The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  The next few minutes were miserable. From what I could tell, she and I had almost wrapped up our interview when Austan called. Once I had ducked into the hallway to speak with him, he told me that the Clinton campaign was taking out ads featuring him as the centerpiece. When we hung up, instead of taking a few minutes to cool off, I returned, agitated, to the couch where Peev and I had been sitting.

  As I explained why I had interrupted the interview, I vented in frustration, using the kind of hyperbole and profanity I typically reserved for Fenway Park umpires. I naively assumed that this part of my conversation with Peev would not be for publication, given that it had nothing to do with the subject of our interview, which was my new book.

  Had I really used the word “monster” to describe Clinton? The tape recording confirmed that I had. But listening to our back-and-forth, I heard that it was actually Peev who had said, “You just look at her and think, ‘ergh.’ ”

  I had then repeated her prompt in the process of making my own point. “You just look at her and think, ‘ergh,’ but . . .” I said, going on to add that, regardless of Peev’s view of the candidate, many voters in Ohio believed Clinton’s warnings about Obama’s trade policies.

  Peev’s inclusion of my use of her words made it sound like I was disparaging Clinton’s physical appearance. However, in addition to saying “monster,” I had made another critical comment, charging that “the amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”

  I told Peev that because of what she had published, I would have to leave the Obama campaign. “No, you won’t,” she said, seemingly oblivious to the roiling controversy occurring on the other side of the Atlantic. “Nobody reads the Scotsman.”

  I called Denis back, dejected, explaining what had happened and the box in which I found myself.

  “Dang, Sammy,” he said. “This is bad.”

  I was distraught by the thought of having damaged Obama and dashed off an email to him, detailing, blow by blow, what had happened and ending with:

  I am so, so sorry. I cannot tell you how badly I feel or how boneheaded I know I was. Please feel free, at any point of this awful process, to throw me under the bus, if it will ever help protect you from such damage.

  I hope you’re holding up. And again, my deepest apologies.

  Obama responded an hour later, telling me to be more careful but not to worry about it.

  “You are absolved,” he wrote. “Rule of thumb—nothing is off the record when you’re part of a presidential campaign. Thought you were great on Charlie Rose, by the way.” My misstep probably seemed like child’s play given everything else he was confronting on the campaign.

  BY THE TIME OF MY ILL-FATED TRIP OVERSEAS, I had been seeing Cass for two months—which was about the time my antibodies against commitment generally kicked in. John was encouraging me to stay out of the Bat Cave and to avoid overthinking the relationship. I was trying, but my anxiety reemerged as I once again began awakening with lungers.

  Frustrated by a week of phone calls in which I was growing increasingly distant, Cass decided to book a flight from Chicago to Dublin so we could spend the weekend together. By the time I learned about the Scotsman article, Cass was already in the air. It was too late to tell him to go home—which I wanted desperately to do. When I faced problems, I faced them on my own. And this problem seemed likely to get worse before it got better.

  I stayed up throughout the night, hitting refresh on a Google search of my name. This gave me the unusual life experience of watching what I hoped would prove a small screw-up turn into a large, global scandal.

  Cass, who remained unaware of any of this as he flew over the Atlantic, received a despairing email from me on his BlackBerry when he landed:

  Hey darlin,

  It’s 4 am in Ireland and I’m still up because I made the biggest mistake of my rookie career. See today’s Scotsman for the worst ever SP fuck up. I feel so very badly.

  Look forward to seeing you later. I’ll be the one who was up all night.

  Xosp

  Reading my message, Cass thought I was overreacting. “So sorry sweetheart—hoping this is smaller than you think,” he wrote from the airport.

  When he got my email, he told me later, he pulled up a few stories on his BlackBerry and assumed the controversy would be a blip. When he arrived at my hotel, I had departed for my day of Irish book tour events. He opened his laptop and did a more comprehensive search. When he logged on, he could hardly believe what he saw. As he later described it, “You were everywhere.”

  The websites of American publications paraded my quotations beneath banner headlines. SAMANTHA POWER THINKS HILLARY CLINTON IS A PROBLEM FROM HELL, wrote New York magazine. The New York Daily News assailed my “slime-time politics” with a cover that screamed MONSTER BASH. Clinton campaign staff inflated my importance on Obama’s campaign, seeking to portray me as the candidate’s alter ego, while the Obama campaign sought distance, saying I was one informal adviser among many.

  I had the delusional notion that I could get through that day without the Irish public learning of my sins. I made it through one Ulster radio show and a second Dublin program. But half an hour into my third appearance, the host relayed a question from a caller: “Is Samantha on your show the same Samantha who recently called Hillary Clinton a monster? If so, shame on her.” The radio host, Pat Kenny, looked confused until his producer ran into the studio with a printout of a news story, which he then summarized on air. “Is it the same?” he asked.

  I looked down. “I wish there were two Samantha Powers out there,” I said apologetically to the live Irish audience. “I wish there was a double who had been my imposter.”

  The only consolation came from Cass, who wrote to me as I shuttled from one venue to the next: “So glad I’m here amid this—got your back.”

  As soon as New York woke up Friday morning, I telephoned Richard Holbrooke to get his sense of the situation. “Well, Sam,” he said as soon as he picked up, “you’ve outdone yourself this time.”

  When I asked how bad it was, he asked me to hold so he could check the morning news. “Well, you’re leading the Today show”—I could hear the sound of the channel changing. “You are leading Good Morning America, and”—he paused while he flipped to CBS—“Good news: you’re only the second story on CBS.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “I’ll say,” he said.

  The Weekly Standard mordantly observed that mine “might have been the most ill-starred book tour since the invention of movable type.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, “While we’ve seen book tours that set up a presidential run, we’ve never seen one that tore one down.”

  The previous year, I had been profiled in Men’s Vogue. As part of a photo shoot, the artistic designer had given me stiletto heels, which I had refused because I couldn’t stay upright. I ended up wearing them while uncomfortably sitting on a simple wooden crate. That photograph now appeared on the cover of the New York Daily News with the headline: PRETTY DUMB!

  Clinton campaign surrogates went into full attack mode. Terry McAuliffe, the campaign’s chairman, sent out a fundraising email that urged supporters to donate because of my remarks: “A contribution now will show the Obama campaign that there is a price to this kind of attack politics.”

  I had given the Clinton campaign a priceless gift. Obama prided himself on running a clean campaign, above negative tactics, but my interview with Peev suggested otherwise. Clinton was also portraying Obama as inexperienced, and what I had said—both in substance and in my clumsy effort to assert that it was off the record—implied that he was surrounded by amateurs.

  Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, the national co-chair of Clinton’s campaign, called for me to be fired, as did three other prominent Democratic representatives. “It’s really a test of Senator Obama,” Jackson Lee said. “It’s a test of character.”

  I did not expect the attacks to let up, but I knew I had to get in touch wi
th Clinton to apologize and explain that I didn’t actually hold the view of her captured in the Scotsman. I wrote a letter to her and sent it to one of her top aides, whom Cass knew.

  Cass and I then began the drive from Dublin to Belfast, where I was slated to give a Friday-afternoon lecture at Queen’s University. I was leaning against Cass in the backseat when David Axelrod—Obama’s political maestro, and my designated executioner—called.

  “Hey Sam, you know we love you,” Axelrod began. “You have been amazing for us, on TV and behind the scenes. Barack really values you.” Even in my semi-catatonic state I knew that this was a ritualistic prelude to the blow he was about to deliver. “But we can’t afford to associate with you right now,” he continued. “You are radioactive. Even if we kept you on, we couldn’t use you. So we might as well get the benefit of asking you to resign.”

  All of his words blurred together and I just heard “resign, resign, resign, resign.” I asked gingerly if I could perhaps take a leave of absence instead. Axe said that a hedged departure would risk causing a “slow bleed,” bluntly concluding, “We need to cut this off”—meaning, “We need to cut you off.”

  Obama called me a few minutes later, telling me how sorry he was. He made me feel temporarily better by assuring me that I just had to sit in the “penalty box” for a while. He promised to bring me back “as soon as things have settled down.” I tried again to explain what I had done, how Austan had called, how I normally erred on the side of publicly praising Clinton when I did interviews.

  He agreed. “Yes, I know. I saw that on Charlie Rose.”

  What I found remarkable about our conversation was how present he was and how much time he gave me. He acted as if no useless explanation or tangent from me was too irrelevant.

  When we hung up, a campaign press aide sent me a draft resignation announcement to edit, which I did, painstakingly. The same aide subsequently informed me that someone had accidentally sent the press an earlier draft. Frazzled minds tend to fixate on the small instead of the large; likewise, I found myself focusing more on the detail that they had used the wrong version of my resignation statement than on the fact that I was no longer part of the campaign.

  “They didn’t use my edits,” I groaned to Cass as we made our way to Belfast.

  As the pain of what had transpired sunk in, I curled up in Cass’s arms for the rest of the journey and tried to face the immutable fact that my time on Team Obama was over. After spending the previous fourteen months promoting Obama’s candidacy, the campaign had come to feel like a second family. I wished Cass and I could just drive up and down the Irish coast for the rest of time.

  When we pulled up to the campus in Belfast, I saw, for the first time in my life, paparazzi staked out for my arrival. In the backseat of the car, Cass advised me to just walk right past them, but I said that I was probably incapable of not explaining myself. And when I exited the car, the journalists’ gentle, Irish way of posing questions prompted me to answer.

  When I watch the video of that brief interview all these years later, I am immediately transported. Ghost-pale, my lips chapped, without a hint of makeup, I am attempting to ensconce myself in my favorite green hoodie—a strange choice of attire for a university lecture. When a cameraman asked if I regretted my statements, I rambled on for two minutes, apologizing profusely. The reporter interjected: “It is coming at a very crucial time for both campaigns.” I agreed, resisting the impulse to say “No shit, Sherlock,” and instead responding, “Yeah, it’s not good.” I continued:

  It is one hundred percent thoroughly my fault . . . I think I’m a bit of a political rookie. I’m a policy person, a scholar, and new to campaigning, and perhaps maybe the heat of it got to me a little bit and I overreacted to something that I heard. But again, there is no excuse.

  The fact that my very public fall had occurred while I was in my home country—where many people had expressed pride in a Dublin girl making good on the big stage of America—made me feel deeply ashamed.

  Even though I had resigned, reporters remained interested in what several called my “Icarus-like descent.” A little cottage industry even developed over the coming weeks in which transcripts of my previous interviews were scoured for other potential mistakes. Some journalists found prophecies from me predicting my own downfall. The year before, I was reminded, I had told The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The one thing that terrifies me [is] that I’ll say something that will somehow hurt the candidate.”

  More recently, I had commented to a Financial Times reporter in London that politics attracted two different kinds of people—those “in it for the game” and those who had a list of problems they wanted to address. “People who treat it as a game usually do better,” I had said.

  If I sounded like I was holding myself apart from the famously cutthroat world I had joined, I probably was. But I resolved that if I ever got to work in the political sphere again—and it did not then seem likely that I would—I would make myself as uninteresting and unavailable to the press as possible.

  TRYING TO LIFT MY SPIRITS, Cass bought us scalped tickets to a sold-out Irish football match at Croke Park. For once, however, I tuned out at a sporting event. I hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours and was overcome by the useless longing to go back in time.

  After the match, we walked around Dublin. Though I was paying little attention to our route, I looked up at one point and realized that we were on the outskirts of St. Stephen’s Green, near Hartigan’s Pub, my childhood home away from home.

  When we entered, the smell was the same—some irremovable blend of Guinness, peanuts, and disinfectant. We took seats at the bar, where a woman who could have been eighty or forty polished the glasses. Cass blurted out, “Did you know Jim Power?”

  The woman didn’t blink, but looked at me and said, calmly, “Hello, Samantha.” I had not been back to Hartigan’s in three decades.

  As Cass and I sipped our sodas, the woman, known as Ma Mulligan, described to Cass how I used to tear through stacks of mysteries as I passed the time downstairs. She told me that my dad had framed one of the color-by-numbers drawings I had sent him from Pittsburgh. Since I had talked to so few of his friends and associates from that time, I took advantage of the opportunity to ask the question that continued to gnaw at me. “So many people drank here, and drank a lot, but my dad was the one who died. Why do you think that was?”

  Ma answered simply, without drama or sentiment: “Because you left.”

  I had thought it impossible to feel worse, but my heart was revealing its elastic power to absorb more pain. Cass laid down a crumpled pile of euros and quickly ushered me out of the bar.

  NOT LONG AFTER WE RETURNED to the hotel, I saw the Wyoming caucus results on the news. Obama had won 61 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 38 percent. I realized that I had been holding my breath, carrying around the utterly irrational fear that I was single-handedly going to cost Barack Obama the Democratic nomination. The fact that only 5,378 Wyomingites had voted for Obama—compared to Clinton’s 3,312 voters—didn’t matter. Feeling a strange mix of delight, relief, and exhaustion, I slept for the first time since the Scotsman article appeared.

  The next day, Obama sent an email, asking about my morale:

  Wanted to check in with you to make sure you’re ok. I know this whole thing is shitty. But I hope you know how much I love and appreciate you, that all this will blow over, and that we are going to change the world together. In the meantime, enjoy your travels, make sure Cass spoils you, and let me know if you want to talk at all.

  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 newspa
per 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.”

  Cass thought this was nonsense. I was suffering, he insisted, from what behavioral scientists called the “Spotlight Effect”—the overwhelming human tendency to believe that others are noticing one’s actions far more than they are. This seemed a fancy way of stating what was true: becoming a headline news story was causing me to exaggerate my own importance.

  Not all the ongoing coverage was negative. 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. Any child who loses a parent covets even the smallest details, but because my mother felt guilty about not having been able to help my dad, I had rarely heard about his life in anything more than broad strokes. I read John Crown’s words so many times, I practically committed them to memory.