The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  Ultimately, although I despised sitting still for the treatments, I tried massage therapists, chiropractors, and acupuncturists. I also saw orthopedists who X-rayed me from every conceivable angle, but who could not find the structural damage that I insisted was there. While I could generally make the back inflammation go down after a few days, nothing seemed to resolve the underlying issue. And once I was working in the Senate, my back spasms grew even more frequent.

  Even though I remained convinced I had dislocated something in my lower back, I soon came to understand that the pain might have a different source. A few months before I had moved to Washington, something unexpected and wonderful had happened: I fell in love.

  The man in question was a thirty-eight-year-old actor from the midlands of Ireland, whom I met while he was performing on Broadway. A mutual friend introduced us after learning that I admired his acting and that he both loved baseball and had read “A Problem from Hell.” Our first date was at a Mets game in New York City, where we started a conversation that seemed destined never to end. A week into our relationship, we heard ourselves talking about marriage, and I felt as though I had found the person I wanted to share my life with. “I feel like myself, only more so,” I wrote in my journal.

  My new great love was a recovering alcoholic and deeply involved in “The Program,” or AA. Eddie and my brother, Stephen, were also both active in AA, and, given my father’s inability to get help, I had great admiration for people who invested themselves in trying to hold the demon of addiction at bay. I attended several open AA meetings with him, and saw the power of his community in deepening his determination not to fall back into old habits. His vulnerability was every bit as appealing to me as his strength. I had excessively scrutinized my prior relationships, assessing and reassessing their pros and cons. But for the first time, I was out of my head and carried away by feelings of great joy. I couldn’t imagine the relationship ending.

  But then it did. The pace and intensity of our courtship, which I found thrilling, threw him off-kilter. A creature of routine in New York, he suddenly found himself taking trips to visit me and, when we were apart, staying up late to talk with me on the phone, departing from the rituals he used as his guardrails for staying sober.

  For me, the only negative aspect of our romance was that I quickly began to imagine the slew of terrible mishaps that could befall him. When I heard about a construction accident in New York, I called him in a panic, virtually positive that he was buried under the scaffolding. When he decided to purchase a motorcycle, I became hysterical, begging him not to.

  For him, though, as we plunged deeper into our relationship, the negatives quickly began to add up. His recovery was his priority. He needed to control his surroundings and his emotions. The first sign that we were heading in a bad direction was an email he sent in which he wrote: “I have never felt this way before. I don’t know what to do.” Within days of introducing doubt into the relationship, he told me he could not see me anymore and refused even to take my calls.

  I was blindsided and crushed. Whether because he was an Irish alcoholic who left me, or because he was a person I loved who left me, the breakup surfaced a sadness that I had not been fully aware I was carrying. For weeks, I was unable to work, eat, or sleep. John, who lived in my Capitol Hill neighborhood, stayed close to me, calling multiple times a day and taking me to shoot baskets at the local YMCA. He encouraged me to mourn and come to terms with the end of the relationship, but he also urged me to use what had happened to try to understand the role my father’s death was playing in my turmoil—as well as in my lungers and back pain.

  John himself was the child of an alcoholic. He too was then going through a difficult breakup, and he suggested that we try attending Al-Anon meetings, which are for the family members of alcoholics. At these sessions, we listened to other people describe their histories, the ways they had sought to compensate for their loved ones’ drinking, and the corrosive residue of their experiences. John and I related to these stories and tried to understand the feeling of rejection and the longing for control we had both developed. We allowed ourselves to be defenseless with each other, and we pushed ourselves to dig deeper.

  Since I was not contributing meaningfully in the Senate office, I decided that for the first time in my life I would make my emotional health my top priority. Instead of trying to repress my fears, I had to identify and talk about them.

  I found a new therapist and threw myself into our sessions in a way I had not done before, arranging to speak twice a week. With my heartbreak so close to the surface, the feeling of loss I had experienced as a child became easier to reach. The therapist questioned why I had gone to live in a war zone and why I was so drawn to other people’s suffering, speculating that this focus allowed me to continue minimizing my own pain, which naturally “paled in comparison” to genocide.

  I resisted his analysis. While acknowledging that my loss may have expanded my ability to empathize, I said I knew plenty of people who hadn’t lost a loved one and yet still dedicated their whole selves to improving the lives of others. I felt I was drawn to writing about atrocities not because of childhood trauma, but because understanding and preventing mass murder was intrinsically important. However, I admitted—to him and to myself—that my parents’ breakup and father’s death continued to tear at me. Even though these formative events of course did not compare to the suffering of Rwandans, they nonetheless left their own scars.

  At the time, I was also writing my next book—a biography of the late UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, whom I had known in Bosnia and who was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq. This project also oddly raised issues of abandonment. When I wasn’t in my cubicle in Obama’s Senate office, I was in my carriage house conducting phone interviews with US soldiers who had tried to rescue Sergio from the bombed-out rubble of UN Headquarters. Because of the absence of planning by the Bush administration and the looting of Iraq’s fire stations, the would-be rescuers didn’t have the equipment that they believed would have saved him. The more I learned, the clearer it was that Sergio, one of the world’s great humanitarians, had ended up dying a preventable death. Unearthing these facts stirred up imagined visions of my father’s last hours.

  In therapy, I became aware of a deeply submerged, misplaced certainty that if my brother and I had remained at home in Dublin, our father would not have died. For years, it seemed, I had been subconsciously blaming myself for my dad’s death. Because I had long accepted that alcoholism was a “disease” over which my father was powerless, I believed that it had been my job to save him. But now, with the help of John, Al-Anon, and therapy, I saw that my child-self had not been a capable agent in a grown-up world; I finally recognized that I had been helpless. For the first time in my life—at the age of thirty-five—I began grieving over the monumental loss and rupture that I had experienced. And I started to stop seeing that loss as my fault.

  I also came to understand just how unwittingly determined I had been to never be vulnerable to such a loss again. And the only way to avoid such pain had been to choose men who themselves resisted sustained closeness.

  EVEN AS JOHN AND I CONTINUED to push each other to explore our pasts, the original spark for our friendship—our work in response to the genocide in Darfur—was now part of something larger than either of us could have imagined. The anti-genocide movement, which started in 2004, had continued growing.

  Major universities—including all of the University of California campuses, Yale, and Harvard—divested their endowment portfolios of stocks belonging to companies doing business with Sudan. Don Cheadle (the lead actor in Hotel Rwanda) and George Clooney had traveled to Darfur with John, and both resolved to throw their celebrity into publicizing the atrocities. Cheadle and John coauthored a bestselling book with strategies for how citizens could get involved, while Clooney and Elie Wiesel lobbied the UN Security Council to devote more resources to addressing the crisis. And after intense pressure from activist
s who were critical of China’s support for Sudan, Steven Spielberg withdrew from his role as artistic adviser for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Summer Olympics. John recognized the shallowness of much celebrity activism, but he also saw that when celebrities were serious about an issue over a long period of time, they helped expose large numbers of people to the cause. This would end up being the case with Cheadle and Clooney, whose advocacy seemed to put Darfur into the public consciousness and onto the radar screens of policymakers more directly than many experts had been able to achieve on their own.

  To capitalize on this wave of attention, the Save Darfur Coalition planned a rally on the National Mall for April of 2006. Because of the sacrosanct office rule that weekends were Obama’s family time, his schedulers declined the invitation for him to appear. However, a few days before the rally, Obama told me he wanted to make an exception. “I have to go, don’t I?” he asked. “I mean, I care about this issue. I can’t not go, right?”

  Obama had been outspoken on Darfur since joining the Senate. He and Kansas senator Sam Brownback had published an important op-ed in the Washington Post warning that the situation in Darfur was likely to “spiral out of control” without a significant shift in US policy. His partnership with Brownback, a conservative Republican, helped demonstrate that the movement had bipartisan support, and his presence at the rally would be a huge draw.

  To generate as much attention for the event as possible, Obama, Brownback, and Clooney held a joint press conference at the National Press Club, where they argued for turbocharging the few thousand peacekeepers in Darfur into a much bigger and better-equipped UN-led mission. After encouraging more countries to take responsibility for stabilizing hot spots around the world, Obama urged that this new UN force be comprised of troops from Western countries. He also gave me a shout-out for my work on the issue, saying, “I’ve got to give a special acknowledgment to the person who’s technically on my staff right now . . . because she actually thought that I might be able to do something on issues that she cared about . . . She’s a wonderful friend and has written a book that I’d recommend to everybody.” I was surprised to find how much I needed a bit of recognition after such a rocky stretch.

  John and I had spent hours on the phone preparing for the rally. We shared drafts of our respective remarks with each other, and we made plans to deliver them on the stage side by side. Still, we kept our expectations in check. “Do you really think ten thousand people will show up for this?” I asked, citing the optimistic figure the organizers had given the National Park Service. “I have no idea,” John said. “But if they don’t, we will just have to be extra grateful to those who do come.”

  On the eve of the rally, the buses began arriving—student groups, churchgoers, people in hijabs and yarmulkes. President Bush graciously met with activist leaders in the Oval Office. “For those of you who are going out to march for justice,” he told them, “you represent the best of our country.”

  The speakers were a mix of celebrities and public officials, including Clooney, Wiesel, Nancy Pelosi, Al Sharpton, Olympic speed-skater Joey Cheek (who had donated his $40,000 in medal earnings from the 2006 Winter Games to Darfur relief), and Paul Rusesabagina, the Rwandan hotelier Cheadle played in Hotel Rwanda. In the end, more than 50,000 people showed up, including Mum, Eddie, and Laura.

  The loudest applause of the day went to Obama. I had sent him an email with a few ideas for his speech. But after looking out at the swelling crowd—a heartening sight to a former community organizer—he started with Scripture:

  In the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 24, Verses 11 and 12, it reads as follows:

  Rescue those being led away to death,

  Hold back those staggering toward slaughter!

  If you say, “But we knew nothing of this!”

  Does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?

  Does not he who guards your life know it?

  Will he not repay each person according to what he has done?

  Obama proceeded to take note of how tempting it often is to look away, and how complex modern challenges can seem:

  There are problems in the world that sometimes seem overwhelming. There’s so much misery, so much want, so much conflict and cruelty, so much violence. And at times there’s lack of moral clarity.

  We look across the span of the globe and we can’t always tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. We don’t always know what the proper course of action is. And so we’re sometimes tempted to withdraw into our own private lives, our own private struggles and ambitions, our own private gardens.

  But this is not one of those times.

  Today we know what is right and we know what is wrong. The slaughter of innocents is wrong. Two million people driven from their homes is wrong. Women gang raped while gathering firewood is wrong. Silence, acquiescence, paralysis in the face of genocide is wrong.

  The whole audience seemed to be hanging on Obama’s every word. For all of his deflections about being just “a vehicle” for Americans wanting to transcend the stale politics of the time, he was captivating people of all races and religions, young and old. Even his closing plea for American leadership sounded different from the normal platitudes one heard from a politician.

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

  The crowd went wild. I was moved and exhausted. The solidarity I had advocated for over so many years had found a powerful and compassionate champion.

  That night, as I applied heat to my back, Obama called after landing in Chicago.

  “That was quite something,” he said. “You should feel really good about what happened out there.”

  “I do,” I started. “But now . . .”

  “I know, I know,” he said. “The genocide in Darfur rages on. But you know what? Sometimes you just have to take the time to appreciate a good thing, even if it doesn’t necessarily bring you exactly what you want. If you don’t savor moments like today, you won’t have the fuel you need to keep going. Take it from me.”

  I told him how much his involvement had meant, and, after hanging up, slept for twelve hours.

  I LEFT WASHINGTON WITH LITTLE FANFARE in the summer of 2006. Although I had never considered myself a particularly partisan person, I came away immensely frustrated with the way Republicans often forced debates over US policy into a false dichotomy between an overreliance on military force on the one hand, and what they called “appeasement” on the other. I was also struck by how unprepared our national security institutions were for responding to unconventional threats like climate change. To deal with cross-border challenges, we needed to build coalitions, a prospect that required having credibility with foreign publics—and the Iraq War had cost us dearly in that respect.

  Seeing all of this up close was deflating. But I did not consider the year a loss. My personal ups and downs in Washington had finally forced me to start addressing the unconscious forces inside me—forces that may well have been preventing me from finding a lasting romantic relationship. And despite the difficulties I experienced while working for him, I did feel that I had gotten to know Senator Obama.

  During the time I lived in Washington, Obama had spent nights and weekends writing his second book, which he was calling The Audacity of Hope. He would email me, usually late, after watching ESPN’s Sports Center, which I had generally watched as well. I would immediately mark up his drafts with edits and suggestions before returning them to him. I had come to realize that these exchanges were more valuable than anything I was doing for him in the Senate.

  When I called Obama to tell him that I was heading back to Massachusetts, he cut me off. “Ye
ah, I never expected you to be useful to me here.” Having spent a year of my life trudging to and from the Hart Senate building, I was taken aback.

  “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings,” he said. “Let me rephrase that: I don’t have the power to use you properly. I was actually wondering what took you so long to bolt.”

  I stared at the phone incredulously. Had he known all along how pointless the year in his office had often felt?

  Although I didn’t share this with him at the time, my experiences with the Senate had left me with one conviction: Obama needed to get out of there. Even though Democrats had taken both the House and Senate in the 2006 midterm elections, I did not think Congress was where he belonged.

  Like millions of other people, I believed that he should run for President.

  DURING THE MONTHS AFTER I MOVED back to Winthrop and resumed teaching at Harvard, I spoke with Obama often.

  “How’s your Sergio book going?” he asked me in one call. I offered him more detail than he needed, as always, and then, assuming he wanted help on something, asked, “So what’s up? What can I do for you?”

  His response surprised me. “What do you mean? I’m just calling to see how your book is coming and how you’re doing. I know how hard it is.”

  I asked him about his recent trip to Kenya, his first since becoming an internationally known figure. He told me about the intensity of the crowds who lined the streets wherever he went.

  “Goodness,” I said. “How did that feel?”

  “Pardon?” he replied.

  “How did it feel?” I repeated.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Barack!” I exclaimed. “Feelings! Remember those?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I felt the way I feel about all of this. People are hungering for something, and they see that something in me. I can’t take it too seriously.”