Samantha Power Biography | Samantha Power Bio | Samantha Power Wiki | Samantha Jane Power | Samantha Power Now
Samantha Power(Full name: Samantha Jane Power)is an Irish-American academic, author, and diplomat who served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. She is a member of the Democratic Party.
Power began her career as a war correspondent covering the Yugoslav Wars. From 1998 to 2002, she served as the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she later became the first Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy. She was a senior adviser to Senator Barack Obama until March 2008, when she resigned from his presidential campaign after apologizing for referring to then-Senator Hillary Clinton as “a monster.”
Samantha Power joined the Obama State Department transition team in late November 2008. She served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights on the National Security Council from January 2009 to February 2013.
In April 2012, Obama chose her to chair a newly formed Atrocities Prevention Board. As U.N. ambassador, Power’s office focused on such issues as United Nations reform, women’s rights and LGBT rights, religious freedom and religious minorities, refugees, human trafficking, human rights, and democracy, including in the Middle East and North Africa, Sudan, and Myanmar.
She is considered to have been a key figure in the Obama administration in persuading the president to intervene militarily in Libya. In 2016, she was listed as the 41st most powerful woman in the world by Forbes.
Power is a subject of the 2014 documentary Watchers of the Sky, which explains the contribution of several notable people, including Power, to the cause of genocide prevention. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, a study of the U.S. foreign policy response to genocide. She has also been awarded the 2015 Barnard Medal of Distinction and the 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize.
Samantha Power Age
Samantha Jane Power is an Irish-American academic, author, and diplomat who served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. She was born on September 21. 1970 in Castleknock, Ireland, as of 2019 she is 49 years old.
Samantha Power Family | Samantha Power Harvard | Samantha Power Pittsburgh
Power was born in London, as the daughter of Irish parents Vera Delaney, a field-hockey international and kidney doctor, and Jim Power, a dentist and piano player. Samantha was raised in Ireland until she was nine years old, she lived in Castleknock and was schooled in Mount Anville Montessori, Goatstown, Dublin, until her mother emigrated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1979.
She attended Lakeside High School in Atlanta, Georgia, where she was a member of the cross country team and the basketball team. She subsequently received her B.A. degree from Yale University, where she was a member of the Aurelian Honor Society and her J.D. degree from Harvard Law School. In 1993, at age 23, she became a U.S. citizen. In 2019, she presented the commencement address at Indiana University where she received her honorary doctorate.
Samantha Power Husband | Samantha Power Wedding | Who Is Samantha Power’s Husband | Is Samantha Power Married | Samantha Power Cass Sunstein
On July 4. 2008, she married law professor Cass Sunstein, whom she met while working on the Obama campaign. The couple was married in the Church of Mary Immaculate, Lohar, Waterville, County Kerry, Ireland. On April 24. 2009, she gave birth to their first child, Declan Power Sunstein.
On June 1, 2012, she gave birth to their second child, a daughter, Rían Power Sunstein. Declan Power Sunstein hugs his mother, Samantha Power, the nominee to be the U.S. representative to the United Nations
Samantha Power Net Worth
Samantha Power is an Irish-American academic, author, and diplomat who served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. She is a member of the Democratic Party. Power has an estimated Net Worth of $ million dollars as of 2019.
Samantha, the youngest-ever U.S. ambassador to the U.N., is considered to be the moral compass of American diplomacy. Already widely known for her 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” she has been a powerful crusader for U.S. foreign policy as well as human rights and democracy since she took office in 2013.
She is using her influence to get the international community on board in the fight against ISIL (ISIS). “This is a global threat; every day we see new parts of Europe, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and even now in South Asia… Everybody has got to step up, there are a lot of ways to do it, not just through military force.” In May 2016, she asserted at the annual Forbes’ Women’s Summit that terrorism and war “isn’t just over there anymore — there’s no wall that can be built to protect us.” But America still has to be the one to lead, she said.
Samantha Power Career
From 1993 to 1996, she worked as a war correspondent, covering the Yugoslav Wars for U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, The Economist, and The New Republic. When she returned to the United States, she attended Harvard Law School, receiving her J.D. in 1999.
The following year, her first edited work, Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact (edited with Graham Allison) was published. Her first book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, grew out of a paper she wrote while attending law school. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize in 2003.
From 1998 to 2002, Power served as the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where she later served as the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy.
In 2004, Power was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world that year. In fall 2007, she began writing a regular column for Time.
Power spent 2005–06 working in the office of U.S. Senator Barack Obama as a foreign policy fellow, where she was credited with sparking and directing Obama’s interest in the Darfur conflict. She served as a senior foreign policy adviser to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign but stepped down after referring to Hillary Clinton as “a monster” in an interview for The Scotsman. Power apologized for the remarks she made and resigned from the campaign shortly thereafter.
The second book she edited and compiled, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, was released on February 14, 2008. The third book she edited and compiled, The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrook in the World (edited with Derek Chollet).
Samantha Power Images
Samantha Power Books | Samantha Power Amazon
The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir 2019
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World 2008
A Problem from Hell 2002
Samantha Power Education Of An Idealist | Samantha Power New Book | Samantha Power Book Review | Samantha Power The Education Of An Idealist A Memoir
In vividly told scenes, with bracing honesty and breathless prose, Pulitzer Prize–winner Power (A Problem from Hell) reflects on the roads that led from her college days at Yale to her work in the U.S. government. She graduated from Harvard Law School, and in 2005 met Sen. Barack Obama, who asked her to serve as a foreign policy adviser.
After his presidential election, Obama brought Power into the National Security Council in 2009, and from 2013 to 2017, she served as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Power takes readers behind the scenes of her visits to Libya during the final tense days of the Qaddafi regime, pointing out that in spite of the downturn in security, Libya’s citizens agreed that they wanted no international presence in their country, but to determine their own future.
She discovered that Burma’s human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi is a bad listener and that it’s not clear that Suu Kyi cared that much about humans. Ultimately, she stresses the necessity of caring, acting, and not giving up when seeking to change people’s lives. Power’s vibrant prose, exuberant storytelling, and deep insights into human nature make for a page-turning memoir.
Samantha Power Twitter
Tweets by SamanthaJPower
Samantha Power Book Tour | Samantha Power Book Tour 2019 | Samantha Power Events
OCTOBER 24, 2019 – PROVIDENCE, RI – BROWN UNIVERSITY
OCTOBER 26, 2019 – AUSTIN, TX – TEXAS BOOK FESTIVAL
OCTOBER 28, 2019 – UNION, NJ – KEAN UNIVERSITY
OCTOBER 29, 2019 – TULSA, OK – MAGIC CITY BOOKS / BOOKSMART TULSA
NOVEMBER 4, 2019 – OXFORD, ENGLAND – OXFORD UNION
NOVEMBER 5, 2019 – LONDON, ENGLAND – THE GUARDIAN LIVE
NOVEMBER 6, 2019 – BATH, ENGLAND – TOPPING & COMPANY BOOKSELLERS
NOVEMBER 7, 2019 – DUBLIN, IRELAND – RCSI – EMILY WINIFRED DICKSON AWARD
NOVEMBER 9, 2019 – KILKENNY, IRELAND – KILKENOMICS FESTIVAL
NOVEMBER 13, 2019 – NEWARK, DE – UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
NOVEMBER 14, 2019 – PORTSMOUTH, NH – THE MUSIC HALL
NOVEMBER 16, 2019 – MEDFORD, MA – CONFERENCE ON GENDER AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
NOVEMBER 17, 2019 – MIAMI, FL – MIAMI BOOK FAIR
NOVEMBER 18, 2019 – DALLAS, TX – WORLD AFFAIRS COUNCIL OF DALLAS/FORT WORTH
NOVEMBER 19, 2019 – ARLINGTON, TX – UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS-ARLINGTON
NOVEMBER 20, 2019 – ATLANTA, GA – A CAPPELLA BOOKS / THE CARTER CENTER
NOVEMBER 21, 2019– ATLANTA, GA – SOUTHERN REGIONAL MODEL UNITED NATIONS
NOVEMBER 22, 2019 – NEW YORK, NY – GEOGRAPHY 2050 SYMPOSIUM
DECEMBER 2, 2019 – PHILADELPHIA, PA – WORLD AFFAIRS COUNCIL OF PHILADELPHIA
DECEMBER 3, 2019 – DURHAM, NC – DUKE UNIVERSITY
DECEMBER 4, 2019 – MEDFORD, MA – TUFTS UNIVERSITY
DECEMBER 5, 2019 – BOSTON, MA – WORLDBOSTON
DECEMBER 10, 2019 – NEW YORK, NY – 92Y
Samantha Power Height | How Tall Is Samantha Power
Power stands at a height of 5 feet 9 inches tall, with red hair that reaches the middle of her back. She loves being with her kids and teaching, Power admits when pushed that her favorite job was at the U.N. Her successes there were not, on the surface, enormous.
She seems oblivious as to how her height, blaze of red hair, deep voice, résumé or intensity might make others feel inferior. After leaving a prestigious position at Harvard to work in Obama’s senatorial office, she inadvertently came across a chat between two colleagues that described her as attention-seeking and snotty.
Samantha Power On Israel | Samantha Power Israel
In an interview with the PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power defended the decision to abstain from a U.N. Security Council vote in December to condemn Israeli settlements, saying it did not negatively impact the U.S.-Israel relationship, but that “the building has to stop.”
“If a two-state solution stands a chance in allowing the people of Israel and Palestine to live in dignity side by side, the building has to stop, and the incitement has to stop, and the violence has to stop,” Power said.
She also addressed the global challenge of fighting fake news, saying American media needed to stand up against disinformation put forward by Russian media.
“Mainstream regular news media does tend to just repeat Russian claims as if they are fact,” she said, including claims about Russia’s military interventions in Syria. “It’s harder to do the pound the pavement reporting that is required to ascertain what’s factual. But we have to be very careful to not just throw in and create on the one hand, on the other hand, stories,” she said.
Samantha Power Obama | Samantha Power Libya
In January 2009, President Obama appointed Power to the National Security Council, where she served as a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights.
In this capacity, Power kept the U.S. out of the Durban Review Conference, the 2009 iteration of the UN World Conference against Racism, which in 2001 was criticized for descending into “a festival of Israel bashing.”
Within the Obama administration, Power advocated for military intervention in Libya during the Libyan Civil War on humanitarian grounds. With then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN ambassador Susan Rice, Power lobbied Obama to pursue a UN Security Council resolution authorizing an international coalition force to protect Libyan civilians. Power left the National Security Council on February 2013.
The former U.N. ambassador “never seriously” considered leaving the Obama administration over its response to Syrian chemical weapons attacks.
Ambassador Samantha Power was a human rights activist turned foreign policy adviser who was sworn in as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations on August 2013. Days later, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime launched chemical weapons attacks, killing more than 1,400 near Damascus. Assad had crossed President Obama’s “red line.”
Ambassador Power’s new memoir, “The Education of an Idealist,” reveals just how close President Obama came to launching airstrikes in response to the attack. He ordered the targets to be drawn up. He told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs that he’d likely order the strikes within two days.
President Obama instructed Power to tell the United Nations to withdraw its inspectors immediately. But the U.N., at first, opposed withdrawing inspectors. In the meantime, Mr. Obama decided to turn to Congress for approval of a military response.
Power, on behalf of the administration, made the “progressive case,” as she puts it, for airstrikes. But the administration failed to get congressional support. Newsy Tonight host Lauren Stephenson asks Power how she was able to reconcile her personal beliefs on human rights with the Obama administration’s decision not to follow through with its threat of military force in response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons and why she argues admitting more refugees is in the U.S.’ national security interest.
Samantha Power Rwanda
The “next Rwanda” will look different: Samantha Power reflects on what we’ve learned and forgotten 25 years after the genocide
Only a major revitalization of U.S. diplomacy and a renewed commitment to peacekeeping can avert the next genocide, Power argues.
On April 7. 1994, soldiers, police, and militia members loyal to Rwanda’s Hutu-led government began systematically killing Tutsi and moderate Hutu political and military officials. Over the ensuing 100 days, as the United States and other world powers declined to intervene, more than 800,000 members of the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutu were murdered, some by soldiers but many by their Hutu neighbors wielding machetes and farm tools.
Samantha Power, a former journalist and war correspondent who would later serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017, chronicled the global community’s failure to respond in her 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning book “‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide.”
Power, the former director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and now Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of practice at Harvard Law School, reflects on the tragedy in Rwanda and the lessons learned—and not learned—since
Q: It’s been 25 years since the Rwandan Genocide. What were the lessons of that tragic event, and has the world taken them to heart?
In Rwanda, the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide staged a series of mini-massacres in advance of carrying out the organized murder of more than 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu. They were testing the so-called international community to see what they might be able to get away with.
When they saw that these crimes were largely ignored, they felt a growing sense of impunity and believed, accurately, that they would be able to go forward with their organized killing without much international interference.
The world is better today at recognizing the risks of early atrocities, and senior U.N. officials and others are quicker to raise the alarm than they were in the past. U.N. peacekeepers, while still not nearly as capable across the board as they should be, have in various missions been more aggressive in protecting civilians who come under threat.
The U.N. Security Council equips peacekeepers with mandates and rules of engagement that allow blue helmets to be more proactive in reacting. But unfortunately, today peacekeepers, mediators, and others are over-extended, because of the vast number of conflicts and daunting number of places where atrocities have occurred or may occur.
Q: Do you see conditions that might contribute to a similar event happening again today? And what steps need to be taken to ensure that doesn’t happen?
Every case of genocide and mass atrocity is, of course, different than every other. But in the last two years, we have seen the Myanmar military’s systematic campaign of destruction against the Rohingya, using murder, rape, and forced expulsion to rid the country of a Muslim minority that had long been persecuted. The countries of the world responded limply.
While U.N. officials issued countless sirens, and the horror of what was being perpetrated was well-documented, China blocked meaningful action on the Security Council. The United States issued occasional condemnations but carried out no sustained, high-level diplomacy.
And Europe, beset by its own divisions on this and much else, was ineffectual as well. The humanitarian response has been generous, but the Myanmar government’s calculus will not be altered and Rohingya will not be able to safely return to their homes without far more collective, sustained diplomatic and economic pressure.
Q: How do you think the current U.S. government, and the global community, would respond if something similar happens today?
The “next Rwanda” will not look like what happened in Rwanda. So it is essential not to wait until we see crimes of that magnitude to mobilize international action. Right now, the only country in the world invested in expanding its diplomatic corps commensurate to the scale of the world’s challenges in China. However, China is skeptical of “outside interference” in trying to prevent human rights crises and mass atrocities.
The U.S. government, which in the Obama administration built up a range of new tools to try to prevent atrocities before they spiraled out of control, is generally not using those tools, except when Congress requires it. Senior U.S. diplomacy is nowhere to be found in trying to mobilize the international community to combat atrocities in places like South Sudan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and beyond.
This can be remedied, but after mass resignations and sustained disempowerment of career U.S. diplomats, it will require the wholesale renovation of the diplomatic corps and a president’s reassertion of the importance of taking appropriate steps to try to prevent and punish mass atrocities.
Samantha Power Memoir
Samantha Power’s new memoir, The Education of an Idealist, is an important and engaging work that should be widely read — especially by those of us who disagree with her. It deftly conveys the linkage between personal biography and political belief, showing Power, not as a wily imperialist villain but a committed liberal whose consistent focus on human rights has nonetheless led her to embrace a perpetual empire.
This distinction matters because Power’s political causes — atrocity prevention, support for subjugated minorities, international human rights — should be championed by all decent people. Yet her flawed prescriptions — particularly “humanitarian intervention” by the world’s most powerful military — help maintain US dominance in the world and often undermine the very principles they profess to defend.
With its adoration of the military and praise for the neutrality of “public service,” the memoir raises serious questions about contemporary liberalism’s ability to check anti-democratic trends. Power’s idealistic view of governmental bureaucracy sidesteps a necessary debate about complicity with Trumpian injustice — a striking blind spot for one of the world’s leading experts on genocide.
Despite the title, the book is less about education than affirmation. It tells a story of misdirected righteousness, in which Power’s youthful critique of American foreign policy is channeled into a personal and institutional comfort with hegemonic power. An unwitting parable, The Education of an Idealist shows what can happen when laudable values never find the radicalism that can truly give them flight.
Samantha Power New Yorker | Samantha Power The New Yorker
What Samantha Power Learned on the Job – The New York Times
Whenever The New York Times invites me to do a book review, I look for an excuse. I’d rather spend my extra time writing books than reviewing them. But when the Book Review editors asked me to review Samantha Power’s “The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir,” I said yes, without hesitation.
It wasn’t because I suddenly had time on my hands. And it certainly wasn’t because Power is a friend. I’ve met her only once — in her last week as Barack Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations. No, it was because I knew only one thing about Power — from afar. She was a table-pounding idealist and human rights advocate and believed in using American power to protect innocent civilians and advance democracy. And lately, I have struggled with that position.
Having been a foreign correspondent in London, in Beirut during its civil war, in Israel and then the foreign affairs columnist for this newspaper since 1995, I’d long wrestled with how much idealism one should allow oneself when advocating for or against the uses of American power abroad. I began reporting from the Middle East in 1979 with a lot of Minnesota optimism in my DNA.
Alas, idealism is now a recessive gene in me after so many crushed hopes and covering one-too-many massacres. I am much more wary today — not isolationist, but wary — about what well-intentioned outsiders can do to sustainably reshape another country or region.
George W. Bush was right on one thing about the Iraq war — many Iraqis wanted to be free to be more democratic once the tyranny of Saddam Hussein was lifted from their necks. But many other Iraqis wanted to be free to be more Shiite, more Sunni Jihadist, more corrupt or just more powerful than the tribe or sect next door. No, Toto, everywhere is not like Kansas.
The only Arab Spring country that was able to make the transition (albeit still tentative) from dictatorship to democracy, and to power-sharing between Islamists and secularists, was Tunisia — the one Arab country America had nothing to do with. Think about that. And Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi showed how even a Nobel Peace Prize can’t guarantee that today’s human rights heroine won’t become tomorrow’s victimizer. Yet Obama’s intervention in West Africa to stem the spread of Ebola — may be his most significant foreign policy achievement, for which he got little credit precisely because it worked — demonstrated that without America as a quarterback, important things that save lives and advance freedom at reasonable costs often don’t happen.
In short, it’s complicated.
So I was curious. This Samantha Power — she had started her career as a journalist covering the mass killing of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs, which led her to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “‘A Problem From Hell’: America in the Age of Genocide,” about why American leaders who vow “never again” repeatedly fail to halt genocides. She had worked as a foreign policy adviser to Senator Obama, and then as a human rights adviser to President Obama before ultimately becoming his second United Nations ambassador.
People told me she was a real idealist — not a tortured one like me. But then she had to eat some heaping plates of realism in public, like defending Obama’s nonintervention in the genocidal Syrian civil war. I wondered: How did she wrestle with all that as she went from reporter-author to policymaker? So I told the Book Review editors: “Yes. I’d like to review her book.” I wanted to see how she sorted it all out.
I’m glad I did. This is a wonderful book.
It’s an unusual combination of autobiography, diplomatic history, moral argument and manual on how to breast-feed a child with one hand while talking to Secretary of State John Kerry on a cellphone with the other. The interweaving of Power’s personal story, family story, diplomatic history, and moral arguments is executed seamlessly — and with unblinking honesty.
The book isn’t all about world affairs. One of the most compelling chapters is about when Power joined the Obama presidential campaign as a foreign policy adviser but ended up making news herself for a “large and public mistake.” That was describing Obama’s rival, Hillary Clinton, as a “monster” — while on a book tour in Ireland no less — and being forced to resign from the campaign. But when the man that her Irish cousins called “O’bama” wins the 2008 election, he brings her back into the fold.
To ease her way back, her friend and the Obama adviser Richard Holbrooke — as a wedding gift — arranges for Power to have a private face-to-face meeting to apologize to Clinton and clear the air. When Power tells Obama about the “wedding gift,” the president quips, “Don’t most people get toasters?”
With America being run today by a president for whom no dictator is too odious to call his friend, I found it something of a balm to journey with this Irish immigrant girl from the basement of a Dublin pub, where Power spent way too much time as a little girl reading books while her dad held court in the bar upstairs, to America, where she emigrates with her mom in the 1970s and falls in love in equal parts with the Pittsburgh Pirates and American idealism. Not the cheap flag-waving variety, but the belief that America is more than just a country. It’s a mission to promote justice and human rights where it can.
When it comes to striking that right balance between idealism and realism, this book is basically a dialogue between the young, uncompromising, super idealistic Power — who cold-calls senior American officials at night at home to berate them for not doing more to stop the killing in Bosnia — and the more sober policymaker Power, who struggles to balance her idealism with realism, and who frets that she’s become one of those officials she despised.
The older Power is not at all a cynic, but she is less ramrod straight. Her posture is what I like to call a tilt. Always tilted toward using American power to defend the defenseless, moderate the tyrannical, rescue the needy and inspire and strengthen the forces of decency — but when she loses the argument to do so in one country, she doesn’t resign. She looks for somewhere else to fix.
Does that sound like an idealist selling out to hold onto the perks of power or one who keeps looking to fight another day another way? You decide. And you can — because Power is unstinting in giving you all the ammunition you need to denounce or defend her.
Samantha Power Quotes
I like to think that as I get older I’m getting better at spending time with people who have qualities that make them worth spending time with.
All advocacy is, at its core, an exercise in empathy.
My style in diplomacy is my style as a human being – I’m very direct and very honest.
Whatever its flaws, the United Nations is still the only institution that brings together all the countries of the world. And it is the best forum for the United States to spur countries to act – and to hold them accountable when they don’t.
U.N. Security Council resolutions are only as effective as their enforcement.
Half of Syria’s refugees are children, and we know what can happen to children who grow to adulthood without hope or opportunity in refugee camps. The camps become fertile recruiting grounds for violent extremists.
If there are no consequences now for breaking the prohibition on chemical weapons, it will be harder to muster an international consensus to ensure that Hezbollah and other terrorist groups are prevented from acquiring or using these weapons themselves.
Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats.
I’ve been a war reporter and a human rights defender. A professor and a columnist. A diplomat and – by far most thrillingly – a mother. And what I’ve learned from all these experiences is that any change worth making is going to be hard. Period.
Samantha Power Un
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
On June 5. 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama announced her nomination as the new United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
Power’s nomination was backed by Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and former independent senator Joseph Lieberman. Power also received support from U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League Abraham Foxman, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, lawyer and commentator Alan Dershowitz, the director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, the director of the Israel Project, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the President of the Rabbinical Assembly, the Eastern Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the National Jewish Democratic Council, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, publisher Marty Peretz, and military writer Max Boot.
Her nomination also faced some opposition. Former U.S. ambassador to the UN John R. Bolton and a former acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Frank Gaffney, criticized her for a 2003 article she authored in The New Republic, in which Bolton claims she compared the United States to Nazi Germany. Power was confirmed as UN ambassador by the U.S. Senate on August 1, 2013, by a vote of 87 to 10, and was sworn in a day later by the Vice President.
Samantha Power Seattle
Samantha Power with John Koenig (9/16) – Town Hall Seattle
Samantha Power is widely considered the moral voice of her generation. A relentless advocate for promoting human rights, she has been heralded by President Barack Obama as one of America’s “foremost thinkers on foreign policy.”
Power takes Town Hall’s stage with insight from her memoir The Education of an Idealist, tracing her career as an author, diplomat, and as a vocal critic of US foreign policy, outlining how she put her ideals into practice while working with Obama in the Senate, on the campaign trail, and throughout his presidency.
In conversation with former US Ambassador to Cyprus John Koenig, Power offers a unique perspective on government, taking us from the streets of war-torn Bosnia to the Situation Room and out into the world of high-stakes diplomacy.
She reveals her experiences with juggling the demands of a 24/7 national security job while raising two young children. With perspective from the front lines of geopolitics, Power reconciles U.S. leadership in the face of great challenges with the assertion that there is always something each of us can do to advance the cause of human dignity. Sit in for a humorous, stirring, and ultimately unforgettable account of the world-changing power of idealism—and of one person’s fierce determination to make a difference.