Samantha Power, in her
memoir The Education Of An Idealist
(Dey Street Books, 2019), wears that mantle proudly. She is wholeheartedly idealistic even in the
shadow of a complicated, dangerous world where hope has not been in so much
jeopardy since the Second World War. Of
course, that is only one of a slew of events in the twentieth century where the
concept of genocide became dinner table conversation, and human beings
practicing ethnic cleansing, systematic murder, and ritual bloodletting have already
set the course for new crimes against humanity in the twenty-first century. Power maintains her cool through all the
tragedies and diplomatic throw-downs, even when she is ignored or dismissed out
of hand. She keeps her positive attitude
and stays in the fight, a strong, powerful woman who has absorbed the wisdom of
her mentors and her family. This makes
her an admirable figure, someone who stays true to herself and the uniquely
American idea that we all must work together for a better world, both geopolitical
enemies and friends alike.
Power, born in
Ireland, is a natural storyteller.
Evidence of this is readily apparent in her previous book, “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (Perennial,
2002), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize.
That book attracted attention with its treatment of the first genocide
of the twentieth century, the Armenian Genocide. She is one of the first historian/journalists
to address this murderous event upon which Hitler modeled his own destruction
of the Jewish people.
“We make sense of our
lives through stories,” she writes, “stories have the power to bind us.” She believes it is the stories that bring
people together and offer a means of acceptance and fellowship. The story is always front and center in her
memoir, often with riveting intensity.
Her personal story is one of “sorrow, resilience, anger, solidarity,
determination, and laughter…[but] also a story of idealism—where it comes from,
how it gets challenged, and why it must endure.”
Her strength comes
from her mother. As she made her way in her
Irish Catholic school, she looked up to her mother who was the first in her
family to attend college and become a doctor.
Power describes her mother as “simply curious and intensely empathetic,”
traits inculcated in Power as she came of age.
She becomes a voracious reader and student. Meanwhile, her father sinks deeper and deeper
into alcoholism and self-destructive behavior.
He takes his children to the local pub where he drinks and entertains
the other patrons with his stories.
Power gets her inquisitive nature from her mother and her storytelling
from her father, and later, her stepfather, but tragedy looms that will take a
lifetime to comprehend. After her
parents split and her mother takes her and her brother to live in the United
States, her father’s girlfriend finds his decomposing body in Power’s former
childhood home in Ireland. He is dressed
in a suit “as if ready to head out of town,” in a “derelict, filthy
house.” He had begged her mother to
allow the children to come home for a visit, but the conservative nature of
Irish courts might have been persuaded to take the children away from the
mother since she was fleeing the country, and indeed, he did try to keep them
in Ireland on a previous visit. However,
the guilt for Power came from a devastating blow: her father was found dead in her childhood
bed. For years she believed she, his
oldest child, was in some way responsible for her father’s death.
In her adopted
country, Power alternates between her fear of the Catholic nuns and the comfort
of Catholic rituals. It is the faith
that helps her deal with the challenges in her home life. She also makes astute observations about her
new country. “The United States was the
first place I had been that didn’t seem to want its people to pause and reflect
during the day.” Quickly, though, Power
finds success and is accepted to Yale University, but the melancholic threads
entangle her in the presentiment that something will go wrong, that she will
never escape the darkness of her parents’ failed marriage.
She keeps the darkness
at a distance and throws herself into her school work, eventually asking
herself the question so necessary to college education and a consideration of
the future: what should she do with her
life? In this questioning, she finds her
true calling and switches her major to history where her intensity for her
studies multiplies and things begin to click.
She realizes that lived experience is better than abstract history, and
this sets her on the path to journalism.
Dignity, she realizes as she covers the war in Bosnia and Serbia, is a
historical force. Mentors she meets
along the way tell her to work for the people and to improve their lives. Constantly seek to answer the question, one
tells her, will it do any good? This
altruism seems quaint in the age of Trump and partisan politics, but Power is
not naive; her research into ethnic cleansing and the use, specifically, of
rape as a weapon of terror, teach her much about the way of the world, so much
so that she decides to leave journalism to do something that will influence
policy and change thinking.
Being a journalist had
sharpened her storytelling skills, and she quickly realizes that bringing these
stories to the rest of the world, including those who have the power to effect
change, that would be the proper work of a lifetime. Her research and subject are clear: the heart of darkness, the violence of
mankind. She begins researching and
documenting murderous attacks on men, women and children. She tells us that in Rwanda, in one hundred
days, 800,000 people were murdered. She writes
to define, fully and without equivocation, genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass
murder, and how those categories include or differ from, the Holocaust. The dead in Rwanda accumulated at a rate
three times that of the Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust. In the face of such brutality and human
suffering, what constitutes just military intervention? She feels an “inexhaustible need to learn
everything.”
Photo courtesy of Pete Souza / Official White House photo |
Of course, the majority
of the book is about her time working with Barack Obama and being the U.S. Ambassador
to the United Nations. Once Power begins
working with Obama, the book becomes a bit more like the traditional political
memoir. She hits all the tropes of such
a book, the feuds, the missteps, the awkwardness; Washington D.C. is, at its
heart, a small town, and Power quickly earns a reputation as a fighter. With her intensity and ever-present notebook, she
continues to fight for the rights of others, and she finds common ground with
the future president from Illinois. She
has good things to say about both Joe Biden and John McCain, although the
latter gives her a blasting over a nomination and the deteriorating situation
in Syria. One aspect that she makes very
clear in the book is that politics are, always, about people. Because of her strong belief in this guiding
principle, she fights hard for the rights of women and girls around the world.
The darkest episode
here, though, is the Boko Haram’s April, 2014 kidnapping of 276 girls from their
school in Nigeria. The name Boko Haram itself
means “western education is forbidden.”
She decides to journey to the region but while there, tragedy
strikes. One of the SUVs in her security
convoy hits and kills a young boy named Toussaint. This sends Power into a crisis of
conscience. She tells her entourage of
security people that she wants to go see the boy’s family, a decision, they
tell her, that cannot happen because her safety would be in jeopardy. “I think no decision in my life up to that
juncture seemed like less of a choice than a question of whether to pay our
respects [to the boy’s family],” she writes.
The meeting, as expected, does not go well. In reflection, Power writes “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.”
Samantha Power’s
memoir is a powerful and insightful read offering a front row center seat on
the Obama administration and the world in which it operated. Power adopts her motto from the Koran: “To save a life is to save all of
humanity.” She also is cognizant, in the
latter pages of the book in regards to Toussaint’s death, of the creed to “First
do no harm,” the motto of doctors like her mother. She believes quite strongly, after all she
has seen, that “People who care, act, and refuse to give up may not change the
world, but they can change many individual worlds.” This is hope in the face of extreme adversity;
this is what it means to look to the horizon not because the sun is setting but
because it will rise again.