The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  At home, I was elated to be able to steal full days with Rían, who was already nine months old. I also taught three-year-old Declan to swim and brought him to his first Washington Nationals baseball games. Then, in late May of 2013, the main White House lawyer reviewing my files called to inform me that I had cleared the vetting process. My nomination would be announced imminently.

  In a remarkable coincidence of timing, Cass and I had been invited to dine with the President, the First Lady, and a few of their friends at the White House residence that very night. In anticipation, I had recruited Eddie to make the drive down from New York to babysit, leaving him with explicit instructions for feeding Rían, who was a fussy eater.

  A few minutes late, we were escorted up to the Obamas’ home and out onto their balcony overlooking the National Mall. Obama was already holding forth among his guests, and as we entered, Cass accidentally knocked over a glass. Obama laughed, perhaps recalling Cass’s messiness when they were colleagues at the University of Chicago.

  “Leave it to Cass,” the President said playfully, “to break the White House.”

  After half an hour of small talk on the outdoor portico, our group was called to dinner. Just as I walked back into the residence, my phone rang. Eddie was in a state of panic, unable to find Rían’s pumped milk. Instead, he had settled on something white that didn’t smell like milk and wasn’t fitting through the small hole in Rían’s bottle, causing her to complain loudly.

  Realizing that he had mistakenly attempted to feed her rice water, I ducked down the hallway to try to calm my frazzled father while President Obama treated the other guests to a quick stop in Abraham Lincoln’s bedroom, showing them the only copy of the Gettysburg Address personally signed by the sixteenth president.

  Explaining the logistics of baby care to Eddie by phone was like trying to explain the complexities of a new tech gadget: what seemed straightforward to me just wasn’t obvious to a man in his seventies. He became increasingly frustrated, I then grew exasperated, and both of us ended up practically shouting. This had happened many times before, but never in such close proximity to Abraham Lincoln’s bedroom. As our conversation escalated in its inevitable way, I suddenly heard a voice behind me.

  “Let me talk to him.”

  President Obama grabbed my cell phone. “Listen,” he instructed Eddie, “this is the President of the United States. You can do this. You just need to stay calm and focus.”

  Obama proceeded to speak with Eddie for a good three minutes before he handed the phone back to me, saying, “He’s got this.” When I put the phone to my ear again, Eddie had hung up, undoubtedly to call Mum. A masterful storyteller had been gifted one for the ages. And for once, no embellishment would be necessary.

  President Obama asked if he could have a word with me in a separate room. I nodded nervously, wondering what was on his mind—or what I could have done wrong. He did not leave much time for suspense.

  “Tom is leaving,” Obama said matter-of-factly, referring to the National Security Advisor. “I am going to move Susan down here into his job, and I want to move you to the UN.”

  I swallowed hard and, while I continued to watch the President’s mouth move, the sound of his words grew faint, drowned out by the tumult in my own brain.

  “Holy shit—I’m going to be UN ambassador,” I thought to myself. “Wait until I tell Mum and Eddie!” Then, almost instantaneously, the bats in my Bat Cave went into a fluttering overdrive. “Oh no—Fox News is going to portray me as a madwoman,” I worried. “This could be a nightmare . . .”

  When I refocused on President Obama, he was zeroing in on my Senate confirmation.

  “The lawyers are telling me that you have been vetted back to when you were twenty-three, but this is a cabinet position, so the vetting needs to go back further. I need you to think really, really hard about whether you did anything between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three that we need to know about—anything at all that could embarrass us,” Obama said. “If there is something, I’m sure we can figure out a way to manage it, but whether it is sex, drugs, or taxes, we need to know. I just need you to think.”

  The joyful moment of being chosen had lasted a grand total of ten seconds. President Obama saw my face fall.

  “What is it?”

  “I . . . did not have an ideal romantic life in those years,” I offered. “I dated a lot of the wrong guys.” I was already overthinking the situation, conflating my early relationships with a few lizards with something severe enough to hurt my confirmation.

  “Well,” Obama said, “unless you dated Yasser Arafat, I think we’ll be okay.”

  And with that, he walked me into the Old Family Dining Room, where the rest of his guests were seated at the table, chatting with the First Lady.

  Cass was seated at the opposite end from me. He watched as I unsteadily took my seat and drained a glass of water. Our eyes met, and I shook my head in astonishment. I put my hand over my heart, signaling that something major had happened. Cass used his fingers to draw the letters “U” and “N” in the air, and I nodded back. As my husband beamed with delight, I sat silently through dinner and drinks, which went until one a.m., racking my brain to recall anything untoward I might have done a quarter of a century before.

  As President Obama walked us to the door at the end of the night, I thanked him for the opportunity he was giving me. But he was not there yet.

  “Think,” he said, giving me a parting kiss on the cheek.

  That night, instead of sleeping, I imagined how every event in my life could be most negatively portrayed.

  “Pretend you are Fox News,” I told myself. I had traveled to Cuba with a human rights activist to document Fidel Castro’s abuses. I saw the Fox headline: “OUR WOMAN IN HAVANA.”

  I had been involved with a man who claimed he was divorced from his wife, but I later learned they were only legally separated. “HOME WRECKER,” the New York Post would proclaim.

  Finally, at around five a.m., I settled on the issue that was surely going to seal my doom—and, according to the logic of my sleep-deprived paranoia, unravel Obama’s presidency altogether.

  As a freelance journalist in Bosnia, I had been paid twenty cents a word for my articles (which, at around eight hundred words each, earned me $160 per piece). Was I sure I paid taxes on every single one of my Bosnia articles? “TAX CHEAT!”

  My mind raced through all the publications I wrote for in my Balkan years: the Boston Globe, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, Economist, U.S. News & World Report, Washington Post, The New Republic. “Rack your brain, Samantha,” I commanded myself. “Were there others?”

  And then, at around 5:30 a.m., I remembered the Irish Sunday Business Post and the Yorkshire Post. I wrote a couple of articles for the former and no more than a half dozen for the latter. I began to spiral downward and shook Cass, who had been sleeping beside me.

  “Cass, wake up,” I said. “I don’t think I paid taxes on my income from the Yorkshire Post in 1995.”

  Through his haze, he asked, “Yorkshire, England? When did you live there?”

  I reminded him that, in a bygone media age, smaller regional newspapers had assigned articles to freelancers around the world. He asked me how much income I had earned from the Yorkshire Post, and I said, as if it was a vast sum, “easily six hundred dollars.” Then I corrected myself, “No, even more than that in dollars, because the six hundred would have been in British pounds.”

  Knowing better than to make fun of me, he turned away, saying I should go back to sleep and assuring me we would find a tax lawyer in the morning. “This is the morning,” I said.

  It would turn out that my Achilles’ heel was not my taxes, which I had paid. And it certainly was not my ex-boyfriends. In the new era of permanent political and policy warfare, it was my writing and public commentary.

  ON WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5TH, a beautiful afternoon five short days after the President had told me to “think” about my past, the White
House announced to the press corps that Obama would be making a “personnel announcement” in the Rose Garden.

  Cass happened to be overseas the day of the ceremony, so he settled for calling me what felt like every fifteen minutes. In the morning, I dropped Rían at daycare across from the White House, and deposited Declan at his summer baseball camp.

  This left me with a few hours to finish preparing my remarks for the event and to track down phone numbers for the White House to contact potential validators—people who could attest to the fact that I was qualified for the position. I picked up Declan at camp around lunchtime, but, because of heavy traffic, had to scramble to change him into a borrowed toddler blazer and clip-on tie. Mercifully, María was there to help me scrub the brown baseball dust off his grimy face, print my remarks, and get to the White House in time to collect Rían and calm myself.

  When we arrived, my parents, María, and the kids were quickly escorted to their seats, while I joined the President, Susan Rice, and Tom Donilon in the Oval Office.

  After a few minutes of small talk, the President led us outside, and we stood behind him as he walked to the podium. The crowd—filled with our families, friends, and colleagues—greeted us with an extended round of applause, putting a lump in my throat. Mort was in the audience, and Gayle helped keep Declan in check during the ceremony.

  The President began by thanking Tom for his four and a half years of tireless service. 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.

  When I stepped up to the microphone, I recounted how I had arrived in Pittsburgh as a nine-year-old, wearing a Stars and Stripes T-shirt. “Even as a little girl with a thick Dublin accent who had never been to America,” I said, “I knew that the American flag was the symbol of fortune and of freedom.” I described practicing a new accent in front of the mirror “so that I too could quickly speak and be American.”

  The day before the Rose Garden ceremony, I had remembered that Cass’s dad, Dick Sunstein (who died of a brain tumor when Cass was just twenty-five), had been on furlough from the Navy in San Francisco in April of 1945 during the founding conference of the United Nations. Rummaging through a box Cass kept of his dad’s letters from the war, I found one Dick had sent to Cass’s mother that seemed uncannily resonant.

  “Conference starts today,” the letter dated April 25th, 1945 began. “The town is going wild with excitement. It is a pleasure to be here for the opening few days. Let’s pray that they accomplish something.”

  After reading parts of the letter in my Rose Garden remarks, I repeated Cass’s dad’s words. “Let’s pray that they accomplish something.”

  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 knew many in my Irish family would be watching the ceremony. And I felt a twinge of sadness that my dad wasn’t around to witness it. But mainly, I felt as though I was levitating. 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. And I still had one last hurdle to clear.

  — 27 —

  One Shot

  Back at our Georgetown apartment after the Rose Garden ceremony, Eddie sat transfixed on our couch, watching commentators on CNN dissect the personnel “shake-up” President Obama had just announced.

  After putting the kids down for a nap, I joined him.

  “How bad?” I asked.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he said.

  “How bad?” I asked again.

  “They get paid to say these things,” he said.

  With Eddie and Mum now sitting on either side of me, we listened to a parade of analysts predict that I was in for a lengthy, ugly confirmation fight on Capitol Hill. One of the talking heads suggested my struggle might resemble that experienced by John Bolton, the flame-throwing conservative whose 2005 nomination to become UN ambassador had proven so controversial that he was ultimately unable to win confirmation.*

  “Oh dear,” my mother sighed, before quietly stepping outside for a walk around the neighborhood.

  Mum had once sent me a pick-me-up card in which she wrote the inscription that appears above the entrance to Wimbledon’s Centre Court, from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”:

  If you can meet with triumph and disaster

  And treat those two imposters just the same

  This was always easier said than done—for me and for her.

  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.”

  The Post article also made the unwelcome prediction that “congressional Republicans looking for a foreign policy fight” could try to derail my confirmation. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was one of the first out of the gate, calling my selection “deeply troubling” and charging that I “strongly supported the expansion of international institutions and international law . . . at the expense of US sovereignty.” Soon after, the far-right Center for Security Policy (CSP) launched what Fox News called “a movement” against my nomination.*

  Led by CSP president Frank Gaffney and retired lieutenant general William Boykin, a former Pentagon official from the George W. Bush administration, the group circulated a letter about Obama’s “wholly unacceptable choice” that was signed by more than fifty conservative activists, retired military officers, and former government officials. “We should be proud to be Americans, and if you look at Samantha Power’s track record, there is a strong indication that her attitude is just the opposite,” Boykin said at a National Press Club event held to mobilize opposition.

  I spent the days after the announcement contacting Republicans to try to secure their support. One of my first calls was to Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, as he was one of his party’s leading voices on foreign policy. He got right to the point.

  “Are you the crazy nut the blogs are saying you are, or someone who will defend US interests at the UN?” Graham asked.

  “The latter, sir,” I responded.

  Much to my amazement and perhaps influenced by his friend Senator John McCain, with whom I had worked on human rights issues while serving at the White House, Graham immediately issued a statement praising my nomination.

  Thinking I should reach out to the two Republican senators representing Georgia, I also called Sally, my high school friend, to see if she happened to know anyone connected to them. As it turned out, Sally’s stepfather wo
rked closely with a leading Republican lawyer in the state, who graciously agreed to encourage Senators Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson to see me.

  Chambliss had been a staunch opponent of Cass’s nomination four years before, and while they had ended up working together closely once Cass had assumed his role, I was not optimistic that he would support me. Yet as soon as I walked into his office, I was bathed in a particularly Southern kind of warmth. Chambliss asked me about my basketball-playing days at Lakeside High, and then quickly eliminated the suspense about how he was leaning on my nomination.

  “Look, Samantha,” he said, “I’m not supporting you because of your advocacy for human rights, but I admire your genocide book. I’m not supporting you because you got into trouble on the Obama campaign for your comments about Hillary Clinton, though I must say I like a lady with a sharp tongue. I’m supporting you for one reason: your husband. There are few finer men around.”

  I was grateful when Republican senators agreed to meet with me, as not all of them did. Although Senator Cruz and Senator Mike Lee of Utah grilled me about the deficiencies of the United Nations and eventually voted against my nomination, our discussions were lively and respectful. I had the opportunity to explain why the world’s only global organization was vital to our national interests in an era when confronting the major challenges to the United States required international cooperation.

  “Of course US sovereignty is important,” I told Cruz at one point during our private exchange, “but to protect US security, we need the UN to get other countries to step up to confront threats.”