The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
“Do you know what that goddamned Fred Cuny is doing?”—but the US-led operation helped save some 400,000 people. From then on, Mort provided Fred with credibility among Washington decision-makers, while Fred inspired Mort with his resourcefulness and daring.
I had the good fortune to get to know both men when, as a recent college graduate, I took up an internship at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington policy institute. I had heard about Carnegie from a friend at Yale, and I had applied because several of the interns served as editorial assistants with Foreign Policy, the Carnegie Endowment’s quarterly journal. This seemed the perfect way to combine my experience in a different kind of journalism (sports) with my burgeoning interest in foreign policy. I could not think of a more perfect first job out of college.
I had pulled my grades up at Yale and written a senior essay on foreign policy that the history department gave an award. I wrote essays for the application and was invited for an interview with one of Carnegie’s senior associates. A few weeks later, I was told I was one of ten graduating seniors who had been admitted to the program, and I had been assigned to Foreign Policy. I was thrilled.
Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, the head of the program called to tell me that the president of the Carnegie Endowment, Mort Abramowitz, had reassigned me to his office. Imagining an administrative internship from which I would learn little, I pleaded with the program head to revert to the original plan. She was firm. “Samantha,” she said in a thick Southern accent, “you can’t turn down the president.” What felt like an unlucky turn of fate would end up being a tremendous stroke of fortune.
In December of 1992, six months after graduating from college, I moved to Washington, DC, transferring my dorm room furnishings to a studio apartment near Dupont Circle. I had long ago framed the Time magazine “Tank Man” cover, and I now placed it on my book shelf, along with photos of Mum, Eddie, Stephen, Bam Bam, and my now ex-boyfriend Schu.
Mort was the first person I came to know well who had helped make foreign policy at such rarified levels, and over time he would drill into me a simple truth: governments can either do harm or do good. “What we do,” he would say, “depends on one thing: the people.” Institutions, big and small, were made up of people. People had values, and people made choices.
I would learn later that Mort was famous in the diplomatic corps for eschewing hierarchy and tracking down the best-informed officials in his embassies, irrespective of their rank. He also took care of “his people”—making phone calls on behalf of junior officials whose work he admired. But none of this was apparent to me in the first couple of months I served as his intern. When I offered edits to drafts of his speeches and op-eds, he would say, “Very helpful, Susan,” and then incorporate almost none of what I had proposed.
My tasks at the outset were as administrative as I had feared: making sure Carnegie’s public materials did not have typos and helping seat the VIP guests who attended Carnegie events—from former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and legendary journalist Bob Woodward to Tom Lantos, a human rights champion who was the only Holocaust survivor in Congress. Although I didn’t yet work closely with my boss, people whose names I had underlined in the newspaper during college were suddenly handing me their coats—and occasionally even looking me in the eye.
I was especially intrigued by Carnegie visitor Jeane Kirkpatrick, President Ronald Reagan’s first UN ambassador, and the first woman in the United States ever to hold a national security cabinet position. Strangely, Kirkpatrick had first come to my attention when I was a child in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s and had somehow noticed a photo of President Reagan’s senior team in Eddie’s copy of the New York Times. Amid all the suits, the diminutive Kirkpatrick stood beaming at the center of the shot—the only woman among Reagan, Vice President Bush, and the seventeen other members of the cabinet. I had been far too young to follow her career at the UN, but the moment I glimpsed her, now a private citizen, at Carnegie, I immediately flashed back to the picture I had seen more than a decade earlier.
During Kirkpatrick’s visits, she would offer acerbic commentary on the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, who had just taken office. As I watched from the back of the room, I was struck by her bluntness, which seemed to puncture the otherwise clubby, polite atmosphere. Men usually dominated the proceedings, but she was a notable exception.
Mort seemed to respect people like Kirkpatrick who had served in government and could offer informed views. But he was impatient with the “blowhards” who circulated in the think-tank world. “These people speak so much,” Mort said about the proliferation of self-styled experts in Washington, “and yet they manage to say so little.”
He was even harder on himself. After he had chaired a meeting or published an op-ed that I found persuasive, I sometimes made the mistake of complimenting him. “What a load of horseshit,” he would respond. I was never sure if this referred to his work or my praise. When I once thanked him for publicly challenging a visiting head of state, Mort looked at me blankly and said, “You do know I don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, don’t you?” His humility often manifested itself as self-criticism, which seemed an extremely uncommon—but to me a very appealing—trait for a person so respected in Washington.
Mort’s standoffishness did not deter me, and his cutting commentary was familiar from years of watching my dad in action at Hartigan’s. But I wondered whether I had what it took to win his confidence. I saw in him someone who could help teach me how the world really worked. He seemed to be guided by only one criteria, the question he would ask every time I approached him with an idea (as I often would in the coming decades): “Will it do any good?”
I noticed that Mort always rearranged his schedule to see Fred when he was in town. “He is a practical man,” Mort said of the Texan. “He doesn’t just tell us ‘something must be done.’ He tells us what should be done and how we should do it. I’ve never known anybody like him.”
Fred was useful. And Mort valued usefulness.
IN EARLY 1993, both men were working to improve conditions in Bosnia, where a savage war had begun the previous April.
The core of the conflict arose from the collapse of Yugoslavia, whose six republics each contained a range of ethnicities and religions: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, ethnic Albanians, Macedonians, Bosnian Muslims, and others. Tito, who had ruled the country for decades, had tried to forge a single Southern Slavic identity among the people and had stymied ethnic and religious expressions of difference.[fn2] After Tito’s death in 1980, however, nationalism—of the kind Schu and I had witnessed on our trip to Croatia—had surged among the country’s various ethnicities. After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union itself headed toward collapse, four of the six Yugoslav republics took steps to secede.
While the eventual outbreak of fighting had many causes, Serbian president Slobodan Milošević bore the greatest responsibility. As Yugoslavia’s largest single nationality, Serbs had enjoyed plum jobs and privileges. But as the Croatian and Slovene governments moved toward declaring independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, Milošević used state media to whip up fear over what he portrayed as the coming existential struggle.[fn3] If Serbs were trapped as ethnic minorities in newly independent Croatia or Bosnia, he warned, they would become second-class citizens.
In 1989, Milošević had notoriously declared “No one will ever dare beat you again!” to a crowd of Serbs in the predominantly ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo, shrewdly tapping into the once-dominant group’s fear that they would become the losers if people of other ethnicities gained more power. Using tactics common to strongmen past and present, Milošević told the Serbs that their “enemies outside the country are plotting against [them], along with those inside the country.” He capitalized on his followers’ nervousness about their place in a rapidly changing world.
In 1992, Bosnia was the most ethnically mixed of all of Yugoslavia’s republics. After following Slovenia and Croatia in declaring independence, it descended into the deadliest and most gruesome conflict in Europe since World War II. Milošević funneled soldiers and