The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  “No,” he said pointing off into the distance, “that is.”

  I saw a formidable lineup of vehicles, which included the President’s limo and his many police escorts, speeding away. I had been left behind.

  It was all too much. Standing in the hot sun, I called Cass and asked him to leave the meeting he was in because I needed him—still an unusual admission on my part.

  “It was so horrible,” I began rambling. “He is not going to recognize the genocide. He is furious with me. And he actually thinks he is doing the right thing—for Armenians! And after that all the speakers talked about the importance of words and remembering history so we don’t repeat it. Then they drove off without me.”

  Cass waited me out calmly. “I am so proud of you,” he said simply. This set me off again.

  “Proud of me? How can you be proud of me? I failed all those people, and tomorrow they are going to be so sad. Some of them are one hundred years old!”

  Cass could probably tell I was not in the proper frame of mind to be reasoned with. “Just come back to the office,” he said. I looked down and realized I hadn’t brought my purse with me.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I don’t have any money.” He said he would wait for me outside the White House and pay the taxi driver.

  Sitting in the taxi, I felt eighteen, not eight months’ pregnant. When the taxi pulled up to the corner where my husband was standing, Cass handed cash to the driver and hugged me on the sidewalk for a very long time. After we walked into the EEOB and cleared security, he held my hand and deposited me in my office.

  For the next hour, I worked at my computer, making a list of the leaders of the major Armenian-American groups I would need to call in advance of the President’s commemorative statement the next day. They had been checking in by email and phone for days, seeking hopeful hints about what Obama planned to say. I dreaded talking to them.

  Although the air conditioner in my office was on, the room felt like it was steaming up. My clothes were sticking to me, and, when I got up to go to the restroom, I noticed that my pants were damp. I returned to the piles of work on my desk, starting to wonder if all the day’s stress and emotion should concern me.

  I called my obstetrician and described how I was feeling. As a precaution, he told me to make my way to Sibley Hospital. I didn’t want to leave work mid-afternoon, but agreed, telling my colleagues that I needed to make a quick trip to the hospital. “I will be back in an hour or two,” I said.

  As soon as I arrived, a Sibley nurse ushered me in for tests. “Honey, you’re not going anywhere,” she soon declared. “Your water broke today.”

  I was stunned. I had imagined that when one’s water broke it gushed forth. My official due date was several weeks away.

  “But I haven’t bought a stroller yet!” I cried, adding, “and I didn’t turn off my computer.” Even as I said these words, I knew how ridiculous they were.

  I suddenly felt euphoric. The doctors could not pinpoint exactly when my water had broken, but it seemed to have happened around the time of my sharp exchange with the President, or perhaps just after, as I sat listening to the speeches.

  Eighteen hours after I was admitted to Sibley Memorial Hospital—with Cass, Mum, and Eddie on hand—Declan Power Sunstein was born. He entered the world on April 24th, 2009, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.

  — 22 —

  Turnaround

  Even though I had been firm in my intention to take three months of maternity leave, everyone who knew me insisted that I would be unable to put down my BlackBerry. I assumed that they were right. I had never not worked; from the time I was a child, my life had entailed constant motion. Whether moving among cities and countries or juggling teaching, activism, and writing, I tended to fill downtime.

  But after April 24th, 2009, for the first time in my life, I became virtually still. I found myself able to sit for an eternity, simply staring into the green eyes of my redheaded newborn. In times past, when I took a break from work, I was prone to bouts of anxiety. But this time lungers did not return. As a new mother, I of course had to fight the urge to focus constantly on my son’s health and safety. Since I still half expected tragedy to befall my loved ones, I tried to fixate on the present and block out fears for the future. Each night before I went to sleep, I would remind myself, “Every day is a blessing,” often whispering the words to Cass.

  During my time off, I also thought a lot about the early struggles I’d been having at the White House. Experiencing such a drop-off in contact with Obama had been a shock to my system—and my ego. Even before entering government, I had known that who participated in meetings was often as contested as what was decided. Still, as a longtime member of Obama’s circle of advisers, I had wrongly assumed that access wouldn’t be an issue for me. During my early months, I had been genuinely surprised to find myself—in the almost comical new lingo of the bureaucracy—“not manifested” for important deliberations on Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts that I had been discussing with Obama since 2005.

  Instead of recognizing the division of labor that necessarily occurs in government, I took it personally. Others around me had long forgotten about my gaffe during the campaign. My relationship with Secretary Clinton, while not close, was cordial. Nonetheless, I remained distressed by what had happened. When I was not included in meetings—meetings that, when I did get to attend, usually proved underwhelming—I began to feel as though my colleagues didn’t trust me or value what I had to say. But now, with more distance from the office, I could see that perhaps I had not been invited simply because my bosses were trying to avoid overcrowding meetings with NSC staff.*

  I began to focus on all I could still do as part of the Obama administration. While other national security officials weighed options for the US-led war in Afghanistan, I could try to mobilize people around initiatives of my own. Working on lower-profile issues would give me more room to maneuver and involve fewer senior people peering over my shoulder.

  I would not get to travel abroad as often as I had as a journalist, but that meant I would be able to work on important foreign policy issues by day and cuddle up with “my boys”—Cass and Declan—by night. My new cravings as a mother obliterated other longings. “Declan gives me calm,” I wrote in my journal. “I want to bring that calm to work with me, and retain it.”

  Above all, I realized that I had allowed the indignities I felt to crowd out the basic, thrilling reality that I worked at the White House for President Barack Obama. In just the short period during which he had been in office, Obama had made high-risk decisions that were helping turn the economy around. He was putting in place desperately needed regulations to lower carbon emissions and developing a plan that would eventually provide health insurance to more than 20 million Americans. And in foreign policy, he had banned torture and begun negotiations with Russia to reduce our respective nuclear arsenals. He had three and a half years left in his first term and no guarantee of a second term. I had never been given an opportunity like this, and I could not count on ever getting one again.

  I couldn’t change the fact that there would be times when the President would make a decision that I recoiled from, as had happened with recognition of the Armenian Genocide. I was going to take those moments hard. But at least I understood Obama’s logic. And I certainly had not entered government expecting that it would be easy to fulfill every campaign pledge or win every battle to inject concern for human consequences into high-level decision-making. After all, I had written a book on how normal bureaucratic habits pull the system in predictable directions. I was profoundly privileged to be in a position where I could at least try to make a difference.

  Of course, I still felt pangs when I saw others at the center of the action. I was in the middle of maternity leave on June 4th, 2009, when Obama delivered a major address to the Muslim world from Egypt. His speech bravely touched upon core tensions between the United States and Muslim societies—violent extremism, religious f
reedom, women’s rights, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

  My only contribution to the remarks had been urging Ben to ensure that the President renounced the use of military force to bring democracy to other countries. Out of the President’s mouth, I heard words I knew Obama deeply believed: “No system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” As I sat nursing six-week-old Declan at home on our red IKEA couch, I found myself wishing I were in Cairo with the President, Ben, and the others.

  I scoured the internet for reactions. Most of the commentary seemed to appreciate Obama’s “refreshing” and “humble” tone, but people wanted to see what concrete policies followed. Obama seemed to have a rare chance to push for reform in a part of the world where horizons were dimmed by corrupt economies and political repression.

  IN JULY OF 2009, my three months of leave were up. I kissed Declan goodbye and placed him in the arms of our new live-in nanny, María Castro. María was the single reason I would be able to work fourteen-hour days in national security for eight years during the Obama administration.

  María hailed from near Guadalajara, Mexico, and, from the start, she treated Declan as if she would want to spend even her days off with him. She took him to Mass and taught him to speak Spanish. She was so present in our son’s life that his first word was “lota,” short for the Spanish pelota, or ball. “Mama” (mercifully!) came next. And “Mima,” his version of María, emerged not long thereafter.

  By the time Cass and I would arrive home around nine p.m., María had usually managed to prepare dinner while also keeping Declan entertained. Even that late at night, she somehow projected the sprightliness of one who was just starting her day.

  María’s family and my family grew close. When one of María’s daughters had children, Declan viewed them as little brothers, and María’s daughters, grandchildren, and husband spent lots of time at our home while María worked. In her time off, she once traveled overseas on vacation with Mum and Eddie, while Declan stayed home with me. She was, of course, our employee, and she made tremendous sacrifices to work long hours to support us, but at times I felt as though our two families had joined forces.

  Still, because my hours were so punishing, even a full-time nanny as devoted as María was not enough. When I returned to work, I also enrolled Declan in a daycare located in the basement of a government building across the street from the White House. This proximity allowed me to pop over a couple of times each day to nurse him on a rocking chair beside his crib before María came to collect him in the late afternoon.

  While I had occasionally forgotten to eat when I was a pregnant White House staffer, I never forgot Declan’s appetite. I did my best to prioritize visits with him over just about every other activity in my day, dashing to his daycare, nursing, and then hustling back across 17th Street. On occasions when I was unexpectedly summoned to the National Security Advisor’s office for a time-sensitive meeting, it pained me to call the daycare to tell them that they should go ahead and give Declan a bottle with the milk I had left that morning. And when I was running late for a feeding, I had no compunction about sprinting in heels down the stately corridors of the EEOB and out the White House gates.

  Because I was chairing so many meetings throughout the day, I had almost no margin of error for these visits. On several occasions, I caught myself mindlessly beginning to unbutton my blouse as I exited the White House grounds. Once, one of my NSC colleagues crossing in the other direction spotted me and grinned. “Busted!” I shouted out joyfully as I ran past. The moment seemed to highlight the sheer absurdity of the number of tasks all of us were cramming into each day. With rare exceptions, though, I did not feel distracted at work because I now had a child. If anything, motherhood made me more focused and efficient, given that every extra hour at the office meant another hour away from my son.

  Like so many parents whose work deprives them of the time they crave with their children, I was all too aware that I would never get to redo the parts of Declan’s early months and years that were whirring by. I told myself that I was “binging” in my work life and that the day would come when I would binge with my family, creating a permanent home. Still, every couple of months during my time in the administration, I tried to step back to assess whether I was getting enough done in my job to justify all the time away. Even during productive periods, I never felt great about my choices.

  ONE DEVELOPMENT THAT DRAMATICALLY IMPROVED my work environment was acquiring a new set of friends. Gayle Smith, the Senior Director for Development and Democracy, occupied an office just down the hall from mine. Gayle, also a former journalist, had distinctive short silver hair styled like Grace Jones’s. She had served as President Clinton’s Senior Director for African Affairs, surprising herself by proving a complete natural in government. She understood my initial struggles to get situated and patiently explained the way policymaking worked. I knew Gayle was becoming more than just a work friend when I walked into her office and saw that she had printed out a photo of Declan and hung it on her wall. Gayle insisted that, if we wanted to build team feeling, we needed to take matters into our own hands. She invited me over to her home for Thai takeout, encouraging me to bring Declan, and we began plotting how we could more than double our impact.

  One Wednesday, Liz Sherwood-Randall, the NSC Senior Director for European Affairs, invited the President’s NSC Legal Advisor Mary DeRosa, Gayle, and me to stop by her office for a glass of wine. What was supposed to be a quick break turned into a ninety-minute release, with each of us apologetically calling our assistants to ask if they could move our next appointments owing to “urgent business.” We had so much to discuss—our frustrations at the NSC, but also what we were proud of and what we hoped to achieve. This first relatively spontaneous invitation turned into a sacred weekly “girls’ hour” of wine, cheese, and gossip. As women rotated onto and off the NSC staff, the participants evolved.

  A few years before, when John Prendergast and I had attended Al-Anon meetings for the family members of alcoholics, we had both seized upon an Al-Anon motto that seemed profound: “Never compare your insides to somebody else’s outsides.” Yet before I joined what we listed on our official calendars as the “Wednesday Group,” I had been doing just that with my White House colleagues. They strode commandingly around the office. They were constantly briefing the President. I felt like the odd person out. But as I got to know my fellow female Senior Directors and began peeling back the layers, I learned about their own struggles. One was trying to raise two teenage boys with a spouse who commuted from California on the weekends; another had a child who was seriously struggling in school.

  When I complimented one of my new friends on the framed photograph of her briefing President Obama, she responded with sweet vulnerability, saying “I was so excited when someone told me the photographer was there.” Another colleague confided that the large number of candid shots displayed of her with the President was misleading. “Basically, every single time I have been in his presence, I have requested a photo,” she said. “I hang every one of them up because it makes foreign diplomats think I’m a big deal.” Over time, I learned that I was not even the only one to have relied on the Washington Post’s map to find the Oval Office.

  These Wednesday evening get-togethers became one of the few immovable parts of my schedule. As I had experienced with the female reporters in Bosnia, I felt part of a sisterhood—like these women would support me, no matter what. Each of us gave the others a quality of attention that was too often lacking in the transactional world we inhabited. When I shared my habit of always fearing the worst when I couldn’t reach Cass, María, or my parents, I was amazed to learn that others leaped to similar worries. Delving deeper into the lives of my colleagues was a precious reminder of the relevance of “Never compare your insides to somebody else’s outsides,” a mantra I learned to keep at the forefront of my mind.

  Beyond our Wednesday night sessions, a change also crept into the
way we acted in the day-to-day NSC policy debates that were central to getting work done. Without ever discussing it or making a conscious shift, we reflexively engaged one another in meetings. This did not mean we always agreed with one another; some of my most heartfelt arguments were with my fellow female Senior Directors. But we took one another’s ideas seriously. This meant never leaving them simply hanging in the air, which typically happened in large group discussions.

  When I am asked today what it was like working in the national security world as a woman, I don’t have a simple answer. Although Obama had appointed more women to cabinet-level national security roles than any president in history, his NSC was the most male-dominated place I had ever been in the United States. Men held the positions of National Security Advisor, Deputy National Security Advisor, Homeland Security Advisor, NSC Chief of Staff, Strategic Communications Advisor, and speechwriter. During that first year of the administration, this top NSC tier was supported by twenty-six Senior Directors—and only six of us were women.

  I was fortunate never to experience sexual harassment of the kind I knew many other women had endured.* And while I could tell I was being condescended to at times, I could never be sure it was because of my gender. I started out as a complete novice in government, and in debates, I often advocated on behalf of human rights, which national security professionals generally viewed as a “soft,” secondary priority. But being with the Wednesday Group made me feel the power of numbers.

  I also came to appreciate one advantage I had: I played basketball. Soon after returning from maternity leave, I joined regular games that took place at the Department of the Interior and on a court that Obama had refurbished just off the White House lawn. Playing pickup with other administration officials gave me relationships I could never have cultivated through regular office interactions. I not only competed and joked around with my male colleagues, but also cornered them to lobby for my latest cause. I finally understood why so many men played golf, and the professional disadvantages that accrued to women (and men) who didn’t.