THE EDUCATION OF AN IDEALIST

Samantha Power

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.williamcollinsbooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Samantha Power 2019

Cover photograph by Geoffrey W. King

Samantha Power asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

The opinions and characterizations in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the US government.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008274900

Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008274931

Version: 2019-08-28

Dedication

For Cass, Declan, and Rían

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

PART ONE

1. Ireland

2. America

3. Loss

4. Dignity

5. Tank Man

6. Doers

7. Risk

8. Hearts of Darkness

9. “Tell Clinton”

10. The Secret to a Long Life

11. “Go Remember”

12. “A Problem from Hell”

13. Upstanders

14. Going to Washington

15. The Bat Cave

16. Yes We Can

17. Monster

18. Victory

PART TWO

19. No Manual

20. Can We Go Home Now?

21. April 24th

22. Turnaround

23. Toolbox

24. Revolutions

25. All Necessary Measures

26. Let’s Pray They Accomplish Something

27. One Shot

28. “Can’t Be Both”

29. The Red Line

30. “Chemical Weapons Were Used”

31. When America Sneezes

32. Upside-Down Land

33. Us and Them

34. Freedom from Fear

35. Lean On

36. Toussaint

37. The Golden Door

38. Exit, Voice, Loyalty

39. Shrink the Change

40. The End

Afterword

Picture Section

Footnotes

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Samantha Power

About the Publisher

PREFACE

On a bright Saturday in September of 2013, I was sitting in a crowded diner in midtown Manhattan with my husband, Cass, and our kids, four-year-old Declan and one-year-old Rían. My cell phone rang. The White House switchboard was on the line: “Ambassador Power, please hold for the President of the United States.”

I took two long sips of water and walked out of the restaurant’s clamor toward the corner of 50th and Lexington.

I had first met Barack Obama eight years before, when he was a newly elected US senator. Although he was already considered a bright young star in American politics, I would not have predicted then that within a few short years he would become president. And I would have found it unbelievable that I—an unmarried Irish immigrant, obsessive sports fan, journalist, and human rights activist who had not served a day in government—would, within that same period, gain a husband and two children and be named United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

And yet there I was, with a security detail hovering, about to confer with the President while my family sat nearby.

Obama was not calling for a Saturday-afternoon chat. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had recently unleashed chemical weapons against his own citizens, killing 1,400 people, including more than 400 children. This atrocity crossed the “red line” that the President had drawn when he threatened the Assad regime with “enormous consequences” if it used chemical weapons. In response, Obama had initially decided to order air strikes in Syria, but Congress—and most of the American public—had not supported him.

Then the unforeseen happened: Russian president Vladimir Putin, Assad’s ally, offered to work with the United States to destroy Syria’s large chemical weapons stockpile.

Locking down the specifics was left to me and my Russian counterpart at the UN. If we failed to negotiate a Security Council resolution, President Obama did not have a Plan B.

“Hey!” Obama said when he came on the line. Despite the gravity of the situation, he used the same airy inflection as when we first met in 2005.

I had only become UN ambassador the previous month, and Obama understood that I was facing a high-pressure diplomatic assignment. He was checking in to be sure we were on the same page.

“I just want you to know I have complete confidence in you,” he said.

I started to thank him.

“But …” Obama interrupted.

At that moment I did not need a “but.”

“But in these negotiations with the Russians,” he continued, “I want to make sure you don’t overshoot the runway.”

The Syrian government was notorious for unspeakable acts of savagery against its own people, and Obama knew I was skeptical that Assad would ever relinquish his chemical weapons. He was concerned I would demand too much from the Russians and cause them to walk away.

“But don’t undershoot the runway either,” he quickly added.

“Yes, Mr. President,” I said.

We hung up and I began walking back toward the diner, security agents in tow.

Don’t overshoot. Don’t undershoot. Looking up to the cloudless sky, I found myself wondering something more fundamental: “Where the hell is the runway?”

I HAD SPENT DECADES thinking about moments such as this, critical junctures in American foreign policy where lives were at stake. Studying the manual, however, is not the same as flying.

In 2002, I had published my first book, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. In the book, I criticized US officials for doing too little to stop the major genocides of the twentieth century. Now I found myself in the President’s cabinet as the Syrian regime was murdering hundreds of thousands of its own people.

“What would the old Samantha Power say to the current Samantha Power?” reporters often asked. “How does the author of a book on atrocities defend the US government’s inaction in the face of mass murder in Syria?”

My standard answer rejected the implication that my past and present selves were in conflict. “The old and new Samantha know each other quite well,” I would reply. “They talk all the time. And they agree …”

The full answer, of course, was more complicated.

I had gone from being an outsider to an insider—from being a critic of American foreign policy to a leading representative of the United States on the world stage. From within government, I was able to help spur actions that improved people’s lives. And yet we were failing to stop the carnage in Syria. I was at risk of falling prey to the same mode of rationalization I had assailed as an activist.

In January of 2017, I concluded eight years in the Obama administration and became an outsider once more. As I tried to get my bearings, President Obama’s successor began to turn the country in a radically different direction. Like many Americans, I vacillated between feelings of disbelief, outrage, and anxiety about the future. I had long taken for granted the importance of individual dignity, the richness of American diversity, and the practical necessity of global cooperation. Yet suddenly, these core values were under assault and far more vulnerable than I had recognized.

I set out to write a book that explored what I had learned thus far in my life and career. I returned to my early childhood in Ireland, the circumstances that brought me to the United States, my high school years in Atlanta, Georgia, and my time as a journalist in Bosnia. I delved into experiences that had moved and even altered me—as a human rights advocate, on a presidential campaign, in the White House, and at the UN. And I examined painful losses and setbacks, both in my private life and in the public glare.

We make sense of our lives through stories. Regardless of our different backgrounds and perspectives, stories have the power to bind us. In my Irish family, being able to tell a lively story has always been a means of fitting in and drawing people together. As a war correspondent, storytelling was the most effective tool I had to bridge the vast space between those suffering the wounds of distant conflict and my American readers. As a diplomat, when foreign officials refused to budge in negotiations, I would try to shake up stale debates by sharing authentic, firsthand stories about the many people who were being affected (for good and bad) by our decisions. And as a woman in national security and the mother of two young children, I used stories to make bearable the tensions inherent in balancing a demanding career and a fulfilling family life.

This story is one of sorrow, resilience, anger, solidarity, determination, and laughter, sometimes jumbled together. This is also a story of idealism—where it comes from, how it gets challenged, and why it must endure.

Some may interpret this book’s title as suggesting that I began with lofty dreams about how one person could make a difference, only to be “educated” by the brutish forces that I encountered. That is not the story that follows.

PART ONE

1
IRELAND

What right has this woman to be so educated?”

My mother, Vera Delaney, had not broken any laws, yet she seemed to be on trial. As she made the case for why she should be allowed to take my brother and me to America, her fate appeared contingent upon the whims of the Irish judge who posed this question.

I was eight; my brother, Stephen, was four. Neither of us was present that day in the Dublin courtroom. But the story of what transpired there is so emblazoned in my psyche that I can see the judge’s face, shaped like the map of Ireland, his skin blotted with what looked like my granny’s blush. I can visualize the mahogany wood paneling behind the bench where he presided. I can smell the boiled ham that wafted off of his black robes. I can even make out the intricate white threads of his juridical wig.

I’ve often wondered how my mother channeled her anger: Did she start to respond to the judge’s provocation, only to get a knee under the table from her lawyer? Did she feel her cheeks burn—as mine are prone to do—despite the chill of the courtroom? I imagined the voice inside her head: “Keep it together, Vera. He wants you to react. Don’t give him an excuse to deny you custody.”

It was far from inevitable that my mother, the person I have always admired most in this world, would end up “so educated.” She came of age at a time when less than 10 percent of married women in Ireland were part of the workforce. Her father, a policeman in Cork City, was an incurable, high-stakes gambler who bet his paychecks on horse and dog racing. My mother, her four sisters, and her younger brother grew up under the constant threat of foreclosure. While none of her three older siblings went to college, my mother decided early on that she would be the first of the Delaney children to do so—indeed, she would become a doctor.

Because the Catholic girls’ school my mother attended did not offer science courses, she had a problem. When she tried to apply to the University College Cork’s medical program, the registrar told her she lacked the background to manage the curriculum. Undeterred, my mother registered anyway. When she got home, one of her sisters lit into her because of the lengthy program’s cost. My mother responded by dumping her plate of bacon, cabbage, and mashed potatoes on her sister’s lap. But she marched back to the college and, livid but shamed, changed her registration to the shorter Bachelor of Science program. After earning that degree, she went on to pursue a PhD in biochemistry in London. But caring for patients was what my mother had always wanted and would never stop wanting; while writing her dissertation, she finally decided to apply to medical school. Thirteen years after first attempting to enroll, she achieved her lifelong dream of becoming a medical doctor.

Yet in that courtroom years later, my mother was forced to answer for her career—for being “so educated”—because she was trying to move with her children to the United States, a country she had never visited, in order to get advanced training in her area of specialization, kidney transplantation.

She was also hoping to run away with the man she loved—a man who wasn’t my father.

MY DAD, JIM POWER, was an epic figure—brilliant, dashing, and charismatic, yet intimidating and witheringly sharp-tongued. At six foot five he towered over his Irish contemporaries. Even as a child, I could tell he was the man in the room that people most wanted to please.

My parents met in London, where my mother was studying medicine and my dad was working as a dentist. Mum first spotted him leading a sing-along for a group of Irish exiles in the Bunch of Grapes pub in Knightsbridge. After long fending off girlfriends, my dad pursued her avidly.

Mum was a slender, stylish young woman with a lively sense of play, who could place a tennis serve or hit a squash forehand better than almost all her male peers. She liked my father’s constant teasing, which kept her off balance. She was amazed by his talent for the piano and his ability to launch into whatever songs the bar patrons requested.

My father initially encouraged and helped subsidize Mum’s medical school pursuits. A scratch golfer, he applauded how quickly she picked up his sport, and cheered her on as she ascended the ranks of British athletics in squash. As a teenager and college student, she had played competitive tennis and field hockey—first for her home province of Munster and later for Ireland. At squash, she was relentless: speedy to the front of the court and agile from side to side. When Mum was off in the library or on the squash court, Dad was at the pub, boasting to his friends about her latest feats. After an impassioned courtship, they wed in September of 1968.

“This is the third of my children getting married this year,” her father told his mother, “and I would not put my money on this one.” For a man who bet on anything and everything, this was saying something.

While my grandfather adored his daughter, his traditional views on gender roles made him worry that Mum would prioritize her career above her marriage. My grandfather accurately saw his new son-in-law as a man who needed to be taken care of. My dad had been idolized and sheltered by his own mother, but despite this coddled upbringing, he was deeply drawn to women with opinions and ambitions of their own.

While the accomplished duo initially charged forth, their interests soon began to diverge. My mother studied constantly, partly to make up for all she felt she didn’t know. And having grown up fearing that any knock on the door might be a lender seizing the family home to pay her father’s gambling debts, Mum was determined to take control of her own path. In contrast, my dad’s achievements had always come effortlessly. His photographic memory allowed him to look at a blank wall and visualize words as he had previously read them on the page. Because my father never felt the passion for his career that Mum had for hers, he lacked focus. Despite being an established dentist, at the age of thirty-five he decided to take the unusual step of returning to school to get a medical degree of his own.

I was born in September of 1970, while Mum was still studying to become a doctor in London. When my dad began the six-year course at University College Dublin shortly thereafter, we moved back to Dublin, where Mum would finish medical school. Although my dad breezed through his program, when he finally became Dr. Jim Power, MD, he showed no interest in practicing medicine—an attitude Mum couldn’t fathom. His older sister came to refer to him as “the eternal student.”

My father had always been a drinker, but after Mum threw herself deeper into her medical career, his drinking became something of a vocation. His second home was Hartigan’s, a pub ten minutes away from where we lived. Known for its highbrow political debates, no-frills decorum, and the taste and pour of its pints, Hartigan’s felt like a village pub in the middle of Ireland’s bustling capital. My father was one of the regulars.

Guinness—the dark brown, silky stout with the thick, pillowy head—was not just his drink; it was his craft. Known as “mother’s milk,” Guinness had adopted the tagline “GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU” in the 1920s, and most of us believed it. For decades, Irish mothers had been served Guinness after giving birth because of its iron content and perceived health benefits.

Like many of his contemporaries, my father hailed the delicacy of the drinking experience, stressing the proper “two-pour” approach: tilting the tulip-shaped pint glass at a 45-degree angle, filling it halfway, pausing so the stout could settle, and then—and only then—pouring the rest. “Pulling a pint” properly, my dad insisted, should take at least two minutes. “Good things come to those who wait,” he would say, mimicking the satisfied customers in the Guinness television ads. Once the pour was complete, my dad—usually an impatient man—waited with unencumbered anticipation for the barman to smooth the creamy head with a butter knife. He relished the first taste of every pint, pausing before clearing his upper lip of Guinness’s signature foamy residue.

By the time my brother Stephen was born in 1974, the cracks in our parents’ relationship were widening. The pub would become at once a sanctuary for my dad and an accelerator of his faltering marriage.

BOTH MUM AND DAD included me—and, when he was older, Stephen—in what they were doing, carving out time to be alone with each of us. I would often spend large parts of my afternoons and weekends accompanying Mum to the squash court, watching her smack the tiny black ball with a wooden Slazenger racket. She was unfailingly gracious on the court, but also fiercely competitive. Sitting in the wooden bleachers and watching her seemingly endless rallies, I would cheer as she wore down her opponents with her trademark grit.

Swimming together in the Irish Sea at the Blackrock beach, we would laugh as we both turned purple, teeth chattering in the frigid water. She often brought me on road trips to her hometown of Cork to visit with her parents and my many aunts, uncles, and cousins. Driving in her tiny Mini on Ireland’s bendy roads, we blissfully belted out songs of my choosing—“It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” “Molly Malone,” and “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.” On occasions when we hopped the train in Dublin and settled in for the three-hour ride, she would unfurl tinfoil-wrapped cheddar cheese and butter wedged between two Jacob’s Cream Crackers, followed by a Cadbury Flake chocolate bar or Kimberley biscuits. I loved the feeling of curling up next to her as she devoured her medical journals, and from around the age of six, I too would sink into a book.

Mum gave people she met a quality of attention that I would come to associate with the most gifted politicians. When making a new acquaintance, she would cock her head to the side and peer earnestly at the other person, digging for details and drawing connections across time and space. She laughed with her whole body, or—if someone’s tale was a sad one—sagged with the weight of the other person’s anguish. I never knew my mother to have an ulterior motive as she listened; she was simply curious and intensely empathetic. She had no airs and eschewed sentimentality, conveying her love not through expressive words—which to her would have sounded maudlin—but through intense, affectionate focus.

Early on, I saw that my mother had a gift for cramming as much life as possible into a day. She arose before dawn, often completing her six-mile morning run before I began groggily pouring my cereal. The only time I saw her sitting still was when she watched professional tennis. When the Wimbledon coverage began, she would park herself in front of our television for hours, contentedly taking in the juniors, the bottom seeds, the doubles, and her favorite, Björn Borg.

Mum was a terrible sleeper. She worried about her patients, with whom she formed deep attachments. But above all, she fretted about my younger brother, who spent the first six weeks of his life in the hospital. When he was born, Stephen suffered a collapsed lung and then quickly contracted meningitis. When he was unable to hold down food, the doctors realized he had a severe intestinal blockage that required surgery. He recovered from the operation, but didn’t talk for his first two years. While my dad thought he would speak when he felt like it, Mum thought the meningitis might have caused him to go deaf.

Dad proved correct. Stephen became an adorably loquacious troublemaker who got great laughs out of laying intricate traps throughout the house for his unsuspecting parents and older sister. At school, though, he struggled, rarely showing interest. My mother spent many nights awake, wondering if he would ever apply himself.

My father always seemed carefree. His dental practice was desultory; he appeared to only work when he felt like it. We would play tennis in the cul-de-sac outside our home, or I would tag along as he pounded golf balls on the driving range. He was close with his parents, whom we often visited two hours away in the town of Athlone. His mother was a force of nature—as a young woman in England, she had built a school from scratch and later made a comfortable living playing the stock market. His dad, whom I and all the grandkids called “Bam Bam,” was a former Irish soldier with a sunny outlook on life, often proclaiming, “Never trouble trouble unless trouble troubles you.” Having retired from the military years before, Bam Bam seemed to have no higher priority than kicking around a soccer ball with Stephen and me or taking us for ice cream.

Thursdays were especially precious to me, as they were reserved for my weekly “day out” in Dublin with my dad. He would pick me up from Mount Anville, the Catholic school I attended, take me for a hamburger, and then help me stock up on candy before we landed at Hartigan’s. Our arrival at the pub was usually a welcome escape from the lashing rain or, on short winter afternoons, the damp darkness. As soon as my father was spotted, he was greeted with cheers of “Jimbo!,” “Jimmy!,” or “If it isn’t the fine doctor himself!” My dad was such a regular patron that he had a designated chair—known as the “Seat of Power”—at the bar.

From around the time I was five years old, I viewed Hartigan’s as a kind of oasis. Without a fuss, I would make my way down a half-flight of stairs from the main pub room and take a seat at a seldom-used bar that mirrored the busy one upstairs. My dad would bring me a bottle of 7 Up—if Stephen was with me, he would get a Coke—and I would contentedly dig into whatever mystery I was reading. I never went far without an Enid Blyton (“The Famous Five” or “The Secret Seven” series), Nancy Drew, or Hardy Boys book under my arm.

Over the course of the many hours I spent in Hartigan’s basement, I disappeared on far-off adventures with intrepid child detectives, combating thieves and kidnappers. On the weekend, when I finished a book I had brought to the pub, I would march upstairs, and my dad would dash to the car to retrieve my coloring books and markers for the next phase of the afternoon. When my dad’s friends brought their children, we would play board games or make up our own entertainment while our fathers laid down sports predictions in the room above.

When I was on my own, I made small talk with the pub guests who ventured downstairs to put change in the cigarette machine or to use the bathroom. Sometimes, I would stand outside the “Gents” toilet, singing songs. I told Stephen that I offered these performances so that my musical talents (which I had yet to realize were lacking) would be “discovered,” but I was probably just pining for attention. For a while, the pub maintained a slot machine downstairs, which I enjoyed because it drew occasional pub patrons. On slow days, I often stood next to the machine’s display screen for the extra reading light.

Hartigan’s was not clean; the downstairs, where I read, played, and sang, had a smell that mingled urine, chlorine disinfectant, and the swirl of barley, malt, and hops. I couldn’t have liked these smells, or playing near a pub’s toilets, but I never complained. Years later, when I mentioned to an Irish diplomat that Hartigan’s had been a big part of my childhood, he claimed that once, while drinking there, he had approached the bathroom door and spotted what he thought was a sack lying across the threshold. “I went to step inside,” he told me, “and then suddenly, to my horror, the sack moved. It was a person!”

I froze, thinking for a second—absurdly—that it might have been me, before he revealed that it was, in fact, a small man who had passed out. I have my doubts that this story is true, but it speaks to the way many who visited Hartigan’s thought about the place I called my second home as a young girl.

Although I must have occasionally experienced boredom or loneliness down in the basement, when I think of that time, I only remember my father, the first man I loved, loving me back. While many Hartigan’s regulars seemed to leave thoughts of their families behind when they entered the cocoon of the pub, my father brought me with him. I was his sidekick. I could find him any time I needed him, with a long row of drained pint glasses beside him. Instead of shaking me off when I bounded up the stairs, he often picked me up and sat me down beside him. I grew preternaturally comfortable chatting with adults and people of different backgrounds, particularly about sports.

While my dad must have been well above the legal limit when he drove us home, he seemed in complete command of our little universe. On school nights when he came home late from the pub, even if it was after midnight, he would come to my room and wake me up. Often, he just wanted to chat about my day, but sometimes he would take Stephen and me for a drive around the neighborhood in his white Mazda—the backseat of which was covered with sheaves of discolored piano sheet music, broken golf tees, loose change, greasy wrappers from the local fish and chips shop, and months-old newspapers.

Hartigan’s was such a vital part of our family routine that when my aunt bought me an elegant blue raincoat and observed, “This will look lovely on you when you go to Mass on Sunday,” I responded, “No—it will look lovely on me when I go to the pub with Dad on Sunday.”

MY PARENTS LOVED LIFE and learning, they loved sports, and they loved me. They just found loving each other a struggle.

I craved harmony between them. On one family vacation, I interrupted lunch to present them with a fifty-pence piece I had been saving. “Whichever of you doesn’t argue with the other will get this,” I declared. “I will be watching, keeping careful track.” But my early efforts at diplomacy did not succeed. Although my mother had fallen for my dad watching him play piano in the pubs of London, she didn’t hide her disapproval of his drinking or his embrace of leisure time. But when she complained that Hartigan’s was no place for kids, my father countered that if she was so committed to our well-being, she should find a way to work less and be home more.

He started to nag and even taunt her. “Where have you been?” he would say when she came home late, physically poking her with his index finger.

“None of your business,” she would answer, before shutting herself in a room where he couldn’t disturb her studies.

One evening, when he found her at the kitchen table reviewing for an exam, he swept her medical notes and books into his arms, and, though it was pouring rain, marched into the back garden and threw them into a walled-up boiler pit where she would be unable to retrieve them.

Sober, perhaps, my dad might have pulled back from a confrontation, but having packed away a dozen pints, he would raise his voice at her, and she would give as good as she got. Lying in my twin bed above the living room, I would listen as the arguments grew nastier and as plates from the kitchen were hurled. When I got out of bed to spy from the landing atop the stairs, I would alternate between straining to decide who was at fault and blocking my ears with my hands so I could make out nothing but the sound of my heart pounding—a sound so deafening I was sure my parents could hear it below.

Sometimes, I would get down on my knees beside my bed, make a hasty sign of the cross, and then try to drown out the noise by saying as many Hail Marys and Our Fathers as it took for the din to subside.

WHEN I WAS SEVEN, Mum left Ireland for a year to help set up the first kidney transplant and dialysis unit in Kuwait, leaving Stephen and me in the care of our dad and wonderful housekeeper and live-in nanny, Eilish Hartnett. While a year was a long time to be separated, during the summer, Mum brought my brother and me to Kuwait for a six-week visit.

There, Stephen and I experienced heat of a kind that was literally unimaginable for two Dublin kids. We wore miniature dishdashas, which kept us as cool as possible, and lathered ourselves in sunscreen before spending long hours on the beach, swimming alongside Bedouin and Kuwaiti boys—but no local girls. I was fascinated by the minarets that dotted the horizon and the mixed dress of women—some in Western clothes, others in abayas or hijabs. Alcohol was illegal, but the Irish expatriates circumvented the rules at their parties. Although my mother was never a big drinker, she liked to join in, and even contributed beer that she home-brewed in a green plastic barrel using a kit she had brought from Dublin.

The deepest impression of our stay was made less by the sights and sounds of Kuwait than by the man with whom Mum had become romantically involved: an Irishman with a wide mustache and thick, prematurely graying hair. Dr. Edmund Bourke, or “Eddie,” was a pioneer in the science and practice of nephrology (the branch of medicine that deals with kidneys), and had been Mum’s supervisor at the Meath Hospital in Dublin during her medical residency. Although Eddie had a wife and four children of his own back in Dublin, he and my mother were now living together in a high-rise apartment, acting as if they were married.

Before Mum brought Stephen and me back to Ireland, she asked us not to tell our dad about Eddie. If we needed to mention that there was an “Eddie” in Kuwait, we were told to identify him as “Eddie McGrath,” an Irish doctor who apparently also worked in Kuwait City.

To a seven-year-old, this seemed like high-stakes mischief. I was invigorated to have been let into an exclusive club with grown-ups who now trusted me with a secret. I could tell that whatever was happening between Mum and Eddie was making her happier than I could remember seeing her with my dad.

Unfortunately, not long after we returned to Ireland, my father asked me point-blank whether my mother had been with Eddie Bourke in Kuwait. I answered truthfully that she had, presuming that Mum would not want me to lie in response to a direct question. She reassured me later that I had done the right thing. But when she moved back to Dublin from Kuwait, although she returned to live at home with us, she slept in the guest bedroom. She and my father began leading separate lives.

My dad, then thirty-six, had himself become involved with Susan Doody, a twenty-five-year-old teacher at a Dublin primary school, another welcome new presence in my and my brother’s lives. While Susan showed more tolerance for pub life than my mother, she still preferred luring Dad away from Hartigan’s to the latest Bergman or Fassbinder film, rugby match, or golf tournament. “He could spend hours watching any ball move on any surface,” she marveled.

In Catholic Ireland, Susan kept quiet about her relationship with my dad, believing that the nuns who ran the school where she taught would come under pressure to let her go if they found out that she was dating a married man. Still, in the coming years, she would play a leading role in prodding my dad to change his lifestyle, appealing to him to find a job that was more fulfilling than his part-time dental practice. “Let’s have a drink and talk about it,” he would say heartily, changing the subject.

Even when Eddie emerged on the scene and my father and Susan became more heavily involved, it never occurred to me that my parents’ marriage could end. To be fair, I had the facts on my side: marriages in Ireland weren’t allowed to end. The Catholic Church was extremely influential, and the priests made sure that Irish law prohibited not only contraception and abortion, but also divorce. And if marriages were to start ending because of “the drink”—known across the land as “the good man’s fault”—it seemed to me that few families would remain intact.

Despite the turbulence around me, I thought life was good. My father projected a sense that he lacked for nothing. He drank too much and clearly didn’t do much work, but he had infinite time for me—a child’s only true measure of a parent. My mother worked feverishly, but when we were together, she managed to make me feel as though time were standing still.

However, not long after she returned from Kuwait, Mum told Stephen and me she was hoping to move with us to the United States. Before she did so, she told my father about this possibility, stressing that she would not make the move if he would get help for his drinking problem. He refused.

My father battled Mum in an Irish court, trying to gain sole custody of us. Each depicted the other as unfit to raise kids: my father because he drank too much; my mother because she worked too much and was having an affair. My father didn’t help his cause when he appeared in court once after “a liquid lunch,” giving my mother more ammunition for her claim that he was incapable of taking care of two children.

When my father lost in the lower court, he appealed the case, which made its way to the Supreme Court. Once again, the court ruled in her favor. My dad didn’t prepare properly, and his itinerant career left him unable to demonstrate that he had the means to financially support his family. Despite the judge’s condescension to Mum about her education, in 1979 the court granted her permission to leave Ireland with my brother and me.

Given Irish tradition and the stigma associated with separating from one’s spouse, it is remarkable that she was awarded custody. But the state attached three conditions if Mum wanted to take us to the United States. First, my brother and I were to be raised Catholic. We were to continue attending Mass and studying religion so that we would receive the sacraments (communion and confirmation for my younger brother, confirmation for me, and regular confession for us both). Second, my mother would home-school us in the Irish language. And finally, we were to return to Ireland to stay with my dad during the summers and over holidays like Christmas and Easter.

I did not experience the news of moving to America as a bombshell announcement. Mum must have casually introduced the idea, herself not then expecting that the move would be permanent.

We boarded a plane bound for the United States in September of 1979. I was just nine years old, but I had a clear sense that Mum would do important medical work and then bring us back to Dublin, our home.

It would be years before I understood that we had immigrated to the United States.

2
AMERICA

When Mum, Stephen, and I landed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I was dressed for the occasion in a Stars and Stripes T-shirt. Mum, then just thirty-six years old, was wearing brown corduroys and a form-fitting turtleneck. All these years later, I remember her face at the airport as we awaited our luggage: she was exhausted. Yet somehow, she was going to start her American medical career the next day.

What must she have felt when we landed? Relief that she had somehow pulled off the move? Trepidation at a new life? I imagine that she was probably just thinking: “Where in God’s name are the bags? Sam and Steve need sleep.”

For my part, I knew that my mother had left my father behind in Ireland. But that she had left him for good—that they would never again even argue over dinner together—had not entered my nine-year-old consciousness. It wouldn’t for a very long time.

I scoured the conveyor belt for our suitcases, crammed with everything we could fit from our lives in Ireland: the components of my Irish school uniform; “runners” that would become “sneakers”; a stash of mystery novels; and “Teddy,” my long-suffering teddy bear. Mum had shipped several Dunlop tennis rackets, her squash racket, her most important medical reference books, and my maroon Raleigh bicycle. She would go to great lengths to reassemble the bike—only for me to quickly disown it as out of fashion in a neighborhood where dirt bikes were all the rage.

As we exited the baggage area, I recognized the middle-aged, medium-built man with a large crop of silver-gray hair who greeted us; it was Eddie Bourke, with whom Mum had told us we would be living. By then, she had been seeing Eddie for five years and he had separated from his wife.

During our time in Kuwait, Eddie had been a playful companion, taking Stephen and me to the beach and teaching me the basics of chess, as well as a few Arabic phrases. But what stood out most was his ability to lighten our days with ridiculous rhymes. He would recite:

There was an old lady from Clyde

Who once ate an apple and died.

Inside the lamented,

The apple fermented,

To cider inside her inside.

Or he would teasingly urge us to join in:

Way up on the mountain,

Green grows the grass,

Down came the elephant,

Tumbling on his …

Just as I was about to scream out the risqué swearword “ass,” Eddie would plow ahead with great animation:

Don’t misunderstand me.

Don’t you be misled.

Down came the elephant,

Tumbling on his head.

While my dad was quick with a cutting barb and flaunted encyclopedic recall, Eddie had a warmer, more inclusive kind of wit and an intelligence that extended well beyond the field of medicine. He would sit for hours with a pencil, marking up dense history books covering everything from Qing dynasty China to the origins of the universe. Eddie was also a once-in-a-generation storyteller. As the drinks flowed among friends, he played the role of the old Irish seanchaí, who offered jokes and tall tales. He would gesticulate dramatically, acting out each of the characters in his stories, his entranced audience holding their sides with laughter well before the punch line. The humor was in the telling, and Eddie delighted in other people’s delight. I sometimes had the sense that, as he went about his day, he was thinking less about what was happening around him than about how he would later stage his comic reenactments.

Eddie made Mum laugh—and laughing always seemed the most important part of their life together. During my childhood, I saw my mother’s face shine in two predictable circumstances: watching my father play the piano and Eddie winding up for a joke or story. She loved them both at different times, and they both drove her mad.

Eddie had been raised in a strict, staunchly nationalistic household, and had attended an Irish school where even calculus was taught in “the medium”—the Gaelic language. The Irish nationalism around him was so intense that, if a boy in his school mistakenly used his head on the Gaelic football field (as one does in the “English” sport of soccer), the match would be suspended, and the ball confiscated. Rugby and soccer were seen as sports for Protestants and Anglophiles. Despite his cerebral day job, Eddie could get choked up singing Irish rebel songs or reciting Irish insurgent Robert Emmet’s last words before he was hanged by the British in 1803.

Years later, I would hear Irish novelist Colm Tóibín speak about how, growing up in Ireland, there was simply nothing worse than “being boring.” “You could be smelly, you could be ugly, you could be fierce dumb,” he said, happily, “but you could not be boring.” This had been the sensibility in our home in Ireland, and so it came to be in America as well. Eddie was as far from boring as Pittsburgh was from Dublin.

When we passed through customs, I gave Eddie a huge hug—what he called a “Squasheroni”—and shouted hello in my pidgin Arabic, “Ahlan wa Sahlan!” “Ahlan bik, Alhamdulillah!” he answered, welcoming me.

Like many intellectuals, Eddie frequently had difficulty focusing on real-world tasks. But having lived in Pittsburgh for nearly a year before our arrival, he had made impressive preparations, drawing on the help of his close Irish friends in the area. He had found a two-story house for us to move into together, and purchased a yellow Renault Le Car for Mum—to complement the charcoal Le Car that he drove.

In Ireland I’d had little exposure to America. The three channels on our Dublin television had played mainly Irish and British programs, so the little I knew about the United States came mostly from American exports like The Incredible Hulk and Charlie’s Angels. The few Americans I had actually encountered were tourists in Ireland on their golf holidays, most of whom seemed to be tanned men with straight teeth and loud opinions.

I didn’t arrive in the US until after the local public elementary school year had already started. When Mum walked me inside and introduced me to my new teacher, I was wearing the outfit I had worn to my Catholic school in Ireland—a navy and green skirt, knee-high lace socks, black leather dress shoes, and a white golf shirt. Immediately, I felt out of place next to my classmates in their blue jeans and docksiders. Within a couple weeks, Mum took me shopping at Kaufman’s Department Store, and I chose what I saw around me: a Pittsburgh Pirates T-shirt, a #12 Terry Bradshaw Steelers’ jersey, a Steelers’ sweatshirt, a green Izod golf shirt, green Izod pants, and a pair of light tan corduroys. This selection would tide me over until our next shopping outing many months later—although I quickly learned from my classmates that if I wore my all-green Izod outfit on Thursdays, it obviously indicated that I was “horny.” While I had no idea what this meant, I did know melting into my surroundings necessitated avoiding green on Thursdays.

Relatively self-assured in Dublin, I now felt self-conscious in Pittsburgh. I had a thick Dublin accent, long red hair in a ponytail, and pale skin. My freckles suddenly seemed to stand out against the backdrop of a complexion that had seen more rain than sun. Unable to do much about my wardrobe or my Irish looks, I dedicated myself to changing my accent, rehearsing a new American way of speaking in the mirror.

I also acquired a new vocabulary. My Sunday “brekkie” of rashers, black and white pudding, and burnt sausages became an American “breakfast” of bacon and eggs. My “wellies” gave way to “snow boots.” The older kids weren’t smoking “fags” behind school, they were merely sneaking “cigarettes.” And if we needed medicine, we no longer got it from the local “chemist,” but from the “pharmacy.”

Quickly seeking to master the preferred profanity of the locals, I noted that a combative classmate was no longer a “right pain in the arse,” but a “royal pain in the ass.” I made a particular point of brandishing words and phrases that I was told were unique to the Pittsburgh dialect, like “yinz” (for “you all”), “pop” (for “soda”), and “jagoff” (for “jerk”).

Of course, other differences abounded. After years of bland cornflakes, I had infinite cereal choices, though I usually landed on Cocoa Krispies or Lucky Charms. The bus I took to school was no longer Irish green but mustard yellow. In Ireland, when I misbehaved (hiding out in the girl’s bathroom, for example, to avoid ballet class, which I detested), I had been asked to produce my hand and was given a lashing with a belt or ruler. In the United States, however, I soon saw that punishment merely consisted of sitting in a corner removed from one’s classmates.

Young boys lived in almost all of the houses on my street. For a tomboy like me who loved sports, the neighborhood was a dream. In Ireland, Mum had taught me to play tennis, soccer, and a bit of field hockey. But the boys on Hidden Pond Drive played—and talked about nothing but—baseball. The game seemed slow, as it does initially to foreigners. But once I mastered the rules and key statistics (batting averages, RBIs, and ERAs), every pitch thrown during every at-bat seemed like a vital part of my day.

Mum adapted to her new life, showing no discernible nostalgia for the country she left behind. Despite her deep empathy for others, she focused far less on exploring her own feelings. When I pointed out this inconsistency when I got older, she either changed the subject or just ended the conversation with a dismissive “Arragh sure, I can’t be bothered.”

Despite completing her medical residency back in Dublin, Mum was required to redo her training in the United States, a three-year ordeal. Yet during the same period, she somehow managed to master the new American sport of racquetball (quickly winning the local club championship). She also regularly took Steve and me to Three Rivers Stadium for the baseball games of our new hometown team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. Unlike most of my new friends’ parents, she never even considered leaving before the last out. And remarkably, she attended most of my school and sporting events.

But there was no mistaking the Irishness of our family. While our neighbors ate pizza and grilled hot dogs, we rarely went a night without “spuds,” and corned beef and cabbage were a staple. Eddie’s version of a date with Mum was a night spent at The Blarney Stone, a local pub owned by an Irish footballer from County Kerry. When they could, they sat among fellow immigrants, ate Irish stew or bangers and mash, and joined the traditional music sing-alongs, enjoying the “craic.”

THE MAIN CONSTANT between Ireland and the United States was God. In Dublin, though some of the nuns at school terrified me, being a Catholic was a source of comfort, and, I suppose, an affirmation of my Irishness. Given the unpredictability of my home life, I was soothed by the familiarity of the prayers and hymns. When Irish television and radio paused three times a day (at six a.m., noon, and six p.m.) to broadcast the slow and steady chimes of the Angelus bell, I had felt calm—not unlike the effect of the call to prayer I had heard five times a day in Kuwait. The United States was the first place I had been that didn’t seem to want its people to pause and reflect during the day.

Mum stuck with her promise to the judge, driving my brother and me to Catholic Sunday school and Mass. But my main religious practice was (and still remains) private prayer, appeals to God to look after the people who mattered to me, and—even without the reminder of the Angelus bells—prayers of gratitude. I prayed when I was tying my shoes, having a bowl of soup, or riding the bus to school. I ran through long lists of all the people and occurrences I was thankful for. I prayed that “my daddy and all my aunts and uncles and grannies and granddads and cousins are happy.” And I devoted inordinate prayer time to the fortunes of my new hometown baseball team.

My interest in the Pittsburgh Pirates quickly became fanatical. During the team’s magical 1979 playoff run, which began soon after our arrival in the United States, Mum, Eddie, and I would sit on the new couch in our den and watch Captain Willie “Pops” Stargell light up the field with his smile and reliable bat. I was distraught when, during the World Series, the Pirates lost three of their first four games to the Baltimore Orioles. As my new team faced elimination in each of their next three games, I ducked into the bathroom during tense moments, got down on my knees, and prayed for a change of fortune.

I remember telling God that I knew from television that the Pirates’ players did all kinds of work in the community for vulnerable people. I tried to bargain with Him, pledging to treat my five-year-old brother better in exchange for a late-inning double off the wall, each time rounding out my prayers by softly singing the Irish National Anthem. Why I viewed this song as relevant to the Pirates is unclear to me now, but when they ultimately won the Series four games to three, I was convinced that my well-leveraged negotiations and patriotic chorus were factors in convincing God to turn the contest around.

I began spending my weekly pocket money—now “allowance”—on Topps baseball cards. I was a skilled trader, doing complex multiparty deals with my neighbors, such that I ended up with the entire 1980 collection, minus two elusive cards. As a medical resident, Mum was earning little money, and because Eddie had bought the house and the cars, she was hesitant to impose her children’s expenses on him as well. Thus, when I nagged her to buy me baseball cards so that I might luck into one of the two players I was missing—for me the equivalent of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s “golden tickets”—she usually turned me down.

Whenever I had saved up my allowance, I would ride my bike up the steep hill on Hidden Pond Drive and down a busy road to the convenience store a mile away. I would buy as many packs as I could afford, tearing open the waxy paper right there at the cash register, inhaling the smell of the pink gum, and checking to see whether I had landed a winner.

In my mind, Ireland was still my home. But this new place felt a bit like a wonderland. And while I was looking forward to my first trip back to Dublin, which I would take in December of 1979, I was going to gobble up all things American for as long as I could.

3
LOSS

Few memories are more seared into my psyche than the moment my father told me he would not allow my mother to take Stephen and me back to America.

Returning to Dublin for the first time since we had moved away in September, Stephen and I were spending the Christmas holiday of 1979 in our old home. Mum had traveled with us and was staying nearby with her close friend Geraldine. I was lying in my pajamas next to my dad on the king-sized bed he had once shared with my mother. He was teasing me for “sounding like a Yank” and for adopting a boy’s haircut, which I had done to look as much like my Pittsburgh friends as possible. Stephen was asleep in the next room.

I was sucking on a peppermint I had raided from a stash in his nightstand when he informed me—as matter-of-factly as if offering up his golf tee time—that he planned to keep Stephen and me in Dublin.

He wanted us around, he explained, and thought it was a grave injustice that the courts had allowed Mum to take us so far away. He waited a few minutes and then telephoned my mother to inform her of his decision. In this short period of calm before I heard Mum’s reaction, I felt affirmed to my core by my dad’s willingness to defy the judge’s ruling. All children covet signs of their parents’ love, and I liked knowing that Stephen and I were worth a fight.

Once he had reached Mum, he handed me the phone so I could say hello first. Almost immediately, I blurted out the news. “Daddy’s keeping us!” I exclaimed, my heart beating madly as I found myself at the epicenter of a high drama.

“What?” Mum asked. When I repeated myself, she said she would be coming to collect us immediately and told me to pass the phone to Dad. Her fury was barely contained.

“Mum’s coming,” I announced, handing the phone over to him.

“No she’s not, pet,” my dad said.

In the ensuing minutes, I could hear Mum’s voice rising sharply through the receiver. Still, I figured they would have another argument—maybe even the fiercest of all their arguments—and then would sort things out.

When Mum didn’t show up that day or the next, I happily settled back into my father’s Hartigan’s routine, with my brother by my side. I loved being back home. For all the novelty that America offered, I had missed even the rain of Ireland.

On Christmas Eve, Stephen and I watched The Sound of Music on a small black-and-white television in the living room where my father and Susan had decorated a Christmas tree and hung our stockings (in Ireland we used our actual socks rather than the enormous red and white American stockings that were the size of Santa’s boots). My father had rented a keg from Hartigan’s and his pub friends were in a jovial mood.

Stephen and I ignored the revelry, happily tugging on Irish Christmas “crackers” until they snapped in two and revealed the small plastic toy. My dad cooked us steaks in a frying pan—his specialty—and took his place at the piano, playing Hoagy Carmichael numbers and our favorite Christmas carols.

At around ten p.m., the doorbell rang. Following my dad to the door and peering around him, I saw Mum and her friend Geraldine standing there. She would not allow Steve and me to stay in a den of booze, she told my father. She had come to take us.

I stood on the threshold, snuggled against my father’s leg. My brother and I watched the two people we loved most speak to each other in subdued tones, but their rage was unmaskable.

“Look at this,” my mother said, gesturing to the scene inside. “Do you really think this is an environment for children?”

When Mum insisted that we were leaving, I walked a few steps toward her. My dad told me to come back, and I froze. Stephen, who had followed me to the door, shuffled forward into Mum’s embrace. But I stood between my parents, paralyzed by the impossible choice.

My mother’s voice grew sterner as she told me to get into her nearby car, its engine running. I did as I was told. And before I had fully processed what was happening, we were driving away.

I turned to look out the back window—a scene I later saw reprised in Hollywood movies—and in the doorway I saw my dad, deflated, watching our car depart. He grew smaller and smaller until we turned the corner and he vanished from sight.

That night, we drove from Dublin to Mum’s hometown of Cork, where we stayed with her sister, Anne. Over the next few days, my father and a friend from Hartigan’s, a member of the Irish parliament, began calling my mother, threatening to secure an injunction to prevent us from leaving the country. As their warnings grew more convincing, Mum began to worry that another legal battle would delay our return to the United States, where she was expected the following week to resume work. In a panic, she asked my uncle Gary, her brother-in-law and the high-spirited family fixer, to drive us to Shannon Airport.

The nighttime drive was harrowing. Uncle Gary ran red lights and drove so far over the speed limit that I felt we were in a car chase. Mum’s constant checking of the passenger-side mirror was a telling sign that the grown-ups were worried. Only now—forty years later—do I realize the meaning of that frenzied drive: although she was in the right, my mother must have had no faith that the Irish courts would see the situation similarly. If my dad had appeared before a judge sober while we were still in the country, she could have lost us.

When we arrived at the airport, as the clock ticked slowly toward the hour of our departure, Uncle Gary bought Stephen and me heaping Irish breakfasts. But my mother neither ate nor took a proper breath until our flight was in the air.

Once we were back in our suburban Pittsburgh home, Mum telephoned Dad to tell him that he couldn’t be trusted to put our welfare first. Not only was he drinking too much, she said, but he had effectively threatened to kidnap us. She couldn’t take time away from work to chaperone our time together, she informed him, so if he wanted to see us, he would need to fly to America.

DURING THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED, I threw myself into my new American life and began to thrive in school. My baseball skills improved, and I started learning the basics of basketball. No longer the awkward new girl with the Dublin accent and the pleated skirts, I developed a fresh set of friends. Their families brought me to barbecues in the summer and skiing and ice-skating in the winter. Although Mum was working long hours as a doctor, she would get home most summer nights in time to grill us corn on the cob as Pirates games played on the radio. Gradually, as she was able to take vacations, she and Eddie took us white-water rafting and to American historical sites like Gettysburg.

Although she said my dad had forfeited the custody agreement, my mother fulfilled the rest of its terms by taking me to Mass and continuing to teach me Irish. Nothing was worse than being summoned on a sunny day to improve my Gaelic. “Mum,” I would declare, “this makes no sense. Even if I lived in Ireland, I wouldn’t speak this language. And in America it is even more useless.” This logic did not move her. She forced me to review flash cards and write out sentences as if I would soon be back at Mount Anville, taking an exam.

Although my dad and I exchanged letters, and I sent him my unimpressive color-by-numbers artwork, he did not visit. When Susan nudged him, he had a ready response: “I just need to get sorted.” But he was never able to admit he needed help to overcome his drinking, and he never did get sorted.

I have no conscious memories of pining for my father, but even as I lapped up the American experience, a large part of me was waiting. I was waiting for word that he would visit, waiting for him to telephone (which he did, but rarely, as he kept misplacing our number), and waiting for him to once again be my companion. Mum never spoke ill of him, instead describing his “brilliance” and athletic gifts; but she made clear that he was an alcoholic, a verdict I accepted. Slotting my dad in this category was tidy. The designation allowed me to blame the separation on something other than my father. And yet, because I couldn’t comprehend the true nature of addiction, I thought that if my dad simply tried harder, he could recover.

I believed that the magnetic bond between us would motivate him to get his act together—that I would motivate him. But as I waited, I did not feel anger at him for staying away. Instead, I began to mentally replay the Christmas Eve scene on the steps of our Dublin home. My dad hadn’t been the one to leave me, I reasoned. He had been willing to break the law to be with me. I was the one who had left. I had made a choice that night when I heeded my mother’s call.

Even as a feeling of regret and shame began to gnaw at me, I felt sure I would have the chance to set things right between us. So many Irish alcoholics lived well into old age that I never associated drinking with poor health. While four years had soon passed and my father still hadn’t come to visit, I was still positive that we would be reunited. My dad would make sure of it.

IN 1983, MUM AND EDDIE moved us from Pittsburgh to Atlanta, Georgia. After my mother was recertified as a nephrologist, they joined the faculty of Emory University School of Medicine. We packed up and made the move south, arriving at our new home a few days before I began eighth grade—which then marked the beginning of high school.

One afternoon, more than a year after our move, I lay sprawled out on the gray carpeted floor of my bedroom, doing my history homework. My walls were plastered in pictures of my idols—everyone from Mike Easler of the Pittsburgh Pirates to Jack Wagner, the hunky actor who played Frisco on the soap opera General Hospital. From the sound of footsteps in their bedroom, I realized that both Mum and Eddie had arrived home earlier than usual. Behind closed doors, Mum talked quietly on the phone and had hushed conversations with Eddie. Just the family was present—Eddie, Mum, Steve, and me—but the house seemed crowded with tension. I sensed that something bad had happened.

Finally, Mum knocked on my bedroom door and sat down beside me on the floor. Her voice tight, her eyes red, she said, “I have bad news.” I couldn’t conceive of what might be coming, but I didn’t have to wait long. “Your father has died.”

I did not react. I looked at her blankly, refusing, with my entire being, to process what she had said.

“The funeral is Monday,” she continued. “I don’t think you should go.”

I asked her how my father could have died—so suddenly, so inexplicably—at only forty-seven.

“The drink,” she said.

“But I didn’t know,” I said slowly.

“None of us knew the extent of it,” she said.

In recent years, my dad had apparently dramatically increased the amount of alcohol he was consuming, arriving at Hartigan’s as soon as it opened in the morning. By the end, he had amassed such large drinking debts that the owners had finally refused to serve him. The alcohol had so ravaged his body that he had stopped eating. He and Susan had broken up, but my mother told me that Susan had been the one to find his body.

I needed to be alone. Mum walked out, closing the door behind her. As she entered the adjoining room to tell my brother, I sat by myself, numb with shock, unable even to cry. I crawled into bed and prayed that what she had just told me was not true. If it was true, I told God, I needed to see my father again in heaven, where they would surely have pubs.

Now, in addition to mentally replaying the last time I had seen my dad, I was pierced with a new realization: for five years I had been waiting for him, but he had also been waiting for me. “He wanted me to come,” I thought. “And I never came.”

I could not understand why an inquisitive fourteen-year-old girl like me had not asked enough questions to learn that her father’s health was slipping. Why had I stupidly assumed the grown-ups would do what was best? Why hadn’t I insisted on flying over to see him? Why hadn’t I shown him that, despite the fact that I had gotten in the car with my mother that Christmas Eve, I was still his girl? Why hadn’t I found a way to help him? I seemed to have been thoroughly passive as my dad wasted away, by himself, across the wide Atlantic.

I buried myself under the covers—the duvet quilt from my old bedroom in Dublin—and shivered with a feeling of cold so deep that it felt as though my bones were being chilled from the inside.

I later learned that Susan had gone looking for my dad after she hadn’t heard from him in more than a month. When she opened his unlocked front door, she was overcome by the smell of what would turn out to be my dad’s decomposing body amid the stench of vomit and human waste. The derelict, filthy house—my former home—retained only the beds upstairs and the piano in the living room. The rest of the family belongings had been stolen or pawned off—even the kitchen cutlery and our toys.

Susan bravely made her way upstairs and found my deceased father, dressed in a suit as if ready to head out on the town.

He was lying not in his bed, but in mine.

I DID NOT TRAVEL back to Ireland for my father’s funeral in December of 1984. Mum was concerned that his friends and family would blame her—and me—for the downward spiral that ended in his death. She went alone, thinking that if I didn’t attend, I would be spared. This was a reasonable assumption: my dad’s younger sister did, in fact, verbally attack my mother just after the memorial service, screaming, “This is your fault!”

But by returning to school the day after I learned that my dad had died, I did not honor the pain that was tearing at me. By not flying back to Ireland, I took on another cause for regret. “You’re really not going to your father’s funeral?” one of my high school classmates asked me. Standing in front of my locker, holding a geometry textbook and a spiral notebook, I realized the mistake, but my mother had already departed.

My teenage brain had quickly established a clear, causal sequence. Nothing that a grieving family member yelled at me could have been worse than what I already believed. When I left Ireland, I left my dad; I didn’t visit my dad; and thus, he died. Had I not left, or had I at least returned to Dublin regularly, he would still be alive.

In my chain of logic—or responsibility—my mother didn’t really make an appearance. To this day, despite various therapists’ insistence that I must be repressing anger toward her, I don’t fault Mum for what happened. I have read widely on how children are quicker to blame themselves than to acknowledge their parents’ flaws and bad decisions. But for as long as I can remember reflecting on Mum’s actions, I have felt that several things were true at once. Yes, she should have actively sought out information about Dad’s health, and she should have brought my brother and me back to Ireland to see our father. But at the same time, she made her decisions with our well-being in mind. It wasn’t until I had my own family that I began to appreciate how young Stephen and I actually were when we had loitered in Hartigan’s, and how dangerous that environment would have seemed to my mother.

Mum knew our father—his virtues and his vices—as only one who had loved him deeply could. It had taken her years to reach the point where she was able to disentangle herself from him and their marriage. She knew that children can almost never give up on their parents, and she did not want Stephen’s and my image of Jim Power—large and luminous—to be replaced by something diminished. Years later, Susan would tell me about my dad’s emaciated condition in the final two years before he died. “Jim was no longer staring at the abyss,” she recalled. “He was in the abyss.”

Carrying around the grief from my father’s death made me more appreciative of the fact that Mum was healthy. I may have suffered a terrible loss in a terrible way, but I gave thanks to God for my good fortune—even though I now feared losing her too, I still had a mother I adored.

During the summer following my dad’s death, I traveled back to Ireland for the first time since that Christmas of 1979. I visited my paternal grandfather, “Bam Bam,” who was living with my aunt. Bam Bam had just turned ninety, but was still mentally and physically agile, driving a car and following sports and politics.

Not wanting to upset him, I rarely raised the subject of my dad’s absence from our lives. But over the years that followed, without any conscious decision on my part, I built the relationship with him I had wanted with my father. I would faithfully visit him for several weeks each summer; we would watch Irish football together and hurl complaints at the TV. And because he gave me the gift of living until the age of 101, I would share the ups and downs of my life with him in an exchange of letters that lasted for eleven years.

On the same visit that I laid this new foundation with my granddad, however, I got a jolt from my seventeen-year-old cousin, who had revered my father. She described how lonely he had been the last few times he had come to visit her mother. “You and Stephen were all he talked about,” she said. “The doctors won’t ever say it, but he died of a broken heart.”

It never dawned on me at fourteen to ask my cousin why, if my dad missed my brother and me so much, he had so rarely called, or why he had never gotten on a plane to visit.

He meant to. I was certain of it.

4
DIGNITY

I started at Lakeside High School in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1983, about a year before my father died. Once again, I was showing up at a new school in a new city where people spoke differently than I did—this time with Southern drawls. When Mum dropped me off, however, I quickly realized that I wasn’t the only new kid arriving that day.

Reporters hovered in the vicinity, waiting to see whether angry white parents would try to impede the arrival of hundreds of new African-American students. As I approached the main entrance, these students—who ranged in age from twelve to seventeen—were filing off a long row of school buses.

Some walked into the school seemingly determined to ignore the uproar that their arrival at Lakeside was causing. A few wore headphones and swayed to music as they disembarked, perhaps shielding themselves from the commotion. Others, less bold or armored, looked like they wished they could retreat back onto the buses.

When Mum and Eddie had moved to Atlanta, they had chosen our suburban neighborhood based on the reputed quality of this two-story public high school, known to be one of Georgia’s best in both academics and athletics. They hadn’t realized, however, that Lakeside was caught up in a long-running fight between black and white Atlantans about the area’s public education system. Just as we made Georgia our home, this conflict erupted into a racially charged firestorm.

While the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education had found racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, the DeKalb County School System, like many school districts in the South, had remained largely segregated in practice. After a 1972 lawsuit challenging the district’s practices, DeKalb launched what it called the “majority-to-minority” (M-to-M) transfer program. The program allowed African Americans who were a racial majority in their local schools to transfer to schools outside of their neighborhoods, where they would be in the minority. Because DeKalb school officials had initially done little to encourage black students to participate in the program, there were few takers, and the student body of Lakeside remained more than 80 percent white.

Not long before we moved to Georgia, however, the district court ordered DeKalb schools to begin providing free busing across the county. This transportation made participating in M-to-M more viable, and hundreds of African-American students applied to transfer out of lower-performing schools. Black parents sought out Lakeside for the same reason my mother had: they wanted their children to have the opportunity to thrive in a school with a stellar reputation.

In 1983, when more than three hundred African-American families signed up to send their children to Lakeside, the school district turned most of them down. The district’s rationale—backed by vocal, impassioned white parents—was that Lakeside needed to maintain its student/teacher ratio of 26 to 1. To our newly arrived family, however, it seemed clear that the opponents wanted to prevent Lakeside from being more racially integrated.

Several hundred white parents mobilized to create a group they called Parents Demand Quality, which supported the district’s decision to turn away a substantial number of the African-American transfers to Lakeside. In turn, their parents filed a motion with the district court, claiming that blocking their children from transferring was “based on race, not space.” The DeKalb NAACP raised the case with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which agreed to investigate. In the end, the African-American parents won their appeal; my class, Lakeside High School’s class of 1988, became the first in the school’s history in which black students outnumbered whites.

While Lakeside offered my African-American classmates more experienced teachers and better-maintained facilities, getting to know the students in the M-to-M program offered a lesson in the denial and assertion of dignity. I had heard priests talk about dignity at Mass: the Catechism insisted that the “dignity of the human person is rooted in his or her creation in the image and likeness of God.” And my years in Ireland, complemented by Eddie’s history lessons, had taught me plenty about British occupiers’ attempts to trample Irish dignity.

While the M-to-M program gave my black classmates great opportunities, it also placed heavy burdens on their dignity. By the time I arrived at school in the morning, rolling out of bed around 7:30 a.m. and taking a quick ten-minute walk to school, most of my black peers had been up for several hours—first waiting for a neighborhood bus that would take them to a transit hub, then catching a second bus that brought them to Lakeside. I played on the school basketball team and ran cross-country and track. Due to afternoon practice, I started on homework “late”—after six p.m., when I would arrive home. The African-American students on my teams, however, had to wait around for an “activity bus” that did not even leave Lakeside until seven p.m., ensuring that they were rarely home and able to start studying before nine p.m. Crazily, students who sought out extra help from a teacher or stayed after school to use the library weren’t even permitted to ride the activity bus and had to find their own way home, which meant navigating a complex Atlanta public transportation system that would have daunted most teenagers.

To this day, when I hear people judge students on the basis of their test scores, I think of my sleep-deprived African-American classmates as we geared up to take English or math tests together. We may have been equal before God, but I had three more hours of sleep, vastly more time to prepare, and many more resources at my disposal than those who were part of the busing program.

During the eighth grade, when the dramatic shift in Lakeside’s demographics occurred, I occasionally heard my white classmates complain about “grease” they claimed to have found on their desks—a dig at African-American students who wore Jheri curls. A friend of mine overheard a group of teachers crudely joking that the English department should begin teaching Ebonics, “so that we can properly communicate in their language.”

As the school’s black population expanded, the court ordered more black teachers to be hired, a decision that prompted a number of white parents to complain that they did not want their kids taught by African Americans. Others went so far as to pull their children out of Lakeside entirely, transferring them to the private, largely white Catholic schools in the area. Some members of the faculty embraced the changes; those entrenched in their views did not budge. One defiant white teacher, who had been open about her opposition to the large number of African-American transfers, was overheard in the faculty lounge saying that it was impossible to get through to her black students. “They say prejudice is learned,” she griped to her colleagues. “Well, trying to teach blacks here, I have certainly learned it.”

Mum and Eddie saw similar bigotry at Emory University, where they had taken up their jobs as nephrologists. When Eddie attempted to recruit a talented Haitian-American doctor who had graduated from Harvard Medical School, one of his colleagues expressed his opposition, telling Eddie, “Down here, they park cars.” At the kidney dialysis unit, the same senior physician replaced a photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr., with that of a Ku Klux Klan leader. My brother became friends with an African-American boy named Dorian who often came over to our home after school. On one occasion, a neighbor called my mother at work to warn her that she had seen a “darky” at our house. Both Mum and Eddie made clear to Stephen and me how horrified they were by the prejudice they encountered, and they encouraged us to speak up when we heard such racist barbs.

I did not discuss with my black friends the more entrenched symbols of racism around us. Some Lakeside students thought nothing of affixing Confederate flag bumper stickers to their cars. School field trips made their way to Stone Mountain, Georgia’s 1,600-foot-tall granite behemoth, into which the Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson had been carved. Only decades later did I learn that the monument had been commissioned by segregationists and was the scene of numerous Klan gatherings over the years. Georgia’s history of lynching and violent racism was routinely ignored or minimized in our school history lessons.

For all of high school, I sat next to Preston Price in homeroom. Preston, who became a good friend, was black and gay, a rough combination in a staunchly conservative school in a white, suburban, evangelical neighborhood. By our junior year, my best friend, Sally Brooks, and another dear friend, Nathan Taylor, had also come out, meaning that three of my closest high school friends were gay. From today’s more progressive vantage point, it is hard to convey just how unusual these revelations seemed at the time—and how brave my friends were. I saw how each of them agonized as they tried to figure out how to tell their family members and classmates; and I saw the excitement and heartbreak of their crushes and romantic foibles as they lived them, just as they witnessed and coached me through my own.

These early exposures didn’t dim my wonderment at the United States, but they opened my eyes to my new country’s struggle to manage difference.

WHATEVER THE CLASHES OF IDENTITY going on around me, I generally did what my life had taught me to do up to that point: I rolled with events and did my best to adapt. I was a conscientious student, doing homework on time and performing reasonably well on tests. I knew that getting into a top-tier university would require high standardized test scores, so I threw myself into expanding my vocabulary, preparing flash cards with unfamiliar “SAT words,” and eventually getting a score high enough to give me a chance in selective admissions processes. Although I later developed into a strong student, my drive was then more evident when playing sports. Lakeside was an athletic powerhouse, sending prospects to Division I college teams and occasionally even to the pros. As the starting shooting guard on the basketball team, I spent entire afternoons and weekends shooting thousands of baskets.

I juggled my immersion in school and sports with part-time jobs, starting at the fast-food chain Del Taco, followed by stints at Sizzler and Frëshens yogurt. Lakeside also had an avid party scene. A few basketball teammates introduced me to 7-Eleven Big Gulps of Fanta soda spiked with vodka, which I consumed with enthusiasm, although I let nothing jeopardize my game-time performance.

Luckily, my high school antics never got me into any lasting trouble. Mum, however, incessantly reminded Stephen and me that alcoholism was “in our genes.” And although I never came close to developing a drinking problem, my dad’s excessive consumption had so warped my frame of reference that I viewed myself as a teetotaler by comparison.

What it meant to be an alcoholic was also no longer solely defined by my father’s destructive habit. Eddie, too, was afflicted with the “good man’s curse.” Back in Pittsburgh, my mother had tried to rationalize his drinking as being very different from my father’s. “He just has pathetically low tolerance,” she would say. While my dad had drunk far larger quantities, Eddie’s inebriation was more demonstrative. He loudly recited Irish poetry and sometimes passed out after just a couple glasses of wine (“Oh no,” my mother would mutter, “the head is going down!”). The worst smell of my childhood—which to this day I associate with the pungency of my disappointment at his relapses—was Eddie’s breath on nights when he tried to cover up the odor of spirits with Listerine.

My dad never really admitted he had a problem, but Eddie recognized his. He made repeated efforts to stop drinking. For years, he climbed on and off the proverbial wagon. After my dad’s death, and because of Eddie’s challenges in staying sober during those years, I became hawkishly vigilant for signs that “the drink” might be acquiring power over me too.

Although Stephen had spent only five years in Dublin, he had inherited many of our dad’s traits and habits. He was growing up to be strikingly handsome, with ocean-blue eyes, dark hair, a lanky, athletic build, and a wide—and selective—smile that melted hearts. In 1988, after I graduated from high school, Mum and Eddie moved with my brother to Brooklyn, where they had found new jobs. There, Stephen would occasionally get stopped on the street and asked whether he had considered modeling.

Although Stephen did not start drinking or using drugs until after I left for college, he began to withdraw from Mum and me while I was still at Lakeside. If I was a joiner, like my mother, embracing new challenges and people, Stephen had just two great passions: dogs, which he said were more reliable than people, and fishing, which he did for hours by himself. He had long ago declared to me, “I’m not like you,” and, despite his probing mind, never studied much in school. Despite this, he cheered me at my basketball games and never seemed to resent Mum’s and Eddie’s celebration of my academic successes.

After basketball practice one day during my senior year, I arrived home to find Stephen, then thirteen, beaming at our dining room table. He had laid out the half dozen response letters from the colleges to which I had applied. I could see in an instant that the letters from Stanford and Princeton were thin, but I was focused on the much thicker, ivory envelope with the navy “Y” and a New Haven return address. I had unexpectedly gotten into Yale University, a dream destination. “Congrats, sis!” Stephen said, grinning, as I jumped up and down and stole a rare, if awkward, hug.

Despite coming at a heavy cost, Mum’s decision to move to America had opened up a whole new world for me. I knew that attending Yale would do the same. But almost as soon as I ripped open the envelope and confirmed my acceptance, I began to imagine all that could go wrong. While I could adapt to any new environment, I did so with the latent conviction that nothing great could last.

5
TANK MAN

During the summer of 1989, I came home to Atlanta after my freshman year at Yale to intern in our local CBS affiliate’s sports department. After covering women’s basketball and volleyball for the college newspaper, I had decided to pursue a career as a sports journalist.

My print dispatches demonstrated little natural talent. My first published article in the Yale Daily News, appearing in September of 1988, had begun: “Volleyballs aren’t the only things high up in the air this week for the women’s volleyball team; so are expectations and spirits.” Another article had described how the campus a cappella group Something Extra had sung the national anthem before that weekend’s Yale–Cornell women’s basketball game. I then proceeded to observe that “the Blue were well aware that it would take ‘something extra,’ or rather, ‘something extra-ordinary’ for them to win.”

Broadcast journalism, I thought, might be a better fit. In the coming years I offered play-by-play and color commentary for the Yale men’s and women’s basketball teams and joined a rotating group of students on a nightly radio talk show called Sports Spotlight.

On June 3rd, I had been instructed by my supervisor at the Atlanta station, WAGA, to “shot-sheet”—or take notes on—a Braves baseball game against the San Francisco Giants. I had to mark down on my clipboard the precise time at which memorable events occurred—a home run, an error, an on-field brawl, a funny dance in the stands—in order to help assemble the sports highlights for the evening news. As I sat inside a glass booth, I was surrounded by other screens showing CBS video feeds from around the world.

On the feed from Beijing, where it was already the early morning of June 4th, I saw a startling scene playing out. Students in Tiananmen Square had been demonstrating for more than a month, urging the ruling Chinese Communist Party to make democratic reforms. The protesters had used Styrofoam and plaster to build a thirty-foot-high statue called the Goddess of Democracy, which bore a close resemblance to the Statue of Liberty. They had lined her up directly opposite the portrait of Mao Tse-tung, making it look as though she was staring down the founder of the repressive Chinese state. But the day I happened to be working in the video booth, the Chinese government was cracking down. I watched as the CBS camera crew on the ground filmed soldiers with assault rifles ripping apart the students’ sanctuaries. As tanks rolled toward Chinese protesters, young people used their bicycles to try to flee the scene and transport the wounded.

In the raw, unfiltered footage playing in front of me—much of which would not be broadcast—I could hear the CBS cameraperson arguing with the authorities as he was jostled. At a certain point, the monitor went black; the feed from China had been terminated. I sat in the booth, aghast at what I had seen. I found myself wondering what the US government would do in response, a question that had never before occurred to me.

That week, the front pages of all the major American newspapers printed a photograph of a man in Beijing who became known as “Tank Man.” The man wore a white shirt and dark pants, and carried a pair of plastic shopping bags. He was pictured standing in the middle of a ten-lane Chinese boulevard, stoically confronting the first tank in a column of dozens.

The stark image arrested my attention. That, I thought, was an assertion of dignity. The man was refusing to bow before the gargantuan power of the Chinese military. His quiet but powerful resistance reminded me of the images of the sanitation workers in Memphis whose strike Martin Luther King, Jr., had joined shortly before he was assassinated in 1968. They had carried signs that simply read “I AM A MAN.”

Although Tank Man’s subsequent actions received less attention, video footage showed him taking an even more remarkable risk: he climbed onto the tank’s turret and spoke with the soldiers inside. After he stepped down and the tank attempted to move past him, the man moved with it, daring the soldiers to run him over. A few minutes into this grim dance, men in civilian clothes dashed onto the road and hustled Tank Man away. The convoy barreled ahead; the man disappeared. He has never been identified. An untold number of Chinese students—likely thousands—were killed that summer in the government crackdown.

I did not respond to these events by suddenly proclaiming a newfound intention to learn Mandarin and become a human rights lawyer. But while I knew little about the protests before they started, or even about China itself, I could not shake my discomfort at having been contentedly taking notes on a Braves game while students my age were being mowed down by tanks.

For the first time, I reacted as though current events had something to do with me. I felt, in a way that I couldn’t have explained in the moment, that I had a stake in what happened to the lone man with his shopping bags.

Where did this reaction come from? Was it just the natural awakening of a political conscience—an inevitable progression after spending a year on a socially aware college campus? Maybe, but never before had I considered involving myself in the causes that consumed some of my classmates. If my political views were developing by osmosis, I had not been aware of the transformation.

My best friend from college, Miro Weinberger, happened to be visiting me in Atlanta that week. Since Mum and Eddie had moved to New York the previous fall and our Atlanta house was up for sale, I had rented a room in a shared apartment. Drinking beers on the stoop, I told my friend about the footage from China. Miro—who today is in his third term as mayor of Burlington, Vermont—was the son of anti–Vietnam War activists. Miro and I had bonded over our shared love of baseball, but unlike me, he had always been equally interested in the world around him. “What am I doing with my life?” I asked. When Miro looked puzzled, I explained, “It just feels like I should be doing something more useful than thinking about sports all the time.”

When I returned to Yale that fall, I became a history major, throwing myself into schoolwork and studying with far greater intensity than during my freshman year.

TWO MONTHS AFTER I RETURNED to campus, the Berlin Wall came down, ushering in the collapse of communist regimes across Eastern Europe. I had subscribed to USA Today, practicing what I called the “clip and shake” method—clipping the red sports section and shaking the rest of the paper into the recycling bin. Now I switched my subscription to the New York Times, eager to understand the monumental developments abroad.

The names, places, and events described in the Times were so obscure to me that I underlined key facts and figures, quizzing myself after I finished an article. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, commentators were reappraising the United Nations and wondering whether the dream of international cooperation might finally be realized. I took the train from New Haven to Manhattan for a guided group tour of UN Headquarters. I liked the concept: a single place where all the countries of the world sent representatives to try to resolve their differences without fighting.

Back at Yale, I still played sports more than I did anything else. After getting cut by the varsity basketball team, I tried my hand at every intramural sport known to humankind (from water polo and soccer to Ultimate Frisbee and touch football). Perhaps inspired by all the hours I had watched my mother play, I also picked up squash, eventually making the varsity squad. While other students received awards in a year-end ceremony, for being “Most Social” or “Most Likely to Succeed,” I was such a fierce competitor that my residential college classmates created a new category for me: “Most Likely to Come Back from the Intramural Fields with Bloody Knees.”

Nevertheless, reading the international news and taking political science and history classes had significantly broadened my interests by the time I finished my second year. Combining a gift from Mum and Eddie with money I had saved working in various restaurants, I was able to fund a summer-long trip to Europe.

John Schumann, whom I had started dating at the end of my freshman year, would be my traveling partner. Known as Schu, he had a mop of dark brown curly hair and an open and warm manner that made him a beloved figure on campus. A class above me, Schu had gone to high school in Cleveland and shared my preoccupation with sports. But unlike me, he was also a voracious reader of history, making him a ringer in Trivial Pursuit and a fascinating companion. We became so close that our identities seemed to merge into a single entity that our friends referred to as “Sam and Schu.”

The centerpiece of our trip would be newly democratic Eastern Europe, where mass protests and political transitions were capturing daily headlines in the United States. We loved the thought of exploring a part of the world that had not yet been overrun by Western tourists and where history was being made every day.

Before we departed, the always well-read Eddie thrust an article from a little-known publication called The National Interest into my hands. Authored by Francis Fukuyama, and titled “The End of History?,” the article argued that with fascism and communism soon destined to land in the dustbin of history, economic and political liberalism had won the ideological battle of the twentieth century. “The West,” Fukuyama concluded, had triumphed.

Although I vaguely recall my Irish hackles being raised by his tone toward small countries,[fn1] Fukuyama’s core claim that liberal democracy had proven the better model seemed convincing. The foreign policy commentators I had begun reading gave little hint that issues of tribe, class, religion, and race would storm back with a vengeance—starting in the Balkans, but decades later spreading to the heart of liberal democracies that had seemed largely immune.

In June of 1990, Schu and I set out to see firsthand the region where the demand for democratic accountability had helped bring an end to communist rule. But before venturing east, we traveled to Amsterdam, where we visited the Anne Frank House. I had read about the Holocaust in high school, but it was during my travels that summer that the horror of Hitler’s crimes hit me deeply. Just as observing Tank Man—a single protester—had helped me see the broader Chinese struggle for human rights, so too did visiting Anne Frank’s hiding place bring to life the enormity of the Nazi slaughter. I learned a lesson that stayed with me: concrete, lived experiences engraved themselves in my psyche far more than abstract historical events.

When I had read Anne Frank’s story the first time, I did not focus on the fact that she and her family had been deported on the last train from Holland to Auschwitz. Nor had I been aware of the stinginess of America’s refugee quotas, which prevented Anne’s father from getting the Frank family into the United States. Struck by these details in Amsterdam, I began keeping a list of the books I would read upon our return to the United States—specifically, books that focused on the question of what 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 an acronym 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.

6
DOERS

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, Fred had become renowned as the Master of Disaster for his relief work in more than thirty crisis zones. Wearing his trademark cowboy boots, Fred had responded to famine in Ethiopia, an earthquake in Armenia, and war in places like Biafra, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and Somalia.[1]

Mort was the ambassador to Turkey when he and Fred had first worked together in an effort to aid Iraqi Kurds who had been attacked by Saddam Hussein and were huddling as refugees on the Iraq-Turkey border.[fn1] Fred’s methods were unorthodox—Mort recalled fielding calls from US military commanders in the area asking “Do you know what that goddamned Fred Cuny is doing?”—but the US-led operation helped save some 400,000 people. From then on, Mort provided Fred with credibility among Washington decision-makers, while Fred inspired Mort with his resourcefulness and daring.

I had the good fortune to get to know both men when, as a recent college graduate, I took up an internship at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington policy institute. I had heard about Carnegie from a friend at Yale, and I had applied because several of the interns served as editorial assistants with Foreign Policy, the Carnegie Endowment’s quarterly journal. This seemed the perfect way to combine my experience in a different kind of journalism (sports) with my burgeoning interest in foreign policy. I could not think of a more perfect first job out of college.

I had pulled my grades up at Yale and written a senior essay on foreign policy that the history department gave an award. I wrote essays for the application and was invited for an interview with one of Carnegie’s senior associates. A few weeks later, I was told I was one of ten graduating seniors who had been admitted to the program, and I had been assigned to Foreign Policy. I was thrilled.

Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, the head of the program called to tell me that the president of the Carnegie Endowment, Mort Abramowitz, had reassigned me to his office. Imagining an administrative internship from which I would learn little, I pleaded with the program head to revert to the original plan. She was firm. “Samantha,” she said in a thick Southern accent, “you can’t turn down the president.” What felt like an unlucky turn of fate would end up being a tremendous stroke of fortune.

In December of 1992, six months after graduating from college, I moved to Washington, DC, transferring my dorm room furnishings to a studio apartment near Dupont Circle. I had long ago framed the Time magazine “Tank Man” cover, and I now placed it on my book shelf, along with photos of Mum, Eddie, Stephen, Bam Bam, and my now ex-boyfriend Schu.

Mort was the first person I came to know well who had helped make foreign policy at such rarified levels, and over time he would drill into me a simple truth: governments can either do harm or do good. “What we do,” he would say, “depends on one thing: the people.” Institutions, big and small, were made up of people. People had values, and people made choices.

I would learn later that Mort was famous in the diplomatic corps for eschewing hierarchy and tracking down the best-informed officials in his embassies, irrespective of their rank. He also took care of “his people”—making phone calls on behalf of junior officials whose work he admired. But none of this was apparent to me in the first couple of months I served as his intern. When I offered edits to drafts of his speeches and op-eds, he would say, “Very helpful, Susan,” and then incorporate almost none of what I had proposed.

My tasks at the outset were as administrative as I had feared: making sure Carnegie’s public materials did not have typos and helping seat the VIP guests who attended Carnegie events—from former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and legendary journalist Bob Woodward to Tom Lantos, a human rights champion who was the only Holocaust survivor in Congress. Although I didn’t yet work closely with my boss, people whose names I had underlined in the newspaper during college were suddenly handing me their coats—and occasionally even looking me in the eye.

I was especially intrigued by Carnegie visitor Jeane Kirkpatrick, President Ronald Reagan’s first UN ambassador, and the first woman in the United States ever to hold a national security cabinet position. Strangely, Kirkpatrick had first come to my attention when I was a child in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s and had somehow noticed a photo of President Reagan’s senior team in Eddie’s copy of the New York Times. Amid all the suits, the diminutive Kirkpatrick stood beaming at the center of the shot—the only woman among Reagan, Vice President Bush, and the seventeen other members of the cabinet. I had been far too young to follow her career at the UN, but the moment I glimpsed her, now a private citizen, at Carnegie, I immediately flashed back to the picture I had seen more than a decade earlier.

During Kirkpatrick’s visits, she would offer acerbic commentary on the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, who had just taken office. As I watched from the back of the room, I was struck by her bluntness, which seemed to puncture the otherwise clubby, polite atmosphere. Men usually dominated the proceedings, but she was a notable exception.

Mort seemed to respect people like Kirkpatrick who had served in government and could offer informed views. But he was impatient with the “blowhards” who circulated in the think-tank world. “These people speak so much,” Mort said about the proliferation of self-styled experts in Washington, “and yet they manage to say so little.”

He was even harder on himself. After he had chaired a meeting or published an op-ed that I found persuasive, I sometimes made the mistake of complimenting him. “What a load of horseshit,” he would respond. I was never sure if this referred to his work or my praise. When I once thanked him for publicly challenging a visiting head of state, Mort looked at me blankly and said, “You do know I don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, don’t you?” His humility often manifested itself as self-criticism, which seemed an extremely uncommon—but to me a very appealing—trait for a person so respected in Washington.

Mort’s standoffishness did not deter me, and his cutting commentary was familiar from years of watching my dad in action at Hartigan’s. But I wondered whether I had what it took to win his confidence. I saw in him someone who could help teach me how the world really worked. He seemed to be guided by only one criteria, the question he would ask every time I approached him with an idea (as I often would in the coming decades): “Will it do any good?”

I noticed that Mort always rearranged his schedule to see Fred when he was in town. “He is a practical man,” Mort said of the Texan. “He doesn’t just tell us ‘something must be done.’ He tells us what should be done and how we should do it. I’ve never known anybody like him.”

Fred was useful. And Mort valued usefulness.

IN EARLY 1993, both men were working to improve conditions in Bosnia, where a savage war had begun the previous April.

The core of the conflict arose from the collapse of Yugoslavia, whose six republics each contained a range of ethnicities and religions: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, ethnic Albanians, Macedonians, Bosnian Muslims, and others. Tito, who had ruled the country for decades, had tried to forge a single Southern Slavic identity among the people and had stymied ethnic and religious expressions of difference.[fn2] After Tito’s death in 1980, however, nationalism—of the kind Schu and I had witnessed on our trip to Croatia—had surged among the country’s various ethnicities. After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union itself headed toward collapse, four of the six Yugoslav republics took steps to secede.

While the eventual outbreak of fighting had many causes, Serbian president Slobodan Milošević bore the greatest responsibility. As Yugoslavia’s largest single nationality, Serbs had enjoyed plum jobs and privileges. But as the Croatian and Slovene governments moved toward declaring independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, Milošević used state media to whip up fear over what he portrayed as the coming existential struggle.[fn3] If Serbs were trapped as ethnic minorities in newly independent Croatia or Bosnia, he warned, they would become second-class citizens.

In 1989, Milošević had notoriously declared “No one will ever dare beat you again!” to a crowd of Serbs in the predominantly ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo, shrewdly tapping into the once-dominant group’s fear that they would become the losers if people of other ethnicities gained more power. Using tactics common to strongmen past and present, Milošević told the Serbs that their “enemies outside the country are plotting against [them], along with those inside the country.” He capitalized on his followers’ nervousness about their place in a rapidly changing world.

In 1992, Bosnia was the most ethnically mixed of all of Yugoslavia’s republics. After following Slovenia and Croatia in declaring independence, it descended into the deadliest and most gruesome conflict in Europe since World War II. Milošević funneled soldiers and guns from Serbia to support Bosnian Serb militants, who quickly seized some 70 percent of the country in what they called Republika Srpska, their own ethnically “pure” republic. Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo had hosted the Winter Olympics only eight years before, but by April of 1992, Bosnian Serb rebels, backed by the remnants of the powerful Yugoslav National Army, began bombarding the city. Across the country, Bosnian Serb Army snipers and heavy weapons began firing at Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and others.

Not long before I joined Carnegie, a group of intrepid journalists had uncovered a network of concentration camps where Serb guards were starving and beating men to death, and disposing of their bodies in mass graves. The Bosnian Serb militia also set up rape camps where they sequestered Muslim and Croat women and systematically brutalized them. For the people of Bosnia, history had not “ended,” and the “New World Order” had brought terror and misery.

Campaigning for president, Bill Clinton had compared the atrocities in Bosnia to the Holocaust, promising that he would “stop the slaughter of civilians” if elected. Mort’s top priority was to use his platform at Carnegie to pressure the Clinton administration to translate those words into action. He turned the redbrick building at the corner of 24th and N Street into a hub where the most influential voices from the former Yugoslavia shared their perspectives with Washington’s top officials and journalists.

By then, Fred was doing humanitarian work on behalf of philanthropist George Soros’s foundation with the goal, as Fred modestly put it, of “breaking the siege of Sarajevo.” But he made a point of visiting Washington every few months, and Mort would invite key influencers to hear his insights on the humanitarian conditions and what could be done to improve the situation. Mort’s perennial sense that he did not know enough fueled his curiosity and caused him to pose fundamental questions that few were asking. He never seemed afraid of looking uninformed—which, to me, seemed to be the highest form of confidence.

As I dug into the news reporting and listened to what visitors from the region said, the war started to feel closer. The more I heard from Bosnia’s crusading representative at the UN or Serbia’s human rights lawyers, the more unnerved I was by the atrocities being committed.

This response marked a change for me. Between my college graduation and taking up my Carnegie internship, I had taught English in Berlin for six months. I had seen the gaunt faces of Bosnian families as they arrived at German bus and train terminals, but I had not been moved to action by their suffering. It never occurred to me that I personally could do anything for them. Although I had felt horror toward the Tiananmen massacre several years before, in Berlin I had gone about my business, teaching and exploring the city, despite encountering the war’s survivors.

Now, just a few months later at Carnegie, I was devouring the dispatches from Balkan war correspondents. I was working for someone who believed he could make a difference; if I could help him, I felt I might be making a modest contribution of my own.

As I learned more, Mort began asking me to fact-check his opinion pieces for the Washington Post and other publications. I slowly started developing views and tried my hand at writing editorials. At first, all I did was read the drafts to Mum and Eddie over the telephone. When I finally got up the nerve to show one to Mort, he eviscerated what I had written, decrying my “purple prose” and telling me to “tone down” the language. Crestfallen, I reflected on the rejection in my journal. “I think what Mort detests—and I can’t say I blame him—is my voice. I’m too young, too lacking knowledge and experience, to assume such airs.”

Even if I didn’t yet have a knack for such writing, Mort was exposing me to a different mind-set. I now shared his impatience with commentary that detailed the contours of a problem without offering realistic, concrete ideas for how the United States and other actors might improve matters. And I now understood why Mort had all the time in the world for Fred, someone who was a font of constructive ideas for how to respond to the Bosnian Serb Army’s devastating siege of Sarajevo.

In addition to terrorizing and killing civilians, Bosnian Serb soldiers had cut off gas and water supplies to the city, sapping the will of its inhabitants to resist. Fred and his team of humanitarian engineers had resuscitated a natural gas line, thereby enabling some 20,000 Sarajevans to restore heating to their homes during the frigid winter. But the Serbs had also cut off the power to pumps that delivered water into the capital, a tactic that had even more dire effects. In order to get water, thousands of Sarajevans were hauling large plastic containers from their homes to the town’s main river or its other water sources. The river was polluted and terribly exposed to sniper fire. Because the queues at the water distribution points often stretched whole city blocks, the waiting crowds spent hours vulnerable to shelling.

“What is the most powerful weapon the Bosnian Serb extremists have?” Fred asked me and the other interns one day on a visit to Washington. “Their siege,” he answered, explaining, “If we can find a way to restore water, they can still shoot people, but the city will not surrender. We will foil their plans and give the Bosnians the time to muster the means to fight back.”

Fred’s plan was audacious in the extreme. He planned to smuggle water pumps and other large machinery past the Bosnian Serb gunners and then jury-rig a vast water purification plant inside a Sarajevo tunnel, where it would be shielded from Serb fire. If the plan worked, Fred said, 120,000 gallons of water would flow, giving a third of the city’s residents water around the clock.

Fred was just one person with a small team. His idea seemed unbelievably risky. “If this is doable,” I asked, “why wouldn’t the United Nations do it?”

Fred dismissed the question, telling me, “If the UN had been around in 1939, we’d all be speaking German.” He was galled by UN peacekeepers’ neutrality in the face of what to him seemed clear-cut aggression.

As Mort deepened his advocacy and Fred began to implement his bold plan to restore water, I also got to know Jonathan Moore, a sixty-year-old former US official based at Carnegie who had been Mort’s colleague in President Richard Nixon’s State Department. Jonathan had a rumpled look. When I first met him, he was wearing brown corduroys and a light green Oxford shirt under a maroon V-neck sweater—attire from which I rarely saw him deviate. For many months, he held together his Rockport shoes with silver duct tape.

A Republican for most of his life, Jonathan had served as a Senate aide and as a presidential campaign adviser. Working under six presidents, he had also held positions in several governmental agencies, including the Departments of State; Defense; Justice; and Health, Education, and Welfare.[fn4] Most impressive to me at the time, he had coordinated the US response to refugee issues under President Reagan, and had gone on to work as one of George H. W. Bush’s top officials at the US Mission to the UN, helping to create the position of a full-time UN coordinator for humanitarian emergencies.

When I marveled at the variety and significance of all Jonathan had done, he downplayed his achievements. He stressed that he owed his “herky-jerky” career to finding himself in the “right place at the right time,” emphasizing how much each job had given him rather than what he had contributed. He was the first person I met who talked about public service with boundless delight—as a source of camaraderie and fun. To him, even government officials who got themselves into trouble were objects more of fascination than of judgment. “He was so devious, it was neat to watch!” he would exclaim. Jonathan keenly weighed the moral ambiguity inherent in high-level decision-making.

My first substantive conversation with him occurred after he poked his head into my office to discuss the Bosnian war. “Do you think what is happening in Bosnia is because of the absence of good or the presence of evil?” he asked.

I was carefully tracking developments in the Balkans, but I had no adequate answer to his question. That didn’t stop him from continuing to drop by my office, recommending readings from scripture or leaving on my chair a news article he had clipped. Jonathan reminded me of Eddie—he had insatiable curiosity.

I realized that—with Mort, Fred, and now Jonathan—I was surrounded by people from whom I could learn a seemingly infinite amount. But I asked myself what a mere intern could do to support them. I raided Kramerbooks in Dupont Circle, immersing myself in the history and literature of the Balkans. I bought Serbo-Croatian tapes and listened to them on my yellow Sony Walkman as I walked to and from the gym. And at the end of the day, when the office began to empty out, I stayed on, poring over the reports on Bosnian concentration camps and trying to understand how such depravity had befallen the place Schu and I had visited just a couple of summers before.

Leaving the office each night, I was usually so shaken by what I had read that I did not feel steady enough to ride my bike home, choosing instead to walk with it by my side.

As I read back issues from the early 1980s of public news sources like the Radio Free Europe digest, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, I began compiling a detailed chronology of the road to Yugoslavia’s destruction. My timeline was a straightforward collection of dates and events, but one that nonetheless showed Yugoslavia’s downward spiral. I had started it so I could keep the sequence straight in my mind and help Mort with his op-eds and speeches. But one night it struck me that such a chronology might find a broader readership. Just as Mort was trying to make himself a quick study on the conflict, so too were many journalists, NGO advocates, members of Congress, and Clinton administration officials.

Five months into my internship, I went to Mort with a lengthy printout of my timeline, held together with a large black paper clip, and asked him if he thought it might be worth publishing. He was focused on something else and didn’t seem to process my question—but he assented. Over the next several weeks, through all-nighters and weekend labor, I tried to improve its quality. In June of 1993, reasoning that speed was as important as substance, I took my floppy disk to a printer and asked them to make one thousand copies.

When I turned up to collect the order a week later, I was taken aback by the sight of a half-dozen large brown boxes that would nearly fill my small office. My amateur creation had been artfully compressed into a small book with a gray cover bearing my name and the title I had landed on: Breakdown in the Balkans. When word got out that such a chronology was available, the Washington think tank, diplomatic, policy, and media communities quickly emptied the Carnegie stock. I soon heard from Fred, who called on a satellite phone from Sarajevo to congratulate me on publishing the “hugely useful” Breakdown, which he said he was passing out to government officials and aid workers.

I felt immense satisfaction—of a kind I had never experienced personally or professionally before. But now that people were actually reading it, I began obsessing about all that I had left out. “The gaps, the gaps,” I would say, deflecting compliments that came my way. Simultaneously, I chastised myself for craving the recognition I was starting to get. “Clearly, I am out, as always, for me, myself, and I,” I wrote in my journal. “I need so much to remember why the book came about in the first place.” I knew that conditions in Bosnia were deteriorating rapidly, and that if my chronology was to land in the hands of Fred’s besieged Sarajevan neighbors, they would likely burn it along with their other books to keep warm.

The war raged unabated. Four US diplomats—George Kenney, Marshall Harris, Jon Western, and Stephen Walker—had already resigned to protest what they saw as the weakness of the US response to the Bosnian war, the largest wave of resignations over US policy in State Department history. I read about these men in a lengthy Washington Post profile and was gripped by their testimonies. Jon Western, a thirty-year-old intelligence analyst, had sifted through hundreds of photos and videos of what he recalled as “human beings who look like they’ve been through meat grinders.” As he told the Post, the intelligence he needed to consume for his job described preteen girls raped in front of their parents, a sixty-five-year-old man and his thirty-five-year-old son forced at gunpoint to orally castrate each other, and Serb torturers who made Muslim prisoners carve crosses in each other’s skulls.

Western and the other US officials who resigned had initially tried to change policy from within, but having made no headway, had finally quit. They felt they could no longer be part of a US government that wasn’t doing more, reasoning that they could at least draw media attention to what they saw as America’s moral abdication.

After reading the Post profile, I grandiosely wrote in my journal: “My only regret is that I don’t work at the State Department so I can quit to protest policy. Instead, I sit impotent and incapable.”

Following my summer at CBS in Atlanta, when people had asked what I wanted to do with my life, I had begun answering that “I wanted to make a difference.” But at Carnegie I saw that this was an abstraction. Now I had a focus—a specific group of people in a specific place who were being pulverized, and I wanted to do something to support them.

As a liberal arts major who had no particular knack for foreign languages, I still worried I had little to contribute. But I had managed to assemble the chronology, and I was seeing up close the vast number of ways researchers, columnists, journalists, government officials, and aid workers were involved in the enterprise of American foreign policy. All seemed to be struggling with how to define the US role in the world now that the Cold War was over, as well as how to manage a sudden flurry of nationalist and independence movements.

I remained acutely aware of all that I lacked—I wasn’t an engineer like Fred, a trained diplomat like Mort, or a doctor like Mum and Eddie. I was focused, but I did not know how to channel my interests. A frustrated journal entry from the time ended simply: “… Act, Power.”

7
RISK

Ben Cohen, a British journalist and activist, was the person who gave me the idea of traveling to the Balkans. “You should see the war up close,” he told me. “And you should write something.”

After I met Ben at a Carnegie event, we struck up a fast friendship. A Sephardic Jew whose ancestors escaped to Bosnia during the Spanish Inquisition, he was more knowledgeable about the country’s politics, history, and literature than anybody I knew in Washington. Though he was devastated by all that had happened, he brought a dark humor to our discussions.

Ben arranged an invitation for me—the “author” of Breakdown in the Balkans—to attend a conference being held in peaceful Slovenia, the newly independent former Yugoslav republic. After the conference, he insisted, we should drive to Bosnia.

Given my chronic expectation that something terrible was bound to happen whenever life was going well, I feared heading into what appeared to be a blazing inferno of a war zone. I also didn’t see what I could add to the existing coverage of the war, as the experienced reporters in the region were doing phenomenal work. But Ben kept pushing. And with my internship nearing its end, I had begun considering what jobs would enable me to keep working on issues related to the conflict.

Thanks to Ben, I already had one published article. Not long after we first met, he had proposed collaborating on an op-ed critiquing the direction of international diplomacy on Bosnia. Joined by George Stamkoski, a Macedonian friend of Ben’s who became our third co-author, we produced what in retrospect seems a rather pedestrian essay and began “shopping” it to various newspapers.

We tried every mainstream publication in the United States, and when each one turned us down, we sent it to outlets in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada for which we could find fax numbers. Eventually, Ben called me with “good news and less good news.” Our piece had finally been accepted, he said. “But it might be hard to find.” The essay would be appearing in Pakistan’s Daily Jang, but he wasn’t yet sure if it would be in the Urdu or English edition.

I didn’t care: I faxed an illegible copy of the op-ed (in English!) to Mum’s office, and stuffed it into Mort’s mailbox.

When I called Fred Cuny in Sarajevo to get his advice about traveling to Bosnia, he agreed with Ben: I should experience what was happening myself. He also invited me to watch his team in Croatia preparing for the water restoration mission he was planning to undertake in Sarajevo.

“I will explain more when I see you,” he said cryptically, not wanting to reveal on the phone how he intended to sneak the necessary machinery past trigger-happy Bosnian Serb soldiers.

Fred’s encouragement was all the motivation I needed. I worked at a think tank. I was published in a widely read newspaper. Well, okay: I interned at a think tank, and the paper was read widely in Karachi. But I was already going to be in the region, so I decided to add two stops after the conference in Slovenia: Bosnia, where Ben promised we would visit someplace safe, and neighboring Croatia, to see Fred in action.

As it happened, Carnegie’s offices were located in the same building as U.S. News & World Report, a weekly magazine with a circulation of more than two million readers. I asked a journalist friend to introduce me to Carey English, the magazine’s chief of correspondents. Three days later, I found myself entering his small cockpit of an office with a copy of my Balkans chronology in hand. As he thumbed through it, revealing little, I asked whether U.S. News would consider running an article from me once I got to the region.

Carey was tough but patient—far more patient than I would have been in his shoes. He asked me about my past journalistic experience, and I pulled out the Daily Jang op-ed and several sports clips from the Yale Daily News. He shook his head. “You are going to a war zone, you know.” I assured him I understood and would not take dumb risks.

“Define a smart risk,” he said.

I blanched, but he continued. “Look, I’m skeptical,” he said as he handed me his business card. “But see what you come up with when you’re over there, and call me collect on this number if you have a story.”

I thanked him and soberly shook his hand. When I left the U.S. News office and the doors to the elevator closed behind me, however, I let out a joyful scream.

“Whoo-hooo, I’m going to be a foreign correspondent!”

Ben was elated at the news and immediately began filling me in on the practicalities, including that I would need a UN press badge in order to pass through checkpoints and enter Bosnia. This meant that a news organization had to sponsor me. He suggested I head back downstairs to U.S. News to procure a letter vouching that I would be reporting for them.

But this was an impossible ask. Carey had said he would take my call if I had a story to propose; that was a far cry from U.S. News sponsoring me as its correspondent. The magazine had a regular freelance contributor in the region already, and Carey was not about to undermine him by adding an untested second.

Crestfallen by the realization that our fledgling plan might already be falling apart, I sat at my desk staring at the ceiling, unsure what to do next. But when two of my fellow interns who worked at Foreign Policy walked by, an idea popped into my head. Back then, the Foreign Policy journal mostly published work for academics and policy scholars.[fn1] Its content was nothing like that of newsmagazines like Time, U.S. News, or Newsweek—and it certainly did not employ foreign correspondents. But I doubted the UN knew that.

I waited until the Foreign Policy editorial staff had headed home and the cleaners had completed their nighttime rounds on the floor. Once the suite was completely deserted, I walked into the office of Charles William Maynes, the journal’s editor, picked up several sheets of his stationery, and then hurried back to my desk.

Hands shaking, I began typing a letter impersonating the unwitting Maynes. I was committing a fireable offense, but to me it felt like a felony. All these years later, I still feel terrible for having violated the trust of a program that was giving me so much. But determined to get to Bosnia, I went ahead and wrote to the head of the UN Press Office, asking that the UN provide Samantha Power, Foreign Policy’s “Balkan Correspondent,” with “all necessary access.”

I had a guilty conscience, but I also had what I needed to obtain my press pass.

IN AUGUST OF 1993, Ben, his friend George, and I met up in peaceful Slovenia. After participating in the conference, we made our way to the Avis car rental agency. Knowing that Avis would prohibit us from taking one of its vehicles into a combat zone, Ben told the salesclerk that he and I were planning a romantic getaway to nearby Venice, Italy. He threw himself into the part, describing our courtship and love of the coast.

Our route to Bosnia took us through Croatia, and when we arrived in Zagreb, the capital, we headed to the Bosnian embassy to collect our visas. We found a grim scene. Dozens of Bosnian refugee families huddled in a long line around the block. Several of the men and women waiting had shaved heads and crosses etched into their faces. One of them told us that they were Muslims whom the Serbs had tortured and marked.

None of my graphic late-night reading at Carnegie had prepared me to see scars cut into human flesh. I asked a man whose right leg had been amputated above the knee what he thought of the current UN peace plan, and he put his thumb down to signal his disapproval. For good measure, he directed the only English words he seemed to know at the Western negotiators: “FUCK OFF.”

A proper journalist would have asked him and the other Bosnians to recount what they had gone through, but I could not bring myself to probe for details. Forcing them to rehash what had happened seemed cruelly voyeuristic. Instead, after George (who spoke Serbo-Croatian) translated some small talk, we shuffled inside to get the visas we would need in order to cross into Bosnia.

Our next stop was the local UN headquarters, where the press official told us that he did not have the passes for which we had applied. My imagination began running wild. I visualized a vast team of forensic specialists conducting an exhaustive verification process—including a call to Foreign Policy asking Maynes to confirm the contents of “his” letter. In reality, the UN official responsible for laminating the badges had simply taken an extra-long lunch break.

With our visas and paperwork finally in hand, we drove our rental car several hours in the direction of Bihać, a small Muslim enclave in the northwest corner of Bosnia that was surrounded on all sides by Serb militants. Ben had sold me on this destination by reminding me that Bihać was the only one of six UN-declared “safe areas” actually living up to its name. But while Bihać was not experiencing the brutal fighting going on elsewhere, the risks of visiting were real. The UN press officer had explicitly warned us not to travel there and had cautioned that many of the roads along the way were mined.

We placed a handwritten “PRESS” placard in our car window as a precaution, but it offered uncertain protection. Many Serb rebels believed they were being unfairly villainized by Western journalists—all it would take for our trip to turn deadly was one renegade soldier deciding to seek revenge. I was scared for my physical safety and knew that the trip was placing great stress on Mum and Eddie.

After passing through Croatian army and Croatian Serb rebel checkpoints, we saw the royal blue, white, and gold flag of Bosnia. A minute later, a group of very thin Bosnian soldiers welcomed us with smiles and high fives. Most of them looked no older than twenty. We drove further, into a landscape of bucolic green hills. So far, Bosnia looked nothing like the bombed-out ruins for which I had prepared myself. Around every bend I half expected the summer cheer to be shattered by gunfire, but the only sounds of war we heard were a comfortable distance away.

Over the course of our three-day stay in the Bihać area, we learned that the relative calm had a great deal to do with a wealthy Bosnian Muslim businessman named Fikret Abdić. Abdić ran a food-processing company that was the region’s chief employer, which gave him bargaining power with the Serbs encircling Bihać. If they let supplies in and didn’t attack, Abdić agreed to provide continued access to the food his company produced.

Because Abdić’s main focus was his own profits, and because Bosnian Serb forces were killing Muslims and Croats elsewhere in the country, the Bosnian government denounced him as a traitor. He was also wanted in Austria for allegedly pilfering money intended for refugees. But the civilians we met, who had been able to keep working and sending their children to school, described Abdić as a hero. I interviewed a young pharmacology student named Nedzara Midzic who had lost twenty-two pounds when she had lived in besieged Sarajevo earlier in the war. In Bihać, she was no longer scrounging for food. “He may profit,” she said of Abdić, “but at least we profit too.”

Listening to Bosnians express their gratitude to Abdić was a reminder of how little I actually knew about the country’s complex dynamics. I wasn’t sure how I would get to the bottom of what was really happening. But at a minimum, I knew I would need to spend much more time in the region and take greater risks.

When we left Bosnia and crossed back into Croatian territory, I was immensely relieved. We had not been attacked and I had managed to interview civilians, soldiers, and government officials as if I were an actual reporter. Back at our hotel in Zagreb, I telephoned Mum at her Brooklyn hospital to let her know that everything had turned out all right.

Ben and George then took me to the Zagreb home of Richard Carruthers, a BBC correspondent with whom they were acquainted. Richard’s smoke-filled flat was everything I had ever associated with the romantic life of a foreign correspondent. Several rugged-looking reporters in cargo pants were drinking whiskey and playing poker at a coffee table. Carruthers himself was thumbing through a vast collection of LPs in search of just the right jazz record for the steamy afternoon. And Richard’s girlfriend, Laura Pitter—an American from Laguna Beach, California, whose byline I knew from Time magazine and the Christian Science Monitor—was on the porch in a red bikini, cooling off in a paddle pool and drinking a margarita.

Sitting among these journalists, I was mesmerized by their lively back-and-forth on Balkan politics. After inquiring about the Serbs’ territorial ambitions, I asked them which news outlets they worked for. They told me that they all filed stories for multiple publications and networks. Because most American and British outlets did not have full-time correspondents permanently based in the region, they often relied on “stringers,” regular contributors who were not on salary but were paid for each article or broadcast piece that was accepted.

When I asked whether a newcomer like me would be able to find work, though, they quickly shot me down. “The strings are all taken,” one said definitively.

Laura, the only woman in the group, did not contradict her colleagues in the moment, but she pulled me aside before I left. “I don’t know what these guys are talking about,” she said. “There is plenty of work to go around. You should move here and give it a try.” Looking around, she grabbed a cardboard coaster out from under a beer and wrote down her email and phone number.

“You can totally do this,” she said as she handed me the coaster. “Write me if you’re coming back. I’ll show you around.”

MY LAST STOP BEFORE RETURNING to the United States was to see Fred. I took a cab out to Zagreb Airport, where he and his engineering team were staging dry runs to prepare for their upcoming mission in Sarajevo. The plan called for landing C-130 transport planes in the besieged city, quickly unloading mammoth water purification modules from the cargo bays, and then whisking the modules into the city before the Serbs realized what was transpiring.

The lives of those on Fred’s team—and the survival of the equipment—depended on being able to maneuver the freight onto trucks with lightning speed at Sarajevo Airport. Since the Serb soldiers manning artillery around the airport were using the siege—and the cut-off of water—to try to force the Bosnian government to surrender, they were expected to try to prevent the water equipment from being delivered, including by barraging Fred and his team with shellfire.

Watching Fred in action, I was struck not by the grandness of the enterprise, but by the tedium and the minutiae necessary to coordinate the pilots, the crewmen, the forklift operators, the engineers, and the drivers. The orchestration of every movement consumed him—any lapse in the assembly line could spell disaster.

“If we don’t get the details right,” he observed to me when a mix-up brought the exercise to a halt, “people are going to die.”

The offloading did not go well in the trial runs I watched. Fred had calculated that the contractors would need to land the plane and unload in ten minutes or less, but the first attempt I watched took a whopping thirty-five minutes. The temperature on the Zagreb tarmac was scorching; tempers seemed to be flaring. I was worried. Fred insisted he was not.

He planned to travel to Sarajevo the next day. “You should come with me,” he said offhandedly. My heart leaped. Now that I had made it to Bihać and back, I had crossed the Rubicon and visited a war zone. Though it was irrational, I was now less afraid. If I were to accompany Fred, I thought, I could give readers back home the inside story of America’s humanitarian “MacGyver.” I would have full access, and in showing what just one person could do, I could show how much more the United States could be doing.

I telephoned Mort with excitement, but he was having none of it. “You’re coming home,” he said. “You work for me.” I was twenty-three years old and hardly indispensable at Carnegie, so his adamancy surprised me. Only when I got back did Mort’s devoted secretary share why he had been so firm. “He was worried sick about you,” she said. While my boss had introduced me to a humanitarian cowboy, he did not want me to become one.

I PITCHED U.S. News a story on Bihać—the moral complexity of Fikret Abdić and “why one Bosnian safe area is actually safe.” Carey told me the foreign editor was intrigued. “Give it a try,” he said, asking for six hundred words.

Back in Washington, I read through my notebooks dozens of times, circling and recircling the most vivid quotes from my reporting. For days, I stared at my desktop screen at work, unable to settle on the right beginning. I joked with Eddie that I felt like the character Grand in Albert Camus’s The Plague, who, for the duration of the novel, obsessively tries to craft the “perfect” sentence, as the plague kills off his neighbors.

After trying hundreds of alternatives, I finally settled upon, “The most jarring sound in Bihać, a Muslim enclave of 300,000 in the northwest corner of Bosnia, is not the reverberation of machine-gun fire, but the splashing and chatter of children playing in the Una River.”

Two weeks later, attending the US Open tennis tournament with Mum, I called U.S. News from a pay phone at a prearranged time. The foreign editor told me that he planned to run the piece. I pumped my fist and gave Mum a thumbs-up. During the call, her expression had been as tense as it was when she was watching her favorite tennis players during their final set tiebreakers, but at my signal, her whole bearing relaxed.

When U.S. News faxed me the edited draft, however, I was horrified by their changes, which I felt misled readers. “They oversimplified my oversimplification!” I complained to Mum and Eddie that night. The next day, I delivered a long exposition contesting what the editor had “done” to my prose. I was surprised to discover that he was not wedded to his edits.

“I just didn’t have space for what you gave me,” he said curtly. “Make it right. But I need it quickly.” In the end, U.S. News ran my 478-word article in a box alongside a much longer piece by their regular stringer.

Seeing my name in print in a mainstream newsmagazine felt like the greatest triumph of my life. The experience also gave me a burst of confidence. I had proven to myself that I could learn about a foreign crisis and get paid to write about it. I sent my clips—the Daily Jang op-ed and the newly published U.S. News article—to Bam Bam, then ninety-eight years old and still a prolific pen pal. “My future is very uncertain. I love working at Carnegie, and I love my boss, Morton Abramowitz. But I feel I’ve expired here,” I wrote in an accompanying letter.

Although I didn’t say so to Bam Bam, I also realized that I had picked up some unappealing habits. I had never been without opinions, but my certitude previously had to do with seemingly trivial issues like an umpire’s bad call in a baseball game. Now, as I researched and reflected on real-world events, I seemed unable to contain my emotions or modulate my judgments. If the subject of Bosnia came up and someone innocently described the conflict as a civil war, I would erupt: “It is genocide!”

While I made an effort to divest myself of sanctimony—among my least favorite qualities in others—I tried to look at the upside: in the span of less than a year, I had gone from hardly thinking about serving others to constantly thinking about what I could do to be “useful”—the quality Mort, Fred, and my mother valued most.

Since the summer, I had also begun marking my place in whatever I was reading with a new bookmark: the coaster on which Laura Pitter, the war correspondent, had written her phone number.

8
HEARTS OF DARKNESS

My mother supported everything I had ever done—until I decided to become a war correspondent.

“Journalism is a fiercely competitive business,” she told me in late 1993 when I called to inform her that I planned to move to Croatia. “Very few people who try actually make it.”

Her conservative counsel was out of character for someone whose every major life choice—from becoming a doctor to running away with Eddie to America—had defied the odds. “Mum, since when have you ever decided whether or not to do something based on an assumption that you will fail?” I asked. “If I think everyone else will be better than me, then you’re right, I shouldn’t try. But if that is my approach, maybe I should just preemptively admit defeat and retire now.”

The back-and-forth grew heated and unpleasant, and the conversation finally ended when one of us hung up on the other.

I knew that the real source of her worry was my safety. But I thought I could bring her around if she could see my growing interest in US foreign policy as something resembling the passion she had for medicine. Thirty years into her career, though her hours remained punishing, Mum seemed almost to skip to work—such was her love of caring for patients. I had always longed to find a job that would likewise allow me to find joy in the task itself. Before working for Mort, I wasn’t sure I was capable of such dedication. But now I was beginning to feel differently.

Within a few weeks, I found myself standing beside her at a Manhattan electronics store as she handed her credit card to the clerk to buy me my first laptop computer. “I can’t believe I am facilitating this,” she mumbled.

Part of my strategy to wear Mum down had been projecting an air of inevitability about the entire endeavor. But as I exited the store, toting my new Toshiba laptop, I was racked with self-doubt. Was she right? Would I fall flat on my face, run out of money, and return home in defeat? Worse, would I allow myself to get sucked into life as a war correspondent and end up getting killed?

Mort was initially skeptical of the move, but knowing he didn’t have a job to offer me after my internship ended, he came around; indeed, he dedicated an entire afternoon to telephoning all the newspaper editors he knew to tell them I was going. He also connected me to the foreign editor of National Public Radio (NPR), who told me, as U.S. News had done, that she would take my calls if I had a story idea.

Working for Mort had made me realize just how American I had become. Beyond my accent, which no longer bore traces of a lilt, I now thought like an American, reacting to problems in the world—like the Bosnia war—by asking myself, “What, if anything, can we, America, do about it?” I also wanted to vote, which, still an Irish citizen, I had been unable to do in the 1992 presidential election.

During high school, I had failed the driver’s test several times (hitting various cones), and I still felt the sting of humiliation from admitting to my classmates what had happened. I was determined to avoid a similar embarrassment on my citizenship test, and wildly overprepared, using a Barron’s citizenship guide to create flash cards with every conceivable question I might be asked about American government and civics. Unlike many of those applying, English was my first language, and I had the benefit of learning US history in school. Still, I felt relieved when, in the fall of 1993, I learned I had passed.

Mum and Eddie had been sworn in as Americans the previous year, and, because they had made no fuss about their naturalization ceremony, I didn’t think to invite them to the courthouse in Brooklyn to see mine. However, the other new Americans participating treated the day like the momentous event that it was, donning their finest suits and dresses and surrounding themselves with family.

During our collective Oath of Allegiance, we pledged, “I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Looking around the courtroom, seeing emotion ripple across the faces of those whose hands were raised, I was struck by what America meant as a refuge, and as an idea. All of us gathered that morning had reached the modern Promised Land. We weren’t giving up who we were or where we came from; we were making it American. I hugged an elderly woman from Central America on my left, and a tall man from Russia to my right. We were all Americans now.

AS MY DOUBTS about whether to move to the Balkans lingered, I devised a test for myself that I have used many times since. The test, as I put it then, was as follows: If I end up not making it as a journalist, will something else I learn in the process make it worth trying? I would come to call this the “in trying for Y, the most I accomplish is X” test, or the “X test.” This was a kind of self-protective exercise—designed to minimize my sense of risk by preemptively establishing a positive spin on even a negligible potential outcome.

Since I was fascinated by Balkan history, I had my answer. If the most I achieved by moving to the former Yugoslavia was to learn the history and language of the region, I thought, it will have been worth it (provided I did not die).

The Irish people are a famously emotional bunch, but tend to avoid displays of sentimentality. Frank McCourt, who spent his childhood in Ireland, wrote in his magnificent memoir Angela’s Ashes:

If I were in America I could say, I love you, Dad, the way they do in the films, but you can’t say that in Limerick for fear you might be laughed at. You’re allowed to say you love God and babies and horses that win but anything else is a softness in the head.

When I read this passage a few years after my move to the Balkans, I dog-eared the page, as I felt it unlocked one of the mysteries of my childhood in which love was tacitly communicated but almost never directly expressed.

Nonetheless, at the airport with Mum and Eddie before I boarded my flight to Europe, we all teared up as we said goodbye. In the back of our minds, we knew that relatively peaceful Zagreb would not hold me long. The human toll of the Bosnian war—and the possibility of being able to do something to draw more attention to it—would be too great a gravitational pull.

I DECIDED NOT TO DIVE IN as a freelance journalist from the start, but instead to sign up for an intensive Croatian language and culture program. I would pay a small fee to live with a host family in Zagreb rather than immediately having to find an apartment of my own. If I could get a handle on the language, I thought, I would need to spend less on expensive interpreters when I started actual reporting.

My arrival in Zagreb was not unlike that of an American college student in a study abroad program. My Croatian host family greeted me at the airport. They encouraged me to try out my rudimentary Croatian,[fn1] and I went out for drinks with their daughter, a vivacious university student who offered tips for exploring the city. But within no time, I found myself put off by the family’s nationalism and the way the parents denigrated Serbs. This was not the first time I had seen how kindness toward a favored “in-group” (I was Catholic like them) could coexist with bigotry toward those who were not included. The situation reminded me of my experience as a new Lakeside student when the parents of a few of my white high school friends had generously embraced me while disparaging the other newcomers, the African Americans who were bused to school.

I soon learned that expressions of anti-Serb animus were fairly commonplace around Croatia. Croatians had felt subjugated by Serbs in the former Yugoslavia and had very recently suffered ruthless Yugoslav Army bombardments. When I tried to argue that the whole ethnic group could not be blamed, several said out loud, “The only good Serb is a dead Serb.” I eventually dropped out of my Croatian language class because my teacher refused to use words that originated in Serbia, and I began the familiar practice of building my own flash-card library. Luckily, I would later find a wonderful teacher in Bosnia.

Laura Pitter was the person who most eased my transition. She proved every bit as bighearted as she had seemed when we first met the previous summer. She immediately invited me to accompany her to interviews. “You are going to do great here,” she said, as if reading my doubts. “Remember, you know the story.”

After I had been in Croatia for two weeks, I telephoned NPR, using the number the foreign editor had given me before I left Washington. I tentatively asked the person who answered if she would be interested in “something” on a cease-fire between Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats that had just been brokered by US diplomats. The voice on the other end seemed practiced in fielding calls from strangers. “Sure,” she said, to my shock. “How about a forty-five-second spot? We will call you back from the studio within the hour.”

Before I had a chance to inquire about specifics, I heard a dial tone.

I turned to Laura, who was sitting cross-legged on her couch, writing her own story on a laptop. “What’s a spot?” I asked.

When NPR called back, Laura said, they would conduct a sound check and then would expect me to do three things: get listeners’ attention with my opening, describe my nugget of news, and efficiently conclude.

I practiced and practiced, ducking into the bathroom so Laura wouldn’t hear my affected inflections. I found the sign-off the most difficult: “For NPR, this is Samantha Power reporting from Zagreb.” I just could not believe that NPR would want me to say this; they barely knew me! But Laura insisted it was standard. When the phone rang, I tried not to let my nervousness show and successfully delivered the “spot” on my third try.

I telephoned my mother later that evening, but she beat me to my news. “I nearly crashed my car on the way home!” she told me, clearly overjoyed and amazed by the speed with which I seemed to have gotten settled. Whatever her misgivings, she had never strayed from my corner. Eddie, meanwhile, had already contacted NPR to secure a copy of the tape. “They said your name twice!” he declared.

Not long after, Fred Cuny passed through Zagreb and welcomed me to the region by inviting me to dinner with a few of his friends. He told us that his team had completed the dangerous operation at Sarajevo Airport. “We got our time down to seven minutes!” he boasted, explaining that the specially designed equipment they had snuck into the city was already filtering and chlorinating previously undrinkable river water. When he and his team opened the pipes for the first time, he recalled, they were accidentally doused in five hundred gallons of water. He described a jubilant scene of soaked engineers, arm in arm with Bosnian staff who laughed merrily as they imagined what running water would mean for their families and neighbors.

I was in awe of what Fred had done. By improvising a water system, he had helped blunt the impact of one of the cruelest tactics in the Bosnian Serb siege. He had also enhanced his relevance in Washington, giving him more sway in the ongoing debate about whether the United States should use military force to try to end the carnage. Because of the Bosnian Serb Army’s terror tactics and what he saw as the minimal risk to US forces, Fred believed it should. He seemed to know more than most US officials about the location and capabilities of Bosnian Serb heavy weapons. While other humanitarians avoided contact with the US government in order to show their independence and neutrality, he relished sharing all he knew.

The day after our dinner in Zagreb, Fred returned to Sarajevo. He was driving with ABC News anchor Peter Jennings when they heard a shell crashing into the main market two blocks away. Sixty-eight people were killed in what was the deadliest massacre of the war. Fred was incensed. He raged against the US government, telling Jennings on camera that two American fighter planes had been flying overhead when the Bosnian Serb Army struck. “They were stunting up there, just flying around in circles and playing,” he said. “They could have done something.”

I was getting a complicated introduction to American power. Since April of 1993, the United States and its NATO allies had been patrolling a no-fly zone that prevented Serb fighter jets from carrying out aerial bombardments over Bosnian territory. US-piloted F-16s were frequently visible in the sky, and their overhead passes—with sonic booms like those heard at a baseball game on the Fourth of July—were awesome displays of might.

Yet the UN Security Council resolution authorizing the no-fly zone only permitted NATO to shoot down aircraft that were dropping bombs from the air; its pilots did not have permission to attack those who were using their artillery and mortars to slaughter people.

Fred called me the night of the market massacre, his voice still trembling as he spoke: “This is a failure of humanity,” he said. “They will not stop until they are stopped.”

Sitting in my Zagreb apartment and watching CNN footage of market vendors carrying away the bloodied remains of their mutilated friends, I found myself rooting for the first time in my life for the United States to use military force.

Despite President Clinton’s promises during the 1992 presidential campaign to stop the killing, the deaths of eighteen American soldiers in Somalia during the first year of his presidency left him deeply concerned about US forces becoming entangled in messy, peripheral conflicts around the world. He was fearful that even limited action in Bosnia would lead to “another Somalia,” or, worse, “another Vietnam.” This reminded me of the peril of applying analogies in geopolitics, best encapsulated in Mark Twain’s line: “A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won’t sit on a cold stove either.” The conflicts in Somalia, Vietnam, and Bosnia had little in common with one another. In addition, the UN Security Council had imposed an arms embargo on Bosnia, which disproportionately impacted Bosnia’s Muslims, as they did not have access to weapons from Yugoslavia’s vast national army arsenal. They could not rescue or defend themselves. American planes were already flying overhead. I did not believe Clinton should deploy ground forces to Bosnia, but I thought he should tell Bosnian Serb soldiers to leave their positions and should order US planes to destroy their weapons, so they could not kill civilians with impunity.

I called Mort and awakened him at four a.m. in Washington. I urged him to contact all the people he knew in the Clinton administration—but mainly, I just needed to hear his voice.

“What will it take?” I pleaded.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But this may finally get them to move.” He was referring to Clinton and his national security team. He paused. “Then again, it may not.”

The fact that Fred was so close to the market when the massacre occurred was an uncomfortable reminder of what I was getting myself into. While Westerners were not targeted nearly as frequently as they later would be in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, journalists, aid workers, and diplomats still faced serious risks, and could easily be hit in “wrong place, wrong time” incidents. I could tell myself Fred knew the ropes and I would be safe with him. But any feeling of security in Bosnia was deceptive. Who lived and died in the war was viciously random.

MY FIRST SPRING IN THE REGION, I traveled with two male colleagues to the towns of Prijedor and Banja Luka in the so-called Republika Srpska. The local Serb authorities had made non-Serbs turn over their properties and businesses before gunmen forced many to flee and herded thousands into concentration camps, where they were tortured, starved, and killed. The paramilitaries had instructed Serb residents to mark their homes to denote the ethnic “purity” of those within. So many Muslims and Croats had been expelled or murdered that we referred to the area as the “heart of darkness.”

As the three of us absorbed the desolate, almost apocalyptic sight of roads lined with gutted, bombed-out houses that had once been owned by Muslims and Croats, we did not speak. The homes that remained flew white flags or had Serbian nationalist symbols spray-painted near their front doors. These marked, lit residences—bustling with life, but often wedged between the carcasses of what had been the homes of their neighbors—gave off a sinister glow.

We checked into a gloomy, virtually empty hotel near the main road and went up to our separate rooms. Just as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard a sudden banging on the door. Before I had the chance to answer, several large armed men barged in, shouting at me to get up and go with them.

They reeked of alcohol, and my hands shook so much that I had trouble packing. One of the creepiest and most commanding of the lot led me outside into the backseat of a car, where, to my great relief, my male colleagues were already sitting. As I tried to settle my nerves, I watched out of the corner of my eyes as the Serb soldier who had taken me to the car began flicking through my passport.

“Sam-an-ta,” he leered in a tone of mock admiration. I looked away, fearing that eye contact might increase the risk of physical contact.

“Sam-an-ta,” he said again. “Are you virgin?” My head began to spin. I thought about trying to bolt from the car.

“I said, are you virgin?” he repeated. I stared out the window, determined to pretend I was not hearing what I heard.

“Sam-an-ta, answer me,” he said sharply. “Are you virgin?” Lacking recourse, I snapped back at him, “It is none of your business. Leave me alone.”

He asked again. “Stop,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster.

He came closer, and I could see he looked puzzled—and slightly wounded. He held up my passport and said, “You born September twenty-one. I thought you virgin.”

I felt suddenly faint. “No, no, no,” I said, “you mean Virgo. You mean, ‘Are you Virgo?’ Yes! My birthday is September twenty-first. I am a Virgo.”

We were soon released without physical harm. Bosnian women and girls were not so lucky. Some 20,000 of them are estimated to have been raped during the conflict.

Being a woman covering the war affected my experience in other ways. The culture that female reporters confronted in the Balkans was traditional and patriarchal, with deep-rooted sexism. That said, those with power may well have viewed women as less threatening than men, sometimes offering us better access to the people and events we wished to cover. I cannot pinpoint the difference gender made, and other female correspondents may not agree, but I found some of my sources underestimated me—and thus may have been more forthcoming than with male reporters.

One night I joined my friend Stacy Sullivan, Newsweek’s freelance correspondent, on an outing across Sarajevo to try to find water for a long-overdue bath. We were pulled over, arrested for violating the curfew, and confined to a Sarajevo prison cell. When I got permission to make a phone call, instead of calling the US ambassador, I telephoned the Bosnian prime minister, whom I had often interviewed and who was a notorious flirt. He seemed to enjoy flexing his muscles to secure our release, and we headed home within several hours. A couple of months later, I agreed to meet the prime minister for an interview at a Zagreb hotel as he passed through on his way to lobby the Clinton administration in Washington. When I arrived at the hotel room that the prime minister’s aide had directed me to, I expected to be greeted by his entourage. Instead, the prime minister himself met me at the door—barely dressed.

I was so shocked that instead of fleeing immediately as I should have, I crossed the threshold into his suite as if on autopilot—only to spend the next fifteen minutes dodging his repeated efforts to embrace me while I futilely urged him to commence our scheduled interview. Finally, when he made clear that he had little interest in being questioned about the war afflicting his people, I left.

I do not know a female correspondent who wasn’t caught off guard by an aggressive sexual come-on from a source. Because we women had become such close friends, we often traded stories and warned one another away from particular people. “Ewwwwwwwww …” was the subject we gave the emails we sent to one another recounting our latest experiences with unwelcome male attention. We even found ourselves occasionally expressing gratitude for those local and international officials who didn’t make lewd comments or direct advances.

Now, however, I am struck by the fact that we didn’t publicize these incidents. Perhaps this was because such aggressive acts were so run-of-the-mill that they didn’t seem noteworthy. We may also have compared our experiences to those of Bosnian women whom we interviewed who had been raped and brutalized. Mainly, though, I think we believed that the burden was on us to evade harm.

9
“TELL CLINTON”

Just after US diplomats helped broker a cease-fire between Bosnian Muslim and Croat fighters in central Bosnia, Time asked Laura to report on the nascent peace, and she invited me along. Laura and I ended up spending several weeks traveling around the ravaged area, which had been inhabited mainly by Muslims and Croats before the war. The Bosnian Serb paramilitaries had first introduced the chilling term “ethnic cleansing” in places like Banja Luka to describe how they sought to “purify” the land they controlled of its Muslim and Croat residents. But it hadn’t taken long for Muslim and Croat militias to adopt the same sinister strategy of purging the “other” from the territory they controlled.

As we drove through the areas where the US-brokered cease-fire was taking effect, we could often tell which ethnic group held an enclave only by noting who was being insulted in the graffiti scrawled on apartment building walls. Sometimes our best clue as to who had been victimized was either a church’s cross or a mosque’s minaret poking out from a large pile of rubble. The scenes reminded me of a Macedonian satirist’s brilliant summation of the ethos behind the killing: “Why should I be a minority in your state when you can be a minority in mine?”

After ten months of ferocious fighting, the civilians we met were shell-shocked, blinking in the afternoon winter sunshine like people who had just emerged into the daylight after watching a horror movie in a darkened theater. One woman stood in her front yard looking at her home, which had been in enemy hands for more than a year, trembling at the sight of what little was left. I asked a group of soldiers how they had gone so quickly from firing grenades across a front line to tossing their rivals packs of cigarettes. “Our commanders told us to fight,” one soldier said simply. “Now they are telling us to stop.”

My time in central Bosnia deepened my understanding of American power, which I could now see encompassed far more than fighter jets. The United States had brokered the cease-fire not by resorting to military action, but by exerting unrelenting diplomatic pressure on both sides. Although almost everyone we met had lost a loved one in the fighting, the new agreement allowed people to dare to hope that the war—or at least their experience of the war—might end. The superpower had made a horrific situation much better.

I felt an immense sense of privilege at being able to chronicle the experience of men and women being reunited with their elderly parents who had been too infirm to flee. And I was moved by the elation of children who relished the simple pleasure of playing outside again. With the pause in fighting, a motley crew of journalists from the UK, the US, and France had rushed to the area to cover this breaking—and rare good news—story. We drove ourselves hard during the day, interviewing dozens of people and crossing front lines that hadn’t been traversed in months. With regular phone service to the outside world cut off across Bosnia, we ducked into UN bases to file our stories—an exercise rarely without technical hassle. We had to first connect our computers to a regular phone jack and then dial up a number in Austria that would, on a good day and after some suspense, let off a long beep indicating that a virtual “handshake” had occurred. Then, when our stories had been uploaded, we went for drinks.

I felt like I stood out as a novice among veterans. Emma Daly of the British Independent accompanied Laura and me on our interviews. Although Emma was also making her first trip to central Bosnia, I seemed perpetually cold and wet while she was somehow prepared for all weather contingencies, pulling the necessary attire from her compact suitcase—whether fleece, down jacket, or raincoat. In a belt wallet under her shirt, she also kept rolls of small bills, which were essential in towns where banks had long since been destroyed. “How did you know to bring all that?” I asked enviously.

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 been converted into graveyards. Since few families who lost loved ones could afford a proper cement marker, they used simple wooden plaques, often scavenged from a table or bookshelf. I felt sick when I saw, at the Lion Cemetery, the relatively recent birthdates on the grave markers—children, teenagers, and twentysomethings seemed to account for the majority of the deaths. And alongside the Bosnian Serb leaders’ determination to kill the city’s residents came a desire to humiliate and torment those who survived. They bombed libraries, concert halls, and universities. As businesses closed or were destroyed, unemployment soared.

To pay for food, English professors sought out jobs as interpreters for the UN. Engineers turned to rummaging among destroyed cars for batteries with a charge. Poets and medical students who had never dreamed of holding a gun joined the army so they could defend their city and all it represented.

Back in 1992, in the early months of the war, Sarajevo residents had opportunities to be evacuated and become refugees. But many stayed because they expected that the war, which they had never believed would happen in the first place, would end quickly. Others remained because, irrespective of whether they were Muslims, Croats, Serbs, or Jews, they knew that the Serb extremists’ primary goal was to destroy the spirit of tolerance and pluralism embodied in the city’s multiethnic character. “If we leave, they win,” Sarajevans would say defiantly. Unfortunately, once they had passed up the chance to depart, they did not get another opportunity.

As dangerous as the Bosnian capital was, I knew I was in a privileged position compared to the residents scrambling for safety around me. I had a UN press badge and thus permission to leave as well as enter; almost everyone else was stuck.

While some Western officials talked about the conflict as if it were historically preordained—“they have been killing one another for centuries”—the lives of the young people before the war were not dissimilar from those of the average young American. They would meet up for an espresso or a beer after work, and would dance at raves or to the music of popular bands like U2. The values they learned were the same as those we had been taught. Mosques, Catholic churches, Orthodox churches, and a synagogue dotted the downtown. One in every five marriages in Bosnia (and one in three in Sarajevo) had been ethnically mixed.

My childhood in Ireland had coincided with the period of sectarian tensions and terrorism known as “The Troubles,” which had started shortly before I was born. The people of Northern Ireland would ultimately endure thirty years of conflict in which some 3,600 lives were lost. The deadliest attack in the Irish Republic’s history occurred in 1974, a couple of months before my brother’s birth, when Loyalist paramilitaries set off a series of rush-hour bombs in my hometown of Dublin, killing twenty-six people, including a pregnant woman. As the conflict escalated, a growing number of refugees from the North—more than 10,000 overall—poured across the border.

These events did not affect my life in any immediate way. Even after violent incidents in Dublin, I do not recall ever fearing that my mother would not make it home from the hospital or my dad from the pub. At the same time, my early years in Dublin meant that I never saw civil strife as something that happened “over there” or to “those people.”

When I spoke with my friends and family back in the States and in Ireland, I tried to translate what Bosnians were experiencing, but I must have sounded preachy as I urged my friends to put themselves in different shoes:

Imagine if you were sitting at home and you suddenly found that your telephone line had been cut. You couldn’t even call your parents to tell them you were okay. Imagine having to sleep in every layer of clothing you owned to survive without heat. Imagine not being able to send your kids to school because it was safer to keep them in your dark basement than for them to take a short walk down the block. Imagine hearing your child’s tummy growling and not being able to help because the next UN food delivery was not for another week. Imagine getting shot at by people whose weddings you had attended. This is what is happening right now to people like us.

When I first visited, although the war had already been under way for nearly two years, I spoke to many Bosnians who still held out hope that the United States would rescue them. Their knowledge of the political dynamics in Washington was striking. The columns of American opinion writers (particularly Anthony Lewis and William Safire of the New York Times) were translated and, despite the shortage of paper and ink, widely circulated. Electricity was intermittent, and smuggled batteries for shortwave radios were only sold at exorbitant prices. Nonetheless, many residents knew which members of the US Senate were pushing for air strikes, while some even tracked when these politicians were up for reelection. Often my Bosnian neighbors informed me of obscure happenings in the Clinton administration. “Have you heard Steve Oxman is out and Richard Holbrooke is in?” a waiter in a café asked in 1994, alerting me to the news that Clinton had replaced his assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs.

Some days, when President Clinton seemed on the verge of using military force, and the Bosnian Serb Army was afraid of provoking him, the atmosphere was so calm that I went jogging. Other periods were extremely dangerous, and I could do little more than pray the shells would not find me. On occasion, when it felt like the mortars were landing closer and closer, I was too frightened to do more than seek shelter in the bathtub of the hotel or apartment where I was staying. The most lethal days started peaceful and turned deadly: daring to trust the early quiet, people would venture outside, and Bosnian Serb forces would then hit crowded bread and water lines, markets, and school playgrounds.

Despite these horrors, for the first several years of the war, Sarajevans treated Western visitors with immense magnanimity. Even after losing loved ones—that very day—they would insist on pouring their hearts out in order to alert the world to their suffering. They would share their most intimate memories.

“Tell Clinton,” one bereaved father said as he ushered me to the door after describing the loss of his son. It was a phrase I heard often.

Amid the darkness, the resilience of the people of Bosnia was inspiring. They asserted their dignity in large and small ways. People scraped together resources to stage elaborate weddings. They went on having babies, perhaps aided by the fact that birth control pills were hard to get in the besieged city. Women who walked to work did so in high heels, even though their impractical shoes would impede their escape when bullets started flying. As Bosnians waited hours in line for their turn at the water pump, they imposed rules and created penalties for those who cut the queue or took more than their share. Poets, novelists, and musicians kept writing. Though the main theaters had been reduced to rubble, artists found places to perform plays and music.

And while there was much to cry about, Sarajevans did not lose their sense of humor. At the start of the war, the Serb militants frequently graffitied areas they claimed should be theirs with the words “Ovo je Srbija!,” or “This is Serbia!” When they did this to a post office in Sarajevo, a resident famously responded in spray paint: “Budalo, ovo je pošta,” or “Idiot, this is a post office.” And when the siege of Sarajevo officially outlasted the siege of Leningrad, becoming the longest in modern history, a pirate radio station blared the Queen song “We Are the Champions.” The heart of the country refused to stop beating.

10
THE SECRET TO A LONG LIFE

In May of 1995, as I was traveling into Sarajevo with Roger Cohen, the New York Times bureau chief for the Balkans, I nearly lost my life. Serb militants had shut down the airport, so we had no choice but to enter via a dirt road over Mount Igman, the one patch of land around Sarajevo that remained in Bosnian hands. What was little more than a steep mountain goat trail before the war had become the lone land route by which people, food, and arms could still make it into the Bosnian capital.

The Serbs had attempted to take Mount Igman, and the Bosnian Army had suffered significant casualties defending the narrow eighteen-mile road that snaked through the mountain. The entire pass remained vulnerable to Serb artillery, with the last fifteen miles in the line of sight for Serb heavy machine guns and cannons. People who used the road often drove at breakneck speed around sharp bends without any idea what might be coming in the opposite direction. Honking in a blind spot was ill-advised because it would attract attention from Serb gunmen. Yet when a car veered even one foot off the path, there was no guardrail to prevent it from slipping off the shoulder. The drop was precipitous, and the Bosnian Army had mined the side of the mountain to prevent Serb soldiers from staging a stealth attack on foot.

Many people died on Mount Igman, including a number of peacekeepers and, later that summer, three US officials: President Clinton’s Bosnia special envoy Robert Frasure, National Security Council aide Nelson Drew, and the Defense Department’s Joseph Kruzel. The French soldier transporting the American diplomats into Sarajevo had been driving at a rapid clip when he accidentally veered off the side of the road while trying to avoid an approaching convoy. The diplomats’ armored personnel carrier went tumbling more than three hundred yards down the mountain, causing anti-tank rockets in the vehicle to explode.

From the relative shelter of a Bosnian government checkpoint at the top of the mountain road, Roger and I braced ourselves for the perilous journey. As we set off, we could see the hulks of vehicles hit by Serb gunfire or destroyed after drivers had taken the hairpin turns too quickly. Driving the heavy armored vehicle provided by the Times, Roger was aiming for the unachievable combination of speed and maneuverability at once. Whenever we shaved the edge of the road, I turned my body toward the gearshift—as if I could personally avoid the land mines that the outer part of the vehicle might accidentally set off.

As we hurtled down the mountain at a velocity that we hoped would outpace the Serb gunners who might have us in their sights, Roger began to lose control of the vehicle. Our downward momentum from the steepness of the descent caused the steering wheel to elude his grasp and spin wildly. Sweating profusely, all I could do as we lunged from right to left was press my hand against the roof of the five-ton vehicle as Roger tried to keep hold of the violently shaking steering wheel and force the car toward the center of the road. At one point in particular, I felt sure we were about to plunge down the mountain as the car careened out of control toward the edge—but somehow, in a mystery that neither of us understand to this day, Roger managed to haul us back onto the trail.

I WAS BY THEN SPENDING most of my time in Sarajevo, the epicenter of the war. The situation was deteriorating badly. While I was working there in June and July of 1995, an average of three hundred shells rained down on the city each day. With no end to the war in sight, I was starting to feel increasingly like a vulture, preying upon Bosnian misery to write my stories.

Even when my articles received prominent placement in a newspaper or magazine, potentially bringing my reporting to the attention of millions of people, I had a nagging sense that I was falling short. I grew practiced at interviewing survivors of violence, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that by asking questions designed to elicit appalling detail, I was exploiting someone’s personal trauma for “my story.”

There would come a moment in every interview where I would feel a rush of recognition—“I have what I need”—and then would hasten to wind down the conversation so I could get to a power source for my laptop and start writing. I would then begin to feel guilty for having invaded someone’s home, drunk (at their insistence) their scarce coffee or tea, and left.

Once, after I rose to end an interview with an elderly Muslim woman in Serb-held territory, she hugged me goodbye. Writing later that night in my journal, I noted, “She squeezed me like I was one of her own. I was ashamed.” I don’t know now if I was ashamed because I had been practicing my new craft while she was sobbing in pain at the loss of her sons, because I felt the United States was not doing enough to prevent such devastation, or some combination.

When I drove with Stacy Sullivan of Newsweek to UN headquarters for the daily press briefing in Sarajevo, we typically passed a cluster of photographers in an expectant scrum at the entrance to the main road, which was known as Sniper Alley. The still and video photographers had their cameras ready, knowing that someone was likely to get shot by a Bosnian Serb sniper as he or she made a mad dash across this exposed portion of road. Elizabeth Rubin, a writer with Harper’s who would become a close friend, once saw a woman who managed to survive the crossing yell back at one of the perched photographers, “No work for you today, asshole. I made it alive.”

Until that summer, I had believed that if my colleagues and I conveyed the suffering around us to decision-makers in Washington, our journalism might move President Clinton to stage a rescue mission. This had not happened. The words, the photographs, the videos—nothing had changed the President’s mind. While Sarajevans had once thought of Western journalists as messengers on their behalf, they had now begun to see us as ambassadors of idle nations. No matter how many massacres we covered, Western governments seemed determined to steer clear of the conflict.

Even if Clinton and his advisers did not think it reasonable to get involved to prevent atrocities, I thought they should have seen how failing to shore up a fragmenting part of Europe would impact traditional US security interests. The occurrence of such a conflict in the heart of Europe made NATO look feckless, and the failed state gave unsavory criminal elements—like arms traffickers and terrorists—a foothold in Europe. I knew that thousands of foreign fighters were making their way to the country, including the battle-hardened mujahedeen from Afghanistan. But I only later learned that a still-young terrorist group known as al-Qaeda was active there, and that two of the September 11th hijackers as well as attack architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ended up fighting in Bosnia.[2]

On several occasions during the long summer of 1995, when I dropped by the home of someone who had lost a loved one in the capital, I was shooed away. “Why should we talk to you?” one woman screamed at me before slamming her door. “The world knows, your government knows, and you do nothing.”

Just as the war had come to feel normal, so too had the idea that nobody would stop it.

At the same time, I noticed that I had gradually lost my fear. While once I had shivered for hours after evading Serb shelling or sniper fire, now I no longer worried about the crack of gunfire or the crash of a mortar exploding nearby. Three years into their agony, Sarajevans were joking, “If you run, you hit the bullet; if you walk, the bullet hits you.” I had begun to feel a similar fatalism, gradually giving up the superstitions that I had originally seized upon for safety—my Pirates baseball cap, my back-street route to the press briefing, and my ritual beer as I pounded away on my laptop after a long day’s work.

I knew I had been lucky—every reporter had close calls, and mine were nowhere near as hair-raising as those of others. But they began to add up. As I was driving in Serb territory along an icy road, my car turned 180 degrees and spun into a ditch that was surrounded by mines. Once, in Sarajevo, shrapnel burst through the window and landed on the desk where Stacy and I often worked side by side. In the same month, a large mortar attack flattened a house several doors from where I was charging my computer. One day, as Stacy, Emma, and I exited our car near the Bosnian president’s office, Serb snipers fired on us repeatedly, forcing us to race across the parking lot in a panicked search for cover. Our assailants were just a few hundred yards away, and certainly could have hit us if that had been their goal. Instead, they seemed more interested in amusing themselves.

The spike in violence weighed heavily on Mum, Eddie, and Stephen, who were each tracking the news from New York. When I called home, my brother, who was back for the summer after his junior year in college, grabbed the phone. Stephen and my mother had a fraught relationship: she struggled to get him to focus on school and to lay off drugs and alcohol, while he insisted he didn’t need her advice, saying he took after his father, which was just what she was worried about. At the same time, he was protective of her. If one of the patients she was close to died, he was tender, assuring her she had done all she could and frying her up a fish he had caught for dinner.

Stephen and I were not especially close, but we were always warm with each other. So it shocked me when he confronted me about the risks I was taking.

“What you are doing is so selfish, sis,” he said on the phone, asking, “Don’t you ever think about Mum?”

My brother had a point. For all the time I’d spent trying to convey to others what it was like to be a Bosnian under siege, I had not really stopped to imagine what it must have been like to be the parent of someone who had chosen to go live in a war zone.

The call with Stephen reoriented me. “Maybe it’s time,” I thought, and the words of folk singer/songwriter Michelle Shocked sprung into my mind: “The secret to a long life’s knowing when it’s time to go.” I began to think seriously about an exit strategy.

Like many of my contemporaries who had graduated college but were not sure what they wanted to do in their careers, I had considered applying to law school and had taken the LSAT during my year with Mort at Carnegie. The prospect of actually becoming a lawyer hadn’t much appealed to me at the time, and I never followed through with submitting applications. After a few months of working in the Balkans, however, the idea had resurfaced.

The one area where the so-called international community seemed to be making progress was in building new institutions to promote criminal justice. A tribunal was being assembled in The Hague to punish war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Self-conscious about simply recording what was happening around me, I wondered whether, if I became a lawyer, I could do something more concrete to support the victims of atrocities or to punish wrongdoers. Immersing myself in lessons on the rule of law seemed an antidote to the violence and impunity around me.

After a year in the region, I had sent an application to Harvard Law School along with several of my press clips. I thought Harvard’s prestige might add credibility to my writings and policy recommendations, and the law school brochure described a wide range of international law offerings. I also liked the prospect of being just a train ride from Mum and Eddie. In the spring of 1995, I was notified that I had been admitted.

Still unsure of whether I actually wanted to attend, I reached out to Mort for advice. He was vehemently opposed. “Why would you stop doing something valuable in order to go sit in a classroom for three years?” he asked.

He then called his friend, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, whom President Clinton had recently asked to lead the American effort to broker peace in Bosnia, and asked him to use his negotiating skills to talk me out of going to law school. When I answered the phone and heard Holbrooke’s nasal voice, which I knew only from television, I was startled. He told me that he knew many women who had mistakenly gone to law school because they felt they needed a credential to be taken seriously. “You do not need a piece of paper to legitimize yourself,” he said, before adding—to my amazement—“Mort says I should hire you.”

The prospect of working as a junior aide to Holbrooke as he tried to bring the war to an end was tantalizing beyond words. I thanked him for calling and told him I would seriously consider what he had said. After we hung up, I called Eddie and told him about the conversation. “If I work for Holbrooke,” I exclaimed, “I can eliminate all the middle men!” What I meant was that, in order to influence US policy, I would no longer need to convince editors to accept my stories. I could make my case directly to the top decision-makers in government.

Eddie loved the idea, and, in a spontaneous burst of lyricism, immediately launched into one of Shakespeare’s best-known monologues, from Julius Caesar:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat;

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

Knowing I didn’t always grasp precisely what he was getting at, after he finished his oration, he declared, “Go for it!”

But something held me back from taking this fantasy job with Holbrooke. I had begun to fixate on the notion that in law school I could acquire technical, tangible skills that would ultimately equip me to make a bigger difference than I would by putting words to paper, even as an aide to the US envoy. I decided to send in a letter of acceptance to Harvard in order to hold my place, but continued to internally debate whether to attend, self-conscious about the luxury of privileged indecision.

In July of 1995, however, all of this faded from mind as the Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladić launched an all-out assault on the UN-declared “safe area” of Srebrenica, and in the ensuing days orchestrated the largest single massacre in Europe since World War II.

THE DAY BEFORE SREBRENICA FELL, I borrowed a satellite phone from colleagues in Sarajevo and called Ed Cody, the foreign editor of the Washington Post, to pitch a story on the Bosnian Serbs’ march toward the town. Cody said he didn’t deem another Bosnian Serb Army incursion newsworthy, especially as readers had seen a lot in recent months about attacks on UN safe areas.

I argued with him, pointing out that some 30,000 Muslims in Srebrenica had no protection. But I knew that American readers were fatigued and that I had to clear a higher bar to place a story in the Western press than in the early days of what was already a three-year-old conflict.

As I rambled on, hoping to persuade him that this crisis was different, Cody cut me off. “Well,” he said, “it sounds like tomorrow, when Srebrenica falls, we’ll have a story.” I was stunned by the cynicism in his words, but I failed to change his mind.

Twenty-four hours later, Bosnian Serb forces stormed into the town of Srebrenica; on July 12th, my article ran on the front page of the Post under the banner headline: BOSNIAN SERBS SEIZE “SAFE AREA.” When I called Mort, he was disconsolate. “This is the pits, the lowest moment yet,” he said.

Western reporters like me were unable to get access to Srebrenica in the days that followed. The best we could do was speak with alarmed UN officials and Bosnian government sources, and report what was being broadcast on Serbian TV—primarily, images of Mladić in the town, carting Bosnian Muslim men and boys away on buses while assuring them, “No one will harm you.” Still in Sarajevo, I began reporting unverifiable claims that Muslim prisoners like those we saw on TV were in fact being executed. On July 14th, I wrote an article in the Boston Globe titled MASSACRES REPORTED NEAR SREBRENICA, which relayed the Bosnian government’s allegations that hundreds of prisoners had already been murdered. I also quoted an eyewitness saying that “while the TV cameras were there, the Serbs were good. Then the media disappeared, and the soldiers started taking people off the buses.” The whereabouts of some 10,000 people were unknown.

Ten days after Srebrenica’s fall, I heard ever more terrifying reports about what was happening out of sight. Bosnian foreign minister Muhamed Sacirbey claimed that 1,600 Bosnian men and boys detained in a stadium near Srebrenica had been shot. Meanwhile, Bosnian Serb radio openly reported that of the Muslim fighters who had fled Srebrenica, “most were liquidated.” I shuddered at what I was hearing. But blocked by Bosnian Serb forces from getting to Srebrenica, neither I nor my colleagues had any way of corroborating the claims. I hoped they were exaggerated or false. I had also already begun reporting on the brazen Serb assault on a second UN “safe area” around the town of Žepa. There, some 20,000 civilians were trapped, protected by just 79 UN peacekeeping troops.[fn1]

On August 10th, at the UN in New York, US ambassador Madeleine Albright presented evidence to the Security Council that Bosnian Serb soldiers had executed as many as 2,700 people, burying them in shallow mass graves. Albright circulated a set of US satellite images showing a small farming village fourteen miles west of Srebrenica. The “before” photos, grainy though they were, clearly showed prisoners crowded into a soccer field, along with pristine fields nearby. The “after” photos were taken a few days later; the prisoners were gone, and the earth in the neighboring fields had been disturbed in three areas, creating what looked like mass graves.

Albright linked the photos to firsthand testimony from a fifty-five-year-old Muslim who said he had been in a group of men who had been machine-gunned there. The man had miraculously survived, hiding among the corpses of his friends and relatives. At nightfall he had escaped to Bosnian territory before the bodies around him were bulldozed into one of the large graves that lay waiting.

MY FRIEND DAVID ROHDE, the Christian Science Monitor’s Eastern Europe correspondent, was on vacation in Australia visiting his girlfriend when the Serbs took Srebrenica. In the weeks that followed, he read horrific testimonies disseminated in the media from survivors like the one Albright quoted. Without permission from the Bosnian Serb authorities, he managed to elude the military and police and spend two days around Srebrenica searching for evidence of the alleged executions.

On the first day, he entered an abandoned building on the grounds of a local soccer stadium—the same place Foreign Minister Sacirbey had referred to in his alarming speech about mass executions. David found human feces, dried blood, and several dozen bullet holes up and down the walls.

On the second day, using a faxed copy of one of the blurry US satellite photos, he found the fields Albright had referenced. There, he discovered empty ammunition boxes, Muslim prayer beads, photographs, and various personal items. Finally, and most tellingly, as he would write in the Christian Science Monitor, he saw “what appeared to be a decomposing human leg protruding from the freshly turned dirt.”

In addition, in a dozen interviews with Serb soldiers and civilians in the area, he met not a soul who reported seeing or hearing about Muslim prisoners. Thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys seemed to have simply vanished.

After writing a story on the graves, David traveled back to Bosnian-held territory, where he found nine Muslims who said they had played dead in the fields of Srebrenica where the mass executions occurred. When he showed the survivors the items he had found in the fields, one man gasped after seeing the 1982 elementary school diploma of his brother from whom he had been separated. He asked David where he had found the document, and David said he had picked it up fifty feet from a mass grave. The man, David wrote in the Monitor, “stared blankly and then quietly faded into a crowd of soldiers.”

David emailed me after his encounter with the survivors, writing:

I cannot articulate the combination of sadness and disbelief that washed over me when these men would accurately describe the soccer field I visited … and then go on to talk about 1,000 people being gunned down. I kept asking them more and more detailed questions, hoping they would get things wrong, but they didn’t … These people aren’t lying.

The evil of what transpired in Srebrenica, which David did more than any other reporter to expose, helped me decide what I should do next. I could continue to write articles about the Bosnia carnage in an effort to move President Clinton. I could pursue a possible job with Holbrooke and work from within the US government to push for the same outcome. Or I could attend Harvard Law School and, although it would take a few years, try to become a prosecutor who could bring murderers to justice. Working at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague now seemed like the worthiest goal, and the one that would ultimately have the most impact. We would not bring back the men and boys who had been executed, but we could make sure that Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić and others like him faced justice.

Jonathan Moore, the former US diplomat and refugee expert I met working at Carnegie, had become someone I turned to at critical moments. With school beginning at the start of September, I needed to make a final decision, so I telephoned him and asked what I should do.

Jonathan didn’t hesitate. “Get the hell out of there,” he urged me. “You need to break out of the compulsion for power, glory, ego, relevance, contribution. Get out. Get out before it gets you, and you forget what got you in.”

I didn’t think self-consciously about power, glory, and ego, but Jonathan knew I didn’t mind seeing my name in print. He also knew that I was drawn to joining the US government’s Bosnia team because I couldn’t bear to move away from the center of the action.

“But Holbrooke—” I tried.

“Forget Holbrooke,” he said. “There will be other jobs. Reading books will do you good.”

THE PERSON WHO I KNEW would be on the other side of the argument—echoing Mort’s conviction that I stay—was of course Fred Cuny. But once Fred had gotten the water flowing in Sarajevo, he had gone in search of his next ambitious project. A few months later, he had ended up in Chechnya to assess how he could help people being subjected to a comprehensive Russian carpet-bombing campaign. But I couldn’t get Fred’s perspective because he had gone missing.

In early 1995, I had been visiting Mum and Eddie when Fred happened to be coming through New York after his first visit to Chechnya. When he walked into the sports bar he had chosen as our meeting place, he exclaimed “Sammie!” and embraced me in a large Texas hug. When we talked about what he had seen, however, he was uncharacteristically despairing.

“The Serb forces in Bosnia are cruel,” he said, “but they are always trying to figure out how they can get what they want without provoking US intervention. They bomb, they probe, they watch, they pause, they bomb again. Russia’s forces in Chechnya know they are free to do anything they please. They know nobody will stop them. There are no lines they won’t cross. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

While Sarajevo had recorded as many as 3,500 heavy detonations per day, he said, the capital of Chechnya had counted that number each hour. He said that some 400,000 Chechens had been displaced in three months of fighting, and as many as 15,000 Russian and Chechen civilians had been killed.

Yet instead of being deterred, Fred saw a problem to be tackled. In what seemed to me a complete non sequitur from his descriptions of slaughter, he concluded, “I think we can help broker a cease-fire.”

My eyes widened. “By ‘we,’ do you mean you?” I asked, hoping I had misheard. He smiled self-consciously. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Fred also thought that, by visiting, he would be in a stronger position to get the Clinton administration to do more to pressure Russia to desist. He had long impressed upon me one of his core beliefs about influence: “The only way to move people in Washington is to tell them things they don’t already know, and that requires seeing things for yourself.”

Even for Fred Cuny, who had often managed to pull off what entire governments and humanitarian agencies deemed inconceivable, getting the Russians to cease their assault in Chechnya seemed delusional. He was the expert, though, and while I teased him about his excessive confidence, I felt I didn’t know enough to challenge him.

Fred spent the next month publicly blasting the Russian government for its actions, testifying before Congress and writing a lengthy critical essay about Russia’s conduct in the New York Review of Books. His advocacy exposed how badly the Russian efforts were going and, indeed, how some 5,000 Russian soldiers had already been killed. It also encouraged greater scrutiny of the Russian military’s atrocities. By going public with his criticisms of Russia’s war, however, Fred made himself a target. For his safety, Fred’s coworkers pleaded with him not to return to Chechnya, but nobody could say no to Fred Cuny.

In March of 1995, Fred traveled back into Chechnya with two doctors from the Russian Red Cross, a Russian translator, and a local driver. When Fred’s delegation entered territory held by Chechen separatists, they were apprehended. Fred sent a calm note to the Soros Foundation, his funder, saying that his group had been delayed. His Russian translator added a postscript with a wholly different message: “We, as always, are in deep shit … If we’re not back in three days, shake everyone up.”

Then the delegation had disappeared.

Fred’s twenty-eight-year-old son, Craig, and his brother, Chris, quickly flew to the region to begin searching. They got shot at, shelled, and robbed as they spent much of the summer of 1995 trying to find him. Mort excitedly called me in Sarajevo one day with word that Fred had been found—and I was euphoric. But the report proved incorrect, one of several false sightings. Still, I clung to the belief that Fred would turn up.

In mid-August, Craig and Chris announced that Fred had been executed by Chechen rebels not long after being taken captive. Chris said that while Chechen gunmen had pulled the trigger, it was the Russian government that had loaded the gun, spreading false information that Fred was an anti-Chechen Russian agent. “Let it be known to all nations and humanitarian organizations,” Chris declared at a press conference, “that Russia was responsible for the death of one of the world’s great humanitarians.”

I was devastated, both by the loss of someone who had been so exceptionally kind to me, and by the death of a humanitarian hero, whose expertise and can-do spirit seemed so necessary in a world increasingly racked by ethnic and religious conflict.

No matter how much cruelty I had seen in Bosnia, a stubbornly naive part of me could not accept the truth. For weeks, I had vivid dreams about Fred showing up at my door with a big smile and a six-pack of root beer. “You didn’t really think I could die, did you?” he would tell me. I did everything I could to fend off thoughts about his final hours. And I resorted to my time-tested approach to blunting the pain I felt at losing someone important to me: I kept moving.

Fred’s death cemented my decision to duck out of the “real world” and decompress. In late August, I packed up my belongings and booked my flight back to the United States to begin law school.

BACK IN AMERICA, I saw that David’s reporting on Srebrenica had landed like a bombshell in Washington, yielding just the kind of impact I had hoped to achieve through my own writing. Suddenly, leading members of Congress were pushing President Clinton to intervene militarily to end the war and prevent “future Srebrenicas.”

The final straw for Clinton came in late August. As I pulled myself together at Mum and Eddie’s home in Brooklyn, I heard the news that Bosnian Serb gunners around Sarajevo had struck again, hitting the same market they had attacked in February of 1994, this time killing forty-three people. Once I had established that nobody I knew had been killed, I fumed that the United States continued to allow the slaying of innocents. And in truth, I wished I were still there to cover a story that was leading the news around the world.

The day before law school began, I loaded up a Ryder truck in Brooklyn with two suitcases, a bicycle, and my laptop, and drove toward Boston. Just as I reached my new hometown, NPR cut into its radio program with a breaking news bulletin: “NATO air action around Sarajevo is under way.” I let out tears of relief.

By my second week of law school, US air strikes had broken the siege of Sarajevo and brought the Bosnian war to an end.

Fred and Mort had been right about what a US rescue operation could achieve, but tens of thousands of lives had been lost.

11
“GO REMEMBER”

From the moment I arrived at Harvard Law School, I feared I wouldn’t last. While in Bosnia, I had imagined how satisfying it would be to learn the law and eventually hunt down Balkan war criminals as a prosecutor at The Hague. But as I struggled to adjust to my new life back in the United States, all I could think about was the place I had left behind. Had I remained just a few weeks longer, I kept thinking, I would have witnessed history.

As I began classes, the US-led NATO bombing campaign quickly wiped out the Bosnian Serb Army’s heavy weapons and communications capabilities, leaving Serb forces unable to defend many of the towns they had ethnically cleansed over the previous three and a half years. Jubilant Muslim and Croat soldiers took advantage of the friendly warplanes in the sky and reclaimed lost territory. For the first time since 1992, my Bosnian friends in Sarajevo could get in their cars and leave the capital, visiting loved ones they had not even been able to speak with by telephone.

My new, shared apartment was in Somerville, the next town over from Cambridge. I amassed a steep phone bill, frantically calling my reporter friends in Bosnia and making them hold their phones in the air so I could hear the background sounds of honking horns and celebratory music. I surrounded myself with reminders of what I had left behind, hanging on my bedroom wall a map of Sarajevo that showed the gun emplacements around the city, and placing on the living room mantel a 40-millimeter shell that had been engraved and turned into a decorative sculpture.

My instincts continued to reflect the fact that I had spent the better part of the summer living in a city under fire: the loud scrape of a desk being moved or a library cart being pushed sent me ducking for cover. Meanwhile, simple conveniences—like a light switch—suddenly delighted me. When I visited the local supermarket, I was now paralyzed by all the options. In Sarajevo, I had counted myself fortunate to find a carton of juice priced like a bottle of Bordeaux, but in Cambridge, I was confronted by more than a dozen flavors of Snapple alone. For two years, my journal reflections had been decidedly grim, but trivial discoveries now passed for big news: “We have cantaloupe Snapple!” I marveled in one entry soon after school started.

My reacclimation to America happened slowly, and it didn’t help that I spoke to Mort daily to discuss developments in Bosnia.

“I wish Fred were here to see this,” I told him a few days after NATO brought the fighting to an end.

“He would ask why the hell you’re in law school,” Mort answered.

I wondered the same thing.

I didn’t lack the ability to focus—I could bury myself in the library for hours without noticing the setting sun. But while I admired the poise of my classmates who threw themselves into Socratic debates with their peers and professors, I just couldn’t make myself care about the topics we were studying. In 1L, Scott Turow’s memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School, he compares studying case law to stirring concrete with his eyelashes; this description seemed a perfect encapsulation of how I felt reading Civil Procedure cases late into the night.

I was also not that quick a study. I became flustered when called upon in class, stammering answers that other students quickly tore apart while a hundred pairs of eyes drilled into my back. When my professors interrogated me, I tried to keep my composure by making an insistent mental note, “This professor is not Ratko Mladić, he’s not Ratko Mladić, he’s not …” But hours after class ended, my cheeks often still felt flushed with embarrassment.

ON OCTOBER 29TH, 1995, nearly two months into law school, I picked up the Sunday New York Times at the bottom of my Somerville stoop. There, in the upper left-hand corner, was a huge headline: SREBRENICA: THE DAYS OF SLAUGHTER.[3] A reporting team had spent weeks preparing a special investigation that contained previously unpublished details of the systematic murder of Srebrenica’s men and boys.

As I sat reading—clenched in what felt like a full-body grimace—I understood what writers reflecting on the Holocaust meant when they described the human capacity to “know without knowing.” I had covered the fall of Srebrenica and had read all of my friend David Rohde’s articles about it. Laura, who had left journalism to attend graduate school, had spent her summer working for Human Rights Watch, gathering the testimonies of people who had survived the massacres. Yet my reaction to the Times exposé confirmed how wide the chasm can be between holding out hope that something is not true and actually absorbing devastating facts in all of their finality. I had experienced the brutality of the war up close. Yet before reading the Times piece, I had somehow believed that Srebrenica’s missing men and boys were no longer alive, and yet had not necessarily believed that they were dead.[fn1]

I looked back at my own actions and wondered why I hadn’t done more. “I don’t know how that could have been me there,” I wrote in my journal. “I was the correspondent in Munich while the bodies burned in Dachau … I had power and I failed to use it.” In beating myself up, I was clearly exaggerating my actual power back in Sarajevo. I was a freelance journalist, running my laptop off of a jury-rigged car battery. President Clinton led the most formidable superpower in the history of the world. He had a vast intelligence apparatus at his disposal. And he certainly knew more contemporaneously than I did about the crimes Mladić and his executioners were carrying out in Srebrenica. The President of the United States had not needed my help if he was to be spurred to action.

Nonetheless, I felt at sea. My law school classmates and I were of a generation that had unquestioningly embraced the slogan “never again.” Yet I was sure very few of my peers were actually aware of the Times investigation that had sent me spiraling, and even those who had seen it would probably have considered it “too depressing” to read. Powerless to affect the fate of men already killed, I decided that I could at least raise awareness on campus about what had happened.

In a move that at the time felt as bold as choosing to live under siege in Sarajevo, I asked my Contracts professor for permission to make an announcement before class. “I apologize for using this forum,” I said nervously after taking the floor. “But I just wanted to draw your attention to something that will be in your mailbox later.” I previewed the article, which documented “the largest single massacre in Europe in fifty years.” My lips quivered as I rushed to try to finish. “So please read it. Thanks.”

After class I met up with a new friend, Sharon Dolovich, who had done her PhD in political theory at Cambridge University and was seemingly curious about all subjects. While most of our classmates had shied away from discussing the upsetting events in the former Yugoslavia, Sharon pumped me for details on my recent experiences and seemed genuinely moved by the revelations about Srebrenica. Sharon and I dropped by the law school copy room to collect the five hundred Xeroxes I had ordered earlier in the day. Together, we solemnly stuffed a stapled copy of the article into the mailbox of each first-year law student. I knew enough not to linger and watch our classmates sift through their mail, which also included notices for an upcoming ice cream social, various law journal meetings, and book discounts at the Harvard Coop. If the Srebrenica article was to be tossed into the nearby blue recycling tub, I did not want to see it. A few of my classmates approached me later to thank me for alerting them to what had happened. But I got the feeling that most found me off-puttingly intense.

After saying goodbye to Sharon, I made my way to the law library. I had already fallen behind in my Property reading and needed to prepare for the next day’s class. After a restless hour in a carrel, I wandered to the nearest phone to collect my answering machine messages. I heard the voice of my friend Elizabeth Rubin, who had just returned to New York from Sarajevo.

“Power, I don’t know if you’ve heard,” she said. There was a pause, and then what sounded like muffled crying. “It’s David.”

Another pause. “Um … he’s been abducted.”

I flashed back to all that my friend David Rohde had written, doing more than any reporter to uncover Ratko Mladić’s summary executions. My mind jumped to Fred Cuny and his last days. “No! No! No!” I said, holding back tears as I raced to the bike rack and began fumbling with my lock so I could get home.

When I reached my apartment, I stood in the kitchen with no idea what to do. What more could I contribute to finding David that the US government, the UN, and the press corps weren’t already doing? I defaulted to what I usually did when I was in a bind, calling Mort.

He was constructive and typically specific. He told me to call Richard Holbrooke—who, in a fortunate coincidence of timing, had just arrived in Dayton, Ohio, for peace talks with the warring factions. He also told me to call Strobe Talbott and Steve Rosenfeld—both of whom I had haplessly lobbied the year before. “Get the Post to write something,” Mort advised.

Unable to get through to Holbrooke, I (somewhat absurdly) asked the hotel receptionist in Dayton to pass on a message—verbatim:

David Rohde has been abducted in Serb territory. Please make him the lead item in the peace talks.

I was able to reach Strobe, who started our conversation as courteously as ever. He told me that Secretary of State Warren Christopher had that day raised David’s case with Serbian president Milošević in Dayton. Instead of expressing gratitude, though, I snapped, “That’s not enough.”

Strobe continued, “Milošević understands that he will bear the consequences if anything happens to David.”

“The consequences!” I said, sarcastically. “What consequences?!” Strobe must have wondered why he ever took my calls.

“Well, if you’re going to take that view, then there’s nothing more I can say,” he responded, and the call quickly ended.

When I connected with Rosenfeld, I begged him to write an editorial demanding that the US government secure David’s release before proceeding with the Dayton talks. “He’s the only Western eyewitness to the mass graves,” I implored. “He’s in profound danger.”

Rosenfeld explained that the next day’s paper had already gone to press. “Well, if we don’t do something quickly, it will be too late,” I warned. “You have to understand: people don’t just disappear in Bosnia. We have a short window to shame David’s captors into not harming him, but it is closing.”

Rosenfeld gave me an opening. “If you want to write something,” he offered, “we will run it.”

Less than thirty-six hours after I heard Elizabeth’s message, the Washington Post ran my op-ed, the first opinion piece I had penned since the Daily Jang. The essay, printed November 3, 1995, concluded: “I relay David’s odyssey because he is my colleague and my dear friend. American officials claim they can do no more than ‘raise the issue at the highest levels.’ David did more. Why can’t they?”

I went to class and tried not to think about the barbaric treatment my friend was likely suffering—if he was even still alive. When I returned home a few hours later, I saw that the tape on my answering machine had been filled. Strangers—lower-level State Department officials, Hill staffers, journalists, and Post readers from all walks of life—had located my home number through directory assistance and left messages asking how they could help. One man moved me immensely with his simple words of support. “Howdy, my name is Bill,” his message began. “I am a truck driver. I just wanna know what I can do for David.”

Much more importantly, by nightfall, the Serb authorities acknowledged that David was in their custody. Had they planned to kill him, they would never have admitted to detaining him. I now believed that his family, who had staged a protest outside of the Dayton airbase where the Bosnia peace talks were taking place, would get him back.

David was released ten days after he was seized. Once free, he revealed that a source had given him a map with the exact location of four additional mass graves near Srebrenica. Blacklisted from entering Bosnian Serb territory because of his reporting in August, he doctored the date on his expired press pass and drove into Serb territory, where he found the first of the gravesites and evidence of murder: piles of coats, abandoned shoes, Muslim identity documents, even canes and shattered eyeglasses.

But as was David’s wont, he had pushed his luck, trying to find even more. He was arrested at rifle-point at the second grave, just as he was preparing to photograph two human femurs he had discovered. Because he was carrying a camera, a map with suspected gravesites circled, and film stuffed into his socks, the Bosnian Serbs labeled him a spy.

“Mr. David,” his interrogator repeatedly asked him at the remote police station where he was held, “What is your rank? Who is your commander in the CIA? And what is your mission?”

His captors forced him to stand through the night, denying him sleep. They threatened him with a lengthy stay in a Bosnian Serb prison camp, and even with execution. After three days of threats, fearful that he would be shot if he continued to hold out, David considered telling the interrogators whatever they wanted. But a friendly guard whispered in his ear that he knew David was a journalist. He urged him to stand firm. This gave US diplomacy and public advocacy time to succeed.

I was thrilled by David’s release and rushed to Logan Airport to be part of the crowd that welcomed him. After the dark discoveries of the previous months, the sight of David being reunited with his family felt like a sudden burst of light.

Close to midnight, I heard a knock on the front door of my Somerville apartment and saw David outside. We stayed up until daybreak, talking about what he had seen and gone through. We also began a debate, which we continue to this day, about when journalism is most effective in prodding change.

The evidence David gathered was a factor in helping convince the Clinton administration to launch the bombing raids that so quickly ended the war. Even though I was now stuck in law school, I told him that he had single-handedly given me a new appreciation for the power of the pen. He later considered attending law school because, despite being one of the most decorated reporters in the business—winning two Pulitzer Prizes—he often wished he could personally do more about the injustices he was exposing.

David’s release also showed the impact of concentrated public pressure. He was the beneficiary of the so-called identifiable victim effect—the human tendency to be more helpful to those with a name and face than to anonymous victims. As Mother Teresa famously said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”[4]

But I knew David had another factor working in his favor: he was American. The photo that the Washington Post used with my op-ed depicted a bespectacled young man wearing a fleece. For all of my heartfelt reporting and writing when I lived in the Balkans, I had managed to generate a far more intense outpouring for my friend than I had for Bosnia’s thousands of victims. Readers could relate to him. They could see him. And because he was one person, they could imagine that their actions could conceivably help him. Not so for the people of Srebrenica. An identifiable American life would almost always be more galvanizing than thousands of faceless foreigners in a faraway country.

I HOPED THAT THE GOOD NEWS of David’s release would help cure me of my all-consuming focus on Bosnia. When I lived in the Balkans, I often thought about how lucky I was relative to the people around me. But once back in the United States, I sometimes acted as if I had personally suffered the losses of war. Changing that would take time.

Jonathan Moore had moved from Washington back to his home in Massachusetts and was now based at the Harvard Kennedy School. I often confided in him about my struggles readjusting to life as a student in placid Cambridge. Occasionally, my self-absorption—a constant—would devolve into self-pity, and Jonathan would stop me in my tracks. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he would say, teasingly but firmly. “Have you been ethnically cleansed?!”

The first time I recall being able to make fun of myself came, strangely, during the 1995 New York City Marathon, a few days after David’s release. Before living in Bosnia, I had never loved running, always preferring what I called “real sports”—games like baseball or basketball that required strategy and skill with a ball. Living in encircled Sarajevo had changed my attitude, making me appreciate the freedom running provided. After returning to the United States, I had trained for the marathon for ten weeks, with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” and John Barry’s cheesy movie theme “Born Free” on heavy rotation on my Walkman’s mixtape. Going for ten-mile practice runs wasn’t exactly fun, but I enjoyed no longer feeling caged up.

The night before the race, I ate a heaping pasta supper with two college friends who were also running. Afterward, we decorated plain white Hanes T-shirts with words designed to draw shouts of moral support from the crowd. Miro, who had been with me in Atlanta at the time of the Tiananmen massacre, wrote “MO” in huge block letters as a kind of pick-me-up nickname.

Instead of “SAM,” or even “POWER,” I scribbled “REMEMBER SREBRENICA.”

Then, for good measure, I added on the back, “8,000 BOSNIAN MUSLIM MEN AND BOYS, MURDERED JULY 12–13, 1995.”

As we set off the next day, crossing the Verrazano Bridge, I heard the crowds yelling, “Go Mo!” Seeing the energy that the cheers gave Miro, I immediately regretted the decision to splash a morbid Public Service Announcement across my chest. Many people along the way made a spirited effort to root for me in spite of myself, albeit while mangling their attempts at pronouncing “Srebrenica.”

“Remember Srebedeedeedee!” I heard, or “Remember Srebre-oh-whatever.”

With two miles to go, a group of rowdy spectators, seeing my pace slowing, tried to urge me on, chanting, “Go Remember! Go Go Remember!” In my heavy-handedness, I had managed to turn myself into someone with the name “Remember,” which kept me smiling until I crossed the finish line. It seemed fitting.

I RETURNED TO SARAJEVO twice during my first year in law school, once over Christmas and then again for summer break. Mort had been the driving force behind creating the International Crisis Group, a new nongovernmental organization dedicated to conflict prevention, and he asked me to help launch their first field office in Bosnia to monitor the implementation of the peace agreement that Holbrooke had negotiated at Dayton. I loved being back among my friends, seeing the universities reopened, and watching the markets and cafés bustling with life. Witnessing even a flawed peace gave me a sense of closure, which I had craved.

Unfortunately, almost as soon as I arrived back in Cambridge for my second year of law school, I found myself struggling to breathe properly. The ailment that my college boyfriend Schu had called “lungers” was back with a vengeance. In college, these bouts of constricted breathing were a nuisance, an inconvenient background occurrence that never interfered with my life. But now I was unable to concentrate on anything other than whether I would be able to take a proper breath.

On the advice of friends, I tried yoga; but like a child who has just noticed her blinking, and suddenly begins to do it intentionally, this activity only caused me to focus more on my breathing, a huge impediment to regularizing it. For the first time, I grew so rattled by this mystery ailment that I could not sleep. Even when I managed to doze off for a few hours, when I awoke, I would experience a split second of deep, regular breathing before recalling the debilitating constriction of my lungs, which would promptly return.

After several weeks of mounting torment, I took a long run along the Charles River in the hopes that it would necessitate inhaling large amounts of air. Still running after an hour, I maneuvered along the paved roads near MIT to head back to my apartment, trying to take extra-deep breaths as I ran. I was so focused on my breathing that I didn’t look where I was running and tripped on an uneven sidewalk slab. I was lucky not to spill into the oncoming traffic, but I did land in a pile of shattered glass. Both of my knees were lacerated and began bleeding profusely.

I hobbled as quickly as I could, in significant pain, to the University Health Services. When the doctor asked what had happened, I told him I had been struggling to breathe and had not paid proper attention to where I was stepping. He asked if I was experiencing anxiety.

“No,” I said, “the complete opposite. I was a journalist in Bosnia, and I think I find the lack of stress here on campus very hard to get used to.”

He asked if I would like to be prescribed something to settle my nerves. I told him I was completely fine and needed nothing other than a good knee cleaning so as to avoid an infection. As I was speaking, I glanced down and saw that my knees bore shards of gravel and glass and my white running socks had turned crimson with blood.

“On second thought,” I said sheepishly, “I’ll take whatever you recommend.”

Within forty-eight hours, the anti-anxiety medicine worked wonders; once I started breathing normally and focusing on my classwork, I pushed the incident—and my lungers—to the back of my mind. It would be years before I would begin to explore their source.

12
“A PROBLEM FROM HELL”

During law school, I came across the transcript of a US government press conference that had occurred while I was working as a journalist in Bosnia. On April 8th, 1994, a mid-level US diplomat named Prudence Bushnell spoke at the State Department’s daily press 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 same events and recognized that I would need to speak to a wide range of officials if I was going to credibly piece together what had happened.

I took a year off from law school to focus on the project, and Elizabeth Rubin kindly put me in touch with her literary agent, Sarah Chalfant. I had not written a book before, and Sarah generally 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?” 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.

13
UPSTANDERS

I had heard the saying “You don’t read a book; a book reads you,” but the truth of these words did not sink in until I traveled the country and began meeting people who had read “A Problem from Hell.”

Many had marked it up with yellow highlighters or plastered it with Post-it Notes for quick access to the parts they found most important. Activists told me they were reading the book to think through how they could better influence Washington decision-makers on a host of different issues. Synagogue congregations grappled with the book’s invocation of the false promise of “never again.”

People who hadn’t followed the Rwandan genocide when it happened said to me, with great earnestness, “I should have at least called my congressman.” The book had quoted Colorado congresswoman Pat Schroeder describing the reaction to the Rwandan genocide in her district. “There are some groups terribly concerned about the gorillas,” she had said in 1994, noting that a Colorado research organization studied Rwanda’s endangered gorillas. “But—it sounds terrible—people just don’t know what can be done about the people.” The paucity of domestic political awareness and pressure were key reasons even low-cost US policies went untried.

The reaction I least anticipated came from those who had no connection to the specific countries I wrote about, but who were drawn to questions about the nature of individual responsibility in the face of injustice. I found that readers from all walks of life identified with the quests of Lemkin, Proxmire, Galbraith, and the officials who resigned from the State Department. College professors assigned excerpts in broad survey courses on leadership and ethics. I received numerous emails and letters from people who said that these stories had inspired them to see how to be more active in social causes.

Somewhere along the way, I began describing the book’s protagonists—those who tried to prevent or otherwise “stand up” against genocide—as “upstanders,” contrasting them with bystanders. I noted that very few of us were likely to find ourselves the victims or perpetrators of genocide. But every day, almost all of us find ourselves weighing whether we can or should do something to help others. We decide, on issues large and small, whether we will be bystanders or upstanders.

Thanks initially to teachers who began to use the idea of upstanders to engage their students, the term started to catch on. Many years later, when I was UN ambassador, I was stunned—and profoundly gratified—to be informed by a reporter that the Oxford English Dictionary had added the term upstander, which it wrote was “coined in 2002 by the Irish-American diplomat Samantha Power.” Of course, it proved far easier to coin the term than to know exactly how to be an upstander in my own life.

Beyond the grassroots interest that developed around the book’s themes, real-world events expanded its audience. I was editing the page proofs six months before publication when al-Qaeda terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001. These attacks, and the political reorientation they caused, changed the entire context in which most Americans thought about US foreign policy. The sense of isolation from global threats that the United States had enjoyed for so long had been shattered, and people began to discuss America’s responsibilities around the world in new ways.

The devastation of September 11th was followed by an intensifying domestic debate over whether the United States should go to war with Iraq. Although the crux of President George W. Bush’s argument for removing Saddam Hussein from power was the national security threat posed by his alleged weapons of mass destruction, Bush and others in his administration often seized upon the fact that Saddam had “gassed his own people” as proof of the Iraqi regime’s dangerous tendencies.

Articles assessing the merits of an invasion in the New York Times and The New Yorker cited “A Problem from Hell” in their descriptions of the Iraqi campaign of genocide against the Kurds. I was uncomfortable seeing my writing about atrocities used in a way that might help justify a war. In my interviews, I tried to remind people what I had actually written.

I had made several arguments. First, I noted that when crafting foreign policy, US officials naturally think through the possible economic and security consequences of their choices, but they needed to do far more to factor the human consequences into their deliberations as well.

Second, I emphasized that the United States has a large toolbox when it comes to preventing genocide. I described the many options short of military engagement at the disposal of a powerful country like the United States: public and private diplomacy, public shaming, negotiations, deploying intelligence and technical resources, international peacekeeping, arms embargoes, asset freezes, and more. Although I sometimes heard people describe the book as an extended argument for US military action in response to mass atrocities, I had actually written that the United States “should not frame its policy options in terms of doing nothing or unilaterally sending in the Marines.”

As the New York Times noted a month before the invasion of Iraq, “Ms. Power bridles at critics who interpret the book as a simplistic call for military intervention in cases of humanitarian crises. Her point, she said, is not that the United States failed to intervene in Cambodia, Iraq or Rwanda, but that it failed to do anything at all.”

While Saddam was a merciless dictator, I did not see that as sufficient reason to go to war. I believed that neither the Kurds nor the American people faced an imminent threat of the kind that justified the use of force. Some of our closest allies opposed the war, and I was also concerned about the repercussions of going it alone. These countries would hardly be eager to help rebuild Iraq in the aftermath of a US invasion.

Although I abhorred the prospect of Saddam remaining in power, I ended up speaking out against the Iraq War on a number of occasions. As I told Newsweek in early March of 2003, roughly two weeks before the war began, “[The invasion] will ratify and fuel the bubbling resentment against the U.S., and this anti-Americanism is the sea in which terrorists thrive.”

Yet the coincidence of publishing the book in relative proximity to the start of the war made “A Problem from Hell” liable to misinterpretation. A year after the war began, I again registered my frustration in an interview with the Financial Times, remarking, “The book is the furthest thing from a plea for American military intervention … [or] for unilateral military intervention on a whim or on a subjective set of excuses and justifications.” To this day, however, I am still approached by people who ask how I could have supported the Iraq War.

A MONTH AFTER THE US INVASION, my publisher called and informed me that “A Problem from Hell” had won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

“Are you sure?” I said, my knees buckling beneath me.

I left a message for Mum to call me back and managed to reach Eddie. My voice caught as I said softly, “I just won the Pulitzer Prize.” Eddie had fostered my love of history. He had read and edited easily a dozen drafts of the lengthy book. After its publication, he had traipsed across New York City each week, stopping at various Barnes & Noble stores to move copies from the less visible history section to the displays at the front of the store, hustling to his next location whenever he was caught by a store clerk.

“What?” he said. When I repeated my news, he said, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” Then, clearly in a state of shock, he asked, “For what?”

“What the hell do you think?” I asked, laughing. He told me to call the publisher back: “They need to get the Pulitzer sticker on the paperback!” he exclaimed.

When Mum called from the hospital a few minutes later, I paused before picking up, just to prolong the moment. When I told her the news, she said, “Ahhh, isn’t that just marvelous, Sam. Marvelous. And to think, you were having such a hard time with that bloody article …”

I had talked to her the previous night about my struggles with a magazine piece I was writing. For my mother, a major perk of winning the Pulitzer was that it would cheer me up. But I later learned that she was so excited about the news that she told all of the hospital nurses she worked with, as well as her favorite patients.

IN TRUTH, I FELT a profound disconnect between my personal good fortune and the state of the world. Around the time the American occupation of Iraq began spiraling out of control, the Western media started reporting about mass atrocities in a place called Darfur.

Most notably, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof traveled to the Chad-Sudan border, writing ten impassioned columns in less than a year to draw attention to the massacres being perpetrated by the Arab-led Sudanese government against African ethnic groups. The more I read of Kristof’s reporting, the more I suspected that the Sudanese military and affiliated militia were perpetrating genocide. The Sudanese government, led by Omar al-Bashir, seemed intent not only on crushing a nascent rebellion in Darfur, but also on destroying the lives of many Africans there. I felt compelled to investigate what was happening.

Articles about the atrocities in Sudan frequently quoted a former US official named John Prendergast. John had previously served as an Africa adviser to President Clinton, and was now working as an analyst with the International Crisis Group, the nongovernmental organization that Mort had helped create back in 1995 (and that I had briefly worked for during law school). Although the organization generally tailored its recommendations for policymakers, John seemed more focused on convincing Americans at the grassroots level to pressure their elected officials to take action to stop atrocities. He argued, just as I had in my book, that because genocide was rarely seen to implicate “traditional” national security interests, citizens would need to make political noise if they wanted Washington to do more.

When I finally had the chance to hear John speak at an event in New York, I approached him after the Q&A and asked if he would be willing to give me a tutorial on Sudan. He had first visited the country in 1987 and had traveled there on many occasions, often for months at a time. After establishing that we were both lovers of baseball, we agreed to meet up in May of 2004 for a Kansas City Royals–Boston Red Sox game. Our outing ended up launching what would be one of the most important professional collaborations—and friendships—of my life.

As we sat side by side along Fenway’s third base line, we talked about how our desire to fit in as kids had helped spark our love of baseball. We also discussed the role that tenacity—and serendipity—had played in our respective careers. The son of a frozen-food salesman, John is a six-foot-one former high school basketball player with a perennially unshaven look and shoulder-length hair that began turning silver in his twenties. He moved around a lot as a child and attended five colleges before graduating from Temple University. In 1984, when he saw television footage showing the famine in Ethiopia, he decided to make his way to Africa. Traveling around the continent, John began writing reports for UNICEF and Human Rights Watch on government and militia abuses against civilians.

Over the years, as he documented crimes that powerful perpetrators didn’t want exposed, John was taken hostage in the Congo, survived mortar fire in Somalia, and was imprisoned in Sudan. But he was upbeat when he talked about Africa and its potential. He predicted that we were entering a period in which Americans—especially young people on college campuses—would rise up to demand a different kind of foreign policy from Washington. “It’s all about pressure,” he said. “Governments will do the right thing, or less of the wrong thing, if people make clear that they care.”

We also plunged right into talking about our personal lives, each of us quickly sizing up the other as incurably single. John had a magnetic personality, and I had been advised that women flocked to him. He told me he had ended a short-lived marriage and was now dating several women at once. My most lasting relationship was still with Schu in college, and I saw nothing on the horizon likely to change that. We didn’t verbalize that day what we later realized we had decided: this was a friendship that was going to last forever. We were not going to endanger it with a romance neither of us could sustain.

We did, however, almost immediately begin brainstorming about how we might collaborate. I floated the idea of traveling to Darfur together, telling him about the “X test.”

“If the most we’re able to do is bear witness and use what we see to activate more Americans to care,” I said, “it will be worth it, right?”

John did not need convincing. By the time the final out of the game was recorded, we had decided on a date for the trip.

THE EASIEST WAY TO REACH DARFUR was not via the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, but by crossing the border from neighboring Chad. John and I traveled there during the summer of 2004 and spoke with dozens of Darfuri refugees about the horrors they had endured. The woman who made the deepest impression was Amina Abaker Mohammed, a twenty-six-year-old Muslim mother of six who was a member of one of the three ethnic groups being targeted by the Sudanese government. As John and I sat cross-legged in the sand under the shade of a tree, Amina stoically recounted what she had experienced. What she said defied belief.

Amina lived in a Darfuri farming village near a town called Furawiyah. The previous year, she had begun to hear that the Sudanese government and nomadic Arab bandits known as janjaweed[fn1] had begun attacking non-Arab ethnic groups, including hers.

Amina reported that, six months before, a Sudanese military aircraft had fired four rockets near her home. Although one rocket failed to explode, she said, the others left large craters in the ground. She and her husband refused to abandon their land, but they dispatched five of their six children to the nearby mountains for shelter. Amina’s oldest child, ten-year-old Mohammed Haroun, remained with her to help take care of the family’s precious livestock.

Shortly after dawn on January 31st, 2004, Amina said, she and Mohammed arrived at the wells to draw water for their animals. They heard the sound of approaching planes, and fifteen minutes later, Sudanese aircraft began bombing the area. She and her son were separated. Amina saw Sudanese soldiers come tumbling out of trucks and Land Cruisers, followed by hundreds of menacing janjaweed on camels and horses. Most of the janjaweed wore turbans around their heads and mouths so that only their eyes were visible. In the initial onslaught, she saw dozens of her neighbors and hundreds of animals killed.

Amina scrambled with several donkeys to a red-rock hillock 300 yards away. Though she thought Mohammed had escaped, when she looked behind her, she saw that he had remained at the wells to try to wrangle the family’s panicked sheep. As a circle of several hundred janjaweed tightened around her son, Amina ducked behind the hillock to pray.

By nightfall, the sounds of gunfire and screaming faded, and Amina returned to the spot where she had last seen Mohammed. She found a grisly scene. Rummaging frantically around the wells by moonlight, she saw the dismembered bodies of dozens of people she knew, but was unable to find her firstborn.

Suddenly, she spotted his face—but only his face. Mohammed had been beheaded. “I wanted to find the rest of his body,” she told me. But she was afraid of the janjaweed, who remained nearby, celebrating their conquest with a roast of stolen livestock. She carried what she found of her son to the mountain where her other children were hiding. “I took my child’s head, and I buried him,” she told John and me, dabbing her tears with the tail of her headscarf. A week later, Amina and her five remaining children made the seven-day trek to Chad, where we would meet them.

Although we had only recently become acquainted, John and I hardly had to discuss our next move. We hired a Darfuri driver to take us across the Chad-Sudan border to Furawiyah, where we would do our best to confirm what Amina had told us and assemble proof of the Sudanese government’s crimes.

Advancing at less than ten miles per hour, we drove in 130-degree heat through the inhospitable terrain of western Sudan, where virtually all human life seemed to have been forced into exile or hiding. We felt utterly alone.

As we drove deeper into Darfur toward Amina’s hometown, we passed through the village of Hangala, where we found the charred remains of huts that had been set ablaze. Each had been reduced to stone walls and mounds of ashes. Amid the debris, we came across the remnants of a jewelry box, a bicycle, and women’s slippers. Of the 480 people who lived in Hangala before the attack, we were later told, 46 were murdered. The rest were now homeless, scattered throughout Sudan and Chad.

In the ransacked village next to Hangala, we found a child’s backpack and his “Duckzilla” notebooks, which contained exercises in mathematics, Islamic studies, and Arabic. In another house, we found small packages of beans and nuts, a sign that the inhabitants had fled in a hurry. As we left one hut, where pots had been overturned and valuables looted, we spotted three toothbrushes tucked into the thatch in the roof. Nestled next to them was a sheet of paper that had been folded into a tight square. Upon opening it, we found a few lines of handwritten Arabic script. Our translator told us that it was a prayer from the Koran, urging Allah to keep watch over the family home.

When we finally reached Furawiyah, we asked to be directed to the wells. As a local resident steered us, we passed a large gray rocket that was partly lodged in the sand; this was the undetonated Sudanese Air Force ordnance that Amina had described. We also passed an enormous crater, at least twenty-five feet in diameter and five feet deep, where another bomb had exploded.

“Here are the wells,” our guide said as we pulled up to the area that Amina had depicted on a map she had drawn for us. I saw only more Sahara sand.

“What wells?” I asked.

The guide kept pointing to the same patch of desert, and, frustrated, we stepped closer. There, barely visible beneath the pale-yellow sand, were the faint outlines of the rims of one large stone well and two smaller ones. This was where Amina and her son had watered their animals, and where Amina had later found Mohammed’s severed head.

The janjaweed had stuffed the wells with bodies and buried their victims beneath mounds of sand. In so doing, they had destroyed water sources vital for the survival of people in the area. Among the twenty-five wells around Furawiyah, we learned, only three still functioned—and those would surely dry up soon due to overuse.

The young man who showed us the wells then took us on a short drive outside Furawiyah to the base of a slope. We climbed out of our Land Cruiser and started to ascend on foot. The stench of decomposing flesh hit us before the rotting bodies, in gullies on either side of the hill, finally came into view.

Fourteen men, in bloodied traditional white djellabas or in shirts and slacks, were lying dead in the sand. I counted seventeen bullet casings scattered around them. It looked as though the men had been divided into two groups and lined up in front of the ditches. They had all been shot from behind, except for one man. His body lay not in a ditch, but in the center of the slope. One of his palms was outstretched, as if he had been pleading for mercy.

WHEN JOHN AND I RETURNED to the United States, we publicized what we had learned as widely as possible. He wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, and several weeks later, I contributed a long article to The New Yorker called “Dying in Darfur,” which opened with Amina’s story. Together, we also did a TV segment that aired on 60 Minutes. We each had full-time jobs—I was still teaching at the Kennedy School, and John was writing reports for the International Crisis Group on a broad range of African conflicts. But we joined others in trying to pressure the Bush administration to take meaningful action to do more for the people of Darfur.

Thanks in part to John’s relentless activism, which brought him to college campuses, churches, and synagogues around the country, an unusual coalition of students and religious groups began to coalesce. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum strived to be a “living memorial” that would use the history of the Holocaust to educate—and motivate—future generations. The museum had already hosted me, John, Nick Kristof, and other speakers to talk about Darfur. In July, it officially issued a “genocide emergency” warning on Darfur, the first time it had ever made this designation. The same month, the museum and the American Jewish World Service teamed up to establish a broad network of faith-based, advocacy, and human rights organizations, which eventually included 190 groups and operated under the banner of “Save Darfur.”

John and I donated the children’s schoolbooks and backpack, the toothbrushes, and the crumpled prayer to the Holocaust museum. We were not sure the people who owned these items were still alive, and, if they were, we assumed they would not be returning to their razed homes anytime soon. The museum staff turned our photos and artifacts into a gripping exhibit, which generated additional public interest.

Evangelical Christians had a history of protesting mass atrocities in southern Sudan (which was home to a substantial Christian population), and now they began raising money for Muslim survivors in Darfur. In August of 2004, thirty-five evangelical leaders, representing fifty-one denominations and 45,000 churches, called for “swift action” from President Bush to “prevent further slaughter and death.” When I reached out to a prominent evangelical leader to better understand what was driving the community, I received a refreshingly straightforward response. “Killing is wrong, whether you’re killing a Jew, a Christian, or a Muslim,” he said. “God made the people there in Darfur. For us to ignore them would be a sin.”

Private citizens and students across the country threw themselves into the Darfur campaign. A piano teacher in Salt Lake City donated two weeks’ of her earnings. The pastor of a Methodist church in Ohio asked congregants to spend half as much on Christmas presents as they usually did, and to contribute the rest—raising $327,000 for relief efforts. At Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, a group of students heard reports that a tiny African Union monitoring mission in Darfur didn’t have the budget to afford flak jackets. They raised $300,000 to help equip the beleaguered African Union personnel. Other college students formed an organization called Students Take Action Now for Darfur (STAND), which, within three years, had established chapters at six hundred universities and high schools across the United States.

Back in 2001, I had written an Atlantic article describing the Clinton administration’s inaction during the Rwandan genocide. I later heard from a US official that President Bush had scribbled “Not on my watch” on a memo summarizing the article. Having always hoped to reach senior policymakers with my writing, I was moved by this, even as I wondered what it would mean practically. Inspired by the Livestrong anti-cancer bracelets, a group of activists created green wristbands inscribed with “Not On Our Watch,” which John and I joined thousands of people in wearing in an effort to raise awareness about Darfur. The year 2004 also happened to be the ten-year anniversary of the Rwandan slaughter, and, when the film Hotel Rwanda hit theaters, powerfully telling the story of Paul Rusesabagina, the hotelier who sheltered thousands during the genocide, many viewers looked to apply the lessons of Rwanda to the crisis under way in Darfur.

In September of 2004, as this pressure was building and the killings in Darfur continued, Secretary of State Colin Powell testified before the Senate that the Sudanese government’s actions amounted to “genocide.”[6] This was the first time that the US government had issued such a finding. Far from satisfying the activists, however, Powell’s genocide declaration inspired them to push even harder.

The Bush administration responded, appointing a special envoy and imposing new sanctions on the Sudanese government. It also greatly increased aid to displaced Darfuris and support for the peacekeeping forces deployed by the African Union and the United Nations. Unfortunately, because the war in Iraq was going so poorly, the administration had lost substantial influence abroad, which weakened its ability to mobilize a united, global coalition to pressure Khartoum to end its atrocities.[7]

Darfur exposed the limits of what one country could do—even one as powerful as the United States. The perpetrators of genocide knew they could still rely on powerful players in the international community, like China, to defend them. Nevertheless, the outpouring of attention forced the Sudanese government to allow food aid and foreign peacekeepers into their country. The movement also kept Darfuris fed and sheltered with the donated funds. This unique network of students, faith groups, and others, in which I had only a small role, helped save lives.

WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH WAS REELECTED in November of 2004, I was despondent. The result seemed to affirm Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, his introduction of torture, and his use of the Guantánamo Bay prison for indefinite detention of prisoners of war, among other deeply problematic, harmful policies. A few days after the election, I had coffee with Peter Galbraith, whom I had profiled in my book. He urged me not to wallow, but to do something constructive.

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