The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
briefing. She described the horrific killings that had just broken out in Rwanda—a genocidal murder spree that over one hundred days would result in the deaths of 800,000 people.
When Bushnell left the podium, Michael McCurry, the State Department spokesperson, turned to the next item on the agenda: criticizing foreign governments that were preventing the screening of Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s movie about a German businessman who saved 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.
“This film,” McCurry said, “shows that even in the midst of genocide, one individual can make a difference.” He continued: “The most effective way to avoid the recurrence of genocidal tragedy is to ensure that past acts of genocide are never forgotten.”
What struck me was that neither the US officials speaking nor the journalists listening drew a connection between the slaughter being perpetrated in Rwanda and McCurry’s appeal to act in the face of genocide. This disconnect seemed to illustrate the perplexing coexistence of Americans’ purported deep resolve to prevent genocide, and our recurring struggle to acknowledge when it is happening in our midst.
Like many Americans, I had read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and Elie Wiesel’s Night as a teenager. But it was only after visiting Anne Frank’s home and the Dachau concentration camp with Schu that I focused on the question of what more the United States could have done as Hitler set out to exterminate Europe’s Jews.
Looking for answers, I had turned to well-known books that examined the Roosevelt administration’s response—David Wyman’s landmark The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 and Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy. I admired President Roosevelt, but I could not wrap my mind around why his administration had not admitted more Jewish refugees, or at least bombed the train tracks to the death camps to disrupt Hitler’s extermination networks. These steps would not have ended the Nazi’s efforts to destroy the Jewish people—it would take winning World War II for that—but at the very least the United States could have saved thousands of lives.
My experiences in Bosnia deepened my original interest in the Holocaust.[fn1] While I was in law school, I scoured the weekly campus event bulletins for lectures on the subject. Not long after the Srebrenica revelations, I watched Claude Lanzmann’s devastating nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah for the first time. I roamed the stacks of Harvard’s Widener Library, checking out so many books on Hitler’s crimes that I dedicated my entire bookshelf to the topic. I traveled abroad, visiting the former Treblinka death camp in Poland, as well as Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel. Although at the time I wouldn’t have been able to verbalize the connection, I think I was looking for ways to put what had happened in Bosnia in historical context.
I also took advantage of Harvard’s wide course offerings and signed up for classes across the university, including a seminar on Holocaust-related literature and film and a broader course called “The Use of Force: Political and Moral Criteria,” taught by Professor Stanley Hoffmann, a legendary scholar of international relations, and Father J. Bryan Hehir, a Catholic priest and theologian. After reading the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Michael Walzer, we were asked to apply their ideas to the war in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, and the 1992–1993 US intervention in Somalia.
The course introduced me to a range of questions I hadn’t considered before but that would help shape my thinking for years to come. For example, when is military force justified? How do the moral and religious traditions of nonviolence coexist with the moral imperative not to stand idly by in the face of suffering? How does one (particularly one who lacks sufficient information) measure the risks of action and inaction before deciding what to do? What would it mean if any country could take upon itself the decision to use force without any rules? Who should write these rules?
For the first time, a question that I had initially seen in fairly black-and-white terms—should the United States intervene militarily to stop atrocities in Bosnia?—took on a much more complex texture. I also began to interrogate the stark, simple power of the slogan “Never again.”
My thinking was powerfully influenced by Philip Gourevitch, an American writer who had traveled to Rwanda in 1995 and then published a series of haunting articles on the genocide in The New Yorker.[5] Gourevitch’s first article about Rwanda, which I read during the Hoffmann–Hehir course, began, unforgettably:
Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-tech—performed largely by machete—it was carried out at dazzling speed … the bloodletting in the former Yugoslavia measures up as little more than a neighborhood riot. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust.
It was impossible for me to comprehend that the pace of killing in Rwanda was faster than Hitler’s mechanized annihilation of the Jews. Nor could I fathom that the Bosnia atrocities so seared into my consciousness could have constituted “little more than a neighborhood riot” in comparison.
I had a pretty clear recollection of being in Sarajevo in April and May of 1994, hearing about massacres in Rwanda, and assuming—just as many were doing at the time about Bosnia—that they were part of a long cycle of recurring “tribal” violence. Only when I read Gourevitch’s work did I begin to appreciate the top-down, organized nature of the killings.
I was struck that, fifty years after the Holocaust, the world had stood by during both the Bosnian and the Rwandan genocides.
I decided to write a paper for the Use of Force class that would allow me to look at these and prior cases of genocide—such as the Armenian genocide, Pol Pot’s slaughter in Cambodia, and Saddam Hussein’s campaign to destroy the Kurds of Northern Iraq.
In the course of my research, I discovered a gap that surprised me. The books written by journalists and academics covered the atrocities, but generally did not investigate what US policymakers themselves were thinking when they responded to these genocides. American decisions and nondecisions seemed to have gone largely unanalyzed. The reference books I had sought for my research simply did not exist.
By the time I turned in my paper, in January of 1997, it had swelled from the required twenty pages to more than seventy. Yet I felt that I was barely scratching the surface. I had done little more than sketch, in the most general terms, the US government’s responses to genocide in the twentieth century. I did not delve deeply into the question of why—despite rarely doing much—Americans continued so buoyantly to embrace the pledge of “never again.” When my professors praised the paper for introducing them to a tension they had not considered before, I wondered if maybe I should try to expand the paper into a monograph or short book.
WHEN I DISCUSSED with a law school friend the pattern of nonresponses I had discovered, he said, “I’m surprised at your surprise.” And looking back, it is clear—maybe because I carried an immigrant’s optimism—that an unmistakable innocence or credulousness helped fuel my inquiry. It was as if I had believed our resolve and then felt almost personally betrayed when I saw the promise being broken.
Regardless of whether the feeling I had was as naive as it seemed to some, the fact that “never again” still carried such force in our culture suggested I was not alone. This contradiction intrigued me. Unlike the way I felt toward my assignments in core law school courses, I was overcome with a seemingly inexhaustible need to learn everything I could about my new subject.
Because I had developed the instincts of a reporter, I was determined to gain an understanding of past events by talking directly to US government officials. I made a list of dozens of former policymakers, and started reaching out to them individually to ask about how they had experienced events in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, and Rwanda from inside the government bureaucracy. Remarkably, very few former officials refused to talk to me, and most provided me with the names of other people whom they urged me to contact. I knew how differently people often remembered the