Samantha Power: Idealist
Samantha Power was our UN Ambassador. Her 2019 memoir is titled The Education of an Idealist. A bold title — no disillusionment hinted.
I picked it up knowing my daughter Elizabeth lionized her; both were in overseas humanitarian-oriented work. Though their life paths were quite different, reading this often put me in mind of Elizabeth. (She’s read it.)
Power is very candid about the personal story behind the public one. Nothing resembling my daughter’s. Born in Ireland, her father’s drinking destroyed her family and killed him — embedding in Samantha a sense of guilt taking her decades to resolve.
Probably affecting her romantic relations. Long prone to bad choices, she finally did connect with a perfect match, the lawyer, scholar and writer Cass Sunstein. Her two children are also prominent in the book.
Power took a somewhat zigzag route to her eventual career as a global macher. Early on, she found herself in the former Yugoslavia, trying to get the story out as it violently disintegrated in the ’90s. At one point she voices dismay at Croatians’ ethnic antipathy toward Serbs. I read this thinking WTF?? Power had just filled pages with Serbian atrocities. I recall, at the time, being shocked that not a single Serb voice denounced them. Teaching me the power of ethnic tribalism.
When Barack Obama entered the Senate, Power became a foreign policy advisor and friend. Then part of his presidential campaign. Writing of his pivotal upset win in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, Power movingly describes the feeling that America could actually become better.
She also relates the joyful night in Chicago when Obama’s presidential election victory was declared. I’ll never forget seeing on TV a middle-aged Black woman jumping up and down crying “God Bless America! God Bless America!” How must it have felt being a Black person in America at that moment. Though I’d voted for Obama’s opponent, that still chokes me up.
But this hopeful part of the book packed a bittersweet emotive punch for me, looking at today’s political landscape, so very different — so very broken, with no remedy in sight.
Obama comes across as a deep, caring, just plain good human being. True of so many others Power writes of working with. Again contrasting starkly with what we’ve got now. That America would embrace a man like Obama — never mind even his race — bespeaks a very different country from today’s.
Power, both outside and then inside government, saw her mission as battling for human rights and against threats to them. Much horrible stuff is discussed. One of those books I had to periodically put down, to gather my wits. Yet being published in 2019 it sometimes seemed like a time capsule — predating Covid; the Ukraine war; January 6 and Trump’s second term; atrocities in Gaza, Myanmar, Sudan. Thus a prelapsarian world. Before it went mad.
The 2013 Syria events loom large. President Obama had publicly decreed a “red line” if the Assad regime used chemical weapons. Small violations were ignored, but then came a massive ghastly one. Our administration, with careful consideration, decided upon air strikes. Delayed while we worked to get the UN to first remove its investigators, potential hostages, whose mission was pointless with the facts being clear. But then, inexplicably, Obama decided to seek Congressional approval before striking. He thought Congress would accede. Naive and foolish. So no air strikes — a huge blow to American credibility.*
In fairness, his response on Africa’s 2014 Ebola outbreak, also retold in the book, was contrastingly decisive and terrific. Preventing a looming giant catastrophe. This, Power writes, was “an awesome demonstration of U.S. leadership and capability — a vivid example of how a country advances its values and interests at once.”
A concept wholly foreign to our current regime.
* Power relates a later phone call with John McCain, where he flayed Obama’s passivity toward Syrian atrocities. Power reiterates how Obama had agonized over the bad choices Syria presented. Yet, reading this, I said to myself, “This is why I voted for McCain, not Obama.”