The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
of my closest high school friends were gay. From today’s more progressive vantage point, it is hard to convey just how unusual these revelations seemed at the time—and how brave my friends were. I saw how each of them agonized as they tried to figure out how to tell their family members and classmates; and I saw the excitement and heartbreak of their crushes and romantic foibles as they lived them, just as they witnessed and coached me through my own.
These early exposures didn’t dim my wonderment at the United States, but they opened my eyes to my new country’s struggle to manage difference.
WHATEVER THE CLASHES OF IDENTITY going on around me, I generally did what my life had taught me to do up to that point: I rolled with events and did my best to adapt. I was a conscientious student, doing homework on time and performing reasonably well on tests. I knew that getting into a top-tier university would require high standardized test scores, so I threw myself into expanding my vocabulary, preparing flash cards with unfamiliar “SAT words,” and eventually getting a score high enough to give me a chance in selective admissions processes. Although I later developed into a strong student, my drive was then more evident when playing sports. Lakeside was an athletic powerhouse, sending prospects to Division I college teams and occasionally even to the pros. As the starting shooting guard on the basketball team, I spent entire afternoons and weekends shooting thousands of baskets.
I juggled my immersion in school and sports with part-time jobs, starting at the fast-food chain Del Taco, followed by stints at Sizzler and Frëshens yogurt. Lakeside also had an avid party scene. A few basketball teammates introduced me to 7-Eleven Big Gulps of Fanta soda spiked with vodka, which I consumed with enthusiasm, although I let nothing jeopardize my game-time performance.
Luckily, my high school antics never got me into any lasting trouble. Mum, however, incessantly reminded Stephen and me that alcoholism was “in our genes.” And although I never came close to developing a drinking problem, my dad’s excessive consumption had so warped my frame of reference that I viewed myself as a teetotaler by comparison.
What it meant to be an alcoholic was also no longer solely defined by my father’s destructive habit. Eddie, too, was afflicted with the “good man’s curse.” Back in Pittsburgh, my mother had tried to rationalize his drinking as being very different from my father’s. “He just has pathetically low tolerance,” she would say. While my dad had drunk far larger quantities, Eddie’s inebriation was more demonstrative. He loudly recited Irish poetry and sometimes passed out after just a couple glasses of wine (“Oh no,” my mother would mutter, “the head is going down!”). The worst smell of my childhood—which to this day I associate with the pungency of my disappointment at his relapses—was Eddie’s breath on nights when he tried to cover up the odor of spirits with Listerine.
My dad never really admitted he had a problem, but Eddie recognized his. He made repeated efforts to stop drinking. For years, he climbed on and off the proverbial wagon. After my dad’s death, and because of Eddie’s challenges in staying sober during those years, I became hawkishly vigilant for signs that “the drink” might be acquiring power over me too.
Although Stephen had spent only five years in Dublin, he had inherited many of our dad’s traits and habits. He was growing up to be strikingly handsome, with ocean-blue eyes, dark hair, a lanky, athletic build, and a wide—and selective—smile that melted hearts. In 1988, after I graduated from high school, Mum and Eddie moved with my brother to Brooklyn, where they had found new jobs. There, Stephen would occasionally get stopped on the street and asked whether he had considered modeling.
Although Stephen did not start drinking or using drugs until after I left for college, he began to withdraw from Mum and me while I was still at Lakeside. If I was a joiner, like my mother, embracing new challenges and people, Stephen had just two great passions: dogs, which he said were more reliable than people, and fishing, which he did for hours by himself. He had long ago declared to me, “I’m not like you,” and, despite his probing mind, never studied much in school. Despite this, he cheered me at my basketball games and never seemed to resent Mum’s and Eddie’s celebration of my academic successes.
After basketball practice one day during my senior year, I arrived home to find Stephen, then thirteen, beaming at our dining room table. He had laid out the half dozen response letters from the colleges to which I had applied. I could see in an instant that the letters from Stanford and Princeton were thin, but I was focused on the much thicker, ivory envelope with the navy “Y” and a New Haven return address. I had unexpectedly gotten into Yale University, a dream destination. “Congrats, sis!” Stephen said, grinning, as I jumped up and down and stole a rare, if awkward, hug.
Despite coming at a heavy cost, Mum’s decision to move to America had opened up a whole new world for me. I knew that attending Yale would do the same. But almost as soon as I ripped open the envelope and confirmed my acceptance, I began to imagine all that could go wrong. While I could adapt to any new environment, I did so with the latent conviction that nothing great could last.
During the summer of 1989, I came home to Atlanta after my freshman year at Yale to intern in our local CBS affiliate’s sports department. After covering women’s basketball and volleyball for the college newspaper, I had decided to pursue a career as a sports journalist.
My print dispatches demonstrated little natural talent. My first published article in the Yale Daily News, appearing in September of 1988, had begun: “Volleyballs aren’t the only things high up in the air this week for the women’s volleyball team; so are expectations and spirits.” Another article had described how the campus a cappella group Something Extra had sung the national anthem before that weekend’s Yale–Cornell women’s basketball game. I then proceeded to observe that “the Blue were well aware that it would take ‘something extra,’ or rather, ‘something extra-ordinary’ for them to win.”
Broadcast journalism, I thought, might be a better fit. In the coming years I offered play-by-play and color commentary for the Yale men’s and women’s basketball teams and joined a rotating group of students on a nightly radio talk show called Sports Spotlight.
On June 3rd, I had been instructed by my supervisor at the Atlanta station, WAGA, to “shot-sheet”—or take notes on—a Braves baseball game against the San Francisco Giants. I had to mark down on my clipboard the precise time at which memorable events occurred—a home run, an error, an on-field brawl, a funny dance in the stands—in order to help assemble the sports highlights for the evening news. As I sat inside a glass booth, I was surrounded by other screens showing CBS video feeds from around the world.
On the feed from Beijing, where it was already the early morning of June 4th, I saw a startling scene playing out. Students in Tiananmen Square had been demonstrating for more than a month, urging the ruling Chinese Communist Party to make democratic reforms. The protesters had used Styrofoam and plaster to build a thirty-foot-high statue called the Goddess of Democracy, which bore a close resemblance to the Statue of Liberty. They had lined her up directly opposite the portrait of Mao Tse-tung, making it look as though she was staring down the founder of the repressive Chinese state. But the day I happened to be working in the video booth, the Chinese government was cracking down. I watched as the CBS camera crew on the ground filmed soldiers with assault rifles ripping apart the students’ sanctuaries. As tanks rolled toward Chinese protesters, young people used their bicycles to try to flee the scene and transport the wounded.
In the raw, unfiltered footage playing in front of me—much of which would not be broadcast—I could hear the CBS cameraperson arguing with the authorities as he was jostled. At a certain point, the monitor went black; the feed from China had been terminated. I sat in the