I read her memoir. I expected it to be self-serving, as all memoirs are. But this one, written by Samantha Power, former UN Ambassador, is different.
This reveals all the scars of her striving, but also her indefatigability in moving forward beyond them. It is refreshingly human, full of feelings, full of humanity. It doesn't feel measured for effect.
When she was caught insulting Hillary Clinton in the 2008 campaign--and had to resign from Barack Obama's campaign team for it--she recounted her entire thought process, including the moment at which she suddenly remembered what she had said and to whom. Very few people would go public about this. Very few people would be this introspective.
If she were a guy, she'd call this approach "balls out." As a former participating athlete, I'm sure she's heard it. She'd probably laugh. Then she'd probably point out the sexism.
She has been in some of the roughest spots in the world, writing about them and what someone should do. Inevitably, she concluded that someone has to stop the abuse, the devastation, the destruction. She was in the middle of it all, in Bosnia, in Serbia.
Her descriptions of her access to sources early on, while she was trying to establish herself as a free-lance reporter, are amazingly strident, a devotion to the idea that you can't get anywhere unless you try. It had to help her win a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her book A Problem from Hell, about the challenges of genocide.
She never backed away from risky venues, in her job as UN Ambassador, either. When there were situations in Africa that demanded attention, she didn't send people, which is what high-ranking government officials usually do: She went there herself.
She went to places like Sierra Leone and Liberia, to help arrest the onrushing Ebola virus (and halting what would have been an ugly forerunner to our current predicament); Nigeria, to see the damage that the hyper-Muslim extremist group, Boko Haram, was doing; and visited the UN offices of every single member country, which stunned them but from which she learned fascinating information about representatives and their conditions.
Her husband, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, regularly freaked out before her foreign trips, as did her children as they got old enough. He would tell her as they embraced, "Please don't go." She felt that. She went anyway.
She went so she could write her own report to the president. As someone who used to be a journalist, she didn't, and doesn't, use legalize for her explanations. The book is remarkably pedestrian for someone who's been in the densest policy meetings. Anybody could understand it easily.
Yes, she's been a bit naive. There's a little Pollyanna in her. But it still seems to be there. She hasn't turned jaded and cynical, despite all she has seen. She still has faith in not only her country's ability to lead and deliver, but in humanity itself.
If you read her book, The Education of An Idealist, and don't walk away with sincere admiration for her, you'd better check your soul to see if you have one anymore.
To be sure, she has been a pain in someone's neck wherever she has gone. She sees problems in strictly their human dimensions, eschewing systems or politics. "You get on my nerves," Barack Obama would tell her more than once in meetings of either the National Security Council or the Cabinet.
Not just his. Secretary of State John Kerry complained more than once that Power sometimes hindered his job. Sometimes, diplomacy can be better accomplished with representatives who agree with a policy, but don't want it attached to their portfolios. You can get work done that way, but not always: It's also a way to avoid tough calls. As UN Ambassador, Power brought things out into the open, though, forcing reluctant diplomats to answer for them. She got work done, too.
She did all this while raising two little kids. Yes, she had help from an Hispanic nanny and various friends, but she spares no sentiment telling us how torn she sometimes was between her family and her jobs.
Today, after withstanding the last, horrible, degrading administration by teaching at Harvard (and for the paperback version of this book, she's added new paragraphs about the pandemic), she's been nominated for the directorship of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the official organization which oversees what most people refer to as "foreign aid." The USAID helps other countries in such areas as:
- Agriculture and Food Security
- Democracy and Human Rights
- Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment
- Global Health
- Humanitarian Assistance
President Biden also wants to raise that position to the National Security Council level (Power was once a member of that group, pre-ambassadorship, under Obama). Doesn't that sound like she's a perfect fit? She had her Senate nomination hearing last month. She awaits approval. She'd better get it, or one blogger will be mighty upset. Should she ever be considered for being, at long last, the first female President (and she's now 50), we could do much, much worse.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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