The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  I was struck that, fifty years after the Holocaust, the world had stood by during both the Bosnian and the Rwandan genocides.

  I decided to write a paper for the Use of Force class that would allow me to look at these and prior cases of genocide—such as the Armenian genocide, Pol Pot’s slaughter in Cambodia, and Saddam Hussein’s campaign to destroy the Kurds of Northern Iraq.

  In the course of my research, I discovered a gap that surprised me. The books written by journalists and academics covered the atrocities, but generally did not investigate what US policymakers themselves were thinking when they responded to these genocides. American decisions and nondecisions seemed to have gone largely unanalyzed. The reference books I had sought for my research simply did not exist.

  By the time I turned in my paper, in January of 1997, it had swelled from the required twenty pages to more than seventy. Yet I felt that I was barely scratching the surface. I had done little more than sketch, in the most general terms, the US government’s responses to genocide in the twentieth century. I did not delve deeply into the question of why—despite rarely doing much—Americans continued so buoyantly to embrace the pledge of “never again.” When my professors praised the paper for introducing them to a tension they had not considered before, I wondered if maybe I should try to expand the paper into a monograph or short book.

  WHEN I DISCUSSED with a law school friend the pattern of nonresponses I had discovered, he said, “I’m surprised at your surprise.” And looking back, it is clear—maybe because I carried an immigrant’s optimism—that an unmistakable innocence or credulousness helped fuel my inquiry. It was as if I had believed our resolve and then felt almost personally betrayed when I saw the promise being broken.

  Regardless of whether the feeling I had was as naive as it seemed to some, the fact that “never again” still carried such force in our culture suggested I was not alone. This contradiction intrigued me. Unlike the way I felt toward my assignments in core law school courses, I was overcome with a seemingly inexhaustible need to learn everything I could about my new subject.

  Because I had developed the instincts of a reporter, I was determined to gain an understanding of past events by talking directly to US government officials. I made a list of dozens of former policymakers, and started reaching out to them individually to ask about how they had experienced events in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, and Rwanda from inside the government bureaucracy. Remarkably, very few former officials refused to talk to me, and most provided me with the names of other people whom they urged me to contact. I knew how differently people often remembered the same events and recognized that I would need to speak to a wide range of officials if I was going to credibly piece together what had happened.

  I took a year off from law school to focus on the project, and Elizabeth Rubin kindly put me in touch with her literary agent, Sarah Chalfant. I had not written a book before, and Sarah generally represented well-known writers. But because my subject interested her, she agreed to take me on as her client. She became a spirited champion, arranging meetings with various New York publishers, and in the end, I signed a contract with Random House to write a book based on my paper. At the same time, Harvard Kennedy School professor Graham Allison contacted me after hearing about a campus talk I had given about the war in Bosnia. Allison was looking to hire someone to manage a new human rights program and offered me a job running what was then called the Human Rights Initiative. Eager for a salary that would help me pay for law school and drawn to the field of human rights (which I did not then know well), I accepted. Together, with funding from American tech entrepreneur Greg Carr, we built the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which became the driving force behind much of the Kennedy School’s human rights programming.*

  After this productive year away, I returned to law school and graduated in 1999. Many of my classmates were pursuing jobs as legal clerks or law firm associates. But I planned to stay put, splitting my time between working at the new human rights center and doing research for my nascent book project.

  Wanting to put some distance between myself and Harvard, I used my modest book advance to make a down payment on an apartment a half-hour drive away in Winthrop, a blue-collar beach town. My new home allowed me relative seclusion, as well as proximity to Logan Airport, my gateway to the various countries I planned to feature in the book.

  Over the next several years, I began teaching courses on US foreign policy and human rights at the Kennedy School. Initially, because many of the students were around my age or had experience working for governments or the UN, I found teaching nerve-racking. But I soon saw that preparing my courses helped me formulate a broader set of ideas on foreign policy. And I was gratified to see students stirred (as I had been) by what they learned about the Bosnian war, the Rwandan genocide, and other recent crises.

  My main focus, though, was my reporting and writing. I spent nights and weekends working on the book, leaving my apartment only to pick up the New York Times on my stoop or to go for a run by the ocean.

  I was never as disciplined as I intended to be, but early on, I learned to forgive myself. I came to understand that writing a book would ultimately require thousands of hours on the phone, on the road, and at my computer. I realized that it was okay to read Sports Illustrated, watch a baseball game, or spend a few hours talking on the phone to my parents, Mort, Jonathan, Laura, or other friends.

  While I still loved the Pittsburgh Pirates, they played in the National League, and I now closely followed the Boston Red Sox, listening to every pitch live or on replay. As I drove home along Storrow Drive after a day at the Kennedy School, I was often drawn by the bright stadium lights of Fenway Park. When I pulled onto Commonwealth Avenue, if I found street parking, I would duck into Fenway for a few innings, revving myself up for the long night of writing ahead.

  These were exciting times for the Red Sox, and particularly for their future Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez, who dominated batters in a way I had not seen before. Unfortunately, I was so consumed with my project that, when I had the chance to meet Martinez at a charity fundraiser, instead of talking baseball, I gave him a long account of the genocide book I was writing.

  When the organizers sent me the photos from the event, there I was, in a black evening gown, gesticulating wildly as a dazed Cy Young winner occasionally looked over my shoulder for bullpen relief. It was no different for the few friends I managed to see regularly. They teased me, with little exaggeration, that I had become “all genocide, all the time.”

  THE TRUTH WAS that I was lonely. I longed to find the kind of companion that Eddie was for Mum. They had their ups and downs, but he had made significant headway battling his alcoholism, joining AA. And he continued to challenge her, and to make her laugh until her sides hurt. But I tended to fall for older, accomplished men who had a habit of evading real intimacy, and I remained single.

  My close woman friends were godsends. We shared many of the same bad dating instincts. At one point, Elizabeth Rubin started calling the men we became involved with “lizards” because of their predictable tendency to seem available, only to slither away as soon as we made ourselves vulnerable to them. When one of us would end a relationship with a lizard, the man would inevitably come back, promising to change. We all knew rationally that true transformation was innately difficult—if not impossible. “Look how hard it is for any of us to change!” I would exclaim. But giving up on a cause did not come easy, so we would dig in, wasting precious months or even years in and out of doomed relationships. When we relapsed with one of our reptilian suitors, we would guiltily email the others a coded confession: “I lizarded yesterday.” The solidarity among my single women friends was fierce, and experience as a war correspondent was not required for membership. When I introduced Amy Bach, a lawyer and writer friend, to the Bosnia gang, they embraced her. Amy joined us in making stories out of our misadventures, which—through the telling—reduced the sting. Once Amy called to tell me about a
bout of writer’s block brought on by a bad breakup. “I’m lying on the floor, Power,” she said. I responded cheerily, “I love the floor!”

  Not all the men I dated were irreparably cold-blooded. Yet when I would get involved with somebody who wanted to get close to me—somebody who started talking dreamily about what we might do together in the future—I would suffer immediate bouts of lungers. Instead of simply ending the relationships in an honest way, I would head off to Rwanda or another war-torn country to do interviews for my book, hoping that, by the time I returned, the person I had begun seeing would have moved on.

  My friend Miro urged me to try therapy. I ridiculed this suggestion, saying, “Let me guess? My screwed-up dating life is all about my father.”

  Miro just looked at me for a long while, letting my words hang in the air. Finally, after a minute, he said, “You were willing to live in a war zone. It is strange that you won’t even explore talking to a therapist.”

  In the coming months, my rationales for avoiding Miro’s recommendation shifted. Therapy would take too much time away from my genocide book, which was already well overdue. It would cost a ridiculous amount of money. And, above all, it would offer, as I put it, “predictable psychobabble.” But finally, after I got back together for the third time with a man I knew was bad news, I caved and asked a friend for the name of his therapist.

  A few days later, I took the T to Davis Square and walked up a small hill to the therapist’s home, where she saw patients in a side studio. I shook her hand and sat down on the couch.

  “Tell me about your father,” she began, and in that instant, I burst into tears, crying for at least five minutes, stopping only to make clear that—despite appearances—I was on top of the situation: “I’m crying for the following three reasons . . .” I explained, waving off the box of tissues she offered.

  Over the next five years, therapy opened me up a bit. I learned how deeply responsible I felt for my father’s death, and realized I was scared of making myself vulnerable to a loss so large again. But even as I came to better understand my actions, I continued to be drawn to men who resembled my dad—larger-than-life, roguish characters who were often struggling in some way with addiction. No amount of therapy seemed to rid me of my tendency to ignore flashing red lights in relationships.

  When my first therapist moved away, I found another—this time, a straitlaced doctor. I had always maintained my physical fitness, and he urged me to make my emotional well-being as much of a priority. As the months passed, though, my patience waned for a dialogue that didn’t seem to have much effect on my behavior. I started forgetting sessions I had scheduled and—not wanting to break away from my writing—began booking them more sporadically.

  One day, having again forgotten an appointment, I called the doctor at the last minute to see if he could hold the session by telephone, and he agreed. I sat on my couch in Winthrop as I talked through my latest relapse with an ex-boyfriend who was separated from his wife but making no move to break permanently free. As I spoke, I suddenly heard a “beep-beep-beep” in the background. I thought I recognized the noise, but could not quite believe it, until I heard it again.

  “What’s that sound?” I asked.

  The therapist didn’t answer.

  “Are you at a fucking ATM?” I asked, indignantly.

  From the moment he admitted that he was, in fact, multitasking at the bank, I renounced therapy and resolved that I would “figure myself out” after I finished my book. Though I took offense at the time, the therapist was clearly mirroring my own ambivalence toward probing too deeply.

  THE BOOK PROJECT DRAGGED ON. I wondered if I would ever feel it was finished. The combination of the heavy subject matter and my endless solitude might have caused me to wallow. However, thanks to the voluminous Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the National Security Archive, the Washington-based NGO where I had interned while in college, I was able to draw upon revealing, declassified documents that detailed what had been happening behind closed doors in the US government as genocide occurred. I felt privileged to be able to highlight the vivid—at times jaw-dropping—government paper trail on Iraq, Rwanda, and Bosnia.

  Every time I saw a declassified cable that demonstrated the cold logic of US decision-making, a swirl of conflicting emotions arose inside me. I was simultaneously horrified and invigorated by the new understanding I got into how policymakers rationalized their decisions in real time. The answer to the puzzle of how we pledged “never again” and then looked away from genocide seemed enshrined in these sterile records.

  Someone in the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs regional bureau had written about Iraq: “Human rights and chemical weapons use aside, in many respects our political and economic interests run parallel with those of Iraq” [italics mine]. On Rwanda, a discussion paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense warned against characterizing the mass murder as “genocide,” advising, “Be careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday—Genocide finding could commit [the US government] to actually ‘do something.’ ”

  Yet for every stomach-churning cable I processed from the Archive’s files, I would come across an American who had risked his career—or, occasionally, his life—to lobby for action. Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the US Ambassador in Constantinople during the Armenian genocide, had sent blistering cables back to Washington, begging his superiors to do more to respond to the slaughter. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who fled to the United States in 1941, had invented the word genocide, convincing himself that if such a crime had been understood and outlawed earlier, the world might have prevented the Holocaust—which killed his parents and forty-seven other family members. William Proxmire, an idiosyncratic senator from Wisconsin, stood on the floor of the US Senate 3,211 times—over a span of nineteen years—appealing to successive presidents and congresses to ratify the UN Genocide Convention, which Lemkin had helped draft.

  Even stories I thought I knew gained texture when I delved deeper. I had met Peter Galbraith for the first time in Croatia, where he was US ambassador. But before that, in the 1980s, he had been a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Upon hearing reports that Saddam Hussein (then a recipient of US aid) had gassed Iraqi Kurds, Galbraith bravely traveled into Northern Iraq to collect survivor testimonies, hoping to use what he found as evidence to convince Congress to suspend assistance to the Iraqi government.

  The first person to resign from the State Department to protest US inaction in the face of Serb atrocities was George Kenney, who had given me his flak jacket and helmet before I left for Bosnia. But until I talked to the former US officials who resigned, I didn’t appreciate just how wrenching they had found leaving their dream jobs. The emotional scars of what they had seen—and what their government had not initially wished to confront—were still evident years later. I believed their actions were noble, but they were focused only on their impact, which they deemed marginal.

  After five long years of obsessive sleuthing and more than three hundred interviews, I delivered what I felt was a solid draft of the book. However, I soon learned that my publisher, Random House, wanted nothing to do with it.

  My original editor had left the company, so the book (actually a thick pile of paper held together with a rubber band) was up for grabs. The manuscript had three strikes against it: it had no champion at the publishing house, it was six hundred pages long, and it dealt with the gloomy topic of genocide. The book passed from one person to the next until Random House informed my stalwart agent Sarah that it would be a good idea to take the book elsewhere.

  Sarah shopped the manuscript to a vast array of New York publishing houses, only to receive a stream of rejections that I took very hard. Over the span of three months, several times a week, I would rush to answer the phone every time Sarah’s New York number lit up my caller ID. But the responses were all the same: Houghton Mifflin? “Pass,” Sarah said. Picador? “Pass.” Farrar, Straus? “Pass.” S
imon & Schuster? “I’m so sorry,” Sarah said, “also not interested.” This rejection went on and on.

  I despaired at the idea that a book on which I had labored for half a decade might never see the light of day.

  At one point, I received word that my original editor had decided to return to Random House. He telephoned me and exclaimed, “I want you back!” I was beyond thrilled. But a few weeks later, after reviewing the book, he changed his mind. “I’m sorry,” he informed me. “The book has been passed over by so many people here that there is just no enthusiasm for it. And if we publish it, we will not do your work justice.”

  I told him that, if his concern was his colleagues and their enthusiasm, I would find a way to promote the book myself. I just needed them to put a few copies in print. “I will do the rest,” I said. “I’m sorry,” he answered. “I can’t.” When I hung up, I knew he meant “I won’t.”

  As always, Jonathan Moore brought me perspective, telling me that I had been delusional to think that it would be easy to publish such a book. “The miracle is that you ever had a publisher!” he said cheerfully. “And because you thought you actually had one, you wrote the book!”

  I had one hope left. I had written for The New Republic when I lived in the former Yugoslavia, and Marty Peretz, the magazine’s owner, also oversaw its small book publishing subsidiary. Marty had read my law school paper several years before and had been unhappy with me when I signed with Random House instead of New Republic Books. I telephoned him at his home and nervously explained that the book he had last seen in its infancy had “become available again.”

  Marty took a long pause, but then said that he would not hold my past lapse in judgment against me. He would be “delighted” to publish the book.