The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
the background. I thought I recognized the noise, but could not quite believe it, until I heard it again.
“What’s that sound?” I asked.
The therapist didn’t answer.
“Are you at a fucking ATM?” I asked, indignantly.
From the moment he admitted that he was, in fact, multitasking at the bank, I renounced therapy and resolved that I would “figure myself out” after I finished my book. Though I took offense at the time, the therapist was clearly mirroring my own ambivalence toward probing too deeply.
THE BOOK PROJECT DRAGGED ON. I wondered if I would ever feel it was finished. The combination of the heavy subject matter and my endless solitude might have caused me to wallow. However, thanks to the voluminous Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the National Security Archive, the Washington-based NGO where I had interned while in college, I was able to draw upon revealing, declassified documents that detailed what had been happening behind closed doors in the US government as genocide occurred. I felt privileged to be able to highlight the vivid—at times jaw-dropping—government paper trail on Iraq, Rwanda, and Bosnia.
Every time I saw a declassified cable that demonstrated the cold logic of US decision-making, a swirl of conflicting emotions arose inside me. I was simultaneously horrified and invigorated by the new understanding I got into how policymakers rationalized their decisions in real time. The answer to the puzzle of how we pledged “never again” and then looked away from genocide seemed enshrined in these sterile records.
Someone in the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs regional bureau had written about Iraq: “Human rights and chemical weapons use aside, in many respects our political and economic interests run parallel with those of Iraq” [italics mine]. On Rwanda, a discussion paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense warned against characterizing the mass murder as “genocide,” advising, “Be careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday—Genocide finding could commit [the US government] to actually ‘do something.’ ”
Yet for every stomach-churning cable I processed from the Archive’s files, I would come across an American who had risked his career—or, occasionally, his life—to lobby for action. Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the US Ambassador in Constantinople during the Armenian genocide, had sent blistering cables back to Washington, begging his superiors to do more to respond to the slaughter. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who fled to the United States in 1941, had invented the word genocide, convincing himself that if such a crime had been understood and outlawed earlier, the world might have prevented the Holocaust—which killed his parents and forty-seven other family members. William Proxmire, an idiosyncratic senator from Wisconsin, stood on the floor of the US Senate 3,211 times—over a span of nineteen years—appealing to successive presidents and congresses to ratify the UN Genocide Convention, which Lemkin had helped draft.
Even stories I thought I knew gained texture when I delved deeper. I had met Peter Galbraith for the first time in Croatia, where he was US ambassador. But before that, in the 1980s, he had been a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Upon hearing reports that Saddam Hussein (then a recipient of US aid) had gassed Iraqi Kurds, Galbraith bravely traveled into Northern Iraq to collect survivor testimonies, hoping to use what he found as evidence to convince Congress to suspend assistance to the Iraqi government.
The first person to resign from the State Department to protest US inaction in the face of Serb atrocities was George Kenney, who had given me his flak jacket and helmet before I left for Bosnia. But until I talked to the former US officials who resigned, I didn’t appreciate just how wrenching they had found leaving their dream jobs. The emotional scars of what they had seen—and what their government had not initially wished to confront—were still evident years later. I believed their actions were noble, but they were focused only on their impact, which they deemed marginal.
After five long years of obsessive sleuthing and more than three hundred interviews, I delivered what I felt was a solid draft of the book. However, I soon learned that my publisher, Random House, wanted nothing to do with it.
My original editor had left the company, so the book (actually a thick pile of paper held together with a rubber band) was up for grabs. The manuscript had three strikes against it: it had no champion at the publishing house, it was six hundred pages long, and it dealt with the gloomy topic of genocide. The book passed from one person to the next until Random House informed my stalwart agent Sarah that it would be a good idea to take the book elsewhere.
Sarah shopped the manuscript to a vast array of New York publishing houses, only to receive a stream of rejections that I took very hard. Over the span of three months, several times a week, I would rush to answer the phone every time Sarah’s New York number lit up my caller ID. But the responses were all the same: Houghton Mifflin? “Pass,” Sarah said. Picador? “Pass.” Farrar, Straus? “Pass.” Simon & Schuster? “I’m so sorry,” Sarah said, “also not interested.” This rejection went on and on.
I despaired at the idea that a book on which I had labored for half a decade might never see the light of day.
At one point, I received word that my original editor had decided to return to Random House. He telephoned me and exclaimed, “I want you back!” I was beyond thrilled. But a few weeks later, after reviewing the book, he changed his mind. “I’m sorry,” he informed me. “The book has been passed over by so many people here that there is just no enthusiasm for it. And if we publish it, we will not do your work justice.”
I told him that, if his concern was his colleagues and their enthusiasm, I would find a way to promote the book myself. I just needed them to put a few copies in print. “I will do the rest,” I said. “I’m sorry,” he answered. “I can’t.” When I hung up, I knew he meant “I won’t.”
As always, Jonathan Moore brought me perspective, telling me that I had been delusional to think that it would be easy to publish such a book. “The miracle is that you ever had a publisher!” he said cheerfully. “And because you thought you actually had one, you wrote the book!”
I had one hope left. I had written for The New Republic when I lived in the former Yugoslavia, and Marty Peretz, the magazine’s owner, also oversaw its small book publishing subsidiary. Marty had read my law school paper several years before and had been unhappy with me when I signed with Random House instead of New Republic Books. I telephoned him at his home and nervously explained that the book he had last seen in its infancy had “become available again.”
Marty took a long pause, but then said that he would not hold my past lapse in judgment against me. He would be “delighted” to publish the book.
Secretary of State Christopher had once tried to explain the Clinton administration’s reluctance to do more to prevent atrocities in Bosnia by claiming that the “hatred” among the warring groups was “centuries old” and by saying memorably, “That really is a problem from hell.” This so aptly reflected the mind-set of many senior US policymakers that I chose to title the book “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide.
When it finally hit stores in March of 2002, I often recounted to audiences all the rejections it received. It wasn’t that I felt sorry for myself. Quite the contrary. I felt immensely blessed that the book found a home, which so many authors never managed.
I simply felt it was essential to convey (particularly to young people) that just because someone attains a measure of success does not mean that they were destined to do so. I had experienced bouts of hopelessness in which I wondered whether I was crazy to believe anyone would ever read what I was writing. I wanted to stress that the path would almost always be winding, but that one had to forge ahead and act as if one had faith things would work out. One could not give up in the face of rejection. And undignified though it felt, one had to fiercely advocate on one’s own behalf.
What I did not know then was how consequential my refusal to take no for an answer—and Marty’s decision to take a chance on me—would prove for my life’s trajectory.