The Education Of An Idealist

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.