WHEN I GOT BACK to the United States, I was bombarded with media requests, which I turned down. I also canceled upcoming book tour events so as to stay out of the news. Obama sent an email, urging me to reconsider:
I don’t think you should be avoiding interviews! I think you should go out there and talk about your wonderful book . . . Do not crawl under a rock. It’s not good for you, and it’s not good for me.
Obama and I had always bonded over basketball, and his emails and phone calls were so well timed during this particularly low period that I began to refer to him as “my Robert Horry.” Horry was an itinerant NBA player who had a knack for hitting improbable, last-second jump shots during key moments in the playoffs, earning him seven championship rings and the nickname Big Shot Rob. “Every time I’m slumping toward self-immolation,” I wrote Obama, “you land that 22-footer from the corner as time expires.”
Obama himself was going through a searing period where old tapes of sermons by his pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright were forcing him to explain his views on race and patriotism. Yet throughout my exile, he was reliably available by phone and email anytime I needed him. When I wished him luck, just hours before he would deliver what became known as his “Race Speech,” he joked: “This whole Reverend Wright thing was an elaborate ruse to take people’s attention off you!”
His empathy and sense of perspective were extraordinary.
Before my book was published, I had agreed to appear on Stephen Colbert’s Comedy Central show to promote it. When I called Colbert’s office to cancel, the producer urged me to use the show to try to put what had happened behind me. Inspired by Obama’s encouragement not to hide, I decided to do my first live interview since having to bow out of the campaign.
As I sat in the green room getting made up, I heard Colbert film the show’s opening. “With us tonight is Samantha Power, Barack Obama’s former foreign policy adviser. Who says he’s inexperienced? He already has a former foreign policy adviser!”
I found myself laughing for the first time in days.
DAY BY DAY, LIFE SLOWLY NORMALIZED. I had clung to Cass in the weeks following the scandal in a manner that made it hard to separate from him when his travel schedule required us to part. I had never allowed myself to depend on anyone in this manner. He held me, fed me, and even served as a human screen for me on airplanes, enabling me to walk down the aisle to the bathroom without being recognized.
From the start, I had known that Cass was brilliant, kind, and hilarious. But now his strength and capacity to care deeply stood out. I could find no excuse to run away from him.
Although we had not been dating long, Cass had flown to Dublin with an engagement ring in his pocket, hoping to propose. Three weeks after I resigned from the Obama campaign, he laid the ring awkwardly between us on the couch of his Chicago apartment and asked if I would marry him. I accepted immediately. I had never come close to marrying anybody before, but I had never met anybody even a little bit like Cass. “I like, love, and admire you,” I told him.
When a friend asked him why he had proposed so early in our relationship, he said, “I love sitting next to Samantha. And it occurred to me that, if she married me, I would be able to sit next to her for the rest of my life.”
When I called Obama to tell him the news of our engagement, he was thrilled. I tried to convince him that his main area of concern about Cass had been addressed, writing soon after:
Cass is no longer quite the same slob you knew. We have an agreement: on each occasion he leaves his apartment each day, he has to carry at least one item with him to the dumpster (eg, argyle sweaters and “Members Only” jackets, Red Sox season guides from the pre-steroids era, his prior tenant’s water color paintings, 1993 University of Chicago environmental law exams . . .)
Cass was content anywhere. Whether hanging out in an airport lounge or waiting at the dentist, he needed only his laptop to feel at home. I came to understand why he was one of the most prolific scholars in the world—he used every nook and cranny of the day, no matter where he was, to write. As soon as he had turned on his MacBook Air and pulled up a document on the screen before him, he simply picked up where he had left off ten minutes, an hour, or the day before. Whenever he received thoughtful criticism of his articles or books, it usually brought a smile to his face. “I love this,” I heard him say once. “His points are devastating.”
But amid his general contentment, he seemed to value our relationship more than anything. We worked sitting side by side, with Johnny Cash or Leonard Cohen playing in the background. Like me, he had to be peeled off the floor after athletic outings. Our version of a romantic evening entailed hitting the squash ball. And since neither of us cooked, we ordered in. His staple as a bachelor had been Panda Express; I convinced him to make modest upgrades.
As I planned a large Irish wedding, I also discovered my inner bride, a stranger with surprisingly strong views. I told Cass I wanted to get married in Loher Church, a small white Catholic church on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. The church was near Waterville, a secluded beach town at the foot of the Kerry mountains where my mother’s younger sister, Patricia, and her husband, Derry, lived. Mum had brought Stephen and me to Waterville many times before we moved to America, and Patricia and Derry’s home had become my favorite place of retreat in my adult life. I went there to read, write, listen to Irish music, and hear the wild stories of my aunt, uncle, and cousins.
Because so many of our friends were traveling vast distances to get to Waterville, I arranged activities for guests, such as hiking up the craggy mountains around the village and taking what proved to be a very rough sea journey out to the sixth-century Christian monastery on the spectacular Skellig Michael Island (later made famous as Luke Skywalker’s hideout in Star Wars: The Last Jedi). I also orchestrated a soccer game on the town green several hours before I was expected at the church, horrifying the hair and makeup stylists when I arrived in my hotel suite caked in mud.
I felt intense joy and certainty marrying Cass, and the day carried added layers of emotion. At the reception, my dad’s side of the family raised glasses alongside my mother’s. Cass’s daughter Ellyn delivered a beautiful toast. And I was touched immeasurably when Eddie, who had raised me for so much of my life, pulled me aside before he walked me down the aisle, to say “Drop the ‘step.’ ”
Although it took me a few seconds to decipher his comment, I realized Eddie wanted me to drop the “step” in “stepdad.” And from then on, I did.
HOLBROOKE HAD GIVEN ME the wedding present I most wanted: he arranged a face-to-face meeting for me with Hillary Clinton. I conveyed the depths of my regret in person, and she graciously accepted my apology. We did not make the meeting public, but Obama—who deemed it a strange wedding gift (“Don’t most people get toasters?” he teased)—decided that this was enough to end my exile.
The night he clinched the number of delegates needed to seal the Democratic nomination, he sent me a note. “Best part is, now I can get you back on the team!”
On August 19th, the day I returned to work at campaign headquarters in Chicago, five months after I had resigned, I wrote to Obama to say, “THANK YOU FOR YOUR HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION. It turns out you have some pull!”
He wrote back: “You were never off the team . . . just taking a break to find true love.”
Obama’s words spoke to a strange truth on which I had not really reflected. Making such a large and public mistake left me feeling defenseless and massively vulnerable. Forced away from the work I longed to do, I allowed a man I might otherwise have pushed away to take care of me.
My regular “X test” formulation now had a new twist: if all I achieved in becoming an overnight media scandal was marrying Cass, it was perhaps the best deal of my life.
— 18 —
Victory
I had assumed that when I left the “penalty box,” or what my Irish relatives called the “sin bin,” life would return to the way it had been before my slipup. I
t didn’t.
In the fall of 2008, I split my time between teaching two days a week at the Kennedy School and serving as one of Obama’s foreign policy advisers, this time based at campaign headquarters in Chicago. Despite receiving my official campaign badge and BlackBerry when I rejoined the team, I felt I bore a large scarlet letter—an M for Monster, or maybe an L for walking campaign Liability.
The higher-ups told me to keep a low profile, as they believed my presence would dampen Obama’s appeal with women voters and impede the reconciliation under way with Clinton’s primary supporters. In turn, I began to shrink from activities that might garner attention in order to protect Obama from his association with me. I wore my green hoodie to headquarters in an effort not to be recognized by visiting reporters. And I tried to avoid eye contact with David Plouffe, the campaign manager, whose jaw I swore tightened whenever he saw me.
In October, I learned that I was pregnant with a baby boy whom we would name Declan and who was due the following May. I was ecstatic about becoming a mother, but I suffered from acute morning sickness. My constant trips to the women’s bathroom required me to walk past the offices of the senior campaign leadership, whose cold stares sent me tumbling back into self-absorption.
Still, I didn’t blame them. “If I were Plouffe,” I thought, “and the stakes were this high, I would shun me too. Why take a risk?”
ON NOVEMBER 4TH, 2008, Cass and I sat on plastic chairs in a white tent in Grant Park, Chicago, among Obama’s friends, advisers, donors, and a host of politicians and celebrities. Just outside—in the same spot where police had mauled protesters at the Democratic National Convention forty years before—240,000 people of all races, religions, and generations watched the election results on a Jumbotron showing CNN. Win or lose, Obama would speak on the stage beneath the big screen later in the evening.
Everything we were hearing from the campaign was positive, but none of us could bring ourselves to believe what was transpiring until Wolf Blitzer made it official. “This is a moment that a lot of people have been waiting for,” he said as soon as polls closed on the West Coast, at ten p.m. Chicago time. “CNN can now project that Barack Obama, forty-seven years old, will become the President-elect of the United States.” A checkmark appeared beside Obama’s picture.
In every corner of the tent, people jumped up and down. I levitated, lunging into Cass’s arms like a World Series–winning pitcher embracing his team’s catcher. Everyone around us seemed to be crying. My phone was ringing off the hook. Cass—not normally a hugger—was enfolding any friend or stranger in his path.
Many of my relatives in Ireland had either stayed up all night or set their alarms for five a.m. Obama (or, as my Irish cousins liked to say, “O’bama”) had done what nobody—even most of his closest supporters—thought possible. His six-point margin of victory was a modern-day landslide. He had taken Virginia and Indiana, states that had not gone Democratic since President Johnson had won them in 1964. The possibilities ahead seemed infinite. I waited in a line of friends and family to congratulate the new President-elect.
“This is something, huh?” Obama said, giving me a deep hug across a rope barrier. I answered truthfully, “It’s too big to comprehend. Do not compute, do not compute.”
The man before me was outwardly the same person I had worked with since 2005. But everything about his manner seemed altered by what had just happened. He had always been a solitary person, but now, even as he and the future First Lady made their way down the line in a seamless communion, he seemed well and truly alone.
It was as if he had been suddenly encased in a glass box, the only man in the world who would be President of the United States. He alone would make the call on when to go to war, and, more immediately, he alone would be responsible for saving a US economy that was in free fall.
Obama had joked in the past about the dangers of the “dog actually catching the bus.” Now he would face the bleakest economic forecast for the United States since the Great Depression. On a night that brought unmediated bliss to the rest of us, Obama’s big smile was there, but the usual spark of mischief in his eyes seemed to have vanished.
Although the election had been called only hours before, and he would not formally occupy the presidency until January, the burdens of decision-making already seemed to be crashing down upon him. This was a momentous night, but for the President-elect, it did not seem a particularly happy one. Even as he focused on his friends like a laser, telling Cass he was looking “more dapper” than he had ever seen him, Obama was reserved, seeming to be saying his goodbyes rather than hellos.
OBAMA HAD MADE CLEAR to Cass and me that he would want us to join his administration if he managed to win. The memory of my struggles in the Senate office made me wonder whether I—who had flown solo my whole career before that fateful dinner with Obama in 2005—could find a place in a huge bureaucracy, having to constantly jockey for access. But Cass and I both believed in him, and we were eager to try to work on issues that we cared about. I knew I was tired of being a professional foreign policy critic, opining and judging without ever knowing whether I would pass the moral and political tests to which I was subjecting others. I wanted to be on the inside, to try to influence this new administration’s actions. We never seriously discussed the downsides of upending our lives; we just began making plans to move to Washington.
Determining what I should do in government, however, was an entirely different matter. Prior to election night, every time Mum or Eddie had raised the question of what role I would want if Obama became President, I would hush them, saying they would jinx the whole election. But now I needed to figure that out.
A few days after we saw Obama in Grant Park, he wrote to say that he was giving up his personal email account. First, though, he asked what my dream job was. I had planned to work wherever he told me, naively assuming that he would have a fixed idea where I belonged. But he was busy filling out his cabinet and developing strategies to address the skyrocketing unemployment rate; he had no mental space to come up with a job description for me.
With nothing to guide me, I thought about how I could be useful, drawing on my years of extensive reading about US foreign policy, along with the interviews of US officials I had conducted for my books. The role I described in my email reply to Obama was convoluted. I thought my specialty could be big picture—articulating American grand strategy in language that people could digest. I also hoped to take up perceived lost causes, conflicts in countries that didn’t make the headlines, to find ways of leveraging the President’s personal interest to improve a situation.
I pored over every word of my proposed position, not wanting to come across as presumptuous, but also believing that Obama might be willing to define a job in the terms that I laid out. Cass googled prior administrations so we could use the correct nomenclature for a title, and we settled on proposing “Assistant to the President for Special Projects.” Mum and Eddie, whom I ran everything by, offered feedback on the tone and substance of the note, as did my aunt Patricia and uncle Derry, with whom Cass and I had gone to stay for a few days in Waterville just after election night. I enlisted the views of John, Mort, Jonathan, and Holbrooke—all of whom had served either on the National Security Council (NSC) or with the State Department. I ended the email to Obama by stressing that we would need to define any job in a manner that appealed to National Security Advisor Jim Jones, Deputy National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, and Mark Lippert, whom Obama had named NSC chief of staff.
I heard nothing back for weeks. Obama now occupied an entirely different orbit from mine. The size of the Secret Service team around him had increased exponentially. Even close confidants like Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod no longer called him “Barack,” “Obama,” or “BO.” He was now the President-elect, or the “PE.”
When Obama walked by, people who had known him for years jumped to their feet, practically saluting. A forbidding mystique pulsed out of any room he occupied. I wanted
to talk to the PE, to see how he was doing and how I could support him during these precious weeks. But I saw that the most prized commodity of all now was his time, and I certainly didn’t need to see him. I just wanted to check in on my friend.
Because Obama, my biggest champion in the political world, was no longer reachable via email, I was now at the mercy of the people he had deputized to manage his personnel choices. Lippert was coordinating the hiring for Obama’s national security jobs. Even though he never seemed a fan of mine, I admired his decision to leave the campaign at its height to deploy as a Navy intelligence officer to Iraq, where he had earned a Bronze Star for his service.
When my emails seeking clarity went unanswered, I checked occasionally to be sure my cell phone was working. When I finally managed to reach him, he demanded to know why I had proposed the “assistant to the President” title in my note to Obama. “Jim Jones, the National Security Advisor, a decorated American Marine general, will be an assistant to the President,” he said. “You think you’re in his league?” I was mortified.
When Cass and I had done our online research, we had seen the designations “assistant,” “deputy assistant,” and “special assistant” to the President, and had somehow jumbled up the order, thinking that “assistant” was the lowest rank of the three—when, in fact, it was the most senior. My limbo continued. “I’m being treated like I’m a problem to be solved,” I told Cass, “not a person anyone actually wants.”
My new husband, by contrast, was given the job he coveted. On one of our earliest dates, I had asked him, if he wasn’t a law professor, what he would most want to be. I imagined he might answer playfully “bass guitarist for Bruce Springsteen.” Instead, he gazed off into the distance, his eyes practically misting up with emotion, and said, dreamily, “OIRA.” I responded, “What the hell is OIRA?” When the head of the transition team informed the President-elect of Cass’s ambition, Obama reportedly asked the same question.
The Education of an Idealist Page 22