On June 4, 1989, Ambassador Samantha Power was working for an Atlanta TV station covering sports news — her summer job after her first year at Yale — when one of the screens in the video booth where she was working started flashing images of students protesting in Tienanmen Square, Beijing.
The footage was raw and unfiltered, and much of it was never broadcast. When the feed was cut off, “I sat in the booth aghast. I found myself wondering what the U.S. government would do in response, a question that had never before occurred to me,” Power recounted to the audience of the Noah Krieger ’93 Memorial Lecture yesterday, reading off the pages of her book, “The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir.”
Power, who served in the cabinet of President Barack Obama and as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, discussed the ability of individuals to enact meaningful change and the role of the United States in advancing human rights causes abroad, among other topics like the importance of the media in shaping the knowledge of leaders.
Currently, Power is the professor of the practice of global leadership and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and a professor of practice in human rights at Harvard Law School. “The Education of an Idealist” is her second book after “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003.
“A lot of (“The Education of an Idealist”) is about at each juncture having doubts about whether one person can make a difference, even a small difference, and how those doubts are overcome over time,” she told The Herald.
Power called on the audience to ask themselves: “What is the way to take the big thing and reduce it to something that’s actually within your power to try?” In her answer, she quoted Obama: “Better is good.”
At her talk, Power cited Morton Abramowitz, a senior diplomat whom she interned for upon her graduation from Yale and who influenced her approach to foreign policy, who told her to “get out into the field. Get close, hear from people who are being affected by our policies, by our decisions and our non-decisions.”
Instead of describing the U.S. government “as if it’s a monolith,” Abramowitz would say that “there is no ‘government’ as such. There a lot of individuals” in different governing bodies, who can work together to “ameliorate the situation for the civilians on the ground.”
While she recognizes that some students may “despair” about how effective U.S. peacekeeping and human rights efforts can actually be, Power said that “when you have legitimacy, and you’re backing the people on the ground, … that is a recipe for success.”
There is a wide-ranging “toolbox” of peacekeeping strategies that the United States can use. In addition, the United States has the ability to protect human rights “because we’re the richest and most powerful country in the world,” Power told The Herald. The United States has the responsibility to do so “for reasons of generosity,” and because “our stability over time is very linked” to that of other countries.
In her lecture, she pointed to “examples of harnessing U.S. leadership to make things better,” such as the U.S. leadership’s role in the multinational response to the Ebola outbreaks or the establishment of the Paris peace agreements. While “not perfect,” these moves were “steps in the right direction,” which had benefits abroad as well as domestically, she said.
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