Tough Love

The political memoir has become de righeur in American culture and political life.  These books seem primarily self-serving, an attempt to portray the writer as playing an important role in history and as having acted in the best interests of his or her constituents.  Often, the memoirist includes explanations for actions they took or accounts of battles they fought during their time in the seat of power.  Some writers, like Samantha Power in her recent memoir, are excellent storytellers.  Others seek to put their own spin on their participation in historical events.

Susan Rice, author of Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For (Simon & Schuster, 2019), focuses her book on the major events she was involved in first in the Clinton administration and then the Obama administration where she was the first black U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and later, became Obama’s National Security Advisor.  On these pages, she is obstinate, driven, intense, competitive, and direct, making her a figure of controversy at times and an unyielding force when making her case on the world stage.  Hence, she spends a lot of time here explaining her reasoning and actions in the face of controversial crises like the embassy attack in Benghazi, the explosion of Ebola into a major worldwide health problem, the numerous civil wars and tribal conflicts in Africa, and the rising up of the Arab Spring.

Her writing is filled with memorable images.  For instance, she describes staff at the White House changing out Obama’s Oval to redecorate for the soon-to-arrive Donald Trump on Inauguration Day.  The Obama carpet had a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. on its edge:  “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  Little did we know that this was not simply a change of decor but a profound and seemingly unending negation of morals and values reflected by the Trump administration.

She writes movingly of her parents, her role models in everything.  Her mother passed away as President Obama was leaving office, making the end of Rice’s era doubly poignant.  The twin elements of education and service run through her family and influenced her from an early age.  She had to push herself through “whatever pain” she experienced to exceed expectations at “school, university, in [her] work, and as a daughter, wife and mother.”  She tells us she does not like being wrong (who does?) and from early on, she could be abrasive but would characterize herself in the same breath as an optimist.  It is from her parents that she learned never to doubt herself.  Her mother admonished her to never use race as an excuse for anything.

If style is character, we see a lot of Rice’s style and character on these pages.  She singles out today’s media machine, saying that Americans lack a common base of facts and instead, rely on self-selected stories that “reinforce our personal preconceptions.”  Therefore, we lack the skill of discourse, of supporting one’s opinion, and having a broad spectrum of knowledge about issues.  At times in her career, she alienated her own people and was considered “overly directive” and “intimidated others so much” that her staff felt stifled and unable to offer other perspectives.  Through it all, she learned “that leadership is more like conducting a symphony than performing as a virtuoso player of another single instrument,” and that “the most enduring outcomes are not always the swiftest ones.”  In considering her past, she tells us she has learned “that sometimes patience is the best strategy for achieving the purest justice.”

Rice defends herself with the classic line that she was not there to make friends or win a popularity contest.  In one instance, when she brings her baby to a meeting to be able to keep up with her breast feeding, she refuses to apologize for making others uncomfortable.  “My direct style did not endear me to every one of those seasoned diplomats,” she writes.  “What I cared about was that I was granted the respect and cooperation necessary to ‘get shit done.’  And, if I did, I know those many who cared foremost about outcomes might eventually accept me on the merits.”

I must admit, her abrasive style often seems a bit extreme in the situation.  She talks about her marriage to a white journalist from Canada and the undercurrent of race in their relationship.  “Sometimes I joke with Ian,” she writes, “that I am still waiting for that fateful morning when ‘he wakes up and calls me nigger.’”  We need to be more frank and open about race in this country and not be intimidated by language, but the use of that term in that context made me uncomfortable.  Another problematic part of the book is when she discusses her battles with the late Richard Holbrooke.  At one point, he so frustrated her that she raises her middle finger at him from across a table during a meeting.  I found this a little immature.

The last third of the book is powerful and moving:  the end of the Obama era, the death of her parents, leaving government service, and living through the extreme disappointment and trepidation over the incoming Trump fiasco.  The new president actually accused her of criminal behavior, a charge for which she was decidedly not culpable.  The Paris Climate Accords, the Iran Nuclear Deal, and the Affordable Care Act—all of these events and their demise, as she makes clear, are now and continue to be devastating to Americans and the world.  Rice believes Trump has made us less secure as a nation, and created destabilization across the globe.  He worships dictators and strong men, thugs and criminals she made a career out of controlling with sanctions and interventions.  One can feel Rice’s pain over the things the Obama administration worked so hard to bring about only to see them debased and destroyed by Trump.

In her analysis of the current condition of our culture, she writes:  “Civil discourse has suffered further from Americans’ growing penchant to filter out information we prefer not to hear—whether through the issuance of ‘trigger warnings’ in classrooms, efforts to constrain conservatives or pro-Israel groups on college campuses, or the right’s reactionary dismissal of progressive views as ‘un-American’ or ‘socialist’ or identity politics…We can now select what ‘facts’ we want to believe and discount those we do not.”

Susan Rice does defend her positions, her arguments, her actions and opinions on these pages.  Reading Tough Love made me think that we have not heard the last from her.  In an age where we lack moral and ethical leaders, she would be a welcomed voice.

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.

Outpost

Dan Richards, in his book Outpost (Canongate Books, 2019), tells us stories about some of the most remote places on earth.  However, his work here cannot compare to Philip Connors’ Fire Season (Ecco, 2011), Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1990) or anything by John Muir or Gretel Ehrlich.  He cites frequently from all of these writers, but his own work is, when all is said and done, a bit of a disappointment.  Richards is not writing about what it is like to live in these places of solitude, but how he, the writer, traveled to these places.  We get up close and personal with him hitching rides and calling in favors from friends with cars, and therein lies the problem:  we are never allowed to forget that Richards is only stumbling around on his way to these far-flung places.  For a book about places of solitude and emptiness, it is annoying to hear about how Richards waited in a gas station for a ride.

The book starts out promising enough with a poem by Wendell Berry, and that illustrates an important point.  There are so many writers who have done the solitude standing thing so much better.  In this age of climate change and melting Arctic and Antarctic ice, a nature writer must have an extraordinary story to tell.  Richards gives us an observation of those who are actually living in these places.  It is second hand at best.  Berry ends his poem with his resting “in the grace of the world,” his freedom out in the big blue yonder.  We can already guess that there is a lot of empty blacktop and gravel to get away from it all, but that is not the most interesting part of the story.

In his study of people in these places, Richards again does not really break new ground.  We know Jack Kerouac did time on Desolation Peak in Washington state as a fire watcher.  Read Philip Connors if you want to know what that is like or Cactus Jack himself.  Richards spends considerable time talking about the logistics of going to Mars, Utah.  We get it:  the landscape is just like Mars.  It is used as training ground for astronauts. Fantastic.

Richards does make the point that homo sapiens is a destructive species, and we are living in the Age of Anthropocene where humans are ruining the planet.  But there are not enough nuts and bolts here, nor a full explanation of the delicate balance of the eco-system we are supposed to be destroying.  This is something Gretel Ehrlich does so well in her books; she puts us in the muck of it.  With Richards we are always kept at a distance.

Instead, we get a meditation on writers’ cabins.  We learn that Roald Dahl wrote in a cabin in his garden.  For Dylan Thomas, it was a shed above his home.  George Bernard Shaw had a hut on his property mounted on a turntable so it could be rotated to follow the sun.  Writers need solitude; do we not know this?

Then there is Theseus’ Paradox:  Richards muses on whether or not an object, such as a boat, if it has all of its constituent parts replaced, is it fundamentally the same object?  All of this is well and good, but I found myself chuckling in skepticism when Richards tells us, “Much of this book examines emptiness, the way particular spaces affect people and vice versa in a creative and explorative sense, but ‘space’ itself, outer space, mankind’s fascination with the heavens, the mechanisms, mysteries and beauty of vaults and worlds unknown, explode such thoughts to a dazzling degree.”  Say what?  The book talks about the roads to those spaces, and the last part of that quote just seems like gobbledygook.  What is “to a dazzling degree?”  Then, he quotes Sylvain Tesson in a footnote:  “To be alone is to hear silence.”  Now we have philosophy; now we have something worth contemplating.  Why, exactly, do we need to hear silence?  What is the value of silence?  Why do we seek such places of solitude?  For the answers, go to Muir, go to Ehrlich, go to Abbey.  Instead, we get Richards on a plane talking with a seatmate, a lawyer for Amazon.  She is looking for a new base for the company away from Seattle because North Korean nukes can hit the city and in a post-apocalyptic world, people will still need to buy stuff.  Is that insight into why we crave solitude?

Richards does not stop there.  He believes, in his informal survey along his travels to these outposts in the United States, that the country is pretty well split with half thinking Obama was the worst president and the other half believing that Trump is the worst.  Is there anything connecting that “fiery” thesis to solitude?  I can tell you that every night when I turn on the news, I want to flee to the Arctic circle, build a snow house, and hide away until the end of civilization has come and gone.  The need for solitude and time to think has never been more sorely imperative.  Then come the clichés about Los Angeles—everyone is working on a screenplay.  Not the freshest of revelations.  In fairness, he does offer an insight into the desire to dump the digital—we need to get in touch with the wild, be present in the moment, concentrate, realize our smallness in the world.  But let’s see that in action.  What do those manning the outposts have to say about that?

I did like his take on stories and storytelling.  It is necessary to the world and how we make sense of this life.  A story crosses cultural boundaries and human frailties.  Stories give us heroes and modes of behavior and the thrill of being alive.  Richards concludes from this, though, that stories make us better humans.  Again, a soft landing to an imperative.  Storytelling in cultures is passion and history.  It is a way to save the memory of the dead, the wisdom of ancestors.  Try that hat on for size.  And he ends the book the way he began, with a fragment of poetry, this time from Gary Snyder:

At the last turn in the path

            goodbye—

All goodbyes are little deaths.  Outposts take us to the edge of that.  They remind us of boundaries and borders between who we are and who we wish to become, of ancestors and future kings and queens who will carry on long after we are gone.  If I am going to travel to the rim of the world, send John Muir and Gretel Ehrlich along as soul companions.  The hike up is just a lot of sweat and steam; the view, the aloneness, the solitude absolute, the great vault of heaven—that is what we came for; only that is worth the loneliness of the last outpost.