The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
US officials knew about the Holocaust and what they could have done to save more Jews.
Next, Schu and I traveled to Germany, visiting the Dachau concentration camp, where Nazis had killed more than 28,000 Jews and political prisoners. The air around us felt heavy, as though the evil that had made mass murder possible still lurked nearby. Seeing the barracks, the crammed sleeping quarters, and the crematorium reduced us to silence for the first time in our relationship.
Although the museum exhibit at the camp made for an extremely bleak day of sightseeing, we lingered in the section that told the story of Dachau’s liberation by American troops in April of 1945. For all our criticisms of what the United States may have failed to do for European Jews, Schu and I wondered aloud how the modern world would look if President Roosevelt had not finally entered the war.
When we took the train to what was then Czechoslovakia, we happened to arrive just a few days before the country held its first free election. A college classmate connected us to a middle-aged woman named Tatjana who had joined the dissident movement in 1968, after Soviet-led forces crushed the Prague Spring. Tatjana invited us for tea and showed us the trove of opposition leaflets that she had circulated as a member of the underground. Then she brought us to accompany her to the neighborhood polling station. We watched as she asked her young daughter to place her first democratic ballot in the box. Tatjana choked up as she talked about the exhilaration she felt regarding her country’s political future. Again, I was struck by the importance of dignity as a historical force. “What was horrible about the communist rule,” Tatjana told us, “was that the man in front of you ordering you around was very stupid, and you had to listen to him.” Even amid jailings and torture, these smaller humiliations ground people down.
Schu and I then traveled north to Poland, which had experienced its first free election on the same day in June of 1989 as the Chinese crackdown in Tiananmen Square—a coincidence that would cause the landmark Polish vote to go almost unnoticed in the American media (a cold competition among world events that I would learn more about later on). Our most inspiring visit of the summer was to the Gdańsk Shipyard, where, in 1980, Lech Wałęsa had organized workers in a strike that would launch the Solidarity trade union. Solidarity turned into an opposition movement that eventually counted nearly a third of the country’s 35 million people among its members.
Yugoslavia, a country in southeastern Europe bordering the Adriatic Sea, was the one place that Schu and I did not warm to that summer. While we had been blessed to form new friendships in the other countries we visited, in Yugoslavia we struggled to make connections. The trains and buses were crowded and hot, and the Cyrillic alphabets in Serbia and Macedonia made finding our way more difficult. “It just seems there isn’t much laughter here,” I wrote in my journal.
Before we visited, Schu and I had thought of Yugoslavia as a single entity. But in Croatia, one of its six republics, the people we met expressed little allegiance to the confederation. Given that the country’s dictator, Josip Broz Tito, had died a decade before and that communism had now collapsed, it was not clear what or who would unite the country’s diverse inhabitants. “I wonder if the state will have a reason to exist,” I wrote to myself at the time. While fissures were evident even to an ill-informed tourist like me, I could never have imagined that the beach resorts where Schu and I swam would soon be subjected to intense bombardment by the Serb-led remnants of the Yugoslav Army. Indeed, the fall of the Iron Curtain had left us with the impression that the world was on its way to becoming more democratic, humane, and peaceful.
THE TRIP SCHU AND I TOOK to Europe cemented our relationship. But the closer we became, the more I worried about him. In the eight years since my father’s death, I had been trailed by a morbid fear that my loved ones would suddenly die. If Schu was even an hour late returning to our dorm, I was often in a full state of panic by the time he arrived.
I also began to suffer bouts of what Schu called “lungers.” Whether on campus or on our travels, every few weeks I would find myself struggling to breathe properly. I could identify nothing tangibly wrong, and I never rasped for breath or experienced asthma-like physical symptoms. I just felt, moment to moment, as though my lungs had constricted and I simply could not take in enough air.
Because I never experienced lungers when I was in a tense situation—playing for the team collegiate national championship in squash, or taking final exams, for instance—I dismissed Schu’s gentle suggestion that my breathing problems might be related to anxiety. After a few days during which I could think about little else, the feeling would usually pass. Instead of seeking professional counsel and delving more deeply into the roots of this occasional phenomenon, I began pushing away the person closest to me.
The summer after my junior year, I lived with Schu in Washington, DC, taking up an internship with the National Security Archive, a listing I came across at Yale’s career services office. As I read about the Archive, I momentarily thought it was a quasi-governmental outfit given that it shared initials with the National Security Agency. But far from being a cloak-and-dagger intelligence enterprise, the National Security Archive was, in fact, a progressive nongovernmental organization (NGO) whose scholars and activists spent their days submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to secure the declassification of US government records. They then used the previously classified information they unearthed to better understand US involvement in events like the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile.
The Archive’s senior researchers were skeptical about US conduct abroad and determined to hold American officials accountable by exposing their deliberations. I found it fascinating to wade through piles of declassified transcripts of government meetings and telephone calls and to study decision memos and talking points that US officials had relied on to carry out their business. Much of what I read was intensely bureaucratic. But I recognized that these sterile pages were the vehicles by which American policymakers made decisions that, in some cases, impacted the lives of millions of people.
As I grew more interested in US foreign policy, Schu was beginning to consider a career in medicine. Having been a history major at Yale, he returned after he graduated to his hometown of Cleveland to take the preparatory science classes he needed to apply to medical school. After three years together, we decided to go our separate ways, though at the time I felt sure that we would find our way back to each other.
As I looked ahead, I envied the clarity of Schu’s professional plan. He would have to break his back taking vexing science classes, but he knew the steps required to one day be able to treat patients. I was interested in trying to find a career that would allow me to work on issues related to US foreign policy. Although I would not have dared express my hopes aloud, I wanted to end up in a position to “do something” when people rose up against their repressive governments—or when children like Anne Frank found themselves dependent on the actions of strangers.
But I did not see a clear path ahead.
Mort Abramowitz and Fred Cuny were in some respects an unlikely pair. When I met him in December of 1992, Mort was a fifty-nine-year-old retired diplomat who had spent more than three decades abiding by the strictures of the US government in roles that included ambassador to Thailand, ambassador to Turkey, and Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research. The son of Lithuanian immigrants, he had grown up in New Jersey and held degrees from Stanford and Harvard. Mort lived in his mind and sometimes lost sight of practical details, arriving in the office wearing mismatched shoes or a woman’s coat he had mistaken for his own after a breakfast meeting.
Fred was a six-foot-three, forty-eight-year-old Texan who had been kicked out of Texas A&M and, as a young man, had listed sailing a Chinese junk ship across the Pacific as one of his life goals. Eventually trained as an engineer,