Even for a prominent intellectual cum foreign-policy adviser, Samantha Power has been keeping a punishing schedule. When she arrived in Europe at the beginning of the month, she had spent the previous few weeks crisscrossing the country on a frenetic hybrid book tour and campaign junket for Sen. Barack Obama, for whom she served as an unpaid adviser. In the middle of an interview to promote her new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (Penguin Press) — an admiring biography of the charismatic Brazilian-born U.N. diplomat who was killed in the August 2003 bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad — the professor of public policy at Harvard University told a Scottish-newspaper reporter, in an off-the-record moment, that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was a “monster.”
Power quickly apologized. But within hours, the story exploded across the American news media, and she resigned from the Obama campaign.
Last month, before her Europe trip, I interviewed Power. She was a nervous wreck even then. Perched on a stool in the corner of a bustling Washington cafe, leaning close, she confided, “I can’t sleep, and I can’t eat.”
It was a surprising admission. After all, Power seemed to be living a charmed life. One journalist had likened the attractive, auburn-haired author (who was recently featured in a glamorous spread in Men’s Vogue) and human-rights activist turned academic to a latter-day Joan of Arc, out to save the world. Another scribe had suggested that Power possessed just the right combination of dynamism and “cerebral bona fides” to make her an appealing presidential candidate. In short, she was the epitome of the academic celebrity. Pretty heady stuff for a 37-year-old who never claimed to be on the receiving end of direct orders from God or to have given any thought to running for elected office, much less the highest office in the land. And she seemed to have found love on the campaign trail: The Boston Globe reported March 11 that Power is dating her fellow Obama adviser, the prolific University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, soon to join her at Harvard University.
So why the frayed nerves? Simply put, Power is wildly popular. At a recent book talk, she was inundated with well-wishers, autograph seekers, and stargazers. With charisma and ease, she responded to a plethora of questions that included, for example, Obama and the prospect of U.N. reform. Unfailingly polite and personable — and presumably not wanting to alienate potential Obama voters — she went over her allotted time on her tightly packed schedule. She would be playing catch-up for the rest of the day, and she had been operating at that frenetic pace for weeks on end.
When we finally got to sit down and talk at a favorite tea shop of hers, she took a deep breath and explained her frenzy. “In order to do these really big, ambitious books, you kind of have to stay out of the daily news cycle a little bit, out of the blogosphere,” Power said, fingering her BlackBerry. But, referring to her work for Obama, she added, “I am in that now, and it has been hard to make sure I am … being an adequate surrogate for a guy I care about so much.”
Power has spent the last 14 months advising Obama on foreign policy. She has always been quick to play down her role, but The Washington Post says she is — make that was — one of the “most influential” figures in the candidate’s brain trust, “part of a group-within-the-group that he regularly turns to for advice.”
The prominently displayed Obama button on her jacket, as well as the way in which her answers to disparate questions always culminated in praise for the Democratic senator from Illinois, made plain the extent to which Power was consumed by Obama’s bid for the White House. “I have always taken my work very, very seriously, but I have never taken anything quite this seriously,” she said. “When you are out there, you just want to do right by him.”
Power had certainly been out there, campaigning for Obama across the country. And in a previous interview with The Chronicle, Power — who is unscripted and forthcoming in conversation — expressed some trepidation that her blunt style would land her in hot water. “That’s the one thing that terrifies me,” Power acknowledged at the time, “that I’ll say something that will somehow hurt the candidate.”
Power rose to fame in 2002 with her book A Problem From Hell (Basic Books), a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of America’s impotent response to genocide in the 20th century — from ignoring Turkey’s deportation and slaughter of its Armenian minority during World War I to the long-delayed effort to halt the Bosnian Serbs’ mass murder of Muslims in the 1990s. Born out of Power’s experience as a novice freelance reporter covering the violent disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, A Problem From Hell is less a pure history than it is an impassioned meditation on America’s role in the post-cold-war world.
The decade following the collapse of the Berlin Wall was a period of great ideological ferment, particularly among liberal foreign-policy intellectuals who believed that, with the defeat of Communism, the United States could begin to make priorities of human rights and democracy promotion. But those ideals rubbed up against the grim reality of genocide and ethnic conflict: Over the course of a hundred days in 1994, 800,000 Rwandans were murdered by their compatriots; thousands of Bosnians were herded into concentration camps, where they were starved, raped, and murdered.
On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran the U.N. “safe area” of Srebrenica, where 40,000 Muslim men, women, and children had sought refuge. Power was in the area at the time. She recalls seeing NATO F-16s flying overhead, doing nothing to halt the assault. She was outraged. She remembers thinking that the tails of the planes seemed to be drooping in humiliation. Over the next few days, more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were systematically slaughtered.
Srebrenica was a watershed moment for Power, who believes earnestly in the mantra “never again.” The United Nations proved toothless, while the world’s sole remaining superpower was unwilling to use its military might to defend human life. “The very qualities that made liberals prone to care about evil seemed to make them incapable of coping with it,” Power wrote with thinly veiled contempt in The New Republic a few years later. “Liberals resisted black-and-white characterizations, sought nuance and understanding, and dithered.”
Though liberals have been allergic to the use of military force since the Vietnam War, many scholars and activists have concluded that America has a moral obligation to protect the victims of mass slaughter — especially if nobody else will do it. “Given the affront genocide represents to America’s most cherished values and to its interests, the United States must also be prepared to risk the lives of its soldiers in the service of stopping this monstrous crime,” Power wrote in the conclusion to A Problem From Hell. That view, which has become known as humanitarian intervention, was put into practice by NATO in 1999 — when a two-month air campaign led to the withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo. Its champions have become known as liberal interventionists, or “liberal hawks.” And Power has emerged as one of the creed’s most eloquent proponents.
“The sky is falling here, but a man has got to eat,” Vieira de Mello told Power before their first meeting at a restaurant on the outskirts of the Croatian capital of Zagreb in April 1994. “If World War III starts while we’re at dinner, we won’t order a second bottle of wine,” he added with aplomb.
Power considers Chasing the Flame “a more important book” than A Problem From Hell. Her new work “speaks to a far greater breadth of issues that we are going to be dealing with as a country and as a global community,” she said. Vieira de Mello, the subject of Chasing the Flame, went to work for the United Nations in 1969, after finishing a degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne. Over the next three decades, he chased conflict across the globe: Sudan, Lebanon, Cambodia, Bosnia, Congo, Kosovo, East Timor, and, fatefully, Iraq. In those broken societies, he grappled with today’s major challenges: civil war, refugees, religious extremism, the role of religious and national identity, genocide, and terrorism.
Described by one colleague as a cross between James Bond and Robert F. Kennedy, Vieira de Mello began his career as a quasi-Marxist anti-imperialist — he stormed the barricades in Paris in 1968 and had the scars to prove it — but his shrill moral absolutism gradually gave way to an idealistic pragmatism. By the time he reluctantly agreed to lead the beleaguered U.N. mission in Baghdad, Power approvingly writes, he had become a “diplomat and politician, comfortable weighing lesser evils.”
To what extent does Vieira de Mello’s intellectual journey reflect Power’s own evolving perspective on American foreign policy? Her writings in recent years suggest a far more chastened outlook on what American power can accomplish in the world. Unlike some of her fellow liberal hawks — who embraced the invasion of Iraq as a noble struggle for the liberation of others — Power opposed the war because she was discomfited by the unilateral manner in which it was waged and the disingenuous way she felt the Bush administration invoked human rights as a rationalization for toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime. More notable, Power’s preferred response to the genocide in Darfur is not a call for U.S. intervention, but rather a nuanced plan to use diplomatic measures to put pressure on the government in Khartoum to halt the killing. When Power discussed policy during our interview, she quickly corrected herself when she uttered the word “solution,” substituting the more humble “remedy” — as if she were still trying out her new, more modest persona.
When I mentioned that anecdote to Richard Falk, a Princeton professor of international law and practice, he interpreted it as evidence that Power is no longer “naïvely expectant that the U.S. will use its power for benign purposes.” Like Vieira de Mello, “she is more reconciled to the need for a Faustian bargain between trying to do good things but also accommodating some dark forces,” he says.
“All this black-and-white, on-off-switch stuff I have no patience for now,” Power conceded to me. “I just didn’t know the world well enough then.” While some foreign-policy wonks might regard that as a welcome sign of maturation, others see it as a betrayal of the very principles Power once so passionately championed. “The implication of A Problem From Hell is that, in the end, the only way to really stop genocide is through armed intervention,” says Thomas Cushman, a professor of sociology at Wellesley College and founding editor of The Journal of Human Rights. He excoriates Power for her insistence that American troops be withdrawn from Iraq. “It’s hard to square Power’s self-affirmed liberal commitment to stopping genocide with her proposed abandonment of fundamental liberal duties in Iraq,” Cushman adds.
Power disagreed with that kind of argument, noting with some agitation that people commonly caricature A Problem From Hell as a plea for endless wars of altruism. “My argument was about the tools in the toolbox: diplomatic, economic, and all the way to military tools that need to be employed when you care about something,” she said, gesticulating energetically.
“The world has changed,” she added. “To think about what the United States can do in 2008 is so different than what it could have achieved in 1994.”
That said, Power does worry that Americans will “overlearn” the lessons of Iraq. “The response to Iraq can’t be, ‘This is what happens when we try to help people,’” she said. “Among the specific reasons Iraq went wrong, one of them is not that we cared for people.”
In fact, she declared forcefully, the opposite is true: “Had we cared for people more, we would have been more likely to succeed.”
Given her celebrity and stature, it’s hard to imagine that the Clinton comment will silence Power’s voice or erode her influence for long.
Evan R. Goldstein is a staff editor at The Chronicle Review.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 29, Page B17
