The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  During my early years in the job, Declan had asked each morning, “Are you coming home early?” This question meant, “Is there any chance I will see you tonight?” Too often, the answer had been no. But even when I had given him an exuberant yes, by late afternoon I usually called María and asked that she tell him that an urgent matter had come up at the White House or the UN, forcing me to stay at work.

  I noticed that after many disappointments, Declan had stopped asking about my plans. Rían had never started.

  I wanted to be present for homework, for baseball and soccer games, and for that magic, unforeseeable moment when they divulged what had happened in school that day.

  So I was torn. The slower the clock moved, the longer I could represent the United States and try to make progress on issues that mattered. And the more quickly the clock moved, the sooner I would be the mother and partner I longed to be.

  In the end, of course, my conflicting inner clocks were immaterial. Time does its own work.

  WHEN ELECTION DAY ARRIVED, I was worried about many potential outcomes. Would the Democrats take the Senate? Would Donald Trump concede graciously or follow through on his threats not to accept an unfavorable result? And in the event that Hillary Clinton asked me to serve in her administration, would I have the discipline to turn her down in order to be with my family?

  I was not asking the more fundamental question of who would win.

  Indeed, I was so unconcerned about the outcome of the presidential race that I arranged an election night party at the ambassador’s residence and invited all the female ambassadors to the UN.

  Diplomats have to try to build constructive relations with whoever is in power, and they do not typically reveal their preferences in another country’s election. But most of my guests made no secret of their longing to see a woman become the US president. They knew the cascading effect that such a victory would have on women’s empowerment globally. In addition, Trump’s outward hostility to much of the rest of the world, combined with the ways he had talked about and treated women, made my election party an unusually incautious diplomatic gathering. Of course, Clinton also had a comfortable lead in the polls going into the evening, so the open partiality of my female colleagues did not seem professionally hazardous.

  “At what time will we know that Hillary has won?” one ambassador from an undemocratic country asked shortly after I began welcoming guests.

  Recalling the tight races between Bush and Gore in 2000, and Bush and Kerry in 2004, I told her that our system did not work like her country’s—nothing was preordained. “But,” I said assuredly, “we won’t keep you too late.”

  I had invited Gloria Steinem, whose lifetime of work on behalf of women’s rights seemed destined to culminate in Secretary Clinton’s victory. Madeleine Albright dropped by, wearing a broach with stained glass in the shape of a ceiling being shattered. I delighted in seeing my mother—whose drive for knowledge had been so impertinently questioned by an Irish judge—chatting with these two better-known pioneers.

  Cass and our children rounded out the festivities, with Declan running around the apartment telling foreign diplomats to ignore the popular vote and pay attention to who “scored 270 points.”

  Only when states that were expected to be shoo-ins for Clinton suddenly became nail-biters did we begin to fear that something unexpected and unwelcome might happen. Still, Trump’s path to victory required undecided voters to break his way in so many places that I tried to remain a calming voice in the room even as evidence mounted that Trump was on the verge of a shocking upset.

  Gloria started to lose color in her cheeks around 10:30 p.m., but she remained unfailingly courteous to foreign ambassadors, who continued to approach her with thanks for inspiring them during their younger years. She patiently inquired about their paths to the UN, all the while keeping one eye trained on the large-screen TV I had rented for the evening.

  My husband took on the role of messenger of doom, carrying in his laptop like the pallbearer at a funeral. His screen showed a website depicting a jumble of pie charts, graphs, and numbers. Cass, who projected perpetual good cheer, looked stricken.

  “She—” he said.

  “She what?” I asked.

  “She can’t get there,” he said, his voice trailing off. Clinton was going to lose.

  Declan had fallen asleep on one of the couches in the great room, holding his stuffed snow tiger. Rían was in her pajamas, stretched out horizontally in deep sleep on my lap. She looked angelic, her pale Irish skin as white as the carpet, her long lashes fluttering while many of the adults wept openly around her.

  Earlier that day, when I had sent Rían off to school with her huge backpack on her shoulders, the horizon had seemed bright and boundless. This was to be the night when young girls saw—and thus believed—that they could do anything. Instead, we were about to elect to our highest office a man who had boasted about forcing himself on women. I was deeply shaken.

  Gloria and I sat on the couch watching CNN’s election coverage until after two a.m., refusing to give up until the race had been officially called. After she left, I crawled into bed next to Cass and thought about the many cruel and foolish policies Trump had pledged to pursue if he became President. I eventually fell asleep for an hour or two and woke just as dawn broke to find Cass on his computer.

  “Gosh,” he said, when he saw I was conscious.

  We each tried out a series of “Maybe it won’t be as bad as we think” arguments—the same expressions of desperate hope that were being made in millions of gloomy households across America.

  On its face, Trump’s victory—and the 63 million votes that made it possible—seemed a repudiation of many of the central tenets of my life. I was an immigrant, someone who felt fortunate to have experienced many countries and cultures. I saw the fate of the American people as intertwined with that of individuals elsewhere on the planet. And I knew that if the United States retreated from the world, global crises would fester, harming US interests.

  When I had arrived at the UN in 2013, I had hoped to make time to get out into the country to connect with Americans far from New York and Washington. I took a few such trips, including to Georgia and Kentucky, where I spoke alongside Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell about how US security was linked with the work of the UN. But in the latter phase of the administration, a few prominent Republicans confessed privately that the party “base” would criticize them if they were seen to be collaborating with the UN ambassador. And while I certainly didn’t need the company of politicians to engage skeptics of our administration’s foreign policy, my responsibilities at the UN and in Washington also limited my domestic travel.

  I knew I had to be careful not to overinterpret such a close election. Nonetheless, caricatures of internationalism—and fearmongering about the “other”—had clearly resonated with millions of people. But more than that, Trump had successfully spoken to deeply-felt and entirely legitimate grievances about how the globalized economy had left people behind. At least some of those who voted for Obama in 2012 and turned to Trump in 2016 had agreed with the President-elect that America’s openness to the outside world had contributed to their struggles.*

  WHILE I TRIED to sort through what had just happened, I recognized that my first task was to find a way to offer my support to the individuals who worked at the US Mission to the UN. “This day is going to suck,” I said to Cass before we parted the morning after the election.

  Declan was in a foul mood during our drive to school, and I was the target. “Mommy you told me Hillary would win,” he said. “You promised you would never lie to me.”

  I tried to explain the difference between a lie and a mistake, but as he argued his position from his booster seat in the back of the armored SUV, I noticed his lower lip was trembling. As soon as we began to pull away from the Waldorf, he started crying, “Mi-ma. Mi-ma. I don’t want Mima to go away.”

  Declan had heard Trump’s bigoted
commentary about Latinos during the campaign and was now terrified that María, his “Mima,” would be deported to Mexico, where she was originally from. I pulled my son onto my lap, trying to soothe him.

  “It’s okay, Declan,” I said. “Mima is an American citizen. Remember, we were with her when she became American and Mommy helped swear her in. She will be completely fine.”

  But Declan was exhausted from the late night, and, once the tears were flowing, they would not soon stop.

  “But what about Mima’s friends?” he cried. “Trump wants to send them back to Mexico. Mima will be so sad.”

  There, unfortunately, I could offer him little reassurance.

  When I arrived at the US Mission, I sat down for the daily meeting I held with my “Dream Team”—a combination of political staff appointed during the Obama administration and lifelong government employees.

  I felt that I had the most skilled legislative affairs adviser, the most able schedulers, the savviest press operation, the wisest Middle East experts, the most rigorous lawyers, and the finest staff in just about every position there was. Many people at the US Mission could have taken their talents into the private sector and landed more lucrative positions with far fancier titles than they had working with me. I had looked forward to lobbying the Clinton transition team so that the political appointees could find ways to continue to serve. Now, those hired by Obama faced unemployment. A few were not sure what they would do to make rent come February. Yet they didn’t talk about themselves: they were far more focused on what the President-elect had promised to do.

  The vast majority of the people who worked at the US Mission to the UN were career civil servants and foreign service officers who faced different challenges. They had no declared political views and were permanent US government employees. Nonetheless, many had invested mightily in such signature initiatives as securing the Iran nuclear deal, negotiating the Paris climate accord, and getting businesses and governments to do more to support refugees around the world. Trump had pledged to undo all of this progress.

  Moreover, Trump’s apparent affection for Vladimir Putin and other dictators boded ill for America’s leadership on human rights. And because the staff at our Mission looked like our country—Latinos, African Americans, Muslim Americans, LGBT people, people with disabilities—many had felt personally demeaned by Trump’s rhetoric during the campaign.

  Even though I was devastated by the prospect of a Trump presidency, I knew my job was to rally the team. I called a Town Hall meeting to deliver a pep talk, rehearsing my upbeat message several times by myself before I tried it out on my team.

  “I know some of you are shocked by the results of the election,” I began. More than a hundred faces looked back at me, and I gave it my best shot:

  I’m certainly shocked. And I know this election opened some raw wounds for many people in this country and, presumably, at this Mission. And I want to give people the chance to talk about how they feel.

  But I also want us to stay focused on our job. We represent the most powerful country in the world—a country that gave an immigrant like me the chance to represent it at the UN, and a country that gave a businessman like Donald Trump the chance to be President. We need to show the rest of the world what it means to respect the rule of law, and to put one’s country over one’s particular political preferences.

  People around the world are going to have questions about where America is going. We won’t have the answers to those questions. But we know that our democracy is strong, our institutions are strong, and, no matter who is running this country, our greatest strength has always been our citizens. We are America. We are going to be okay, and the rest of the world needs to know that.

  One of the first people who got up to speak was a talented foreign service officer. “Look,” she said, “I don’t agree with a lot of the things Trump has said. But he doesn’t seem to have a lot of people experienced in foreign policy in his inner circle. He and his team will need us. And we will have the same duty to our country—and the same privilege of serving our country—on January twentieth as we had when we served George W. Bush and Barack Obama. We will keep serving this country. That’s what we do.”

  One after another, the US officials in the Town Hall expressed their determination to serve the next President. Having gathered my staff thinking I was going to need to comfort them, they ended up consoling me, with their professionalism and patriotism.

  FOR THE NEXT TEN WEEKS, my team and I made a mad dash to the finish line, lobbying governments to release more political prisoners, trying to bring more vetted refugees into our country, and supporting John Kerry in his efforts until the last moment to bring about a cease-fire in Syria.

  Russia’s multipronged attack on the US presidential election, which had been designed to bolster Donald Trump’s candidacy and widen divisions in our democracy, also loomed large as the clock ticked down and the full scope of what Moscow had done began to come into view. Even though the public debate over election interference was just beginning, it was already breaking down along alarmingly partisan lines. Republican defenders of President-elect Trump insisted that those focused on Russia’s meddling were simply “sore losers.” This was obviously false. In focusing on Russian actions, voters could disagree mightily on who should be President of the United States but still be united in insisting that only Americans should get to decide.

  On December 13th, 2016, President Obama chaired an NSC meeting on the situation in Syria that was the most somber of my time in government. Over the previous three and a half years, I had participated in countless discussions of Syria that left me sad and frustrated. But this one was the worst.

  For months, Russia and the Syrian regime had been laying catastrophic siege to opposition-held Aleppo. Their tactics and destruction brought to mind Fred Cuny’s description of Russia’s decimation of Grozny, Chechnya. Russian and Syrian heavy weapons pummeled apartment buildings and makeshift hospitals with seemingly no regard for the 300,000 civilians trapped in the city.

  The greatest superpower in the history of the world was a lame duck in the face of the systematic bombardment of innocents. And we were about to hand the reins to someone who had nothing but kind words for Putin.

  After Obama’s meeting, which I had joined by video, I walked across the street to an emergency UN Security Council session, also focusing on the assault in Aleppo. In the chamber, I listened to the secretary-general describe “scores of civilians being killed either by intense bombardment or summary executions” by Syrian government forces—with Russian and Iranian support. UN officials had begged to evacuate tens of thousands of civilians, but Syria, Russia, and Iran had refused to allow humanitarian convoys to enter the city to remove the wounded.

  When my turn came, I began by reading the testimonies of people trapped in eastern Aleppo. I quoted a teacher named Abdulkafi Al-Hamdo, who had written on Twitter: “I can tweet now but I might not do it forever. Please save my daughter’s life and others. This is a call from a father.”

  I recalled a doctor who had said to a journalist: “Remember that there was a city called Aleppo that the world erased from the map and history.”

  Then I put my prepared statement down and went off:

  To the Assad regime, Russia, and Iran, your forces and proxies are carrying out these crimes. Your barrel bombs and mortars and air strikes have allowed the militia in Aleppo to encircle tens of thousands of civilians in your ever-tightening noose. It is your noose. Three Member States of the UN contributing to a noose around civilians. It should shame you. Instead, by all appearances, it is emboldening you. You are plotting your next assault.

  I looked up from my notes at Vitaly, and extemporaneously posed a set of questions that I felt I urgently needed him to answer.

  Are you truly incapable of shame? Is there literally nothing that can shame you? Is there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child that gets under your skin, that just creeps you out a
little bit? Is there nothing you will not lie about or justify?

  Vitaly spoke next. He made no effort to respond to what I had said. Instead, he did just what he and Russian officials had done regarding the Syrian chemical weapons that killed 1,400 people, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the brazen attempt to swing the election to Trump: he dismissed, diverted, and lied.

  My Russian counterpart denounced as “fabrications” all the claims of independent observers and the UN. As always, he delivered his statement in Russian, and I listened to the interpretation through my earpiece.

  “Propaganda, disinformation, and psychological warfare are not new concepts,” he said. “A new phenomenon, exacerbated by what we are seeing in the Syrian conflict, is the spread of . . .”—and then he suddenly broke into English to use a phrase I had not heard before that moment—“fake news.”

  Instead of waiting for the session to end after Vitaly’s remarks, I walked out in disgust at the Russian and Syrian governments—but also at my own impotence. By the time I got back to my office, the statement I had made in the Council had gone viral. For some Americans who circulated the video, my question—“Are you truly incapable of shame?”—applied to Aleppo. But for many, I think, it was the question they longed to scream out loud to the President-elect.

  I dedicated my last major public speech as UN ambassador to the threat posed by Russia. Once I gave the speech, I knew that I would not hear from Vitaly again. And I was relieved not to see him, given what Russia had done.

  Yet leaving New York did not feel right without acknowledging the ups and downs of the years he and I had experienced together. After I had packed for our move to Massachusetts, I called his cell, and he answered on the first ring.