After these discussions, I resolved that, if I became ambassador, I would try to set aside time to meet with UN critics and those generally skeptical of America’s engagement abroad. The growing number of Americans getting their news from Fox were seeing the UN falsely depicted as a threat. In debunking these fabrications and taking on the arguments of American isolationists and nationalists, I hoped to make a small contribution to sustaining support for US investments in the international system.
All told, I found that I had more support than the pundits had initially anticipated. But many senators informed me that they were reserving judgment. What I said and how I presented myself at the confirmation hearing would prove pivotal.
As my scheduled appearance approached, I was of two minds about it. On the one hand, I would be relieved to finally get to speak for myself and respond publicly to the bizarre caricatures of my views that were being promoted by Fox News and right-wing websites. On the other hand, I needed to be very sure that I did not make a mistake. My goal was to make no news.
BILL DANVERS, A SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT AIDE, ran point on my confirmation. Bill had served in a number of national security roles in the Executive Branch and on the Hill, including as staff director of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, where my testimony would take place. In addition to accompanying me to meetings with senators, Bill organized a series of mock confirmation hearings (or “murder boards”) for me to practice responding to the aggressive questioning of senators.
I recruited people from inside and outside the government to be my mock interrogators, including Cass, David Pressman, and my friends Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor, longtime Obama aides who had recently left the administration. Their job was to act like the most abrasive senators imaginable.
The pummeling began immediately.
“What makes you think you have the experience to represent us at the UN? What does an academic know about foreign policy?”
“You called Hillary Clinton a ‘monster.’ Is insulting people how you plan to win friends and influence people at the UN?”
“You have written that the United States made a mistake by not recognizing the Armenian genocide. Yet President Obama has also failed to do so. Will you, right now, pledge that as UN ambassador you will recognize the genocide?”
“You have long criticized American foreign policy and shown you would prefer the United States be ruled by world government and by international treaties. Do you plan to use your position to undermine the sovereignty of the United States?”
Everyone who participated in these sessions had before them the most controversial excerpts from my past writings and interviews, and expertly used them to back me into a corner. Someone would read a quote that sounded maximally objectionable, before asking innocently, “Is this still your view?” Cass, who played Senator Rand Paul, knew I got needlessly irritated when people mistakenly added an “s” to the end of my last name, so he upped the ante by addressing me as “Ms. Powers” every time he asked a question.
As my colleagues, friends, and spouse threw hundreds of questions at me, it quickly became apparent that I made a lousy witness on my own behalf. I had a knack for offering long, sincere, and ultimately damaging answers. I showed poor judgment even on minor issues of decorum; when “Senator Paul” called me Ms. Powers, I interrupted to correct him—“It is Power, Senator.” I had not expected these practice sessions to go smoothly right away, but neither had I imagined them to go quite so badly.
Danvers, whose sighs grew louder the longer my answers dragged on, told me plainly:
There is something you do not seem to get: the senators are not there to listen to you. They are there to listen to themselves. They want to be on television. They want to play to their base. As you speak, most will not even be listening. You are just filler between their first comment that pretends to be a question and their second comment that pretends to be a question. So the longer your answers are, the more annoyed they will become, and the greater the chance that you say something you will regret. If you hear nothing else, just remember this: your hearing is not on the level.
I knew this from my days working with Obama in the Senate, but I struggled to internalize the implications.
In our life together, Cass had almost always found words of encouragement for me in low times. But here, instead of offering false praise for answers that could appear in a guide for how not to get confirmed by the US Senate, he just commiserated, telling me, “I’m so sorry you have to go through this.”
I devoted weeks to the murder boards, drilling my answers in an effort to make them as rote and succinct as possible. State Department officials had prepared responses to various questions that might trip me up, but much of what they wrote felt inauthentic. I would stop halfway through attempting the formulaic answer and tell my interrogators, “I can’t say this. It doesn’t come close to answering the question.”
On a number of occasions, this caused Danvers to bury his face in his hands before asking, “Do you want to get confirmed or not?”
My temper would flash. “I want to get confirmed,” I once responded, “but not at the expense of becoming a Washington asshole.”
We eventually managed a compromise. “Here’s what will work,” I told Danvers. “You don’t want me actually answering the question in the detailed way I would generally respond. And I don’t want to pretend that a senator didn’t ask a question we all heard him ask, or mouth a bunch of drivel. Why don’t we find something that isn’t my first answer, but that feels responsive and which is something I actually believe?”
This became the strategy by which I prepared—finding a way not to always say what first came to mind, but to express something that, as I put it, “was also true.”
I had an opportunity to try out this new approach when discussing an article I had written for The New Republic in 2003, just before President Bush’s invasion of Iraq. In the article, I argued that the United States should practice what we preached to other countries. “Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility,” I wrote. “US foreign policy has to be rethought. It needs not tweaking but overhauling. We need a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States.”
“For what crimes does the United States need to apologize?” Tommy Vietor asked in one of the murder boards.
“Thank you for your question, Senator,” I said. “Obviously, this is a challenging issue. But for example, the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison, the . . .”
“NO, NO, NO . . .” Danvers shouted, as Cass looked down to avoid eye contact with me. “Why would you say something that somebody could paint as an insult to our armed forces? Why the hell would you pick a fight like that? You don’t have to. Your goal is to get in and out of your hearing, not to establish world historical truths.”
“OK,” I said, defeated, and by then exhausted. “I get it. Well, what should I say?”
“Say the article was written a long time ago, and your views have changed,” said Bill.
“My views have definitely changed,” I said, “but I still believe we make mistakes and that we can’t pretend we don’t.”
Bill again gave me the look of “Do you want to be UN ambassador?”
Our strategy called for saying something that was “also true,” so I suggested, “I can talk about the importance of accountability, as well as how great the United States is—which I believe.”
Bill did not object, so I fleshed out a detailed version of this response and practiced it for days.
I KNEW MY ANSWERS to the senators’ questions had to show that I was not taking the outcome of the confirmation process for granted. This meant prefacing most responses with caveats like, “If I am fortunate enough to be confirmed, I will . . .”
But with Susan already in place as National Security Advisor, I couldn’t wait until the Senate had voted before planning how Cass and I would go about uprooting our family and moving to New York.
Fortunately, Hillary Schrenell, who worked at the US Mission to the UN, took much of this burden off my plate.
I had first met Hillary a decade before, when she was a twenty-two-year-old intern at the Kennedy School. I found her so dedicated and sharp that I hired her as my full-time research assistant. In five years of working together, she became a close friend. After she graduated from Harvard Law School in 2010, I introduced her to Susan Rice, who hired her as a policy adviser. Now, if I could get confirmed, I would have the chance to work with Hillary again. But in the meantime, I asked her to come to DC to join my confirmation team. I felt it was important to have someone in my inner circle who knew both me and the practical and substantive steps I would need to take once in the job. Because Hillary was close to my family, she also volunteered to help me think through how I would get everybody moved to New York.
I was a bit embarrassed to rely on Hillary for help on household issues given that she would soon be my senior policy adviser—if I was fortunate enough to be confirmed—but she insisted on using her vacation time to help me.
“The whole system is geared for the old days, when a male ambassador swoops into his new job,” she said. “And the faithful wife trails behind, organizing the movers and finding schools for the kids.”
We both knew that Cass was not going to embrace the role of old-school spouse. Over the years, I had learned that when I assigned him domestic tasks, I often regretted it. After I gave birth to our son, I asked Cass to write Declan’s name and birth date on the official form. A few months later, after I waited several hours at the Washington, DC, birth registry for Declan’s birth certificate, I received one for “PECLAN POWER SUNSTEIN.”
As soon as I saw the typo, I knocked on the glass window and asked for the spelling to be corrected. But the clerk told me that such an alteration would require a trip to the “amendments office.” I was beside myself.
“Ma’am,” I said, “I promise you I didn’t call my son Peclan and then change my mind. My husband just has horrible handwriting.”
The clerk repeated directions to the amendments office and slid the glass window shut. After waiting another hour, I received the corrected birth certificate, which still noted that Peclan Power Sunstein was born April 24th, and then, beside his “birth name,” in inch-high black type, the office had added the stamp, “AMENDED,” and his “new” name, Declan Power Sunstein.
The experience now seems trivial, but at the time it sent me into an exasperated rage at my husband. “You had one job!” I told him. “And now, for the rest of his life, Declan will have to explain to people why his parents named him Peclan!”
When Rían was born, Cass promised I could count on him. “I learn well,” he said. Yet when I returned to the same birth registry to collect our daughter’s birth certificate, it read “RTAN POWER SUNSTEIN.” Her birth certificate, like Declan’s, now has an inch-high “AMENDED” stamp, indicating that, after a few months of reflection, her parents decided that “Rían” was preferable to “Rtan.”
I felt we had no margin for error when it came to settling our family in New York, and was grateful to be able to rely on Hillary. She developed an elaborate matrix of all the local preschools and daycares so I could begin to make inquiries. Knowing Declan and Rían herself, she also helped me narrow the search by speaking with the administrators of schools that she thought might be a good fit. She even helped find computer classes for María, who had generously agreed to move with us.
When I talked through my substantive priorities with Hillary, she urged me to decide who I would want as my chief of staff—one of the first consequential decisions I would make. I settled almost immediately on Jeremy Weinstein, my former NSC colleague. I had seen firsthand how effective Jeremy was in government. He brought a special combination of realism about government’s limits and a drive to nonetheless get as much out of the system as possible.
Jeremy had spent two years at the NSC and then returned to Stanford to resume teaching. I asked him to move east again for another two-year stint. My offer presented an excruciating choice: he had two young sons, ages three and six, and was a committed partner in childcare with his wife, Rachel, who worked as an environmental advocate. But Rachel heroically agreed to shoulder the child-rearing burden for two years, while Jeremy committed to traveling back to California every other weekend. The sacrifices he and his family made were enormous.
Jeremy’s interest in public service was deeply personal. When he was seven years old, his father began working obsessively to expose a top-secret CIA program called MKULTRA. The program had funded esteemed psychiatrists and psychologists in the United States and Canada to administer experimental drugs and intensive shock treatments on human subjects—one of whom was Jeremy’s grandfather, causing him permanent brain damage.21 Following an eight-year lawsuit, the CIA settled with eight Canadians, including his grandfather, paying victims a woefully modest amount.
From his family’s ordeals at the hands of the US government, Jeremy acquired two key convictions, both of which I shared. He believed that governments should not be able to act with impunity in the name of national security. And equally important, he thought public officials should keep in mind the individuals who would be harmed by our failure to act in the face of gross injustice.
For all I would honestly say about my love of the United States at my confirmation hearing, I never forgot how often people in positions of power fell short. With Jeremy as my partner, I believed we could assemble a team that shared both our ambition and our humility in facing the formidable challenges that lay ahead.
WITH TWO DAYS TO GO until I was to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Cass got us a hotel room a block from our apartment so I could focus on final preparations for the interrogation that we knew lay in wait. We recognized that if I worked from home and saw so much as a small sock belonging to Declan or Rían—never mind their magnetic selves—being deferential to Rand Paul would quickly fade from my mind.
Over those last forty-eight hours, Cass and I ate three meals a day together as he fired question after question at me, and I grew more and more skilled at responding without setting off land mines.
ON JULY 17TH, 2013, I woke up in the hotel to the sound of drumbeats and a looping piano riff:
Started from the bottom now we’re here
Started from the bottom now my whole team fuckin’ here
Cass’s laptop was blaring Drake’s ode to beating the odds and showing up the haters. “Just the way Drake intended!” I exclaimed, wishing the computer speakers could play louder. As I showered, dressed, and recited answers to Cass’s questions on climate change, world government, the Middle East, and more, I asked him to add Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” to the playlist.
There we were—two nerdy professors rapping Drake and Eminem lyrics in the Georgetown Inn:
His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy . . .
He’s nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready . . .
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime . . .
Though I belted out Eminem’s “his palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy” line with great fervor, the truth was that, as we made our way to Capitol Hill, I felt calm and ready.
Because of my Georgia background, Senators Chambliss and Isakson had agreed to introduce me before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But as soon as Chambliss began speaking, I accidentally knocked over a glass of water, which spilled across the long, wooden table in the hearing room.
“Good start, Sam,” teased Isakson.
The hearing room was filled with friends and supporters. My parents, Cass, Laura, Hillary, María, Declan, and Rían sat right behind me. Other close friends sat a row behind them. Unsurprisingly, Rían became restless almost as soon as the hearing began, and María spent the next few hours roaming the halls with her. When Declan saw his godfather, John Prendergast, enter a few minutes
after I started testifying, he said in a loud whisper, “Mommy, look, there’s John.” I tried to ignore him because I was responding to a senator’s question at the time, but his whisper grew louder.
“Mommy, John’s here!”
My mother tried to quiet him, but I knew he needed acknowledgment. When another senator on the dais began speaking, I quickly turned to Declan to signal that I too was pleased that John was there.
Fortunately, the hearing went well and I did not make headlines. However, I did have a tortured exchange with Florida’s Republican senator Marco Rubio, who, just like in the murder boards, had a stack of my writings sitting in front of him, with the most controversial comments highlighted. Rubio spent most of his time on the New Republic article I had prepared to discuss.
“Which crimes [committed by the United States] were you referring to, and which decisions taken by the current administration would you recommend for such a reckoning?” he asked.
My learning kicked in, and I responded by saying something I believed . . . but which was perhaps not what Rubio was hoping to elicit:
I, as an immigrant to this country, think that this country is the greatest country on Earth, as I know do you. I would never apologize for America. America is the light to the world. We have freedoms and opportunities here that people dream about abroad.
. . . the point, I think, that I was trying to make is that sometimes we, as imperfect human beings, do things that we wish we had done a little bit differently, and sometimes it can be productive to engage . . . with foreign citizenry in a productive dialogue. And I think that is what President Clinton did [by apologizing] in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. It had a great effect. It really meant a great deal. And that is really all I was meaning.
Rubio noted that the Rwandan genocide could be characterized as “permitted” by the United States. But he wanted to know: “Which [crimes] did the United States commit or sponsor that you were referring to?”
The Education of an Idealist Page 36