The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
represented well-known writers. But because my subject interested her, she agreed to take me on as her client. She became a spirited champion, arranging meetings with various New York publishers, and in the end, I signed a contract with Random House to write a book based on my paper. At the same time, Harvard Kennedy School professor Graham Allison contacted me after hearing about a campus talk I had given about the war in Bosnia. Allison was looking to hire someone to manage a new human rights program and offered me a job running what was then called the Human Rights Initiative. Eager for a salary that would help me pay for law school and drawn to the field of human rights (which I did not then know well), I accepted. Together, with funding from American tech entrepreneur Greg Carr, we built the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which became the driving force behind much of the Kennedy School’s human rights programming.[fn2]
After this productive year away, I returned to law school and graduated in 1999. Many of my classmates were pursuing jobs as legal clerks or law firm associates. But I planned to stay put, splitting my time between working at the new human rights center and doing research for my nascent book project.
Wanting to put some distance between myself and Harvard, I used my modest book advance to make a down payment on an apartment a half-hour drive away in Winthrop, a blue-collar beach town. My new home allowed me relative seclusion, as well as proximity to Logan Airport, my gateway to the various countries I planned to feature in the book.
Over the next several years, I began teaching courses on US foreign policy and human rights at the Kennedy School. Initially, because many of the students were around my age or had experience working for governments or the UN, I found teaching nerve-racking. But I soon saw that preparing my courses helped me formulate a broader set of ideas on foreign policy. And I was gratified to see students stirred (as I had been) by what they learned about the Bosnian war, the Rwandan genocide, and other recent crises.
My main focus, though, was my reporting and writing. I spent nights and weekends working on the book, leaving my apartment only to pick up the New York Times on my stoop or to go for a run by the ocean.
I was never as disciplined as I intended to be, but early on, I learned to forgive myself. I came to understand that writing a book would ultimately require thousands of hours on the phone, on the road, and at my computer. I realized that it was okay to read Sports Illustrated, watch a baseball game, or spend a few hours talking on the phone to my parents, Mort, Jonathan, Laura, or other friends.
While I still loved the Pittsburgh Pirates, they played in the National League, and I now closely followed the Boston Red Sox, listening to every pitch live or on replay. As I drove home along Storrow Drive after a day at the Kennedy School, I was often drawn by the bright stadium lights of Fenway Park. When I pulled onto Commonwealth Avenue, if I found street parking, I would duck into Fenway for a few innings, revving myself up for the long night of writing ahead.
These were exciting times for the Red Sox, and particularly for their future Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez, who dominated batters in a way I had not seen before. Unfortunately, I was so consumed with my project that, when I had the chance to meet Martinez at a charity fundraiser, instead of talking baseball, I gave him a long account of the genocide book I was writing.
When the organizers sent me the photos from the event, there I was, in a black evening gown, gesticulating wildly as a dazed Cy Young winner occasionally looked over my shoulder for bullpen relief. It was no different for the few friends I managed to see regularly. They teased me, with little exaggeration, that I had become “all genocide, all the time.”
THE TRUTH WAS that I was lonely. I longed to find the kind of companion that Eddie was for Mum. They had their ups and downs, but he had made significant headway battling his alcoholism, joining AA. And he continued to challenge her, and to make her laugh until her sides hurt. But I tended to fall for older, accomplished men who had a habit of evading real intimacy, and I remained single.
My close woman friends were godsends. We shared many of the same bad dating instincts. At one point, Elizabeth Rubin started calling the men we became involved with “lizards” because of their predictable tendency to seem available, only to slither away as soon as we made ourselves vulnerable to them. When one of us would end a relationship with a lizard, the man would inevitably come back, promising to change. We all knew rationally that true transformation was innately difficult—if not impossible. “Look how hard it is for any of us to change!” I would exclaim. But giving up on a cause did not come easy, so we would dig in, wasting precious months or even years in and out of doomed relationships. When we relapsed with one of our reptilian suitors, we would guiltily email the others a coded confession: “I lizarded yesterday.” The solidarity among my single women friends was fierce, and experience as a war correspondent was not required for membership. When I introduced Amy Bach, a lawyer and writer friend, to the Bosnia gang, they embraced her. Amy joined us in making stories out of our misadventures, which—through the telling—reduced the sting. Once Amy called to tell me about a bout of writer’s block brought on by a bad breakup. “I’m lying on the floor, Power,” she said. I responded cheerily, “I love the floor!”
Not all the men I dated were irreparably cold-blooded. Yet when I would get involved with somebody who wanted to get close to me—somebody who started talking dreamily about what we might do together in the future—I would suffer immediate bouts of lungers. Instead of simply ending the relationships in an honest way, I would head off to Rwanda or another war-torn country to do interviews for my book, hoping that, by the time I returned, the person I had begun seeing would have moved on.
My friend Miro urged me to try therapy. I ridiculed this suggestion, saying, “Let me guess? My screwed-up dating life is all about my father.”
Miro just looked at me for a long while, letting my words hang in the air. Finally, after a minute, he said, “You were willing to live in a war zone. It is strange that you won’t even explore talking to a therapist.”
In the coming months, my rationales for avoiding Miro’s recommendation shifted. Therapy would take too much time away from my genocide book, which was already well overdue. It would cost a ridiculous amount of money. And, above all, it would offer, as I put it, “predictable psychobabble.” But finally, after I got back together for the third time with a man I knew was bad news, I caved and asked a friend for the name of his therapist.
A few days later, I took the T to Davis Square and walked up a small hill to the therapist’s home, where she saw patients in a side studio. I shook her hand and sat down on the couch.
“Tell me about your father,” she began, and in that instant, I burst into tears, crying for at least five minutes, stopping only to make clear that—despite appearances—I was on top of the situation: “I’m crying for the following three reasons …” I explained, waving off the box of tissues she offered.
Over the next five years, therapy opened me up a bit. I learned how deeply responsible I felt for my father’s death, and realized I was scared of making myself vulnerable to a loss so large again. But even as I came to better understand my actions, I continued to be drawn to men who resembled my dad—larger-than-life, roguish characters who were often struggling in some way with addiction. No amount of therapy seemed to rid me of my tendency to ignore flashing red lights in relationships.
When my first therapist moved away, I found another—this time, a straitlaced doctor. I had always maintained my physical fitness, and he urged me to make my emotional well-being as much of a priority. As the months passed, though, my patience waned for a dialogue that didn’t seem to have much effect on my behavior. I started forgetting sessions I had scheduled and—not wanting to break away from my writing—began booking them more sporadically.
One day, having again forgotten an appointment, I called the doctor at the last minute to see if he could hold the session by telephone, and he agreed. I sat on my couch in Winthrop as I talked through my latest relapse with an ex-boyfriend who was separated from his wife but making no move to break permanently free. As I spoke, I suddenly heard a “beep-beep-beep” in the background. I thought I recognized the noise, but could not quite believe it, until I heard it again.
“What’s that sound?”