Читать книгу The Education of an Idealist - Samantha Power, Samantha Power - Страница 13

Mort Abramowitz and Fred Cuny were in some respects an unlikely pair. When I met him in December of 1992, Mort was a fifty-nine-year-old retired diplomat who had spent more than three decades abiding by the strictures of the US government in roles that included ambassador to Thailand, ambassador to Turkey, and Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research. The son of Lithuanian immigrants, he had grown up in New Jersey and held degrees from Stanford and Harvard. Mort lived in his mind and sometimes lost sight of practical details, arriving in the office wearing mismatched shoes or a woman’s coat he had mistaken for his own after a breakfast meeting.

Fred was a six-foot-three, forty-eight-year-old Texan who had been kicked out of Texas A&M and, as a young man, had listed sailing a Chinese junk ship across the Pacific as one of his life goals. Eventually trained as an engineer, Fred had become renowned as the Master of Disaster for his relief work in more than thirty crisis zones. Wearing his trademark cowboy boots, Fred had responded to famine in Ethiopia, an earthquake in Armenia, and war in places like Biafra, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and Somalia.[1]

Mort was the ambassador to Turkey when he and Fred had first worked together in an effort to aid Iraqi Kurds who had been attacked by Saddam Hussein and were huddling as refugees on the Iraq-Turkey border.[fn1] Fred’s methods were unorthodox—Mort recalled fielding calls from US military commanders in the area asking “Do you know what that goddamned Fred Cuny is doing?”—but the US-led operation helped save some 400,000 people. From then on, Mort provided Fred with credibility among Washington decision-makers, while Fred inspired Mort with his resourcefulness and daring.

I had the good fortune to get to know both men when, as a recent college graduate, I took up an internship at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington policy institute. I had heard about Carnegie from a friend at Yale, and I had applied because several of the interns served as editorial assistants with Foreign Policy, the Carnegie Endowment’s quarterly journal. This seemed the perfect way to combine my experience in a different kind of journalism (sports) with my burgeoning interest in foreign policy. I could not think of a more perfect first job out of college.

I had pulled my grades up at Yale and written a senior essay on foreign policy that the history department gave an award. I wrote essays for the application and was invited for an interview with one of Carnegie’s senior associates. A few weeks later, I was told I was one of ten graduating seniors who had been admitted to the program, and I had been assigned to Foreign Policy. I was thrilled.

Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, the head of the program called to tell me that the president of the Carnegie Endowment, Mort Abramowitz, had reassigned me to his office. Imagining an administrative internship from which I would learn little, I pleaded with the program head to revert to the original plan. She was firm. “Samantha,” she said in a thick Southern accent, “you can’t turn down the president.” What felt like an unlucky turn of fate would end up being a tremendous stroke of fortune.

In December of 1992, six months after graduating from college, I moved to Washington, DC, transferring my dorm room furnishings to a studio apartment near Dupont Circle. I had long ago framed the Time magazine “Tank Man” cover, and I now placed it on my book shelf, along with photos of Mum, Eddie, Stephen, Bam Bam, and my now ex-boyfriend Schu.

Mort was the first person I came to know well who had helped make foreign policy at such rarified levels, and over time he would drill into me a simple truth: governments can either do harm or do good. “What we do,” he would say, “depends on one thing: the people.” Institutions, big and small, were made up of people. People had values, and people made choices.

I would learn later that Mort was famous in the diplomatic corps for eschewing hierarchy and tracking down the best-informed officials in his embassies, irrespective of their rank. He also took care of “his people”—making phone calls on behalf of junior officials whose work he admired. But none of this was apparent to me in the first couple of months I served as his intern. When I offered edits to drafts of his speeches and op-eds, he would say, “Very helpful, Susan,” and then incorporate almost none of what I had proposed.

My tasks at the outset were as administrative as I had feared: making sure Carnegie’s public materials did not have typos and helping seat the VIP guests who attended Carnegie events—from former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and legendary journalist Bob Woodward to Tom Lantos, a human rights champion who was the only Holocaust survivor in Congress. Although I didn’t yet work closely with my boss, people whose names I had underlined in the newspaper during college were suddenly handing me their coats—and occasionally even looking me in the eye.

I was especially intrigued by Carnegie visitor Jeane Kirkpatrick, President Ronald Reagan’s first UN ambassador, and the first woman in the United States ever to hold a national security cabinet position. Strangely, Kirkpatrick had first come to my attention when I was a child in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s and had somehow noticed a photo of President Reagan’s senior team in Eddie’s copy of the New York Times. Amid all the suits, the diminutive Kirkpatrick stood beaming at the center of the shot—the only woman among Reagan, Vice President Bush, and the seventeen other members of the cabinet. I had been far too young to follow her career at the UN, but the moment I glimpsed her, now a private citizen, at Carnegie, I immediately flashed back to the picture I had seen more than a decade earlier.

During Kirkpatrick’s visits, she would offer acerbic commentary on the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, who had just taken office. As I watched from the back of the room, I was struck by her bluntness, which seemed to puncture the otherwise clubby, polite atmosphere. Men usually dominated the proceedings, but she was a notable exception.

Mort seemed to respect people like Kirkpatrick who had served in government and could offer informed views. But he was impatient with the “blowhards” who circulated in the think-tank world. “These people speak so much,” Mort said about the proliferation of self-styled experts in Washington, “and yet they manage to say so little.”

He was even harder on himself. After he had chaired a meeting or published an op-ed that I found persuasive, I sometimes made the mistake of complimenting him. “What a load of horseshit,” he would respond. I was never sure if this referred to his work or my praise. When I once thanked him for publicly challenging a visiting head of state, Mort looked at me blankly and said, “You do know I don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, don’t you?” His humility often manifested itself as self-criticism, which seemed an extremely uncommon—but to me a very appealing—trait for a person so respected in Washington.

Mort’s standoffishness did not deter me, and his cutting commentary was familiar from years of watching my dad in action at Hartigan’s. But I wondered whether I had what it took to win his confidence. I saw in him someone who could help teach me how the world really worked. He seemed to be guided by only one criteria, the question he would ask every time I approached him with an idea (as I often would in the coming decades): “Will it do any good?”

I noticed that Mort always rearranged his schedule to see Fred when he was in town. “He is a practical man,” Mort said of the Texan. “He doesn’t just tell us ‘something must be done.’ He tells us what should be done and how we should do it. I’ve never known anybody like him.”

Fred was useful. And Mort valued usefulness.

IN EARLY 1993, both men were working to improve conditions in Bosnia, where a savage war had begun the previous April.

The core of the conflict arose from the collapse of Yugoslavia, whose six republics each contained a range of ethnicities and religions: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, ethnic Albanians, Macedonians, Bosnian Muslims, and others. Tito, who had ruled the country for decades, had tried to forge a single Southern Slavic identity among the people and had stymied ethnic and religious expressions of difference.[fn2] After Tito’s death in 1980, however, nationalism—of the kind Schu and I had witnessed on our trip to Croatia—had surged among the country’s various ethnicities. After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union itself headed toward collapse, four of the six Yugoslav republics took steps to secede.

While the eventual outbreak of fighting had many causes, Serbian president Slobodan Milošević bore the greatest responsibility. As Yugoslavia’s largest single nationality, Serbs had enjoyed plum jobs and privileges. But as the Croatian and Slovene governments moved toward declaring independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, Milošević used state media to whip up fear over what he portrayed as the coming existential struggle.[fn3] If Serbs were trapped as ethnic minorities in newly independent Croatia or Bosnia, he warned, they would become second-class citizens.

In 1989, Milošević had notoriously declared “No one will ever dare beat you again!” to a crowd of Serbs in the predominantly ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo, shrewdly tapping into the once-dominant group’s fear that they would become the losers if people of other ethnicities gained more power. Using tactics common to strongmen past and present, Milošević told the Serbs that their “enemies outside the country are plotting against [them], along with those inside the country.” He capitalized on his followers’ nervousness about their place in a rapidly changing world.

In 1992, Bosnia was the most ethnically mixed of all of Yugoslavia’s republics. After following Slovenia and Croatia in declaring independence, it descended into the deadliest and most gruesome conflict in Europe since World War II. Milošević funneled soldiers and guns from Serbia to support Bosnian Serb militants, who quickly seized some 70 percent of the country in what they called Republika Srpska, their own ethnically “pure” republic. Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo had hosted the Winter Olympics only eight years before, but by April of 1992, Bosnian Serb rebels, backed by the remnants of the powerful Yugoslav National Army, began bombarding the city. Across the country, Bosnian Serb Army snipers and heavy weapons began firing at Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and others.

Not long before I joined Carnegie, a group of intrepid journalists had uncovered a network of concentration camps where Serb guards were starving and beating men to death, and disposing of their bodies in mass graves. The Bosnian Serb militia also set up rape camps where they sequestered Muslim and Croat women and systematically brutalized them. For the people of Bosnia, history had not “ended,” and the “New World Order” had brought terror and misery.

Campaigning for president, Bill Clinton had compared the atrocities in Bosnia to the Holocaust, promising that he would “stop the slaughter of civilians” if elected. Mort’s top priority was to use his platform at Carnegie to pressure the Clinton administration to translate those words into action. He turned the redbrick building at the corner of 24th and N Street into a hub where the most influential voices from the former Yugoslavia shared their perspectives with Washington’s top officials and journalists.

By then, Fred was doing humanitarian work on behalf of philanthropist George Soros’s foundation with the goal, as Fred modestly put it, of “breaking the siege of Sarajevo.” But he made a point of visiting Washington every few months, and Mort would invite key influencers to hear his insights on the humanitarian conditions and what could be done to improve the situation. Mort’s perennial sense that he did not know enough fueled his curiosity and caused him to pose fundamental questions that few were asking. He never seemed afraid of looking uninformed—which, to me, seemed to be the highest form of confidence.

As I dug into the news reporting and listened to what visitors from the region said, the war started to feel closer. The more I heard from Bosnia’s crusading representative at the UN or Serbia’s human rights lawyers, the more unnerved I was by the atrocities being committed.

This response marked a change for me. Between my college graduation and taking up my Carnegie internship, I had taught English in Berlin for six months. I had seen the gaunt faces of Bosnian families as they arrived at German bus and train terminals, but I had not been moved to action by their suffering. It never occurred to me that I personally could do anything for them. Although I had felt horror toward the Tiananmen massacre several years before, in Berlin I had gone about my business, teaching and exploring the city, despite encountering the war’s survivors.

Now, just a few months later at Carnegie, I was devouring the dispatches from Balkan war correspondents. I was working for someone who believed he could make a difference; if I could help him, I felt I might be making a modest contribution of my own.

As I learned more, Mort began asking me to fact-check his opinion pieces for the Washington Post and other publications. I slowly started developing views and tried my hand at writing editorials. At first, all I did was read the drafts to Mum and Eddie over the telephone. When I finally got up the nerve to show one to Mort, he eviscerated what I had written, decrying my “purple prose” and telling me to “tone down” the language. Crestfallen, I reflected on the rejection in my journal. “I think what Mort detests—and I can’t say I blame him—is my voice. I’m too young, too lacking knowledge and experience, to assume such airs.”

Even if I didn’t yet have a knack for such writing, Mort was exposing me to a different mind-set. I now shared his impatience with commentary that detailed the contours of a problem without offering realistic, concrete ideas for how the United States and other actors might improve matters. And I now understood why Mort had all the time in the world for Fred, someone who was a font of constructive ideas for how to respond to the Bosnian Serb Army’s devastating siege of Sarajevo.

In addition to terrorizing and killing civilians, Bosnian Serb soldiers had cut off gas and water supplies to the city, sapping the will of its inhabitants to resist. Fred and his team of humanitarian engineers had resuscitated a natural gas line, thereby enabling some 20,000 Sarajevans to restore heating to their homes during the frigid winter. But the Serbs had also cut off the power to pumps that delivered water into the capital, a tactic that had even more dire effects. In order to get water, thousands of Sarajevans were hauling large plastic containers from their homes to the town’s main river or its other water sources. The river was polluted and terribly exposed to sniper fire. Because the queues at the water distribution points often stretched whole city blocks, the waiting crowds spent hours vulnerable to shelling.

“What is the most powerful weapon the Bosnian Serb extremists have?” Fred asked me and the other interns one day on a visit to Washington. “Their siege,” he answered, explaining, “If we can find a way to restore water, they can still shoot people, but the city will not surrender. We will foil their plans and give the Bosnians the time to muster the means to fight back.”

Fred’s plan was audacious in the extreme. He planned to smuggle water pumps and other large machinery past the Bosnian Serb gunners and then jury-rig a vast water purification plant inside a Sarajevo tunnel, where it would be shielded from Serb fire. If the plan worked, Fred said, 120,000 gallons of water would flow, giving a third of the city’s residents water around the clock.

Fred was just one person with a small team. His idea seemed unbelievably risky. “If this is doable,” I asked, “why wouldn’t the United Nations do it?”

Fred dismissed the question, telling me, “If the UN had been around in 1939, we’d all be speaking German.” He was galled by UN peacekeepers’ neutrality in the face of what to him seemed clear-cut aggression.

As Mort deepened his advocacy and Fred began to implement his bold plan to restore water, I also got to know Jonathan Moore, a sixty-year-old former US official based at Carnegie who had been Mort’s colleague in President Richard Nixon’s State Department. Jonathan had a rumpled look. When I first met him, he was wearing brown corduroys and a light green Oxford shirt under a maroon V-neck sweater—attire from which I rarely saw him deviate. For many months, he held together his Rockport shoes with silver duct tape.

A Republican for most of his life, Jonathan had served as a Senate aide and as a presidential campaign adviser. Working under six presidents, he had also held positions in several governmental agencies, including the Departments of State; Defense; Justice; and Health, Education, and Welfare.[fn4] Most impressive to me at the time, he had coordinated the US response to refugee issues under President Reagan, and had gone on to work as one of George H. W. Bush’s top officials at the US Mission to the UN, helping to create the position of a full-time UN coordinator for humanitarian emergencies.

When I marveled at the variety and significance of all Jonathan had done, he downplayed his achievements. He stressed that he owed his “herky-jerky” career to finding himself in the “right place at the right time,” emphasizing how much each job had given him rather than what he had contributed. He was the first person I met who talked about public service with boundless delight—as a source of camaraderie and fun. To him, even government officials who got themselves into trouble were objects more of fascination than of judgment. “He was so devious, it was neat to watch!” he would exclaim. Jonathan keenly weighed the moral ambiguity inherent in high-level decision-making.

My first substantive conversation with him occurred after he poked his head into my office to discuss the Bosnian war. “Do you think what is happening in Bosnia is because of the absence of good or the presence of evil?” he asked.

I was carefully tracking developments in the Balkans, but I had no adequate answer to his question. That didn’t stop him from continuing to drop by my office, recommending readings from scripture or leaving on my chair a news article he had clipped. Jonathan reminded me of Eddie—he had insatiable curiosity.

I realized that—with Mort, Fred, and now Jonathan—I was surrounded by people from whom I could learn a seemingly infinite amount. But I asked myself what a mere intern could do to support them. I raided Kramerbooks in Dupont Circle, immersing myself in the history and literature of the Balkans. I bought Serbo-Croatian tapes and listened to them on my yellow Sony Walkman as I walked to and from the gym. And at the end of the day, when the office began to empty out, I stayed on, poring over the reports on Bosnian concentration camps and trying to understand how such depravity had befallen the place Schu and I had visited just a couple of summers before.

Leaving the office each night, I was usually so shaken by what I had read that I did not feel steady enough to ride my bike home, choosing instead to walk with it by my side.

As I read back issues from the early 1980s of public news sources like the Radio Free Europe digest, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, I began compiling a detailed chronology of the road to Yugoslavia’s destruction. My timeline was a straightforward collection of dates and events, but one that nonetheless showed Yugoslavia’s downward spiral. I had started it so I could keep the sequence straight in my mind and help Mort with his op-eds and speeches. But one night it struck me that such a chronology might find a broader readership. Just as Mort was trying to make himself a quick study on the conflict, so too were many journalists, NGO advocates, members of Congress, and Clinton administration officials.

Five months into my internship, I went to Mort with a lengthy printout of my timeline, held together with a large black paper clip, and asked him if he thought it might be worth publishing. He was focused on something else and didn’t seem to process my question—but he assented. Over the next several weeks, through all-nighters and weekend labor, I tried to improve its quality. In June of 1993, reasoning that speed was as important as substance, I took my floppy disk to a printer and asked them to make one thousand copies.

When I turned up to collect the order a week later, I was taken aback by the sight of a half-dozen large brown boxes that would nearly fill my small office. My amateur creation had been artfully compressed into a small book with a gray cover bearing my name and the title I had landed on: Breakdown in the Balkans. When word got out that such a chronology was available, the Washington think tank, diplomatic, policy, and media communities quickly emptied the Carnegie stock. I soon heard from Fred, who called on a satellite phone from Sarajevo to congratulate me on publishing the “hugely useful” Breakdown, which he said he was passing out to government officials and aid workers.

I felt immense satisfaction—of a kind I had never experienced personally or professionally before. But now that people were actually reading it, I began obsessing about all that I had left out. “The gaps, the gaps,” I would say, deflecting compliments that came my way. Simultaneously, I chastised myself for craving the recognition I was starting to get. “Clearly, I am out, as always, for me, myself, and I,” I wrote in my journal. “I need so much to remember why the book came about in the first place.” I knew that conditions in Bosnia were deteriorating rapidly, and that if my chronology was to land in the hands of Fred’s besieged Sarajevan neighbors, they would likely burn it along with their other books to keep warm.

The war raged unabated. Four US diplomats—George Kenney, Marshall Harris, Jon Western, and Stephen Walker—had already resigned to protest what they saw as the weakness of the US response to the Bosnian war, the largest wave of resignations over US policy in State Department history. I read about these men in a lengthy Washington Post profile and was gripped by their testimonies. Jon Western, a thirty-year-old intelligence analyst, had sifted through hundreds of photos and videos of what he recalled as “human beings who look like they’ve been through meat grinders.” As he told the Post, the intelligence he needed to consume for his job described preteen girls raped in front of their parents, a sixty-five-year-old man and his thirty-five-year-old son forced at gunpoint to orally castrate each other, and Serb torturers who made Muslim prisoners carve crosses in each other’s skulls.

Western and the other US officials who resigned had initially tried to change policy from within, but having made no headway, had finally quit. They felt they could no longer be part of a US government that wasn’t doing more, reasoning that they could at least draw media attention to what they saw as America’s moral abdication.

After reading the Post profile, I grandiosely wrote in my journal: “My only regret is that I don’t work at the State Department so I can quit to protest policy. Instead, I sit impotent and incapable.”

Following my summer at CBS in Atlanta, when people had asked what I wanted to do with my life, I had begun answering that “I wanted to make a difference.” But at Carnegie I saw that this was an abstraction. Now I had a focus—a specific group of people in a specific place who were being pulverized, and I wanted to do something to support them.

As a liberal arts major who had no particular knack for foreign languages, I still worried I had little to contribute. But I had managed to assemble the chronology, and I was seeing up close the vast number of ways researchers, columnists, journalists, government officials, and aid workers were involved in the enterprise of American foreign policy. All seemed to be struggling with how to define the US role in the world now that the Cold War was over, as well as how to manage a sudden flurry of nationalist and independence movements.

I remained acutely aware of all that I lacked—I wasn’t an engineer like Fred, a trained diplomat like Mort, or a doctor like Mum and Eddie. I was focused, but I did not know how to channel my interests. A frustrated journal entry from the time ended simply: “… Act, Power.”