“The Education of an Idealist” doesn’t read like a standard Beltway exercise in self-justification. It’s this gutsy choice that will prompt debate about “The Education of an Idealist.” Is Power indeed an idealist, battered but still steadfast in her conviction that America’s power on the world stage creates a moral obligation to do good, to use that power in the cause of human rights even by force? Or is she a partially co-opted ideological shill, someone willing to provide humanitarian rhetoric as a cover for self-interested American interventionism? Partisan critics lining up to take either position will, one suspects, scarcely glance at the book itself before pouncing. Power is every bit as candid when the recollections tell against her she shares some brutal moments when she and Obama disagreed, moments made all the sharper by Power’s willingness to allow readers to see her as not just a frustrated idealist but a sometimes dangerously naive one. Stunned, she sent a message to the candidate: “Um, congratulations on changing everything forever.”Ĭan a Democrat win over rural Ohio? Tim Ryan gives it a shot. Some of the book’s most soaringly affecting pages revolve around the meteoric presidential campaign that seemed to climax when Obama won the 2008 Iowa caucus. Thanks to Power’s long background with the candidate, the Obama portrait in these pages begins well before the Oval Office.
His trusted advisers would then duke it out in front of him,” Power writes, dutifully adding, “The President would make the tough decision, and we would rush off to implement it.” “He would pose questions, and we would each state our case. Although Power has a formidable academic background, this book describes the kind of education that only raw experience can provide.Īs a portrait of President Obama, Power’s book immediately ranks right alongside that of her administration colleague Ben Rhodes, “The World as It Is.” As in that book, so too here: Readers see Obama as Intellect-in-Chief who seemed to thrive on letting the thinkers on his staff do his deliberating for him. ambassador to the United Nations, that gave Power access to international power politics, and this role is likewise what provides “The Education of an Idealist” with its most interesting chapters. It was her role as a foreign policy adviser to candidate and President Obama, who appointed her first to the National Security Council and then as U.S. She attended Yale, was a war correspondent covering the bloodshed in Sarajevo in the early 1990s, got a degree from Harvard Law School, joined the faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, won a Pulitzer, and eventually worked for a charismatic senator named Barack Obama. Readers of “A Problem from Hell” will recognize Power’s lean, evocative prose line, and here that focus is turned on her own life, from the story of her parents and her early years in Ireland to her immigration to the United States with her mother and brother in 1979. “The Education of an Idealist” is both the story of that transformation and the next step in the process.
A clashing array of cultural forces virtually assures a rough landing for Samantha Power’s memoir, “The Education of an Idealist.” Power, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her brilliant and controversial 2002 book “‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide,” managed a career move that has been causing problems for its practitioners since at least the days of Machiavelli: She moved from the theoretical worlds of academia and literature to the real-consequences world of diplomacy.
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