The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

by Samantha Power

After I sat down and prepared to gavel the meeting to a start, I scrolled through a stream of text messages that were pouring in to my phone: “We want to cosponsor.” “We are in.” “Count on us.” “Thank you for US leadership.” I showed the texts to Rabia Qureshi, the foreign service officer at the mission who covered West Africa. She shook her head in disbelief and told me that, at last count, we had a breathtaking 100 country cosponsors. Ten minutes later, we had 20 more. By the time the sponsors’ list closed, we had 134, the largest number of cosponsors for any Security Council resolution in the sixty-nine-year history of the UN.

One had the sense that the connection could go out at any time. But when this man on the other side of the world spoke, my fellow ambassadors—who usually multitasked during briefings—stared up at the screen, rapt. Niamah said that when Ebola came to Monrovia “people began dying,” including his niece and cousin, both nurses, who passed away in July of 2014. “So many of my friends, university classmates and colleagues have died in recent months,” he said. “They die alone, terrified, and without their loved ones at their side.” Niamah had signed up to work for MSF out of a sense of patriotism. His job was to assess patients and then help care for those diagnosed with Ebola. He described what it meant to have more infected people than the MSF clinic had beds. “We have to turn people away, and many are dying at our front gate,” Niamah said. “Right now, as I speak, there are patients sitting at our front gates, literally begging for life.” He then went on: One day this week, I sat outside the treatment center eating my lunch. I met a boy who approached the gate. His father had died from Ebola a week ago. I saw him with blood at his mouth. We had no space, so we could not to take him in . . . When he turned away to walk into town, I thought to myself that that boy is going to take a taxi, and he is going to go home . . . and infect his family. Because Ebola was transmitted through fluids exchanged during physical contact, anyone the boy touched would likely become a casualty of h...

Niamah had made an abstract threat strikingly human and real. Still, each government was doing a cost-benefit calculus about the specifics of what they would contribute. For all the high drama of the moment, and all the support our Security Council resolution had earned, political leaders had experienced few costs for running away from Ebola.

These models show what could happen if we continue to let fear, inaction, or indifference drive our response . . . Models are forecasts of the future. But . . . it is we who actually determine our future. Individuals make history, not models. The United Nations was built for global challenges like this. That is why we are here.

I focused on the fact that border closures put every country at greater risk. If medical personnel believed they would not be able to travel home after working in an Ebola-affected country, they would be less likely to volunteer to help. This would reduce the likelihood that Ebola would be controlled, in turn increasing the chances that the disease would spread to the very countries whose leaders were trying to keep their people safe. Like so many twenty-first-century challenges, Ebola was not a zero-sum fight in which some countries could “win” by pursuing their interests in a vacuum.

As the session went on, there was no sweeter sound than to hear a colleague say, “I am pleased to announce today . . .” China, which was increasingly looking for ways to show off its superpower status, declared fighting Ebola “a common responsibility of all countries in the world” and pledged to send more money, supplies, biosecurity labs, and public health professionals. The UK promised an additional five hundred treatment beds in Sierra Leone (a contribution that might seem small, but that would prove important). Japan sent some 20,000 infection prevention suits for health care workers. The Swiss provided 14 tons of protective medical gear like specialized eye goggles and masks. Malaysia kicked in more than 20 million medical rubber gloves. Cuba sent its highly experienced team of 250 doctors and nurses trained in foreign disaster response. Uruguay promised not to pull its peacekeepers out of the UN mission in Liberia, as some countries had begun doing.

Merely convening the meeting generated striking headlines like EBOLA DECLARED THREAT TO PEACE AND SECURITY BY UN.

A teacher in Maine was placed on a three-week leave of absence because she had visited Dallas for a conference. A passenger who vomited on a flight from Dallas to Chicago was sequestered in the bathroom until the plane landed. A middle school principal in Mississippi was asked to stay home after parents learned that he had traveled to Zambia—a country on the other side of the continent from the affected region. The approaching midterm elections in November fed into the fearmongering and political posturing, with Republican members of Congress compounding the turmoil by demanding a government-imposed travel ban. House Speaker John Boehner encouraged the idea, and several Democrats facing tough reelection fights also offered their support. Some of Obama’s longtime critics, seeming to tap into the racist conspiracies suggesting the President was not fully American, accused him of prioritizing the lives of Africans over those of the American people.

This country, I’ll tell you 🙇‍♀️

Less presidentially, I wrote in my journal on October 17th: “Our ability to lead the world turns on our ability to prevent a full freak-out at home.”

Against this backdrop, my speechwriter Nik suggested that I travel to the three Ebola-affected countries in West Africa. LEAVING NEW YORK in the midst of our lobbying efforts had never occurred to me, but I immediately embraced Nik’s idea and asked my staff to see if the White House would provide a government plane for a trip.

This is important

A trip would also enable me to bring journalists to the sites we visited, and their stories could demonstrate to the American public that by following proper precautions, one would not contract Ebola.

This. All day this! Good leadership; And a grounded science-based approach to difficult global problems. Why fuck this up if you don’t have to? Seriously. The COVID crisis is heartbreaking, devastating, and above all fucking dumb — so far as our Benevolent Leadership goes. Why fuck this up when you don’t have too??

Cass hated the idea and for the first time, Declan was old enough to offer reinforcement. Having just entered kindergarten at the UN International School (UNIS), Declan must have heard someone talking about the epidemic. “Mommy are you going where the Bola is?” he asked me a couple days before I was scheduled to depart. I nodded, but promised I would stay safe. “How do you know?” he asked, adding: “Those other people thought they would be safe too.” I explained how I would not do anything dangerous, but he kept pressing, saying, “Mommy, I’m certain you will bring back Bola.” I had never before heard him use the word “certain,” which I found jarring.

On October 23rd, a New York doctor named Craig Spencer was diagnosed with the virus after returning from an MSF mission in Guinea. When the news broke, Spencer’s cell phone rang off the hook as his former patients called to see if they could help. Spencer had covered a lot of ground during the week between his return and his diagnosis. He had walked the High Line in Chelsea, eaten at a popular restaurant in Greenwich Village, and gone bowling in Williamsburg. Even more terrifying to New Yorkers, he had taken an Uber and ridden the subway. A tightly packed city with millions of people had its first Ebola case—the plotline of a horror film come to life.

Look at this contact tracing. 🤓📝📝📝📝

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio rode the subway and dined with his wife at the restaurant where Spencer had eaten to show they were safe. Conversely, New York governor Andrew Cuomo joined New Jersey governor Chris Christie in announcing that their states would quarantine any person who had worked to combat Ebola in West Africa. It did not matter whether they showed symptoms or not—for twenty-one days, they would be wards of the state.

Ebola isn’t a respiratory illness so good on Mayor de Blasio. Not recommend for instances of a respiratory pandemic.

The day of Hickox’s confinement, Susan Rice, who had done a masterful job pushing the administration to be aggressive in our Ebola response, telephoned to urge me to consider calling off my trip. Acknowledging that she was calling more in her capacity as my friend than as National Security Advisor, she urged me to think about my responsibility to my kids. I said I had of course thought about my family, but I was confident in the safety protocols and felt it was essential to show that our collective domestic panic was misplaced. She continued to press me. “Think about it, Sam,” she said. “What if something goes wrong? Can you imagine what would happen to our larger effort if a member of the President’s cabinet had to be quarantined?”

“Look, you are not going to be touching Ebola patients,” he said. “But of course it is risky.” When he had traveled to Guinea a few weeks before, he recalled listening to his interpreter translating and suddenly thinking, “Wait, as he is speaking inches from me, microscopic specks of his saliva could be entering my ear right now. This is not good!” Still, he urged me not to cancel. I also called my mother, who had gotten educated on Ebola since her initial negative reaction. She now offered unflinching encouragement, ending our call by saying, “I wish I could come.” With her vote of confidence, I resolved to go ahead.

“You could forget that you must not shake anyone’s hand,” I said. “And, if you shake someone’s hand who has Ebola and a tiny cut, and you have the same, you could get Ebola.” Unaccustomed to offering this form of apocalyptic leadership, I echoed Susan’s concerns as my team looked at me gravely. “I want to make sure that each of you has thought through the risks you are taking,” I said.

BY THIS POINT, more than 10,000 people in West Africa had confirmed or likely cases of Ebola, and some 4,900 people had died.* The physical manifestations of the disease—fever, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding, and intense pain—had left victims dying on roadsides and in overcrowded clinics.

A much higher death rate than COVID. Both would be horrible to die from.

My delegation took a number of precautions—traveling with a physician, checking our temperatures regularly, giving elbow-bumps as greetings instead of handshakes, and not entering the Ebola Treatment Units we visited.*

Equally important, the ability to begin early treatment was dramatically increasing survival rates.Once these recovery stories finally began to make their way back to rural communities, terrified citizens with Ebola symptoms began to come forward, suddenly hopeful that their lives could be saved.

On the wall of the call center was a map of Freetown. The Sierra Leonean volunteers were using red pins to mark the locations where deaths had been reported. When a team retrieved and buried a body, the red pin was replaced with a blue one. A week before, the Sierra Leoneans told us, only 30 percent of bodies were being collected and safely buried within twenty-four hours. By the time we visited—in no small part due to the infusion of British military and civilian experts and other international support—98 percent of reported bodies were being buried within a day. On the map, we saw a single red pin surrounded by a sea of blue pins. The practice had not yet been scaled in districts outside the capital, but they had developed proof of concept.

At training centers run by the United States in Liberia and by the United Kingdom in Sierra Leone, we saw young people lining up to volunteer. I stopped a number of them, asking what was motivating them to take part in the Ebola response. With the economy in complete free fall and unemployment surging, for some it was the lure of a day’s wages. But for most, it was the simple desire to help. As one young man in Sierra Leone told me, “If we leave our brothers and sisters to die, who knows, it might be us next. It is a point of duty.”

Back in Washington, Obama had done what he could to fight the stigma, inviting Texas nurse Nina Pham to the Oval Office after she was released from the hospital, and giving her an effusive embrace. I had taken to describing the photo of the scene as “the hug heard around the world” because everyone from Camara to Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf had mentioned how much it meant to them. “Our countries need to be hugged like Nina Pham,” Johnson Sirleaf told me.

As I left our meeting and reflected on all that we had witnessed, I began to believe that we would succeed in ending the Ebola epidemic—if fear (channeled through Congress) did not interfere with the US-led response.

I came across an essay that MSF had posted on its blog the previous week from a Liberian worker named Alexander James who had been traveling around the country educating communities on Ebola. “Sunday, the twenty-first of September, is a day I will never forget in my life,” James wrote: At that time, Ebola had come to Liberia so I tried to talk to my family about the virus and to educate them, but my wife did not believe in it. I called my wife begging her to leave Monrovia and bring the children north so we could be together here. She did not listen. She denied Ebola. Later that night, my brother called me. “Your wife has died.” I said, “What?” He said, “Bendu is dead.” I dropped the phone. I threw it away and it broke apart. We were together for 23 years. She understood me. She was the only one who understood me very well. I felt like I’d lost my whole memory. My eyes were open, but I didn’t know what I was looking at. I had no vision.

I was able to see Kollie in the care center from across the fence, so I called out to him, “Son, you’re the only hope I got. You have to take courage. Any medicine they give to you, you have to take it.” He told me, “Papa, I understand. I will do it. Stop crying Papa, I will not die, I will survive Ebola. My sisters are gone, but I am going to survive and I will make you proud . . . ” When finally I saw him come out, I felt so very, very happy. I looked at him and he said to me, “Pa, I am well.” I hugged him. Lots of people came to see him when he came outside. Everybody was so happy to see him outside . . . Since then, he and I do everything together.

. . . He is 16 now, so I will make him my friend. Not just my son, but my friend, because he’s the only one I have to talk to. I cannot replace my wife, but I can make a new life with our son.

A family of six, reduced to two, and almost to one. As I read this story, all the pent-up emotion I had been carrying during the trip came pouring out.

IN THE END, the surge of resources, from money and health workers to buckets and SIM cards, meant West Africans got w...

Although the affected African countries would suffer several small flare-ups thereafter, Liberia was declared Ebola-free for the first time on May 9th, 2015. Sierra Leone rid itself of the disease on November 7th, 2015. And Guinea got a clean bill of health on December 29th, 2015.* Some 28,000 people were infected with Ebola, and more th...

The most deadly and dangerous Ebola outbreak in history was beaten above all because of the heroic efforts of the people and governments of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Their national health responders were on the front lines battling the virus from the very beginning, providing care, staffing treatment units, and educating affected communities. Their citizens took it upon themselves to change the way they interacted with one another, avoiding hugs and even handshakes. The people of the region labored to track down every single contact that an Eb...

Despite this success, the polarization that was increasingly defining American politics and society meant that those who had objected to Obama’s efforts never acknowledged how effectively he had managed the crisis. Our health workers and soldiers never got the bipartisan embrace they deserved for their bravery and sacrifice. Mostly, the United States and the world just moved on.

Damn.

I used Ebola as an example of why the world needed the United Nations, because no one country—even one as powerful as the United States—could have slayed the epidemic on its own.

With Cass teaching in Cambridge during the week, I myself leaned most heavily on María, Mum, and Eddie. But I also depended on friends like Laura, who after working a long day at Human Rights Watch faithfully dropped by the Waldorf every Wednesday night to play with the kids. Hillary, John, my law school classmate Elliot, and a legion of other friends carved out time to act as an extended family. Without this support network, I don’t know how Declan and Rían would have transitioned so smoothly to our radically different life in New York City.

“Pure power!” Declan would exclaim after whacking a Ping-Pong or squash ball the length of the room, as John attempted to make a diving stop before the ball clattered against the grand piano. Fearing a fire hazard, every few weeks Mum, María, or I would recover balls from the chandelier. Once, as I stood on top of a dining room chair and used Declan’s bat to dislodge a ball that had gotten wedged among the glass pendants, I said to Cass, “I just can’t see Adlai Stevenson or Jeane Kirkpatrick doing this.”

The other UN ambassadors were similarly generous toward my family. Halfway through my tenure, Boubacar Boureima, Niger’s Ambassador to the UN, told me that the African ambassadors were “all talking” about how much they enjoyed getting to know Mum and Eddie and seeing Declan and Rían race around the apartment. The inclusion of three generations of my family in large gatherings, he said, “was creating a different impression of the United States,” one with which they could identify. “Family matters so much to Africans,” he explained. “The big power seems much more open to us.” I had not been trying to make a statement by including Mum, Eddie, and the kids when I held events at the Waldorf apartment. With a job that didn’t allow much free time, I was simply hoping to maximize every moment with them.

I saw this dynamic play out in powerful ways at the male-dominated United Nations. While men had held the majority of positions during my time working at the NSC, only when I got to the UN did I regularly find myself the only woman in the room. When Obama had nominated me for the job, I went to see Madeleine Albright, President Clinton’s UN ambassador during his first term (before she became America’s first female Secretary of State in his second). Albright told me that in 1993 she had assembled the seven female ambassadors at the UN (out of 183 countries at the time) in what she called the G7—the “Girl Seven.” The way she described her gatherings with the women who represented Canada, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Lichtenstein reminded me of the Wednesday Group. Albright’s G7 developed into both an informal sisterhood and a cross-regional lobby that managed to secure the appointment of two female judges to the bench of the UN war crimes tribunal.

Whenever we got together, we would inevitably commiserate about how tired we were of being asked how it felt to be “one of only X women” in whatever venue we were in.42 We would also lament how some in the broader international affairs community still dismissed the push for enhanced female participation as a form of special pleading.

In addition, progress at closing the gender gap in employment significantly increases GDP, reduces income inequality, and leads to higher incomes for men. Learning from one another that we shared a frustration with the narrow way in which gender issues were sometimes treated emboldened us to be more outspoken.

I was acutely aware that my circumstances as a woman at the UN were not comparable to those of my female colleagues. Because the United States was the most powerful country in the world, the fact that I was American was far more salient to UN officials and foreign diplomats than the fact that I was a woman. I suffered few of the slights endured by female diplomats from other countries.

WHEN IT WAS TIME for the UN to elect a new secretary-general in 2016, I thought that a woman might be selected for the first time. When I mentioned this to a European ambassador, he told me that he was open to it—“as long as she is competent.” I relayed this comment to Jordan’s UN ambassador Dina Kawar, who had become a close friend. She rolled her eyes. How, she asked, could anybody seriously think that an unqualified woman might just slip through the cracks to become UN secretary-general? As Dina joked to me, “Are they afraid that some woman will say, ‘Oh, I was going to do my hair today, but thought I would become Secretary-General instead!’ ” Such qualifiers would never have been considered necessary for male candidates in the race.

In 2014, thanks to rotations among the ten nonpermanent members of the Council, I had the chance to serve with five other women, the ambassadors representing Argentina, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Nigeria, and Jordan. We were the largest female contingent on the Security Council in the seven-decade history of the UN. Although we still accounted for less than half the ambassadors on the Council, and although our number would dwindle back to one female representative in 2016, the excitement around the UN was palpable. Young women would pull me aside in the restroom to say how proud they were to see the six of us duking it out in the traditionally male chamber. Our deliberations changed in subtle ways; I noticed that the female ambassadors tended to refer back to their colleagues’ comments more frequently than the men did. Having six women on the Council didn’t deter male ambassadors from occasionally taking outlandish positions, such as questioning well-documented cases of sexual violence. Once, when we were discussing what to do about allegations that Sudanese Army soldiers in Darfur had perpetrated mass rape, one of my African colleagues dismissed the detailed reports.* “Why would the soldiers have done this when they have their wives to come home to? Where is the proof?” he asked, insisting, “If these rapes really happened, the women would have spoken openly about it—even if the security forces were present.” I interjected. “Oh, are you speaking from your vast personal experie...

Vitaly memorably criticized the UN’s Yemen envoy for spending too much of his precious time talking to women. “Your job is to make peace, and that is hard enough,” Vitaly said. “Why are you wasting your time having meetings with women who aren’t even involved in the conflict?” On such occasions the women ambassadors—and a few of the enlightened men—would fling our hands up to demand the floor in order to respond.

I especially loved playing sports with them—the epitome of the “lean on” ethos, in which team members set one another up for success. In Mexico, I played soccer with a group of underprivileged girls. In war-ravaged northern Sri Lanka, I played the local sport of Elle (a bat-and-ball game) in the rain with Muslim girls who had only recently returned to school after years of conflict. And in the Middle East, I played basketball with Israeli and Palestinian girls who hoped to become engineers, architects, and even politicians. In each instance, the shy teenagers who had barely spoken before we began playing began to open up once I was in my gym clothes, no longer looking like a senior US official.

When I met with young women in the United States, I erred on the side of oversharing, describing my self-doubt in the Bat Cave and the tradeoffs between my dream job and the family I longed to see more of. I did not gloss over the challenges they would face if they pursued ambitious careers in public service or foreign policy, but I encouraged them to take the leap. I also offered a dose of perspective, highlighting the stories of women and girls who were breaking through barriers I found almost unimaginable. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, for example, girls had been denied almost all access to education. Yet by the time I arrived at the UN, three million Afghan girls had risked violence and enrolled in schools. Finally allowed to run for seats in Afghanistan’s Parliament, women had won 28 percent of the positions—a higher proportion than in the United States Congress.

Ever since my time in Bosnia, I had believed that I could best learn about a situation by being where events were unfolding. As the Hungarian war photographer Robert Capa once said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” I tried to bring this “get close” spirit to diplomacy. As a writer and an activist, seeking out people’s firsthand experiences was of course common practice. But as a government official, it proved much more difficult. The briefing papers and diplomatic cables I consumed rarely offered raw, unfiltered points of view.