Samantha Power, tapped to be the next US envoy to the UN, is a young and outspoken foreign policy whiz whose meteoric career has taken her from Balkan battlefields to the White House.
Still just 42, Power has won a Pulitzer Prize for a book on genocide, was among those who nudged US policy towards ousting Libya’s Moamer Kadhafi in 2011, and clashed famously and nastily with no less than Hillary Clinton.
As an adviser to Barack Obama in 2008, then battling Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, Irish-born Power derided Bill Clinton’s wife as a “monster” who would do anything to get elected.
Power thought she was speaking off the record, in an interview with a Scottish newspaper. She later apologized and resigned from the Obama campaign. The Clinton team said her remarks showed the Obama team was amateurish.
But Power was eventually resurrected and appointed as an aide at the National Security Council, specializing in human rights and multilateral affairs.
She is known as advocate of firm government action and even military intervention to halt human rights abuses.
Most recently she has taught on foreign policy and human rights at Harvard University.
Her Pulitzer award winning book of 2002, “A Problem from Hell: America & The Age of Genocide,” argued that US governments had performed miserably in responding to cases of genocide in the 20th century.
As a young untested journalist just 22 years old, Power covered the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s.
She said that after seeing ethnic cleansing unfold in news reports of the fratricidal war of Yugoslavia’s destruction, she felt moved to do something to help — anything — and was revolted by America’s refusal to intervene to stop the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims.
“I was stuck. Anybody who got close to the issue was stuck. Once you knew, really knew, then you had lost your alibi,” she said in a speech in 2002 to graduating students at Swarthmore College.
Power also went on a fact-finding mission to the Sudanese region of Darfur in 2004 to report on widespread killings of ethnic minorities by the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum.
She later wrote an award winning article for The New Yorker, entitled “Dying in Darfur,” and won the National Magazine Award for best reporting.
Power is married to Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar who also served under Obama, and they have two children.
US nominee for UN post is outspoken rights advocate
