Samantha Power: belief

Transcript context

…[laughs] I mentioned my sort of meta purpose, which of course evolved as I’ve written the book and become clearer to me than right when I started. But what I saw, I think, in teaching, when I came back to teaching after being a member of President Obama’s cabinet and being in this incredibly blessed position that I was in, was somehow I was now other. I was somebody who had been a senior official, and I had my act together. Clearly, I must have had my act together, or how could I have been representing the United States at the United Nations? Very much in the same way that I would have seen a Madeleine Albright or a Jeane Kirkpatrick when I was a kid — these iconic women who are out there, standing up to Russia. That can be very appealing, and some students will come up to me and say, “I want to be America’s ambassador to the UN. How do I go about doing it?” And I’ll say, “Well, not that way, probably.” Because if you focus on the title rather than what you want to do in the world, you’re probably not going to get very far. But some people are drawn to power, to the position or whatever. I get that, and I want to work with those students, too. But many just think, “I want to try to make a difference, but I don’t know that I could ever be that person. I don’t have my act together to that extent. I don’t have that kind of conviction.” So the reason I include the personal, and especially the material about self-doubt and about what I call the bat cave, which is my head at times, where the bats are swirling around: “Can I do this?” and “Have I gone too far?” and “Did I go on too long in that meeting with President Obama?” This sort of self-recrimination. By opening that up, I want young people to know that whatever doubts they’re experiencing, whatever their romantic foibles, that’s what it looks like to grow up. Sometimes you grow up in the public eye. Sometimes you grow up in the confines of your own relationships and your own family and your own home. And I did a bit of both. The idea that my public persona would somehow cause young people to think that I was some other species of person — I did not want that to happen. To the essence of your question about whether there’s more, there’s always more, Tyler. But yeah, there’s something that happens . . . Oh, this is actually interesting, and somebody pointed this out to me. I would not have picked this up on my own. Lee Siegel, the writer, pointed this out to me. When you’re writing a memoir, if you’re me anyway, you start pretty boxed up and anxious about using the first person and saying, “Who am I to write a memoir? I didn’t make Middle East peace. What the hell am I doing here?” Start with that disposition. Then you gradually kind of unfurl yourself, and you realize that you have to build the portrait of a character, and the readers have to get to know the writer. So it becomes almost a literary exercise, but you can’t make anything up because it’s a memoir. lize that you have to build the portrait of a character, and the readers have to get to know the writer. So it becomes almost a literary exercise, but you can’t make anything up because it’s a memoir. So you have to use the material of your life to build a kind of thick portrait that people will get to know and hopefully root for. I wanted people to root for me and the ideals that I had, and I want them to share those ideals, hopefully. But Lee Siegel pointed out to me that as you unfurl, there comes a moment where you then think that you have to say everything, and you start to just TMI, too much information. And you actually can lose your dignity because you’ve lost your sense . . . You initially had an appropriate sense of what TMI is. My past, pre-memoir self, I think, is the right balance of what you share and what you don’t share. I share a lot as it is. But then I decided, okay, I was really going to go out there. And then you lose the sense of where the boundaries are, and so to go back over it and to say, “Okay, I want to give enough of a portrait where this is a distinctly human person that the reader gets to know, but also they don’t need to be in my . . .” What work is every one of these scenes doing for the larger story? And if it doesn’t meet that threshold, and if, let’s say, I’m making the same mistake with different men six times, they only need to hear about it happening once. If I did it five other times, the part can stand for the whole. For a final closing segment, I just have some super simple questions about foreign policy again. Over the course of the last summer, Iran apparently seized two British tankers. There’ve been other incidents in the Strait of Hormuz in some way connected with Iran. From a game-theoretic point of view, why would they do this? Why does this make sense?…

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