Culture

Samantha Power: ‘We thought: Trump’s not gonna do all that. He’s done all that’

Power and Melody Barnes, both former Obama insiders, spoke to Fintan O’Toole

Samantha Power. Photograph: Stephen Kelleghan

Tanya Sweeney
Thu Jul 16 2020 - 23:36

“A couple of my old school friends from Mount Anville and I went back there last November and prowled the halls. The confession booth had me running in the opposite direction.” Samantha Power, former US ambassador to the United nations, was speaking to Irish Times columnist and author Fintan O’Toole on the last night of the Irish Times Summer Nights Festival on Thursday.

The festival – supported by Peugeot – is a series of online talks that began on Monday 13th and ended on Thursday night.

Speaking of her experience of moving from south Co Dublin to the US at the age of nine, Power recalled: “I think I didn’t really appreciate the degree of disruption or even of rapture to my life. I don’t think I appreciated it until my own son Declan turned 9 and, God almighty, he is so young and his world is so small, and his desire to control that world is all-consuming.

Summer Nights

“Another part of childhood loves big things and bright shiny objects and adventure, and both of those would have been duelling inside me for much of my youth without even knowing it.

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“I got to live in American, and go back to Ireland to my family every holiday, but I got to escape the nuns and escape learning Irish and pathologically follow American sports. I got to cut my long red hair and ditch my Mount Anville school uniform as quickly as I could, but I was always pulled back into my family, in traditions that ground me to this day.”

Her childhood experiences in Troubles-era Ireland gave Power a certain perspective when she encountered sectarian conflict or ethnic conflict in areas like Sarajevo or Bosnia in her earlier career as a war correspondent: “The ethnic conflicts and horror that can descend in ordinary European cities… that wasn’t entirely strange for us.”

Power also referenced a passage in her book The Education Of An Idealist, in which she endured her own #MeToo moment as a rookie war correspondent in Bosnia.

“The Bosnian prime minister shows up in a white bathrobe, and at the door his entourage vanished. I find myself in a hotel room when I’m expecting the chief of staff and note takers to be there, and I’m on my own. He’s not intending to stay in the bathrobe either.

“When I told my war correspondent friends that I was going to include the story in my book, each of the six women chimed in with an analogous story,” Power said. “I asked them if they thought of telling a Bosnian journalist about it, and each of them wrote back, ‘it never even occurred to us’. Is that on us? I guess it’s on us. What you’re internalising is that it’s so run of the mill, but also… that no-one does anything to contest it.

“There’s a real lesson there, in terms of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. There’s a real bravery and praiseworthiness in being the first mover, and the people who, even though they have every reason to believe no-one will react, they still risk themselves in that way. My hope is that young women who read this book will not accept what seems normal as normal. It’s easier said than done.”

“People around the world, people and leaders, have witnessed what has just occurred – I don’t mean merely the decisions Trump has taken during presidency, or even the fact that we’re leading the world in terms of coronavirus deaths, but we elected him. There has been no bait and switch here. He said what he was going to do – he made clear his [views] on science, government and bureaucracy, not to mention his contempt for global co-operation, and his sense that American could make itself great by itself… he said he was going to do it all. People, and I put myself in this category, thought, ‘he’s not gonna do all that!’ He’s done all that.”

Melody Barnes

Earlier in the evening, in another Summer Nights event, O’Toole interviewed US lawyer and political adviser Melody Barnes.

Barnes, who was aide and chief counsel to Sen Edward M. Kennedy before later joining Sen Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, discussed Black Lives Matter, police brutality, civil rights and the upcoming American election.

“America has been on the field with half the team. We were playing the game with an arm behind our backs, because we weren’t able to engage the people we needed to, in order to make America the country we want it to be,” she said.

Barnes noted that the moment she walked into the White House alongside President Obama was a “great moment of hope” and “will always be reflected on as an important pivot for the country”.

“What accommodated that moment was the requirement that the whole of society would start to see people of colour – in this case, an African-American man – as equal, it would have to shatter the hierarchy of human value, or the currency of whiteness. All those things would have to be shattered… what we saw was a resistance and backlash to that.

“You heard people say they felt like strangers in their own land. There was this sense that the government had restricted American society in such a way that those working hard, and waiting in line, and waiting for opportunity and doing the right thing, saw people jump in line in front of them. African-Americans. Women. Entities that they felt pushed them further to the back of the line, and that was the fault of government.”

“Don’t believe that this will not be a hard-fought election”

Discussing about what made the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May a turning point in US race relations, Barnes noted: “For the entire world to see an eight-minute 46 second video of a police officer casually with his knee on the neck of a man begging for his life, and others begging for his life, where the police officer had his hands in his pockets… that shocked our consciousness in a way we haven’t seen for quite some time. You can’t make an excuse for it. You can’t make an excuse when you see that video, and that’s what is critical to this moment.”

Speaking about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s capacity to “blow Trump out of the water”, and as Fintan O’Toole noted, to perform healing on a nation “like what you need in a very complex, life-saving operation”, Barnes said: “I know Joe Biden from our days in the White House, and… I got to watch him, got to know him, and see his staff and the people he surrounds himself with. Not only do I believe he has a deep commitment to the healing of the country, in terms of policy practice, the economy… he has a commitment to making those kinds of changes.

“I don’t believe anyone should make the mistake of thinking that this will not be a hard-fought election, even given what the polling looks like today.”

Streams of all events at the Irish Times Summer Nights festival will be available on irishtimes.com when the festival ends. Read more at www.irishtimes.com/summernights.