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I had heard the saying “You don’t read a book; a book reads you,” but the truth of these words did not sink in until I traveled the country and began meeting people who had read “A Problem from Hell.”
Many had marked it up with yellow highlighters or plastered it with Post-it Notes for quick access to the parts they found most important. Activists told me they were reading the book to think through how they could better influence Washington decision-makers on a host of different issues. Synagogue congregations grappled with the book’s invocation of the false promise of “never again.”
People who hadn’t followed the Rwandan genocide when it happened said to me, with great earnestness, “I should have at least called my congressman.” The book had quoted Colorado congresswoman Pat Schroeder describing the reaction to the Rwandan genocide in her district. “There are some groups terribly concerned about the gorillas,” she had said in 1994, noting that a Colorado research organization studied Rwanda’s endangered gorillas. “But—it sounds terrible—people just don’t know what can be done about the people.” The paucity of domestic political awareness and pressure were key reasons even low-cost US policies went untried.
The reaction I least anticipated came from those who had no connection to the specific countries I wrote about, but who were drawn to questions about the nature of individual responsibility in the face of injustice. I found that readers from all walks of life identified with the quests of Lemkin, Proxmire, Galbraith, and the officials who resigned from the State Department. College professors assigned excerpts in broad survey courses on leadership and ethics. I received numerous emails and letters from people who said that these stories had inspired them to see how to be more active in social causes.
Somewhere along the way, I began describing the book’s protagonists—those who tried to prevent or otherwise “stand up” against genocide—as “upstanders,” contrasting them with bystanders. I noted that very few of us were likely to find ourselves the victims or perpetrators of genocide. But every day, almost all of us find ourselves weighing whether we can or should do something to help others. We decide, on issues large and small, whether we will be bystanders or upstanders.
Thanks initially to teachers who began to use the idea of upstanders to engage their students, the term started to catch on. Many years later, when I was UN ambassador, I was stunned—and profoundly gratified—to be informed by a reporter that the Oxford English Dictionary had added the term upstander, which it wrote was “coined in 2002 by the Irish-American diplomat Samantha Power.” Of course, it proved far easier to coin the term than to know exactly how to be an upstander in my own life.
Beyond the grassroots interest that developed around the book’s themes, real-world events expanded its audience. I was editing the page proofs six months before publication when al-Qaeda terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001. These attacks, and the political reorientation they caused, changed the entire context in which most Americans thought about US foreign policy. The sense of isolation from global threats that the United States had enjoyed for so long had been shattered, and people began to discuss America’s responsibilities around the world in new ways.
The devastation of September 11th was followed by an intensifying domestic debate over whether the United States should go to war with Iraq. Although the crux of President George W. Bush’s argument for removing Saddam Hussein from power was the national security threat posed by his alleged weapons of mass destruction, Bush and others in his administration often seized upon the fact that Saddam had “gassed his own people” as proof of the Iraqi regime’s dangerous tendencies.
Articles assessing the merits of an invasion in the New York Times and The New Yorker cited “A Problem from Hell” in their descriptions of the Iraqi campaign of genocide against the Kurds. I was uncomfortable seeing my writing about atrocities used in a way that might help justify a war. In my interviews, I tried to remind people what I had actually written.
I had made several arguments. First, I noted that when crafting foreign policy, US officials naturally think through the possible economic and security consequences of their choices, but they needed to do far more to factor the human consequences into their deliberations as well.
Second, I emphasized that the United States has a large toolbox when it comes to preventing genocide. I described the many options short of military engagement at the disposal of a powerful country like the United States: public and private diplomacy, public shaming, negotiations, deploying intelligence and technical resources, international peacekeeping, arms embargoes, asset freezes, and more. Although I sometimes heard people describe the book as an extended argument for US military action in response to mass atrocities, I had actually written that the United States “should not frame its policy options in terms of doing nothing or unilaterally sending in the Marines.”
As the New York Times noted a month before the invasion of Iraq, “Ms. Power bridles at critics who interpret the book as a simplistic call for military intervention in cases of humanitarian crises. Her point, she said, is not that the United States failed to intervene in Cambodia, Iraq or Rwanda, but that it failed to do anything at all.”
While Saddam was a merciless dictator, I did not see that as sufficient reason to go to war. I believed that neither the Kurds nor the American people faced an imminent threat of the kind that justified the use of force. Some of our closest allies opposed the war, and I was also concerned about the repercussions of going it alone. These countries would hardly be eager to help rebuild Iraq in the aftermath of a US invasion.
Although I abhorred the prospect of Saddam remaining in power, I ended up speaking out against the Iraq War on a number of occasions. As I told Newsweek in early March of 2003, roughly two weeks before the war began, “[The invasion] will ratify and fuel the bubbling resentment against the U.S., and this anti-Americanism is the sea in which terrorists thrive.”
Yet the coincidence of publishing the book in relative proximity to the start of the war made “A Problem from Hell” liable to misinterpretation. A year after the war began, I again registered my frustration in an interview with the Financial Times, remarking, “The book is the furthest thing from a plea for American military intervention … [or] for unilateral military intervention on a whim or on a subjective set of excuses and justifications.” To this day, however, I am still approached by people who ask how I could have supported the Iraq War.
A MONTH AFTER THE US INVASION, my publisher called and informed me that “A Problem from Hell” had won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.
“Are you sure?” I said, my knees buckling beneath me.
I left a message for Mum to call me back and managed to reach Eddie. My voice caught as I said softly, “I just won the Pulitzer Prize.” Eddie had fostered my love of history. He had read and edited easily a dozen drafts of the lengthy book. After its publication, he had traipsed across New York City each week, stopping at various Barnes & Noble stores to move copies from the less visible history section to the displays at the front of the store, hustling to his next location whenever he was caught by a store clerk.
“What?” he said. When I repeated my news, he said, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” Then, clearly in a state of shock, he asked, “For what?”
“What the hell do you think?” I asked, laughing. He told me to call the publisher back: “They need to get the Pulitzer sticker on the paperback!” he exclaimed.
When Mum called from the hospital a few minutes later, I paused before picking up, just to prolong the moment. When I told her the news, she said, “Ahhh, isn’t that just marvelous, Sam. Marvelous. And to think, you were having such a hard time with that bloody article …”
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