The Ambassador: Samantha Power

Samantha Power is a Woman of the Year because... "She is truly a 'woman of power' for peace. She is a champion of global action through the United Nations."--U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

Samantha Power is a Woman of the Year because... "She is truly a 'woman of power' for peace. She is a champion of global action through the United Nations."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

HER WORDS TO LIVE BY: "He who fights every war fights none. Develop a mastery of a specific challenge. Focus. Learn a language, or how to fund-raise, or to write. Have skills that you can use to help people, not just the abstract goal of 'I want to help people.'" —United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, photographed in the U.N.'s Security Council chamber. Oscar de la Renta dress. Astley Clarke earrings.

In her twenties, when Samantha Power was a journalist reporting on the war in Bosnia, she saw a woman dash out of a bombed building into the arms of a news photographer, who responded not by helping the woman, but by adjusting his camera instead. In that moment Power knew: Documenting the world's troubles wasn't enough; she wanted to try to solve them.

Now 44, Power has gotten what she wished for. Confirmed last year as the United States' youngest-ever permanent representative to the United Nations, she holds the ambassador job at a moment in history when the world is exploding with crises: Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Syria's civil war, the proliferation of the extremist group ISIS, the Ebola outbreak, and on and on. During her first year, the U.N.'s Security Council, which works to resolve threats to world peace, held more emergency sessions than it had in the entire 10 years prior. "I saw Elie Wiesel, the great writer and Holocaust survivor, not long ago, and he said, 'Samantha, the winds of madness are blowing,' and I thought that was a very good way to describe what it feels like right now," Power says. "What people read in the newspaper, I read in the newspaper and then have to try to figure out, What do we do about it?"

As ambassador, Power takes a direct, practical approach to unraveling this complicated question. In a turning-point August session on the Ukraine conflict, she spoke out against Russian president Vladimir Putin: "[Russia] has manipulated. It has obfuscated. It has outright lied," she told her colleagues (and the world).

And when the world wanted to hide its eyes from the Ebola outbreak, she forced us to look early on—and to help, calling the response "woefully insufficient" on morning TV in September. That same day she spoke at an emergency Security Council meeting—the U.N.'s first ever on a health crisis: "The math is simple," she told her colleagues emphatically. "The sooner we act, the more lives we save."

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof says Power's impact at the U.N. is unique: "She is passionate in a chamber that frankly doesn't have a lot of passion.... One can get the impression that diplomacy is about resolutions, about paper, about cocktail parties. Samantha knows that what's at stake is the lives of people in very remote parts of the world who don't have a voice."

It's a style she's perfected over the years. Power, who immigrated to the United States from Ireland when she was nine years old, studied law after her return from Bosnia and went on to found the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In 2003, at just 32, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide and was teaching at Harvard when a relatively unknown senator, Barack Obama, invited her to dinner. Their evening ended with Power leaving her job and taking a role as his adviser, long before he announced a run for president. Her leap of faith paid off on many levels; she met her husband, constitutional scholar Cass Sunstein, when both were working on Obama's campaign. Then came gigs on the National Security Council and a role as head of the administration's Atrocities Prevention Board.

To counterbalance the darkness of her job, she finds light at home with her kids, Declan, five, and Rìan, two. But she does not hide her work from her children. In fact, she says their simple perspective is useful, recalling how Declan worried about the children on Mount Sinjar in Iraq, who were stranded there after fleeing the terrorist group ISIS in August. "He would ask if the kids were [safe] and whether he could share his water, somehow, with 'the thirsty kids on the mountain.' He sees it very plainly in terms of 'But you shouldn't be able to take part of somebody else's country'...and 'What are you doing to stop him?' and 'Will it work?' In a way he holds me accountable for whether I'm succeeding."

Thought leaders like CNN's Christiane Amanpour, a 2005 Glamour Woman of the Year, say that Power's "muscular approach to standing up for human rights" is a tactic whose time is now. She "is in a position of influence," Amanpour says, "at a time when that influence is needed most."

Tara Bahrampour is a staff writer for The Washington Post.

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