Samantha Power.Photo: Stephen Kelleghan
AsJoe Bidensettles into the White House for the second time, a familiar freckled face is planning to join him in Washington, D.C.
Power, 50, has the resume for the work: A Pulitzer Prize-winning human rights activist and writer, she was involved in the U.S. response to the Ebola outbreak and the Syrian civil war.
Diplomacy afterDonald Trumpis another kind of challenge, given how the former president focused on upending traditional alliances he argued did not best serve America — while affronting many of those same countries. Biden campaigned in part on restoring those international relationships.
Speaking to PEOPLE in December weeks before she was named as Biden’s pick at USAID, Power, an Irish transplant, said she was excited about the prospect of working with him.
“As an immigrant to this country, when the president calls, yours is not to question why, as the old poem goes … it says ‘do or die,’ but in this instance, yours is to serve,” she said then. “We’re in a period of national and international emergency, so to have the chance to give back again, I would absolutely answer the call.”
Power’s memoir,The Education of an Idealist(recently released in paperback), traces her journey from the streets of Dublin to the White House Situation Room. It’s a story of lessons learned, both easy and hard.
Power’s mother, Vera, decided to immigrate from their native Ireland to the U.S. with Samantha and her brother, Stephen, after a bitter divorce from their father, Jim. Power was 9 years old.
Her parents — and “the diversity of humanity that came through the door of the pub” where she was often with her dad — influenced her worldview and the moral conscience Power carried with her into the White House, she says.
After moving to America, she slowly grew apart from her father, who battled alcoholism for years. He died when she was 14. Power says the loss was “excruciating” and even still she feels the touch of those twin experiences: “being an immigrant and feeling a sense of guilt on my part not to have been able to do more for my dad.”
WritingThe Education of an Idealist, however, led to new discoveries about her dad and allowed Power and her mom to talk through some painful family history, she says. As she was researching for the book, Power discovered her father was found dead lying on her childhood bed.
“It’s like stirring up a hornet’s nest,” she says. “You may get stung, but the hornets will go away. And I think in [writing the book], all of us feel not necessarily closure, because I’m not sure that ever really comes, but now it’s all out there.”
Power credits mom Vera, a kidney doctor, with teaching her the importance of being an empathetic listener. “She’d always bring home the stories of her patients, and she’d describe them in ways that made them feel that they were sitting at our dinner tables,” Power says. “The quality of attention she gives everyone is what makes her an incredible doctor, and that kind of empathy is really uncommon.”
A former war correspondent who reported from the frontlines of far-flung places like Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda, Power — who became an American citizen at 23 — joined President Obama on the campaign trail, serving for four years as a human rights adviser.
In 2013, she became the youngest American to assume the role of the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
Working for Obama drastically changed the course of her personal life, too: She met her husband, Cass Sunstein, while working on the campaign and she gave birth to their children, son Declan and daughter Rían, during Obama’s first term in the White House.
There were bumps. Power found herself in the spotlight — and then sidelined from the Obama team — for a time during the 2008 campaign when, during an interview withThe Scotsman(a popular newspaper in Scotland), she took a call from a fellow Obama aide. Within earshot of the reporter, she called his primary challengerHillary Clintona “monster.”
The paper printed her remark and controversy ensued.
She continues: “I’m embarrassed and ashamed of it, still. But the reason I write about it in my book is that it led to an important realization for me: investing relationships with people who are going to be with you when you fall, not who’s with you just when you’re on top of the world. Cass, who I had just started dating, my friends and my family were so good to me, even though I’d just done something that I thought was so terrible.”
Indeed, that blunder did have a silver lining, with time. She jokes: “Out of that experience, I ended up with a husband and two children. So the greatest parts of my life are rooted in that great professional implosion.”
In her PEOPLE interview in December, before her next role was officially announced, Power nonetheless looked ahead, drawing on her years in international relations.
She said then that political polarization worried her “more than anything.”
“It’s our biggest national security liability and vulnerability. It’s why, for example, Russia is able to interfere in our elections,” she said. “But also, can we come together on anything? On infrastructure, on jobs, on COVID-19?”
That division damages our ability to lead abroad, Power says.
She continues: “When you don’t [respect those agreements], it makes it harder for you and for those who come after you to negotiate agreements, because other countries are like, ‘Why should we take the political risk of doing this when someone else can come along and rip it up?’ "
“It’s a sign of people saying, ‘If there’s going to be change in my life or my community or my country, we’re going to have to claim it, enough waiting on the government,” she says. “There’s a real opportunity in 2021 to speak to these aspirations people have for accountable governance, and for this next administration to also say, ‘We’re back world! Let’s roll our sleeves up and work together on problems that cross borders.’ "
source: people.com
