The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

by Samantha Power

On the plane home, I reflected on all that had conspired to produce the speech—not only Obama’s willingness to confront big, hard questions, and clarifying thinking from people who lived long ago, but also bureaucratic gridlock and a chance encounter. The drafting process had been a tightrope walk, but it had come together beautifully.

In my writing and activism, I had argued that US officials should respond with a sense of urgency to early-warning signs, and that they should be empowered to alert senior decision-makers to threats of violence. High-level officials should then open their toolbox, scrutinizing whether or not the benefits of employing a particular tool outweighed the costs. People who knew me before I met Obama expected the hardest part of my adjustment to working at the White House would be taming my outspokenness. But when people asked, “Do you miss having your own voice?” I could barely fathom the question. “The reason I was exercising my voice before was to influence people in jobs like the one I now have,” I would say. “A voice is not an end in itself.”

I had secured a decent number of changes to the speech on other human rights issues, and I was resigned to the fact that this would not be the year President Obama took on LGBT rights at the UN. When I woke up a couple of hours later, though, Ben had forwarded me the final version of the speech with the words “Happy Birthday” at the top of the email. My birthday (and Cass’s) always fell during UNGA week. In the craze, I had forgotten it. This birthday present—like Holbrooke’s wedding gift of a meeting with Hillary Clinton—was unusual, but much appreciated.

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.

Tom had served in every Democratic administration since Jimmy Carter, and he would be elevated to National Security Advisor later that year. He often dispensed wisdom on how government worked, and told me I should not have waited until a high-level meeting had ended to make my point. “Listen,” he said firmly. “If you hear nothing else, hear this. You work at the White House. There is no other room where a bunch of really smart people of sound judgment are getting together and figuring out what to do. It will be the scariest moment of your life when you fully internalize this: There is no other meeting. You’re in the meeting. You are the meeting. If you have a concern, raise it.”

Richard Holbrooke had warned me that I should get used to feeling dependent on other governments for information. “US officials wearing badges around their necks run around the world trying to find foreign officials who wear badges around their necks. And they call it diplomacy,” he said. “This is why we know so little about what is actually going on anywhere.”

Dennis, Gayle, Jeremy, and I argued that regimes that consistently failed to deliver for their people would come under growing pressure. And when citizens contested the ways they were being governed, long-standing leaders could soon find themselves backed into a corner, resorting to ever-more incendiary means to cling to power. Polling already showed that the more repressive governments became in trying to keep a lid on brewing discontent, the less legitimacy they had with their people. When we took into account key trends—like mass unemployment, a population predominantly made up of young people, technology that increased the average person’s ability to see elites’ standard of living and to organize—we concluded that change was coming.

On December 17th, 2010, just as we were sending this large package of material to President Obama for his approval, a Tunisian fruit vendor lit himself on fire. Mohamed Bouazizi’s desperate act of protest against corruption and humiliation set in motion a cascade of revolts that would reorder huge swaths of the Arab world. These uprisings would end up impacting the course of Obama’s presidency more than any other geopolitical development during his eight years in office. The revolution had begun.

What a terribly sad moment. This death of despair haunts me to this day.

As a former reporter, I retained the habit of carefully detailing in my government notebooks what was discussed and decided in meetings in the Situation Room. During this period, however, my scribbles jumped from detailing Libyan military movements to recording specific telephone instructions from a nurse about how to adjust my IVF drug regimen. It dawned on me that future researchers of the Arab Spring who dug through the White House archives would have a hard time making sense of this juxtaposition.

😂🙃

When we arrived at the Human Rights Council meeting, ambassadors and their aides chatted with each other and typed on their BlackBerries, barely listening as speaker after speaker read monotone statements condemning Qaddafi. But when Clinton began to speak, the crowd hushed. Clinton reinforced President Obama’s demand that Qaddafi step down, and, knowing she was speaking to ambassadors from other repressive countries, pointedly warned, “The power of human dignity is always underestimated until the day it finally prevails.”

For all of our hopes that the Libyan leader would step down or at least cease attacks on civilians, he repeatedly made clear that he planned to stay in power—and that he viewed those who opposed him as an existential threat to be eliminated.

In a fist-pounding, seventy-five-minute speech on Libyan television, he had ranted against the opposition, calling them rats and threatening to slaughter them if they did not surrender.

Burma was nearly 90 percent Buddhist, and the Rohingya were a beleaguered Muslim minority that the military dictatorship disenfranchised and severely mistreated. Over the previous three decades, they had been denied citizenship and conscripted into what amounted to slave labor. Government rules forbade Rohingya from traveling out of their villages, or from marrying and having children without official permission. And state security forces used rape to terrorize Rohingya women.

Damn.

Aung San Suu Kyi had a ready answer. “Do not forget that there is violence on both sides,” she said, repeating a false claim made by Buddhist radicals to justify the attacks. Few predicted then that the persecution of the Rohingya would escalate into full-scale genocide, which it did in August of 2017.*

I took in the utter improbability of the moment. Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the United States, had just been elected to a second term by a sizable margin. Aung San Suu Kyi was a free woman and a member of the parliament from which she had been banned for decades. And I, the mother of two children who had successfully negotiated with the Burmese military junta’s representatives in advance of a presidential visit, was pumping in the bathroom of the home of a human rights giant. I looked up at the ceiling and said a short prayer of thanks.

🌍🌏🌎

I accepted an offer from the new Secretary of State, John Kerry, to become Undersecretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights. The role came with a large portfolio in which I would oversee human rights, refugees and migration, international justice and law enforcement, and conflict prevention.

He described his confidence in Susan, who would be stepping into the government’s most important, high-pressure foreign policy position. And finally, as I looked at Mum’s and Eddie’s faces in the audience—in the Rose Garden! At the White House!—the President introduced me as his choice to represent the United States as UN ambassador: One of our foremost thinkers on foreign policy, she showed us that the international community has a moral responsibility and a profound interest in resolving conflicts and defending human dignity . . . To those who care deeply about America’s engagement and indispensable leadership in the world, you will find no stronger advocate for that cause than Samantha.

I concluded by saying that I had seen the best and worst of the UN—aid workers enduring artillery fire to deliver food to people in Sudan and peacekeepers failing to protect the people of Bosnia. The UN had to do a better job “meeting the necessities of our time,” I said, an objective that I believed was possible to achieve only if the United States led the way.

I thought of all that Mum and Eddie had done for me over the years. Mum getting on that plane to America and later buying me my first laptop before I headed off to the Balkans. Eddie keeping my love of the underdog alive with his Irish fight songs. Both of them spending an untold number of hours editing chapters of my books—even after their own long days of work at the hospital. I had traveled a vast distance to represent the United States at the UN.

I understood that for many of Obama’s Republican critics, my perspective on foreign policy was intrinsically suspect. And having watched Cass go through the confirmation process back in 2009, I knew the US Senate’s approval was not foreordained. Like my husband, I had amassed a voluminous body of writing that the senators’ staffs would examine. As the Washington Post summarized, “During a long and outspoken career as a journalist, author and human rights activist, Power, 42, has provided extensive fodder for questions about her views on many US foreign policy issues.”

There is something you do not seem to get: the senators are not there to listen to you. They are there to listen to themselves. They want to be on television. They want to play to their base. As you speak, most will not even be listening. You are just filler between their first comment that pretends to be a question and their second comment that pretends to be a question. So the longer your answers are, the more annoyed they will become, and the greater the chance that you say something you will regret. If you hear nothing else, just remember this: your hearing is not on the level. I knew this from my days working with Obama in the Senate, but I struggled to internalize the implications.

I asked Cass to write Declan’s name and birth date on the official form. A few months later, after I waited several hours at the Washington, DC, birth registry for Declan’s birth certificate, I received one for “PECLAN POWER SUNSTEIN.” As soon as I saw the typo, I knocked on the glass window and asked for the spelling to be corrected. But the clerk told me that such an alteration would require a trip to the “amendments office.” I was beside myself. “Ma’am,” I said, “I promise you I didn’t call my son Peclan and then change my mind. My husband just has horrible handwriting.” The clerk repeated directions to the amendments office and slid the glass window shut. After waiting another hour, I received the corrected birth certificate, which still noted that Peclan Power Sunstein was born April 24th, and then, beside his “birth name,” in inch-high black type, the office had added the stamp, “AMENDED,” and his “new” name, Declan Power Sunstein. The experience now seems trivial, but at the time it sent me into an exasperated rage at my husband. “You had one job!” I told him. “And now, for the rest of his life, Declan will have to explain to people why his parents named him Peclan!” When Rían was born, Cass promised I could count on him. “I learn well,” he said. Yet when I returned to the same birth registry to collect our daughter’s birth certificate, it read “RTAN POWER SUNSTEIN.” Her birth certificate, like Declan’s, now has an inch-high “AMENDED” stamp, indicating that, after a...

😂🤦‍♀️

Jeremy’s interest in public service was deeply personal. When he was seven years old, his father began working obsessively to expose a top-secret CIA program called MKULTRA. The program had funded esteemed psychiatrists and psychologists in the United States and Canada to administer experimental drugs and intensive shock treatments on human subjects—one of whom was Jeremy’s grandfather, causing him permanent brain damage.21 Following an eight-year lawsuit, the CIA settled with eight Canadians, including his grandfather, paying victims a woefully modest amount. From his family’s ordeals at the hands of the US government, Jeremy acquired two key convictions, both of which I shared. He believed that governments should not be able to act with impunity in the name of national security. And equally important, he thought public officials should keep in mind the individuals who would be harmed by our failure to act in the face of gross injustice.

ON JULY 17TH, 2013, I woke up in the hotel to the sound of drumbeats and a looping piano riff: Started from the bottom now we’re here Started from the bottom now my whole team fuckin’ here Cass’s laptop was blaring Drake’s ode to beating the odds and showing up the haters. “Just the way Drake intended!”

On matters of war and peace, the UN has been less of an actor in its own right than a stage on which powerful countries have pursued their interests. Richard Holbrooke, who served as President Clinton’s UN ambassador, once observed, “Blaming the UN for a crisis is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the New York Knicks play badly. You are blaming a building.”

While most countries, including the United States, sometimes balk at living by the ideals in the UN Charter, it is historically significant that none of the major powers have fought a war with one another since the UN’s founding. UN peacekeeping missions have fallen far short on many occasions, but they have also helped protect huge numbers of civilians from violence and prevented conflict from spreading across borders.

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.”

The career staff had generally internalized an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) rule of government to await instructions from those above them in the hierarchy before taking initiative. I had left my job at the National Security Council with a heightened appreciation for the importance of inclusive and transparent government processes.

Many had lived in the conflict-prone countries we were discussing. Some were experienced in the fields of international law or humanitarian relief. Several were Chinese, Russian, or Arabic speakers who brought invaluable insight to US negotiations. And almost all of them had institutional memories I lacked—knowing what had and hadn’t worked in the past. I reminded them of the expertise they brought to their jobs and encouraged them to make their own recommendations to help shape US policy. I knew that Holbrooke, Mort, and Jonathan had surrounded themselves with people who both challenged them and generated ideas, even if they were considered “junior.” I wanted to do the same.

I also tried to encourage an ethos of never being satisfied by merely raising an issue, making a public statement, or holding a meeting, stressing that we “care less about inputs and more about outcomes.”

My team and I knew the danger of being overwhelmed by what we called “the tyranny of the inbox.” As a result, after soliciting ideas from my staff and the four deputy ambassadors,* I settled on several human rights concerns that I would try to address without much involvement from Washington—issues that would not only help specific individuals, but also perhaps boost the confidence of US diplomats who sometimes seemed to doubt America’s potential impact. We chose initiatives that I knew President Obama would support wholeheartedly, but which much of the bureaucracy beneath him did not prioritize. At a time when American society seemed to be increasingly divided on the subject of immigration, I decided to find occasions to highlight the impact being made by refugees and immigrants in the United States. In addition, I would work with my team to embed LGBT rights within the DNA of the UN and to try to secure the release of political prisoners.

I remained in the Council from 9:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m., when the meeting was “suspended.” “It isn’t over?” I asked the US diplomat sitting behind me. When he told me that the meeting would resume after lunch, I offered the old adage, “I guess everything has been said, but not everybody has said it.”

This is always true in everything

So much was happening at the UN that, when the prepared speeches went on too long, I would use the time to plow through more than a hundred pages of materials I received daily in order to deliver direction to my staff. At any given time, US diplomats working at the Mission were immersed in negotiations on issues ranging from whether to impose sanctions to how to rehabilitate child soldiers after conflict. In the General Assembly chamber, US representatives often sought to expand girls’ education programs while also fending off maddening efforts to create new UN positions, which would cost money that could otherwise be spent providing assistance to people in need.

I would inevitably devour the contents—preparatory material for my meetings and events the next day, classified updates on various conflicts I was tracking, lengthy analytic reports from organizations like the International Crisis Group, and updates from staff on our longer-term initiatives.

I explained my rationale. “Cuban government goons ran Payá off the road. They know that and will never allow a proper investigation. The closest we may get to holding them accountable for murdering a Cuban activist are a few negative headlines. I don’t see how silence helps anyone.” “Talk to me in a few months,” he said. The Mexican ambassador became a friend, but I never came around to his view. I was not prepared to choose between public and private diplomacy; both have their place.

IN 2011, THE SYRIAN REVOLUTION had begun like the other uprisings across the Arab world—with jubilant, largely peaceful protests. Given the earth-shattering developments taking place in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, Syrians believed they were riding a wave of history that would soon wash away their oppressive and corrupt government, which had been led by the Assad family since 1970. During this early stage of the revolution, I was still working at the White House and had the chance to meet Syrian opposition and civil society leaders who traveled to Washington seeking US support. Often wielding large maps, they excitedly pointed out the towns that were no longer controlled by the Syrian authorities, and they described voting for the first time in free elections to choose the local committees that would govern newly liberated areas. But within a matter of months, the bright future had darkened. The Syrian regime, run since 2000 by President Bashar al-Assad, responded to the opposition’s progress with violent tactics more inhumane than anything I had seen since researching the Rwandan genocide for “A Problem from Hell.” Initially, the Syrian police rounded up critics, while government snipers shot at protesters. Before long, Syrian forces began firing on the funerals of those killed. They also filmed the mourners so that they could identify more opposition supporters to arrest. Many of those detained were tortured and some were executed. Assad’s army soon increased its firepower...

Damn.

Taken together, these chemical weapons strikes were estimated to have killed between 100 and 150 people. These fatalities did not generate significant public uproar in the context of a war that had already taken more than 90,000 lives by the spring of 2013. Still, the findings called into question whether Obama had been serious when he warned of “enormous consequences.” I had taken a short leave from the Obama administration in late March of 2013 in order to prepare for what I thought was my next assignment as Undersecretary of State. When Ben Rhodes convened a conference call with the press to discuss the letter to Congress and field questions about the administration’s next steps, I combed over the transcript posted online, looking for clues.

This remained the basic state of play on August 21st, 2013, the date of the Syrian regime’s massive early morning attack on the Damascus suburbs. Watching the footage from the apartment where we stayed in Ireland, I felt sure that Assad had chosen his timing deliberately: the attack began a year to the day, Washington time, from Obama’s red-line threat.

Obama turned to me. “Sam, I need you to get those UN inspectors out of Syria,” he said sharply. “That UN mission needs to be shut down now.”

After months of being blocked by the Assad regime, twenty UN investigators had arrived in Damascus on August 18th—just three days before the massive chemical weapons attack—to investigate the allegations of chemical attacks from earlier in the year. Obama was concerned that the Assad regime, which was clearly capable of stooping to anything, would detain the UN officials and use them as human shields once US military strikes began.

😔😔😞

These were among the many dynamics that those of us advising the President had debated prior to August 21st and now were discussing anew as he prepared to order military action. Yet for the first time since the start of the Syrian conflict, even when considering all of these potential downsides, Obama had concluded that the costs of not responding forcefully were greater than the risks of taking military action. Whereas on Libya he had sought a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force, here—given the stakes for Syria and for upholding the international norm against the use of chemical weapons—Obama was prepared to operate without what White House lawyers called a “traditionally recognized legal basis under international law.” The lawyers suggested that, given the vast number of international obligations Assad’s regime had violated, acting without the Council could, as it was in the case of Kosovo, be “justified and legitimate under international law.”

Assad had staged the largest massacre of the war, and he had carried out a chemical attack beyond anything the world had seen in a quarter century.26 While I wished President Obama would consider confronting Assad’s other instruments of death, I agreed with him that chemical weapons warranted a specific red line. They were weapons of mass destruction, capable of killing vast numbers of people at once. The nations of the world had come together after World War I to ban these weapons, and if the international consensus against their use were to break down, the lapse would almost certainly come back to haunt many more people (Americans included) in and out of conflict zones around the world.

Assad had become convinced that no one would stop him from using even the most merciless tactics against his own people.

If the US government looked away from this incident, signaling that Assad could gas his citizens at will, I worried he would never feel sufficient pressure to negotiate. Instead, he would go on using unspeakably vicious methods to remain in power, and the war would continue indefinitely, killing countless Syrians and eventually endangering American national security.

But from Ban’s perspective, pulling the inspectors out would make the UN look complicit in the western military action that he and the world recognized was imminent. The secretary-general was unyielding. “We cannot not proceed,” he said.

The presence of the UN team caused Obama to delay the US military operation he had hoped to launch on the night of August 25th. Every day for the next five days, Obama would ask me, Susan, or John Kerry whether Ban had withdrawn the flawed mission, so that he could order the planned strikes. And each day, one of us would report to the President that the UN investigators remained in Damascus.

On Friday, August 30th, nine days after the attack, Ban called to relay the utterly unsurprising news that the UN team had gathered convincing proof that sarin gas had been used. They would be leaving Syria the next morning with environmental and biomedical samples (like tissue and hair),...

That night, as I wearily entered the Waldorf at nine p.m., I heard my secure phone ring and hustled to the back study to answer it. Susan was on the line. I started filling her in on the latest from the secretary-general, but she cut me off. President Obama had decided on a sudden change of course, she said. He had gone from “wanting to go and go yesterday” to deciding that he would seek authorization from Congress for the use of force before proceeding with military strikes against Assad. I was so taken aback that I asked Susan to repeat what she had said, to be sure I hadn’t misheard. She insisted that Obama was not going wobbly on the use of force itself. “He will fight like hell to get the authorization,” she explained. “He is betting his presidency and our reputation in the world on this.” When I asked if the President might be open to reversing his decision, she said we would have a chance to offer our views at a meeting early the following morning. But, she added, “His mind is made up.”

Punting here. Big it’s an important constitutional duty for Congress to do stuff life this. Idk. This is fucked up.

Over the past several decades, presidents have argued that the limited nature and scope of their military operations meant they were not “at war” as such, allowing them to use military force without congressional approval. However, the 1973 War Powers Resolution stipulated that, when Congress has not authorized a military operation, the President must report the action to Congress within forty-eight hours and remove US armed forces from “hostilities” within sixty days. Presidents have generally gotten around the sixty-day requirement by arguing that US hostilities were not continuous, allowing the “clock” to stop and then reset again. Indeed, during his first term, Obama himself had contended that he was in compliance with the War Powers Resolution during the 222-day military campaign in Libya because US involvement was sufficiently limited as to not constitute “hostilities” or require the automatic sixty-day pullout.

This is fucked up. No easy solution given where we are at politically.

Already, some 140 House lawmakers (among them 21 Democrats) had signed a letter warning Obama that military strikes in Syria “without prior congressional authorization” would be unconstitutional.