The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  “If I ran for president,” he said, “I would have to start fundraising and building an organization two years after becoming a senator. How presumptuous would that be? It would take a lot of nerve. I’m going to keep my head down.”

  After John Kerry’s bruising defeat in the 2004 election, 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.

  “I have no power as the ninety-ninth senator,” he underscored, referring to his lack of seniority in the Senate. “But I find myself in this surreal position where almost nobody in this town has a bigger platform. I don’t know how long that will last, but I’m going to try to use my influence while I can.” He thought Kerry had lost the election because voters had not been sure what he stood for. “I have learned,” Obama told me, “that if you are truthful, people respond, even if they don’t agree with you. We have to find our truth and not be afraid to be straight with people.”

  After four hours, our “forty-five-minute” dinner began to wind down. Obama had mentioned that Mark Lippert, a Navy reservist and experienced Hill staffer, was his senior foreign policy adviser. I had known in advance that he already had a full-time aide, but hoped I might be able to help him develop broad strategy. Yet even though the dinner was going well, he seemed to think of me as an academic with whom he might occasionally share his ideas, not somebody who might join his team. I began to worry that the conversation we were wrapping up would prove to be a onetime event.

  I wanted more than that. Although the Republicans controlled both the Senate and House, I still held out hope that Congress could play a role in forcing the Bush administration to abandon its ruinous approaches to Iraq and counterterrorism. Even though I had interviewed hundreds of US policymakers for my genocide book, I thought I would be a better teacher at the Kennedy School if I were more familiar with Congress’s role in foreign policy. And above all, I was now not only inspired by the kind of leadership Obama had espoused publicly but also by the kind of person he actually seemed to be.

  As Obama asked the waiter to bring the check, I ran over my time-honored “X test” question in my mind. In this context, the question seemed to boil down to: “If the most I am able to do is learn more about how Congress works, will moving to Washington have been worth it?” But in this case, the truth was that Obama had a background, optimism, and vision that I hadn’t encountered in another public figure. Yes, I would learn. But I was also energized by the prospect of being part of whatever he did.

  Despite this conviction, I felt self-conscious about raising my own future with him. And since he showed no sign of recruiting me, I would have to force myself to raise a question that had been on my mind, but didn’t seem to be on his: Might there be a place for me on his team?

  After he paid, Obama stood up and I quickly followed. We continued chatting as we walked slowly toward the door of the restaurant, which was now nearly empty. He had seemed in such a hurry at the beginning, but now he chatted easily, as if the time pressure had lifted.

  I did not want to look back and feel I had missed the moment, so I decided to risk rejection and take the plunge. “You know, if you think I could be helpful, I could come down to Washington and work with you,” I offered.

  He asked me what I meant, and I explained that since he wanted to develop a broader foreign policy platform, I could take a leave from Harvard and help him do that. He asked if I was sure that would make sense for me. “You’ve got books to write and courses to teach,” he said.

  I was firm. “Even if you don’t change the world overnight,” I said, “I will learn something, right?”

  At 11:15 p.m., as we stood on the deserted street, his driver’s engine idling, he jotted down his email address and cell phone number. He would work out the details with his chief of staff, but would love to bring me “on board.”

  I RENTED A SMALL CARRIAGE HOUSE apartment a short walk from Capitol Hill. If Washington, DC, thought of itself as the center of the universe, the 288-foot-high dome of the US Capitol building seemed—and in fact was on street maps—the center of the center. When I worked for Mort at the Carnegie Endowment back in 1993, I had taken long runs on the Mall, looping around the Lincoln Memorial and climbing the hill toward the Capitol dome, which was always lit up in the humid night. I had seen it so often in movies and on postcards that, from the outside, it had come to seem more like a cardboard cutout than a building where real work was done. But as an aide to Barack Obama, I felt I would actually have the chance to influence the direction of US foreign policy. I imagined myself drawing up legislation in eighteenth-century nooks, as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson gazed down approvingly from murals above.

  The first indication that I was not to be a twenty-first-century incarnation of James Madison came as soon as I showed up for work. It turned out that Obama’s office was located not in the Capitol building, which is reserved for House and Senate leaders, but in the gray-white marble Hart Senate Office Building adjacent to the Capitol. Opened in 1982, Hart had a large atrium with the feel of an ice-skating rink, while the nondescript Senate chambers encircling it resembled dentists’ offices.

  The only sign that Obama’s Senate office housed a rising star was the sight of school groups waiting for hours in the small reception area in the hopes that they might catch a glimpse of him. African Americans came from all over the country for this privilege, as if needing proof that an African-American senator (only the third since Reconstruction) really existed. I felt for Obama. Overnight, millions of people had invested their hopes in him.

  My role was not well defined. I would be paid a small stipend (not by his office but by the Council on Foreign Relations) to serve as a “foreign policy fellow” on his Senate staff.* I was given a cubicle, a badge, and a key to the office so I would be able to work on weekends.

  It didn’t take long to discover why Obama wasn’t crazy about his job. The 109th Congress, already under way when I arrived, would end up meeting for fewer days than any in more than fifty years. This was fewer even than the Congress of 1948, which was famously assailed by President Harry Truman as the “do-nothing Congress”—and it still managed to pass the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. “It’s worse than the UN!” Obama vented as we spoke on the phone one evening.

  As I trailed Obama and his aide Mark Lippert to committee hearings around the Capitol, the congressional debates I observed seemed detached from actual human life. Many members appeared to be motivated less by John F. Kennedy’s call to service than by a self-serving parody of that famous exhortation: “Ask not what your representative can do for the issue, but what the issue can do for your representative.” Unsurprisingly, the legislative branch was suffering a major drop in popularity. At the outset of the new session in January of 2005, Congress had a 43 percent approval rating among Americans. By December of 2006, that figure had dropped to 21 percent.9

  Obama had come to Washington having served for eight years as a legislator in the Illinois State Senate, where he had helped pass laws on campaign finance reform, an earned-income tax credit for the working poor, and a requirement that police interrogations be videotaped. Yet in the far grander US Senate, he was stymied. 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. Often surprisingly transparent abou
t his thinking, Obama told an interviewer after his first year, “I think it’s very possible to have a Senate career here that is not particularly useful.”

  Occasionally, Obama tried to poke fun at the disconnect between his star power and his limitations in achieving actual results. “I’ve been very blessed,” he quipped in a speech at the Gridiron dinner. “Keynote speaker at the Democratic convention. The cover of Newsweek. My book made the best-seller list. I just won a Grammy for reading it on tape . . . Really, what else is there to do?” he asked, pausing for effect. “Well, I guess I could pass a law or something.”

  When I saw him in the office, Obama seemed to resent many of the new demands on his time. In his past life, he had enjoyed great freedom, shuttling between representing his district and teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He now bristled at the vast number of people who had access to his calendar and all the obligations that encroached on his independence. Before I made the move to Washington, Obama told me that he planned to force me to go on walks with him, allowing us to escape staff scrutiny and talk through the ideas he was exploring for his next book. But, he added, “I may just put my headphones on and chill while we walk.”

  His temperament definitely did not fit the profile of Senate legends like Lyndon Johnson, who, when he first came to Washington as a junior Hill aide, got a room in a hotel where fellow staffers stayed and took four showers a day just so he would bump into people in the shared bathroom. Obama, by comparison, was a recluse.

  He just didn’t seem to need the affirmation that Johnson, Bill Clinton, and so many other highly successful politicians famously craved. It often seemed as though part of him was floating above the fray, judging what he and his colleagues were doing below.

  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.’ ”

  Once, as one of the hearings dragged on, Obama tilted back in his chair and motioned to me to lean in. I hunched forward eagerly, thinking he was looking for counsel. He held his binder up to shield his mouth so his colleagues could not hear him, and said, “I’m sorry you have to witness this.” With Republicans in the majority, Congress seemingly had little appetite to influence the Bush administration’s actions.

  The most important foreign policy issue then was the direction of the war in Iraq, where US troops were confronting a worsening insurgency and the prospect of an open-ended military occupation. When I arrived in DC, more than 1,500 members of the US military had been killed, and another 11,000 wounded. Close to two years after President Bush had declared the end of major combat operations, the American public was increasingly questioning a continued military presence in Iraq. Since taking office, Obama had visited Iraq to hear from the troops and had held sobering meetings with men and women who had sustained serious injuries on the battlefield. In a decision that disappointed Obama’s anti-war supporters, though, he voted against a proposal requiring that US troops leave Iraq within a year. Instead, he supported an amendment that called on President Bush to begin a phased troop withdrawal. (Neither measure passed.)

  Despite his desire to bring our 140,000 troops home, Obama did not believe that Congress was equipped to micromanage the war. He was also frustrated by the binary way in which pundits, administration officials, and members of Congress chose to discuss Iraq, as if the only options available were “staying the course” or “cutting and running.”

  Obama often formulated his own views on important policy questions by bringing people with disparate perspectives together and listening as they debated what to do. He did this on several occasions regarding Iraq, gathering Lippert, communications director Robert Gibbs, chief of staff Pete Rouse, me, and others. I was heartened every time he reminded us that he wanted to determine the right approach “on the merits,” and only afterward “worry about the politics.” But even with worthy intentions, it wasn’t easy to know what to recommend. As we deliberated, I was reminded of President Johnson’s famous observation that a leader’s problem was not in “doing what’s right, but knowing what’s right.”

  AS WAS PROBABLY FITTING, I received my first taste of the politics of politics while working in the Senate. Although Lippert had seemed welcoming at the start of my tenure, he was not enthusiastic about my continued presence. I tried to put myself in his shoes. He had been Obama’s chief foreign policy adviser, and suddenly I had shown up in what was a surprisingly small office. I understood it might be initially awkward. But instead of coming around and welcoming an extra pair of hands, he seemed mostly to resent the intrusion upon his turf. I proposed speeches, op-eds, and Senate resolutions on topics I had discussed with Obama, but Lippert generally responded by saying that other senators had already cornered the market on the issue, or by questioning how Obama’s input would “add value.” Disheartened, I began to ration my time in the office, just trying to do good work whenever Obama or Lippert threw an assignment my way.

  One day when I was in the office, my computer froze as I was attempting to print a news article for Obama. After I jumped on a colleague’s desktop and pulled up the story to print it, an Outlook message alert popped up in the lower right-hand corner of his computer screen, showing that he had received an email from one of Obama’s top advisers. The message notification was followed by several others—all of them appearing quickly and then melting away, so I caught only the gist. I don’t know the full context to this day. But even from the partial messages that momentarily appeared on the screen, I could see that—to my horror—the emails between two senior colleagues I respected were about me.

  “You’ll LOVE this,” the first one began, suggesting that I was exploiting the genocide in Darfur to promote myself. Those that followed continued in the same vein.

  As each notification popped up and then vanished, I felt guilty that I was inadvertently seeing portions of a coworker’s personal messages, but also clueless for having failed to recognize the extent of my colleagues’ resentments. From the familiar, chummy tone of the exchange, it was clear that I had stumbled into an ongoing back-and-forth in which I was a regular topic.

  Instead of getting angry, I felt wounded. I also didn’t know what I was doing to come across in the way I was being described.

  I went for a walk outside to compose myself and then called my friend Debbie Fine for some support. Debbie, a Washington lawyer I had recently gotten to know, went to great lengths to reassure me. She asked me to imagine a scenario in which the senior men in the office ganged up on a man that Senator Obama had personally invited to work with him.

  “They hate that you have your own channel to him,” she said. “And because you’re a woman, they think it’s okay to tear you down.”

  Working alone for years as a journalist and an academic, 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.

  — 15 —

  The Bat Cave

  Because I didn’t feel secure in my new work environment, I found myself more distracted at work than I had been before. When I told John Prendergast about how I was feeling, he appropriated the concept of the Bat Cave from Bruce Wayne, giving it new life.

  The Bat Cave, John explained to me, is inside each of our heads—either a place of great stillness, or, on other occasions, a place where bats fly around, flapping their wings in sometimes frantic ways. Being “in the Bat Cave” thereby became our shorthand for times when self-doubt was intruding.

  The bats fluttered wildly in my head when I worked in Obama’s Senate office, and while I tried to slay them by reminding myself “it’s not you; it’s them,” that mantra rarely worked. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote movingly about having her own equivalent of a Bat Cave, but in the end, she found consolation by telling herself, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” I agreed with this, but I still couldn’t get the small things or people out of my head.

  EVENTS IN MY PERSONAL LIFE required me to understand better where my “bats” were coming from. Alongside my breathing issues, ever since the publication of “A Problem from Hell,” I had begun to experience regular episodes of sharp, debilitating back pain. Every few months, I would find myself writhing on the floor with back spasms and would spend the day wrapped in a heating pad.

  I initially attributed the pain to cramped travel on too many airplanes and to punishing squash and marathon training sessions. But the episodes continued even when I eased up on international trips and competitive sports. Next, I thought I was hurting my back by spending too much time hunched over my computer, so I ordered a stand-up desk and an ergonomic keyboard, which also didn’t help.