The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  Coached to avoid specifics, I fell back to home base: “Again, sir, the greatest country on Earth. We have nothing to apologize for.”

  Rubio looked up with surprise and considerable irritation, but I kept an eye on the clock in front of me. I knew that he was allotted five minutes for questioning, and his time would soon expire. I kept hearing Danvers’s words in my head. “This hearing is not on the level. It is not on the level.” I just had to be patient and not let my self-consciousness about my answers overwhelm my desire for self-preservation.

  For two minutes we went back and forth in exchanges like this:

  Rubio: So you do not have any [crimes] in mind now that we have committed or sponsored?

  Me: I will not apologize for America. I will stand very proudly, if confirmed, behind the US placard.

  Rubio: No, I understand. But do you believe the United States has committed or sponsored crimes?

  Me: I believe the United States is the greatest country on Earth. I really do.

  Rubio: So your answer to whether we have committed or sponsored crimes is that the United States is the greatest country on Earth?

  Me: The United States is the leader in human rights. It is the leader in human dignity . . .

  Rubio’s time expired. I had lost my innocence. And two weeks later, the US Senate confirmed me by a vote of 87–10.

  — 28 —

  “Can’t Be Both”

  I was sworn in as the twenty-eighth US Ambassador to the United Nations on August 2nd, 2013. As we stood in his West Wing office, Vice President Joe Biden handed Cass a tattered, leather-bound Bible that had been in the Biden family since the 1890s. As Cass held the book, which had a Celtic cross on the cover, I placed my left hand on top and raised my right hand. Almost as soon as I began the oath, I got choked up. Seeing my emotion, Cass followed suit. And then, never one to be outdone, Biden’s eyes welled up with tears as well.

  I was overwhelmed by the momentousness of representing my country at the United Nations. Even after I watched the final Senate votes being tallied on C-SPAN, the idea that I would be the one sitting behind the placard that read “United States” had not seemed entirely real.

  Now, looking into the sky-blue eyes of the Vice President and hearing myself swear to uphold the Constitution, I was struck by the gravity of embodying America to the world. Taking the oath, I felt what I imagined medal winners might experience as they stood on the podium at the Olympics and listened to their national anthem—a mix of pride, patriotism, and relief.

  I had known Biden since my time in the Balkans, when he was a senator lobbying President Clinton to rescue Bosnians under siege. And over the past several decades, he and Cass had often discussed judicial appointments. The Vice President had shown immense warmth toward both of us.

  Having observed Biden in debates in the Situation Room, and from just chatting with him during chance encounters in the West Wing, I was struck by the extent to which the man I saw up close resembled the public Biden, the person millions of Americans felt they knew. He was blunt and demonstrative. He could go on too long. But he seemed to see the value of each person he met, irrespective of their status.

  After losing his wife and one-year-old daughter in a car accident, Biden encouraged people to confide their losses to him. I learned from one of his advisers that he still gave his personal cell phone number to grieving strangers he met, urging them, “If you feel low and you don’t know where to turn, call me.”

  I marveled at how, when these people sometimes followed up, he made them feel as though they were his first priority.

  Once I had concluded the oath with the familiar words “So help me God,” Biden leaned toward me and said, “Don’t you change up there. Be you. That’s what we need.”

  “Yes sir,” I replied, before Cass added, “She doesn’t have a choice.”

  WHEN SUSAN WAS AMBASSADOR to the UN, I had stayed with her in the official residence of the ambassador at the Waldorf Astoria Towers, so I thought I knew what to expect. But nothing prepared me for arriving at the Waldorf in the role myself.

  “Good evening, Ambassador,” the doorman said as Cass and I exited my armored SUV and stepped under the blue and gold Waldorf Astoria awning.

  “Good evening, Ambassador,” the concierge said, after we had passed through the revolving doors.

  “Good evening, Ambassador,” one receptionist repeated, followed by two others.

  After we rode up to the forty-second floor, the armed guard who kept watch outside the apartment around the clock added his greeting: “Welcome home, Ambassador.”

  Nobody said much to Cass.

  The Waldorf Astoria apartment complex, which opened in 1931 along with the renowned hotel, had been home to every US Ambassador to the UN since 1947. After leaving office, Presidents Herbert Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower had suites there, as did Frank Sinatra, Queen Elizabeth II, and General Douglas MacArthur.

  After the guard opened the door, Cass and I entered tentatively, not quite able to absorb the fact that a palatial, nine-room, five-bathroom, white-carpeted penthouse had become our family home.

  María had stayed in Washington with Declan and Rían so I would have a few days to choose their schools. When I looked into their shared bedroom, I was stunned to see that Hillary had already decorated it, lining the walls with giant floor-to-ceiling photographs of Declan’s favorite Washington Nationals players and preparing Rían’s crib—probably the first time a US Ambassador to the UN had needed one.

  At a certain point, delighted to be alone with me for the first time in many hours, Cass exclaimed, “Let’s race!,” and we began doing wind sprints down the long halls.

  “You may be a fancy ambassador,” he shouted over his shoulder, “but I’m still faster.”

  Finding ourselves with a rare “date night,” Cass and I pored over the stash of takeout menus left for us. “New York is the United Nations of food,” I thought, before we settled on Szechuan Chinese from nearby. When we called in our order, asking for delivery to the Waldorf Astoria sounded positively bizarre.

  After Cass blared Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm,” we capped off my first night as a fancy ambassador by watching the two-hour season finale of the crime mystery series The Killing.

  CASS HAD BEEN so thoroughly in my corner since the moment Obama selected me as ambassador that he had not thought much about how his own life would change once I assumed the role. Because he had taken a nearly four-year leave from Harvard Law School to run OIRA, he did not feel he could abandon his teaching position again so soon. As a result, he planned to continue teaching in Cambridge three days a week during the school year, spending the rest of his time with our family in New York. He anticipated a seamless transition. But not long after I arrived at the office for my first official day on the job, he called in a panic from our bedroom at the Waldorf, where he was working for the day.

  “There are too many people,” he said, almost hysterical.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “There are people in our home. People in our bedroom.”

  “What people?” I asked.

  “All kinds of people,” he said.

  He was referring to the staff that cared for the ambassador’s residence—a chef, an assistant house manager, and the Waldorf’s cleaning staff.

  After I had left that morning, chef Stanton Thomas had knocked on the bedroom door.

  “I’m in here,” Cass had shouted, hoping for privacy. When the knock came again, Cass trudged to the door.

  “So sorry to bother you, Professor Sunstein,” Thomas said amiably. “But I’m going for groceries. What does the Ambassador like to eat?”

  Cass’s mind, unusually, drew a complete blank. He viewed food as fuel—tuna sashimi from Nobu was indistinguishable from a tuna sandwich from a vending machine. He and I had been married five years, and he still had not dedicated mental space to logging my food tastes. However, wanting to be left alone, he knew he needed to come up with
an answer, so he blurted, “Diet Coke.”

  Chef Thomas looked back quizzically. All that mattered to Cass was that a person who was not me was still standing there.

  “And cheese,” my husband added cheerfully, closing the bedroom door.

  When I came back that evening, the refrigerator was filled with dozens of Diet Cokes and the largest variety of cheeses either of us had ever seen.

  Every time Cass entered or exited the Waldorf, the concierge in the lobby greeted him as “Mr. Power.” After a few weeks, Cass decided he should tell the man his real name.

  “Good morning,” Cass said. “You are so friendly to me, I just thought I would clarify . . . My last name isn’t actually ‘Power.’ It is ‘Sunstein.’ But you can call me ‘Cass.’ ”

  The concierge looked mystified.

  “That’s incredible,” he said, shaking his head.

  Now Cass was the one who was confused.

  “I just can’t believe this,” the concierge said. “You look exactly like Mr. Power.”

  WHILE MY HUSBAND NAVIGATED his first experience of being viewed as what he called a “derivative person,” I adjusted to the fact that a protective detail of armed agents from the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service accompanied me virtually everywhere. Even when I went for a run in Central Park, I did so with these agents keeping pace beside me. For years, I had watched Cabinet officials disembarking from their armored black SUVs at the White House and felt the aura of importance they carried. Now, suddenly, I was one of them.

  There were obvious perks. No longer permitted to drive, I did not have to jostle for parking in Washington or New York. I was prescreened for travel, so I could arrive at airports just minutes before the boarding gate closed. And because the protection officers had scoped the restaurants where I would be eating, I rarely had to wait for a table. The drawbacks, though, were not trivial: outside of our home, most conversations I had with Cass and the kids would happen in the agents’ company. Although I would grow personally close to many of the individuals who served on my security detail, I frequently found myself longing for privacy.

  I also had far less time alone at my new workplace, the United States Mission to the United Nations, a twenty-two-story, 147,000-square-foot building on the busy corner of 45th Street and 1st Avenue in midtown Manhattan, directly across the street from UN Headquarters.

  After more than four years at the White House, I had grown accustomed to reading intelligence about terrorist threats to US government personnel and facilities around the world. Since the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the September 11th attacks in 2001, many American diplomatic facilities, including the US Mission to the UN, had undergone extensive overhauls. The building had been gutted, completely redesigned and rebuilt to endure even an enormously destructive attack. The glass windows in the bright atrium lobby were tempered to withstand explosions, and a special filtration system protected against chemical and biological agents. The offices were set back forty feet from the curb, and the first six floors had no windows.

  My office was near the top of the building, and it looked out on the East River and UN Headquarters. At street level, I could see the 193 flags of the UN member states, as well as school groups lining up for tours throughout the day. I could also spot the UN’s most famous sculpture, known as Non-Violence: a mammoth, bronze Magnum revolver with its barrel twisted into a knot.

  In 1945, after the devastation of two World Wars, the United Nations’ founding charter defined the aim of the organization in stark terms: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The UN is the one place on earth that brings together representatives of all the world’s recognized governments, large and small, rich and poor, in pursuit of this goal.* China, with 1.4 billion people, sits in the UN General Assembly with the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, which has a population of 11,000. Russia, a country of 6.6 million square miles, sits alongside Monaco, which covers less than one square mile.

  The UN founders recognized that conflict is often connected to economic deprivation and saw a role for the UN in helping to mitigate hardships that might fuel instability. As a result, thanks to the financial contributions of member states, UN programs over the years have lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty. Its food aid has nourished those at risk of starvation. Its refugee agency has resettled and sheltered people with no place to go. Its health efforts have eradicated smallpox and very nearly ended polio and guinea worm, while providing vaccinations to children who might otherwise have died of preventable diseases. And its environmental programs have mobilized countries to halt the depletion of the ozone layer, among other feats.

  UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was himself a beneficiary of efforts like these. UNICEF, the UN children’s agency that has facilitated access to schooling for millions of kids, helped provide Ban with an education when he was a boy living in an impoverished, rural village in war-ravaged Korea.

  And yet. On matters of war and peace, the UN has been less of an actor in its own right than a stage on which powerful countries have pursued their interests. Richard Holbrooke, who served as President Clinton’s UN ambassador, once observed, “Blaming the UN for a crisis is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the New York Knicks play badly. You are blaming a building.”

  In 2010, Holbrooke had died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving a void in the lives of all who loved him. I missed him terribly and found myself constantly wishing I could pick up the phone to seek his counsel. Once I became ambassador, his wisdom echoed in my brain—and I often cited his analogy to Madison Square Garden, which vividly encapsulated the power and limitations of the UN.

  As an organization, the UN has at its disposal whatever resources the governments within it choose to provide. It is the major players—countries like the United States, China, and Russia—that dictate how “the UN” handles crises. As a general rule, when politicians claim that a crisis is the “responsibility of the United Nations,” they are diverting attention from their own impotence or lack of political will. In actual fact, in order for the UN to “act” or to “reform,” a critical mass of countries must make that happen (or at least not actively block others from doing so). Much of the UN’s dysfunction stemmed from the actions of particular countries, especially powerful ones. Early on in my tenure, I was given a cartoon that circulated widely at the UN. The cartoon showed dozens of people listening to a speech. In the first panel, the speaker asks, “Who wants change?” and all audience members enthusiastically raise their hands. In the second panel, the speaker refines his question, asking, “Who wants to change?” This time, each audience member looks toward the ground, demurring.

  Measuring the impact of UN standards and laws on state behavior is difficult, but a world without UN rules or without UN humanitarian agencies would be infinitely crueler. And while divisions within the Security Council severely reduced the body’s impact, doing away with the UN—or unilaterally exiting the organization, as some Republican politicians have proposed the United States do over the years—would greatly undermine collective efforts to end all conflicts.

  While most countries, including the United States, sometimes balk at living by the ideals in the UN Charter, it is historically significant that none of the major powers have fought a war with one another since the UN’s founding. UN peacekeeping missions have fallen far short on many occasions, but they have also helped protect huge numbers of civilians from violence and prevented conflict from spreading across borders.

  Former UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld may have best summed up both the UN’s track record and its promise when he said it was created “not to lead mankind to heaven but to save humanity from hell.”

  WHEN I ENTERED THE LOBBY of UN Headquarters for the first time as US Ambassador, around two dozen reporters and photographers were waiting for me. I offered some brief comments, expressing my eagerness to make the UN work for Americans and for vulnerable people around the wo
rld. As the reporters thrust out their tape recorders, I noted that they were wearing the same UN press badge that I once wore. And they were chasing down leads in the same corridors where I had once walked as a reporter. I felt a warm connection with a group of people whose world helped shape me. But I also knew that I had to be guarded. I could not repeat the mistake I had made with the Scotsman during the Obama campaign.

  Before I could assume my official functions, I was required to present my credentials to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.* For reasons I cannot now fathom, I chose to wear a striped sundress that exposed both too much shoulder and too much leg. Upon seeing the official photo of me with the secretary-general, the French Ambassador to the UN, Gérard Araud, would later ask mischievously, “You wore your swim suit to present credentials?”

  The picture showed me from the waist up, and, as I shook hands with Ban in his dark suit, one could have reasonably thought that I wandered into the UN from a local pool. I later heard from Kurtis Cooper, my deputy spokesperson, that a Spanish-speaking reporter had pulled him aside to ask about my attire as well, but managed only, “Samantha is very . . . hippie, no?” As a woman diplomat, I had to come to grips with the fact that, while I wished to focus on substance, my wardrobe would be scrutinized right alongside my negotiating skills.

  Despite the UN secretary-general’s grand title, he was named in the UN Charter as the administrator of the organization. For this reason, former secretary-general Kofi Annan described the position as “more secretary than general.” In 1935, when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was asked to help enlist the Pope in efforts to counter the threat of Nazism, he reportedly answered, “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?” The UN secretary-general is in a similar bind: he commands no armed forces and has no authority over heads of state, so he lacks the means to enforce UN rules that are supposed to govern how countries behave. In all areas, he must rely on collective action by UN member states. Nonetheless, the secretary-general can use the prestige of his office to pursue diplomacy, and he can employ his bully pulpit to urge countries to respect human rights and international law. In our short meeting, which included our spouses, I told Ban Ki-moon that I looked forward to building a strong working relationship with him and warned that I had a long list of issues I hoped to raise when we next spoke.