—      18      —

Victory

I had assumed that when I left the “penalty box,” or what my Irish relatives called the “sin bin,” life would return to the way it had been before my slipup. It didn’t.

In the fall of 2008, I split my time between teaching two days a week at the Kennedy School and serving as one of Obama’s foreign policy advisers, this time based at campaign headquarters in Chicago. Despite receiving my official campaign badge and BlackBerry when I rejoined the team, I felt I bore a large scarlet letter—an M for Monster, or maybe an L for walking campaign Liability.

The higher-ups told me to keep a low profile, as they believed my presence would dampen Obama’s appeal with women voters and impede the reconciliation under way with Clinton’s primary supporters. In turn, I began to shrink from activities that might garner attention in order to protect Obama from his association with me. I wore my green hoodie to headquarters in an effort not to be recognized by visiting reporters. And I tried to avoid eye contact with David Plouffe, the campaign manager, whose jaw I swore tightened whenever he saw me.

In October, I learned that I was pregnant with a baby boy whom we would name Declan and who was due the following May. I was ecstatic about becoming a mother, but I suffered from acute morning sickness. My constant trips to the women’s bathroom required me to walk past the offices of the senior campaign leadership, whose cold stares sent me tumbling back into self-absorption.

Still, I didn’t blame them. “If I were Plouffe,” I thought, “and the stakes were this high, I would shun me too. Why take a risk?”

ON NOVEMBER 4^TH, 2008, Cass and I sat on plastic chairs in a white tent in Grant Park, Chicago, among Obama’s friends, advisers, donors, and a host of politicians and celebrities. Just outside—in the same spot where police had mauled protesters at the Democratic National Convention forty years before—240,000 people of all races, religions, and generations watched the election results on a Jumbotron showing CNN. Win or lose, Obama would speak on the stage beneath the big screen later in the evening.

Everything we were hearing from the campaign was positive, but none of us could bring ourselves to believe what was transpiring until Wolf Blitzer made it official. “This is a moment that a lot of people have been waiting for,” he said as soon as polls closed on the West Coast, at ten p.m. Chicago time. “CNN can now project that Barack Obama, forty-seven years old, will become the President-elect of the United States.” A checkmark appeared beside Obama’s picture.

In every corner of the tent, people jumped up and down. I levitated, lunging into Cass’s arms like a World Series–winning pitcher embracing his team’s catcher. Everyone around us seemed to be crying. My phone was ringing off the hook. Cass—not normally a hugger—was enfolding any friend or stranger in his path.

Many of my relatives in Ireland had either stayed up all night or set their alarms for five a.m. Obama (or, as my Irish cousins liked to say, “O’bama”) had done what nobody—even most of his closest supporters—thought possible. His six-point margin of victory was a modern-day landslide. He had taken Virginia and Indiana, states that had not gone Democratic since President Johnson had won them in 1964. The possibilities ahead seemed infinite. I waited in a line of friends and family to congratulate the new President-elect.

“This is something, huh?” Obama said, giving me a deep hug across a rope barrier. I answered truthfully, “It’s too big to comprehend. Do not compute, do not compute.”

The man before me was outwardly the same person I had worked with since 2005. But everything about his manner seemed altered by what had just happened. He had always been a solitary person, but now, even as he and the future First Lady made their way down the line in a seamless communion, he seemed well and truly alone.

It was as if he had been suddenly encased in a glass box, the only man in the world who would be President of the United States. He alone would make the call on when to go to war, and, more immediately, he alone would be responsible for saving a US economy that was in free fall.

Obama had joked in the past about the dangers of the “dog actually catching the bus.” Now he would face the bleakest economic forecast for the United States since the Great Depression. On a night that brought unmediated bliss to the rest of us, Obama’s big smile was there, but the usual spark of mischief in his eyes seemed to have vanished.

Although the election had been called only hours before, and he would not formally occupy the presidency until January, the burdens of decision-making already seemed to be crashing down upon him. This was a momentous night, but for the President-elect, it did not seem a particularly happy one. Even as he focused on his friends like a laser, telling Cass he was looking “more dapper” than he had ever seen him, Obama was reserved, seeming to be saying his goodbyes rather than hellos.

OBAMA HAD MADE CLEAR to Cass and me that he would want us to join his administration if he managed to win. The memory of my struggles in the Senate office made me wonder whether I—who had flown solo my whole career before that fateful dinner with Obama in 2005—could find a place in a huge bureaucracy, having to constantly jockey for access. But Cass and I both believed in him, and we were eager to try to work on issues that we cared about. I knew I was tired of being a professional foreign policy critic, opining and judging without ever knowing whether I would pass the moral and political tests to which I was subjecting others. I wanted to be on the inside, to try to influence this new administration’s actions. We never seriously discussed the downsides of upending our lives; we just began making plans to move to Washington.

Determining what I should do in government, however, was an entirely different matter. Prior to election night, every time Mum or Eddie had raised the question of what role I would want if Obama became President, I would hush them, saying they would jinx the whole election. But now I needed to figure that out.

A few days after we saw Obama in Grant Park, he wrote to say that he was giving up his personal email account. First, though, he asked what my dream job was. I had planned to work wherever he told me, naively assuming that he would have a fixed idea where I belonged. But he was busy filling out his cabinet and developing strategies to address the skyrocketing unemployment rate; he had no mental space to come up with a job description for me.

With nothing to guide me, I thought about how I could be useful, drawing on my years of extensive reading about US foreign policy, along with the interviews of US officials I had conducted for my books. The role I described in my email reply to Obama was convoluted. I thought my specialty could be big picture—articulating American grand strategy in language that people could digest. I also hoped to take up perceived lost causes, conflicts in countries that didn’t make the headlines, to find ways of leveraging the President’s personal interest to improve a situation.

I pored over every word of my proposed position, not wanting to come across as presumptuous, but also believing that Obama might be willing to define a job in the terms that I laid out. Cass googled prior administrations so we could use the correct nomenclature for a title, and we settled on proposing “Assistant to the President for Special Projects.” Mum and Eddie, whom I ran everything by, offered feedback on the tone and substance of the note, as did my aunt Patricia and uncle Derry, with whom Cass and I had gone to stay for a few days in Waterville just after election night. I enlisted the views of John, Mort, Jonathan, and Holbrooke—all of whom had served either on the National Security Council (NSC) or with the State Department. I ended the email to Obama by stressing that we would need to define any job in a manner that appealed to National Security Advisor Jim Jones, Deputy National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, and Mark Lippert, whom Obama had named NSC chief of staff.

I heard nothing back for weeks. Obama now occupied an entirely different orbit from mine. The size of the Secret Service team around him had increased exponentially. Even close confidants like Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod no longer called him “Barack,” “Obama,” or “BO.” He was now the President-elect, or the “PE.”

When Obama walked by, people who had known him for years jumped to their feet, practically saluting. A forbidding mystique pulsed out of any room he occupied. I wanted to talk to the PE, to see how he was doing and how I could support him during these precious weeks. But I saw that the most prized commodity of all now was his time, and I certainly didn’t need to see him. I just wanted to check in on my friend.

Because Obama, my biggest champion in the political world, was no longer reachable via email, I was now at the mercy of the people he had deputized to manage his personnel choices. Lippert was coordinating the hiring for Obama’s national security jobs. Even though he never seemed a fan of mine, I admired his decision to leave the campaign at its height to deploy as a Navy intelligence officer to Iraq, where he had earned a Bronze Star for his service.

When my emails seeking clarity went unanswered, I checked occasionally to be sure my cell phone was working. When I finally managed to reach him, he demanded to know why I had proposed the “assistant to the President” title in my note to Obama. “Jim Jones, the National Security Advisor, a decorated American Marine general, will be an assistant to the President,” he said. “You think you’re in his league?” I was mortified.

When Cass and I had done our online research, we had seen the designations “assistant,” “deputy assistant,” and “special assistant” to the President, and had somehow jumbled up the order, thinking that “assistant” was the lowest rank of the three—when, in fact, it was the most senior. My limbo continued. “I’m being treated like I’m a problem to be solved,” I told Cass, “not a person anyone actually wants.”

My new husband, by contrast, was given the job he coveted. On one of our earliest dates, I had asked him, if he wasn’t a law professor, what he would most want to be. I imagined he might answer playfully “bass guitarist for Bruce Springsteen.” Instead, he gazed off into the distance, his eyes practically misting up with emotion, and said, dreamily, “OIRA.” I responded, “What the hell is OIRA?” When the head of the transition team informed the President-elect of Cass’s ambition, Obama reportedly asked the same question.

It turned out that the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) was known around Washington as “the most powerful job nobody has ever heard of.” OIRA oversees regulation on issues as diverse as civil rights, health care, the environment, worker safety, transportation, food safety, and veterans affairs. Obama told Cass that he intended to nominate him for the post, and Cass spent the transition weeks between November and January giddily mapping out what the new President could do on regulation during his first hundred days.

Once Obama announced his choices for the big national security jobs, I hoped that someone high up would focus on the next level down. Strobe Talbott generously called, having forgiven me for lobbying him rudely on Bosnia more than a decade before when he was President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State. Strobe was close to Hillary Clinton, whom Obama had just nominated to become Secretary of State. A few days later, after inquiring whether she would consider me for a position, Strobe forwarded me a blunt message from a Clinton insider: “I think she should go with the NSC.”

Cass tried to console me. He insisted something would work out, quoting Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who wisely wrote, “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.” But even when I managed to focus elsewhere, my mind ran wild, reminding me of how scarred I was by my recent public disgrace.

In one of my many dreams during this period, I was overjoyed because I was about to interview for a job with Clinton at the State Department. As the meeting time approached, I looked frantically for my car keys, but couldn’t find them. After rushing to the State Department in a cab, I was told that the meeting had been moved to her office on Capitol Hill. When I got there, I realized that although I was already half an hour late, I needed urgently to use a restroom—as pregnant women often did. The bathrooms had long lines of women beside them, and, as I waited, my cell phone rang, telling me I had to get to the meeting or it would be canceled. When it was finally my turn for the bathroom, I stepped forward, inching past a woman who had just arrived. As I walked by, she began whacking me with her handbag. Doggedly continuing forward, I heard her fall behind me. When I turned, she was lying on the ground and jabbing her cane upwards at me, saying, “You, missy, will pay for this. I recognize you. You are Samantha Power. I am going to tell all the newspapers that you hit an old lady trying to go to the bathroom.”

This was my mental state as I waited for a job offer.

I was also determined to keep my pregnancy hidden from my colleagues on the transition team. I lived a strange duality. On the one hand, the very thought of the baby—“half of Cass!”—made me smile throughout the day. But on the other hand, I reflexively feared I would get a lesser job if senior people found out, so I wore oversize Irish woolen sweaters and wide scarves, often keeping my winter coat on indoors.

The irony of my subterfuge was not lost on me. The President-elect was the progressive son of a trailblazing mother. He had married a woman who had once been his mentor, and they had two young daughters. Yet here I was, one of his female advisers, petrified it would cost me if the people around him discovered I was pregnant.

Obama had nominated Susan Rice to become US Ambassador to the UN. Rice had been a national security aide during the Rwandan genocide, and I had been critical of her in “A Problem from Hell.” But after some initial awkwardness, we had grown friendly over the course of the campaign, and she had been one of the few people to go out of her way to stay in touch during my exile. Strong-willed and scrappy, she laughed easily and was quick to break out dancing at social events.

Having observed the UN in Bosnia and written about it for much of my career, I offered to help her prepare for her new role. When I mentioned the job that I had pitched to the President-elect, she thought it was idiotic. “What you say you want is all mush,” Susan explained, drawing on her decade of experience at the National Security Council and State Department. “Who will report to you? What will you be responsible for? If you are responsible for nothing, nobody will call you. You will be a floating person, irrelevant to what is happening day to day.”

Susan advised me to seek the job of Senior Director and Special Assistant to the President for Multilateral Affairs at the National Security Council. This was the President’s senior adviser on all matters related to the UN. “From the White House,” she said, “you can see the full field.” She would help show me the ropes, and I could serve as a bridge between her team at the US Mission to the UN in New York and the White House, which tended to develop its own insular political culture from which even cabinet members felt excluded.

Convinced by Susan’s bureaucratic wisdom, I told the President-elect’s foreign policy gatekeepers that I would like to be considered for this specific multilateral affairs position. I was finally speaking a language that White House personnel staff could act on, as the job had existed in the Bush administration, and it had been allotted a salary. Lippert, who had been inundated with demands from former campaign staff, seemed genuinely relieved to be able to slot my name into the traditional organizational chart.

Much as I wanted to change the system and fantasized about doing so for Obama, my embrace of an established, conventional role would be the first of many concessions I would make to immutable realities. I had also never before relied so heavily on someone for career advice. I was grateful to Susan and would soon learn that, as a Washington novice and as a woman in national security, I needed to ask others for support.

Even when Lippert and I had settled on the job, I still had to get the formal okay from National Security Advisor Jones, who would be my new boss. As I awaited my interview with him, I drove to the FBI field office in downtown Boston to be fingerprinted for the investigation that was required before I could obtain a security clearance. I also started making my way through a mountain of government paperwork. I had to complete forms for ethics, medical history, and financial disclosure, but it was the SF-86, the national security background questionnaire, that stunned me with its breadth. The form had twenty-nine separate sections, each with a detailed subset of questions. It also came with a bold warning that those who submitted false information could be charged with a federal crime and face up to five years in prison.

Among its requirements, the form asked applicants to go back fifteen years and list any “close and/or continuing contact” with a foreign national, along with any contact with the representative of a foreign government. My entire family besides Mum, Eddie, Stephen, Ellyn, and Cass lived in Ireland, so I had to list each of my relatives. I sent emails to my Irish cousins telling them to alert the rest of the family that the FBI might soon be in touch. “Don’t worry,” I told them. “I’m not in trouble.” I had also traveled widely in Asia and Africa as a journalist, interviewing dozens of foreign officials, so I spent a number of taxing days going through my old reporters’ notebooks to track down the dates and locations of each of those interactions, as required by law.

In January of 2009, I learned that I had been granted the top security clearance I needed to be able to participate in classified discussions and receive intelligence products. Now all I needed was General Jones’s approval.

A few days before Obama’s Inauguration, my cell phone rang, and I was surprised by the voice I heard on the line.

“It’s Obama,” he said.

“You’re kidding,” I replied.

“Who else would it be?” he teased.

“You don’t call yourself the ‘PE’?” I asked.

“It sounds like a ratty gym class,” he joked. “I prefer Obama.”

We discussed my job limbo, which he said he’d been inquiring about constantly. “It will be fine,” I said, knowing the unfathomable pressures he was under. He described the logistical nightmare of ensuring that all of his friends and family felt appreciated during the festivities. “It’s like a wedding,” he observed.

I praised the draft of his Inaugural speech I had read, especially the line in which he would tell dictators that America “will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Cass took the phone with a big smile.

“We’ve come a long way from the University of Chicago,” said Cass.

“Maybe I should have taken Douglas Baird’s offer,” said Obama, referring to the University of Chicago Law School dean who had urged Obama to pursue a tenure-track professorship.

“Well, if you keep up the good writing, I’m sure something can be arranged,” said Cass.

Obama signed off, saying, “I’d like to get together with you two, soon, to bat some ideas around.”

We would quickly learn that such a meeting was a luxury the forty-fourth President of the United States could scarcely afford.

THE NEXT DAY, CASS and I boarded the US Air Shuttle in Boston, ready to take up our new life in the nation’s capital. Mum and Eddie would be meeting us in DC so we could attend the Inauguration together.

I was struck by the Americanness of it all. When they came to the United States three decades before, could Mum and Eddie have imagined that their adopted country would elect an African-American President? Or that their daughter would get to work at his White House?

After the plane took off, we flew over Winthrop. I glanced at my home out the window before the land below us faded quickly into the distance.