The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
Initially, I wore a camouflaged vest and helmet given to me by George Kenney, the first of the US officials to resign from the State Department to protest the government’s Bosnia policy. I thought it would protect me from stray bullets and shrapnel, but when I saw what the battle-hardened journalists wore, I realized that Kenney’s vest lacked the lifesaving ceramic plates of a standard flak jacket. It would be largely useless in the face of gun- or mortar fire.
Luckily, my colleagues were so focused on gathering material for their own stories that, at first, they paid me little mind. By the time they began teasing me for the goofiness of my flimsy vest and the inappropriateness of my Nine West boots (no match for this war zone’s winter mud), I blushed more with a sense of belonging than with shame. I felt exhilarated by the camaraderie; the press corps offered a solidarity I had felt before only on my sports teams. This was a club to which I very much wanted to belong.
Much of my life over the nearly two years I spent in the Balkans would entail pitching story ideas to editors in major American cities like Boston, Washington, and San Francisco. I would end up with more than a dozen different employers, from the wire service UPI to regional newspapers around the United States like the Dallas Morning News and the Baltimore Sun. But my core relationships were with the Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report, and later, The Economist, The New Republic, and the Washington Post. Whenever I had a piece published, the newspaper or magazine kindly cut out the clipping and mailed it to Mum and Eddie’s Brooklyn home, my only American address. Once I started taking frequent trips from relatively peaceful Croatia into Bosnia, Eddie dedicated himself to intercepting mail that included articles with a Bosnian dateline so that Mum would not realize my location.
Mort had convinced me that the only way President Clinton would intervene to break the siege of Sarajevo was if he felt domestic pressure to do so. As a journalist, therefore, I believed I had a critical role to play. I wanted not only to inform members of Congress and other decision-makers, but to try to make everyday readers care about what was happening to people thousands of miles away.
Many journalists in Bosnia brought a similar focus to their work. High-minded though it sounds, we wanted our articles to matter and our governments’ actions to change. I was aware that this aspiration was more reminiscent of an editorial writer’s ambition than that of a traditional reporter, whose job was to document what she saw. But when I wrote an article—no matter how obscure the publication where it appeared—I hoped President Clinton would see it. I wanted him to do more than he was doing to help the people I was meeting, most of whom were desperate and believed that only the United States could save them.
When I reported my heart out and my editors weren’t interested, I was crushed. I blamed myself for not figuring out how to bridge the distance. The editors did their best to remind me of the US context so I could keep my readers foremost in my mind. They drilled into my head one of the basic truisms of reporting: if I did not make the stakes of the issue clear and compelling, most people would not read past the first paragraph.
While I despised trying to “sell” the suffering around me, the experience helped refine—in a way that would prove valuable later on—my own sense of what animated Americans or, alternatively, what was likely to cause their eyes to glaze over. As the months passed and I became a more capable reporter, I went back and forth about whether I should pursue journalism as a permanent career. Since nothing we were writing had thus far managed to sway Western decision-makers, I wondered if I could find a different path that was less about describing events and more about directly trying to shape them. Once, when I reported on a diplomatic gathering that included European foreign ministers and Secretary of State Warren Christopher, I noted in my journal: “I would like to be one of them.” On another occasion, after covering a massacre of children who were struck by a shell while jumping rope in a Sarajevo playground, I wrote to myself that I wanted to “be on the other side of the microphone,” in a position to make or change US policy.
I TOOK A SHORT TRIP back to Washington in September of 1994. I was twenty-three years old and had lived in the former Yugoslavia for less than ten months. Encouraged by Mort, who often seemed blind to hierarchy and propriety, I contacted two people that I still cannot believe I had the gumption to engage.
First, I called Strobe Talbott at his home. Strobe was a longtime Time magazine correspondent who had become Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration—the second in line at the State Department. I had his number only because I had met him through Mort before he entered government. The conversation was then—and remains now—cringeworthy in the extreme:
“Hello, Strobe, you may not remember me. This is Samantha Power.”
“Yes, of course, how are you?” he said warmly.
“I’m good, but I actually spent the last year in Bosnia, and I was wondering if you’d like to have a chat.”
There was a long pause.
“I suppose you’d like to offer recommendations,” he said dryly, filling the silence.
“I may be presumptuous enough to phone you at home at nine o’clock at night, but I’m not so presumptuous to think I could make informed recommendations. I just know what I see … but it might be useful to meet,” I offered.
“I would like to, but I’m kind of busy with Haiti right now,” Strobe replied.
I put my face in my hands and mouthed to myself, “Haiti! Of course he’s busy with Haiti!!” The newspapers were then filled with reports that Clinton’s national security team was meeting around the clock, preparing a large military deployment to help restore the country’s democratically elected president to power.
Strobe hurried off the call. But I was not finished making a fool of myself on my homecoming visit.
Thanks again to an introduction from Mort, I met the next day with Steve Rosenfeld in his office at the Washington Post, where he was the editorial page editor. He understandably assumed I was interested in career advice. “So you want to be a journalist?” he asked. “No,” I answered. “Or maybe,” I said, not wanting to offend him. I shifted the topic. “I hear you are sort of a dove on Bosnia,” I began.
As Rosenfeld looked over my shoulder at CNN’s Haiti coverage on a nearby television, I tried to make a persuasive case for why he should write editorials urging Clinton to do more to stop the Bosnian atrocities. He was surprisingly polite, but also firm that the United States should stay out of the conflict.
After half an hour, when he tried to end our meeting and get back to work, I persisted.
“I know you have to go,” I said. “Just two or three last points, if I may.” Fifteen minutes later, I was still talking.
While I was becoming a decent reporter, I was a woefully ineffective advocate.
IN 1994 AND 1995, I traveled regularly to Sarajevo. Doing so was to be transported into another galaxy: the dystopian landscape was burned and broken, yet people went on living as if no longer noticing the plastic sheeting on their windows or the charred cars turned into barriers to shield them as they crossed the road. Parts of the city felt instantly familiar—Mum and I had watched the 1984 Winter Olympics together in Atlanta, cheering for “Wild Bill” Johnson, the daring American skier, as he captured his gold racing down hills that were now teeming with Serb heavy weapons. Scott Hamilton had skated to gold in the Zetra Stadium, which was now destroyed and surrounded by graves.
Only once inside the city could I feel how close the attacking Serbs were, and how claustrophobic the trapped inhabitants must have felt. The mountains seemed to grow out of the river that split the city in half. By holding the high ground, the Bosnian Serb Army was able to choose its targets at will. I found it hard to believe that men who called themselves soldiers were setting their rifle sights on women carrying their water jugs home. But by the time the siege was finally brought to an end, the Bosnian Serb militants would end up killing some 10,000 people in the city.
By 1994, the cemeteries in Sarajevo had already been so overwhelmed that the town’s biggest parks and football fields had