I could tell I was being condescended to at times, I could never be sure it was because of my gender. I started out as a complete novice in government, and in debates, I often advocated on behalf of human rights, which national security professionals generally viewed as a “soft,” secondary priority.

At the office, I tried to follow through on the commitments I had made to myself while on leave. With Denis’s support, I expanded the size of my staff from one NSC quasi-deputy (or “director”) to four; with each NSC director who worked under me, we would be able to drive progress on three or four more real-world issues.

I began aggressively reaching out to women who had made an impression on me in meetings, trying to convince them to join my small team rather than waiting for them to apply.

I, myself, would use a different term than ‘aggressive’ but the principle still goes.

I also dedicated more energy to building coalitions with like-minded individuals across government.

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The aspect of government that I had least appreciated before I joined was the importance—and shortage—of “bandwidth.” So much was going on in the world on any given day that one could easily lose an afternoon editing language in various press releases. Mort, my longtime mentor, urged me to prioritize, helping me understand my days as analogous to my mother’s when she worked in the emergency room. He advised me to start by doing triage: patients with life-threatening conditions should be seen first. At the same time, I needed to look for opportunities. Was there a place in the world that was ripe for reform? Was there a conflict or situation where, with more diplomacy, resources, or pressure, the United States could make a positive impact?

“Go where they ain’t.” By “they,” he meant senior US officials. Legions of government aides flocked to consequential issues that drew presidential attention. But all around the world, immense suffering was occurring in forgotten places. With even a modest time investment, one could support positive change in ways that would not make the evening news. Lower down in the bureaucracy, he and Mort both stessed, one could also find enthusiastic partners brimming with ideas about how to help. 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.”

I thought I could help Iraqi refugees garner stronger support from the US government. At my urging back in 2007, then-candidate Obama had pledged to expand humanitarian assistance to the four million Iraqis who had been displaced in the wake of the US invasion and to increase the number of Iraqis resettled in the United States. Instead of meeting resistance when I tried to ensure we followed through on these promises, I encountered many US officials who had themselves lived in Iraq and were especially concerned about those who had risked their lives working as translators for the US military. By the time Obama took office, at least three hundred of these Iraqis had already been murdered as retribution for assisting our soldiers.*

I handed him the memo I had prepared, which included a history of humanitarianism, an account of the relationship between human rights and conflict, and thoughts on violence from Hume, Kant, Martin Luther King, Jr., Niebuhr, and Henry Dunant, the founder of the International Committee for the Red Cross. Obama stayed up through the night, starting a new speech from scratch and developing an elaborate, deeply original, handwritten draft on a yellow legal pad. In the morning, he called Jon, Ben, and me into the Oval to walk us through what he had done. The President had produced a piece of rhetoric that embraced contradictions that most politicians blew past. He rejected pacifism in the face of evil and aggression; at the same time, he insisted that while soldiers could achieve great glory, “war itself is never glorious.” He criticized the “reflexive suspicion” toward the United States and the use of military force prevalent in Europe, defending America’s record in underwriting the global order and the modern-day peace in Germany, Korea, and the Balkans. “I understand why war is not popular,” Obama had written. “But I also know this: the belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. Peace requires responsibility.”

For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

No matter how callously defined, neither America’s interests—nor the world’s—are served by the denial of human aspirations . . . We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of depravation, and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.