Golden Door
On a bright Saturday in September of 2013, I was sitting in a crowded diner in midtown Manhattan with my husband, Cass, and our kids, four-year-old Declan and one-year-old Rían. My cell phone rang. The White House switchboard was on the line: “Ambassador Power, please hold for the President of the United States.”
I took two long sips of water and walked out of the restaurant’s clamor toward the corner of 50th and Lexington.
I had first met Barack Obama eight years before, when he was a newly elected US senator. Although he was already considered a bright young star in American politics, I would not have predicted then that within a few short years he would become president. And I would have found it unbelievable that I—an unmarried Irish immigrant, obsessive sports fan, journalist, and human rights activist who had not served a day in government—would, within that same period, gain a husband and two children and be named United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
And yet there I was, with a security detail hovering, about to confer with the President while my family sat nearby.
Obama was not calling for a Saturday-afternoon chat. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had recently unleashed chemical weapons against his own citizens, killing 1,400 people, including more than 400 children. This atrocity crossed the “red line” that the President had drawn when he threatened the Assad regime with “enormous consequences” if it used chemical weapons. In response, Obama had initially decided to order air strikes in Syria, but Congress—and most of the American public—had not supported him.
Then the unforeseen happened: Russian president Vladimir Putin, Assad’s ally, offered to work with the United States to destroy Syria’s large chemical weapons stockpile.
Locking down the specifics was left to me and my Russian counterpart at the UN. If we failed to negotiate a Security Council resolution, President Obama did not have a Plan B.
“Hey!” Obama said when he came on the line. Despite the gravity of the situation, he used the same airy inflection as when we first met in 2005.
I had only become UN ambassador the previous month, and Obama understood that I was facing a high-pressure diplomatic assignment. He was checking in to be sure we were on the same page.
“I just want you to know I have complete confidence in you,” he said.
I started to thank him.
“But …” Obama interrupted.
At that moment I did not need a “but.”
“But in these negotiations with the Russians,” he continued, “I want to make sure you don’t overshoot the runway.”
The Syrian government was notorious for unspeakable acts of savagery against its own people, and Obama knew I was skeptical that Assad would ever relinquish his chemical weapons. He was concerned I would demand too much from the Russians and cause them to walk away.
“But don’t undershoot the runway either,” he quickly added.
“Yes, Mr. President,” I said.
We hung up and I began walking back toward the diner, security agents in tow.
Don’t overshoot. Don’t undershoot. Looking up to the cloudless sky, I found myself wondering something more fundamental: “Where the hell is the runway?”
I HAD SPENT DECADES thinking about moments such as this, critical junctures in American foreign policy where lives were at stake. Studying the manual, however, is not the same as flying.
In 2002, I had published my first book, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. In the book, I criticized US officials for doing too little to stop the major genocides of the twentieth century. Now I found myself in the President’s cabinet as the Syrian regime was murdering hundreds of thousands of its own people.
“What would the old Samantha Power say to the current Samantha Power?” reporters often asked. “How does the author of a book on atrocities defend the US government’s inaction in the face of mass murder in Syria?”
My standard answer rejected the implication that my past and present selves were in conflict. “The old and new Samantha know each other quite well,” I would reply. “They talk all the time. And they agree …”
The full answer, of course, was more complicated.
I had gone from being an outsider to an insider—from being a critic of American foreign policy to a leading representative of the United States on the world stage. From within government, I was able to help spur actions that improved people’s lives. And yet we were failing to stop the carnage in Syria. I was at risk of falling prey to the same mode of rationalization I had assailed as an activist.
In January of 2017, I concluded eight years in the Obama administration and became an outsider once more. As I tried to get my bearings, President Obama’s successor began to turn the country in a radically different direction. Like many Americans, I vacillated between feelings of disbelief, outrage, and anxiety about the future. I had long taken for granted the importance of individual dignity, the richness of American diversity, and the practical necessity of global cooperation. Yet suddenly, these core values were under assault and far more vulnerable than I had recognized.
I set out to write a book that explored what I had learned thus far in my life and career. I returned to my early childhood in Ireland, the circumstances that brought me to the United States, my high school years in Atlanta, Georgia, and my time as a journalist in Bosnia. I delved into experiences that had moved and even altered me—as a human rights advocate, on a presidential campaign, in the White House, and at the UN. And I examined painful losses and setbacks, both in my private life and in the public glare.
We make sense of our lives through stories. Regardless of our different backgrounds and perspectives, stories have the power to bind us. In my Irish family, being able to tell a lively story has always been a means of fitting in and drawing people together. As a war correspondent, storytelling was the most effective tool I had to bridge the vast space between those suffering the wounds of distant conflict and my American readers. As a diplomat, when foreign officials refused to budge in negotiations, I would try to shake up stale debates by sharing authentic, firsthand stories about the many people who were being affected (for good and bad) by our decisions. And as a woman in national security and the mother of two young children, I used stories to make bearable the tensions inherent in balancing a demanding career and a fulfilling family life.