The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  THE DRIVE FROM THE REFUGEE CAMP BACK to Toussaint’s village was foreboding. Although it was steaming hot in the area, my skin began to go numb.

  When we arrived, I exited our vehicle and walked down a dirt path leading to Toussaint’s house. I felt as though the entire village had turned up. While we had been welcomed earlier in the day, now dozens of men squatted or stood stoically nearby, silently staring at us. I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.

  As we ducked under a low doorway into a mud-walled home, we found a very old man, probably in his eighties, who was Toussaint’s grandfather. He sat beside a much younger woman named Fanta Makachi, Toussaint’s mother. They were sitting on wooden crates opposite white plastic lawn chairs, where we were gestured to sit.

  I shook the old man’s hand first. He looked strangely serene. A Cameroonian translated his words into French, which Najat translated into English. “It was God’s will,” he said. “It was his time. God had a reason for taking him. We praise God.”

  I looked at Toussaint’s mother. She was wearing a T-shirt and a floral skirt. Her eyes looked vacant. She did not speak.

  Najat, Ambassador Hoza, and I went to shake her hand, but she looked away as she held out her limp palm. I longed to connect with her, to know that she saw the depth of our regret and sorrow. But she was naturally unable or unwilling to fully participate in our visit. I was thankful she had even agreed to see us.

  Toussaint’s two brothers and two sisters ranged in age from one to eleven years old. I watched one of the young boys, himself tear-stained, slide into his mother’s lap. I tried to speak. Now, Najat translated my words into French before the Cameroonian spoke them in the local dialect.

  “As a parent—” I started, but I choked up and had to begin again.

  “I cannot imagine what you are going through,” I said. “I am so terribly sorry.”

  Before I knew it, we were back outside, all of us blinking back tears as we walked toward our vehicles. Later that night, I wrote in my journal: “I think walking over that threshold was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I did not do it well, but I am glad I saw their faces.”

  ON THE NIGHT OF THE ACCIDENT, when our flight landed back in Cameroon’s capital, I was scheduled to videoconference into an NSC meeting chaired by President Obama. As various senior officials wandered into the room before the meeting started, I could see them notice me on the large screen, but no one gestured my way. I had been shivering in the frigid embassy conference room, but now, feeling as if my colleagues were deliberately looking away from me, I turned hot with shame, shedding the jacket and sweater in which I had been bundled.

  I saw Secretary Kerry walk in and assumed he too would say nothing. But when he spotted me, he pressed the button to unmute the microphone and shouted, “Sending you a big hug, Sam.”

  Becca passed me an email from Jim Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence:

  Knowing you as we do, I expect you’ve taken this hard. It’s doubly sad, given the noble mission you had just embarked on. I choose to think now of the thousands of lives that you have saved—either directly or indirectly. Please accept my heartfelt thoughts, prayers, and a virtual hug.

  I was overcome with gratitude.

  I wondered if President Obama knew what had happened and whether he would say anything. Just after he entered, Susan passed him a note. He studied it for a second, then his shoulders slumped. He exhaled deeply, shaking his head as if pained. Given his job, the note could have informed him of any number of tragedies. But I had an instinct it was about our convoy’s accident.

  Obama launched directly into chairing a two-hour discussion of our policy on Middle East peace. I compartmentalized, participating in the meeting as if it were any other day.

  I did not get back to my hotel until midnight. I tried to sleep, but kept waking up and checking my BlackBerry as if I might find a message that said: “What you think happened today did not really happen.”

  Instead, I received an email from the President:

  I’m so sorry about today—heartbreaking. I know you know rationally that bad stuff like this happens, and there’s nothing you could have done differently to anticipate it. But given the emotions it surely evokes, it’s worth hearing from your friend that I don’t know anyone who cares more about people, and your work saves countless lives, and I couldn’t be prouder of you. So hang in there. Much love.

  “Hang in there” seemed the operative words. Knowing that Colin, Gideon, Kurtis, Becca, and others were probably just as sleepless and tormented in their own rooms, I spent the next hour sending them individual emails of thanks and support.

  “I was so glad you were by my side,” I wrote to Becca, “though I wish for your sake you could have been elsewhere.”

  OVER THE NEXT WEEK, I met with the presidents of the three countries we were visiting: Paul Biya of Cameroon, Idriss Déby of Chad, and Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria. Because I had spoken with civilians before each of these meetings, I was able to describe not only the devastation being caused by Boko Haram but also the damage the presidents’ own militaries were doing with their mass roundups and seeming indifference to the starvation that loomed.

  Presidential advisers shuffled awkwardly in their chairs as I spoke, some even interjecting to claim that I was misinformed—or lying. But I was able to present a detailed litany of the facts that our delegation had gathered. I and the deputy commander of US forces in Africa each spoke with humility about the challenges of fighting terrorists. We stressed that military force alone would not solve their problems, describing how torture and civilian casualties had set back US efforts to defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  I also held a very difficult meeting with the grief-stricken parents of the abducted Chibok girls. When I arrived at the park where they held daily vigils, I was handed a card bearing the name of Aisha Ezekiel, a teenager who had been missing for 738 days.* A woman draped head to toe in a bright red chador stood and declared:

  Our Chibok girls are no longer just children from Chibok. They are no longer just children from Nigeria . . . Aisha Ezekiel is now your daughter. As long as Chibok girls are in captivity, we are all in captivity. Humanity is in captivity.

  A father then pleaded with us not to allow his daughter to be punished simply for wanting an education. “Take our cry to the world,” he implored me. The parents could not comprehend how a country as powerful as the United States, with all of our sophisticated surveillance tools, could not find their daughters. I knew nothing I said would be satisfying, but I took the microphone that had been passed among the parents.

  “What I can tell you, as a personal representative of President Obama, is that we will never give up,” I said. “Just as you will never give up. We will never give up.” I believed that our intensifying efforts would help, but I did not want to raise false hopes.

  When I got back to New York, I joined others in the US government in pressing the leading UN humanitarian organizations to declare what is known as a “Level 3 emergency”—the highest level at the UN—in order to focus attention and resources on the severity of the looming famine. The resulting Level 3 declarations, which were made over the following months, enabled UN agencies to channel more funds to the region. I also lobbied the secretary-general to chair a high-level event at the next UN General Assembly, which he did, raising an additional $168 million in humanitarian assistance for the people menaced by Boko Haram.

  Separately, I worked closely with the State Department as we sought to mobilize support for the Birwe family. Because such accidents had unfortunately happened before, an established protocol existed for how to provide funds to the families. Toussaint’s family ultimately received restitution many times greater than the protocol stipulated, and the State Department also funded the construction of a well in Toussaint’s honor, providing fresh drinking water for his village.

  In an area of such extreme poverty, with no tradition of saving, I recognized tha
t the infusion of money would only last so long. I wanted, in some small way, to do something meaningful for Toussaint’s four siblings, so Cass and I established an escrow account in Cameroon to fund their primary and secondary schooling.

  TOUSSAINT’S DEATH FORCED ME to more directly confront a charge often made against the United States—that even when we try to do right, we invariably end up making situations worse. I knew the force of this argument. In the dark days after we returned home, no matter what anybody tried to tell me, I fixated on the suffering our visit had brought about.

  As the weeks passed, however, I began to think about the impact of our efforts differently. Although my sense of responsibility for the accident would never abate, I began to take pride in what our delegation had tried to accomplish. Being a public servant requires making decisions every day—decisions that can have unintended outcomes, even life or death consequences.

  The road to hell is paved with good intentions, to be sure. But turning a blind eye to the toughest problems in the world is a guaranteed shortcut to the same destination.

  As a young reporter watching American motorcades zoom by in Bosnia, I judged the people inside only by what they achieved in the moment. I could not fathom just how long it sometimes took to see a return on their investment. I also never considered what the former Yugoslavia would have looked like if the United States had not shown up.

  Each member of our delegation had taken personal risks by traveling to Cameroon, Chad, and Nigeria, and had done so out of a conviction that our fates were somehow linked to those of people thousands of miles away. Every day, while nobody was watching, young boys and girls were dying in the countries we visited because of malnutrition, disease, military violence, and terrorism. We visited because we were determined to help in a way that we knew no other country would. After the accident, people in the region had gone out of their way to thank us for being there. Amid the warnings of impending famine, we had announced new humanitarian assistance, and we had pressured governments to cease their human rights abuses and better facilitate international relief initiatives. These efforts mattered and would continue to matter.

  We had also gathered ideas for how to advise President Obama following our return. Thanks to a strong White House push from Susan, the United States stepped up its efforts against Boko Haram. In 2016, as the regional coalition further pushed the terrorists out of the territory they had seized, deaths at the hands of Boko Haram dropped by 80 percent from the previous year. And humanitarian organizations finally gained access to parts of the region in dire need of support.*

  Toussaint’s death also concentrated my focus on Declan and Rían. Since I first met Barack Obama in 2005, I had managed to get married and build a family. But my kids were not seeing enough of me. My father’s sudden death during my childhood had shown me that tragedy could strike in an instant. But Toussaint’s death once again brought that stark reality to the surface. So much of what happens is beyond our control.

  Yet how we use the time we have is within our control. Representing the United States at the United Nations, I was doing the most fulfilling work of my career. When the Obama administration ended in 2017, I would have liked nothing more than to find a way to continue serving as a diplomat if Hillary Clinton became president. But I knew that instead I would need to leave government and finally build a home for my family. I needed to get closer to those I loved most.

  — 37 —

  The Golden Door

  One fall afternoon, I got an excited call from María. After living in the United States for seventeen years, she had received a date to be sworn in as an American citizen.

  Born near Guadalajara, Mexico, María Isabel Castro Gonzalez was one of ten children. Her dad was a farmer, her mother a shopkeeper. She had married young and, in 1998, at age thirty-one, moved with her husband and four children to Virginia, where he had found work as a builder. Cass and I first met María when one of his colleagues recommended her as an occasional babysitter. But the moment I saw the way she held our then-infant Declan, I had asked if she would consider becoming our live-in nanny.

  María had tremendous energy. She kept running lists in her mind of all that she needed to do in a day or week, and when she got to the end of one list, she would immediately devise a new one. She was a perfectionist about her work and managed almost all aspects of our household when I was in government. She also made time to attend daily Mass during the week. Because Declan and Rían often accompanied her, to this day they say their Our Fathers and Hail Marys in Spanish. María’s faith in God’s love gave her an optimism and joy that I almost never saw falter. Knowing she was watching over our kids made it possible for me to work while having peace of mind about their well-being. Her presence in our family was a profound blessing.

  I had spoken previously at naturalization ceremonies and wanted to help celebrate María’s big day. I offered to give brief remarks at the event where she would officially become a citizen.

  Like many Americans, I was familiar with one of the verses from Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” the poem engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But as I reread Lazarus’s poem on the drive to María’s ceremony, I took special note of her final line: “I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Mum, Eddie, Stephen, and I had entered through that door, and now María would do the same.

  That morning, she would take the Oath of Allegiance alongside people originating from twenty-eight countries. I could only imagine what each had been through to gain a foothold and integrate themselves into American society. And as I looked out onto the crowd of expectant new Americans, I could see the pride in their faces: they felt they had earned their citizenship.

  The ugly political winds in the United States contrasted sharply with the earnest gravity of the occasion. Donald Trump had launched his campaign for President on a platform that blatantly stoked fear about immigrants and refugees, falsely depicting them as criminals and terrorists who were cannily masquerading as persecuted civilians. Among his proposals, he had called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” claiming such a ban would prevent terrorism.* Back in 1979, when my family moved to Pittsburgh, the Troubles were still roiling Northern Ireland and terrorists had killed civilians in Dublin, my hometown. The repulsive ideology of judging (and punishing) people collectively due to nationality or religion could have kept my family and other Irish immigrants out of the United States.

  In my speech at María’s naturalization, I decided to address these worrying forces. For as long as the United States had existed, I said, some people had claimed to represent “an original, pure America” and defined themselves in opposition to immigrants. Nativists had once stigmatized Chinese, Irish, Italian, and Jewish arrivals. Now they had turned on Latinos and people of Muslim faith. In the face of such fearmongering, I urged those taking the oath that day not to hide where they came from, but to celebrate it.

  The audience included not only those being naturalized, but Eddie, Declan, Rían, and several of my friends who had become María’s over the years. I recounted her journey from Mexico to the United States, describing all she had sacrificed for her family and for mine.

  “She’s not only taught my children her language,” I said, “but more importantly, she’s taught them her values. How to listen. How to treat people with respect and dignity. How to live life and treasure the small wonders every day.”

  María had held on to all she learned in Mexico, I said, “and now my kids will carry what María teaches them for the rest of their lives.”

  When I returned to the US Mission after the ceremony, I was struck that the faces in a typical US government office did not look all that different from the courthouse I had just left. I had heard foreign ambassadors remark on the power of President Clinton choosing Czech refugee Madeleine Albright to represent the United States at the UN, President Bush naming Afghan i
mmigrant Zalmay Khalilzad, and President Obama selecting me. But immigrants defined every part of American society.

  Kelly Razzouk, the human rights adviser at the Mission, was the daughter of a Lebanese man who had escaped his country’s civil war as a nineteen-year-old, carrying with him just two pairs of pants. Kam Wong, the mission’s longest serving administrative assistant, had worked for the State Department for twenty-five years. Her father had fled Communist China when she was an infant. After spending his family’s savings on a boat ticket to America, he had worked shifts in a Chinese restaurant in Iowa until he could send for his wife and newborn daughter.

  The parents of my military adviser, Colonel Mike Rauhut, were German survivors of World War II who had made their way to the United States when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961. By coincidence, their son Mike had been stationed in Berlin when East and West Germany were unified in 1990, and on the day of reunification he had walked through Brandenburg Gate with his mother. Mike would go on to become a decorated officer, serving tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Wa’el Alzayat, one of my Middle East advisers, had immigrated with his family to the United States from Syria when he was a teenager. Wa’el’s father, a former colonel in the Syrian Air Force, drove limousines and ice cream trucks before returning to school in his fifties to become a semiconductor testing engineer. Wa’el, meanwhile, studied at top American universities and then joined the State Department.

  Maher Bitar, my deputy in Washington, was the son of a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother who had met in Beirut before being displaced by Lebanon’s civil war. Maher spoke Arabic, French, and German and had gotten his law degree at Georgetown by taking night classes while serving as an aide to Middle East peace envoys George Mitchell and David Hale. My assistant Manya-Jean Gitter’s grandfather had been a prominent Jewish businessman and her grandmother a well-known psychologist in Vienna. After Hitler annexed Austria in 1938 and the Nazis began confiscating Jewish property, her grandparents, each of whom spoke six languages, fled with their young son, Manya’s father, to New York City. Manya’s grandparents learned after the war that their parents and many of their siblings, nieces, and nephews had been murdered in the Holocaust.