"It's Obama. Call me." These words recently showed up on Samantha Power's cell phone, and only such a message from the Illinois senator—or one from Power's mother in Yonkers—could rouse her from lockdown writing mode. In order to complete the follow-up to her 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, sometimes Power has to hole up, as she is doing now, in her seaside apartment in working-class Winthrop, Massachusetts, and shut out all but these few exceptions.
Most days she is either at her office at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (where she's taught American foreign policy for six years) or here, in this lair with wide east-facing windows that she calls her cockpit. There's something Amelia Earhart–like about her view of the Atlantic expanse just beyond her computer's screen, despite the dozen Post-it notes-to-self on the pane. On her walls and shelves, a collection of woven rugs and tribal statuary signals her acquaintance with a larger world. Her childhood was spent in motion—Dublin, then Kuwait City, onward to Pittsburgh, and finally Atlanta. Then some battle-tested years as a reporter sent her to Bosnia, Darfur, Rwanda, and East Timor. With 500 interviews to sort through, she's now in the last chapters of a biography of the late Sergio Vieira de Mello, an equally itinerant Brazilian-born U.N. nation-building expert who, in 2003, became a victim of the first suicide bombing of a civilian target in the Iraq War.
"He gets his idealism kind of knocked out of him and then rechanneled," Power says, with her bare feet up on a wooden coffee table. "So I feel like it very much mirrors me." Her views are hardly left-wing doctrine: She supports international intervention in trouble zones, but full-on military invasion or head-in-the-sand isolationism is, to Power, an unimaginative either-or. "Intervention" is a tricky word, and she notes how often her use of it gets misconstrued to suggest that she supported the Iraq invasion. Such are the risks for humanitarian hawks entering the political labyrinth, where nuance is unwelcome. But Power is cheerfully relentless in making herself understood: She even marshals a New York Times interview she gave before the war, and right there is her stay-out-of-Iraq proclamation in black-and-white.
Policy debates suit her, and, apart from many journalist friends she made covering battles in Bosnia, Power is not an adrenaline junkie drawn to conflict after conflict. "I was a kid when I went into war zones for the first time, and wasn't perhaps thinking adequately about the risks," she says. The statuesque, sturdy redhead winces and admits she "put her parents through hell" when she was living through the capture of friends, the slaying of interview subjects, the kind of killing plague that global awareness hasn't yet cured. "There shouldn't be concentration camps anywhere on earth, never mind in Europe, 50 years after the Holocaust," she says. She had thought this idea was "a basic," but found otherwise. And if you accept that, then there's something else to consider: "Well, who should close them?"
