—      28      —

“Can’t Be Both”

I was sworn in as the twenty-eighth US Ambassador to the United Nations on August 2^nd, 2013. As we stood in his West Wing office, Vice President Joe Biden handed Cass a tattered, leather-bound Bible that had been in the Biden family since the 1890s. As Cass held the book, which had a Celtic cross on the cover, I placed my left hand on top and raised my right hand. Almost as soon as I began the oath, I got choked up. Seeing my emotion, Cass followed suit. And then, never one to be outdone, Biden’s eyes welled up with tears as well.

I was overwhelmed by the momentousness of representing my country at the United Nations. Even after I watched the final Senate votes being tallied on C-SPAN, the idea that I would be the one sitting behind the placard that read “United States” had not seemed entirely real.

Now, looking into the sky-blue eyes of the Vice President and hearing myself swear to uphold the Constitution, I was struck by the gravity of embodying America to the world. Taking the oath, I felt what I imagined medal winners might experience as they stood on the podium at the Olympics and listened to their national anthem—a mix of pride, patriotism, and relief.

I had known Biden since my time in the Balkans, when he was a senator lobbying President Clinton to rescue Bosnians under siege. And over the past several decades, he and Cass had often discussed judicial appointments. The Vice President had shown immense warmth toward both of us.

Having observed Biden in debates in the Situation Room, and from just chatting with him during chance encounters in the West Wing, I was struck by the extent to which the man I saw up close resembled the public Biden, the person millions of Americans felt they knew. He was blunt and demonstrative. He could go on too long. But he seemed to see the value of each person he met, irrespective of their status.

After losing his wife and one-year-old daughter in a car accident, Biden encouraged people to confide their losses to him. I learned from one of his advisers that he still gave his personal cell phone number to grieving strangers he met, urging them, “If you feel low and you don’t know where to turn, call me.”

I marveled at how, when these people sometimes followed up, he made them feel as though they were his first priority.

Once I had concluded the oath with the familiar words “So help me God,” Biden leaned toward me and said, “Don’t you change up there. Be you. That’s what we need.”

“Yes sir,” I replied, before Cass added, “She doesn’t have a choice.”

WHEN SUSAN WAS AMBASSADOR to the UN, I had stayed with her in the official residence of the ambassador at the Waldorf Astoria Towers, so I thought I knew what to expect. But nothing prepared me for arriving at the Waldorf in the role myself.

“Good evening, Ambassador,” the doorman said as Cass and I exited my armored SUV and stepped under the blue and gold Waldorf Astoria awning.

“Good evening, Ambassador,” the concierge said, after we had passed through the revolving doors.

“Good evening, Ambassador,” one receptionist repeated, followed by two others.

After we rode up to the forty-second floor, the armed guard who kept watch outside the apartment around the clock added his greeting: “Welcome home, Ambassador.”

Nobody said much to Cass.

The Waldorf Astoria apartment complex, which opened in 1931 along with the renowned hotel, had been home to every US Ambassador to the UN since 1947. After leaving office, Presidents Herbert Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower had suites there, as did Frank Sinatra, Queen Elizabeth II, and General Douglas MacArthur.

After the guard opened the door, Cass and I entered tentatively, not quite able to absorb the fact that a palatial, nine-room, five-bathroom, white-carpeted penthouse had become our family home.

María had stayed in Washington with Declan and Rían so I would have a few days to choose their schools. When I looked into their shared bedroom, I was stunned to see that Hillary had already decorated it, lining the walls with giant floor-to-ceiling photographs of Declan’s favorite Washington Nationals players and preparing Rían’s crib—probably the first time a US Ambassador to the UN had needed one.

At a certain point, delighted to be alone with me for the first time in many hours, Cass exclaimed, “Let’s race!,” and we began doing wind sprints down the long halls.

“You may be a fancy ambassador,” he shouted over his shoulder, “but I’m still faster.”

Finding ourselves with a rare “date night,” Cass and I pored over the stash of takeout menus left for us. “New York is the United Nations of food,” I thought, before we settled on Szechuan Chinese from nearby. When we called in our order, asking for delivery to the Waldorf Astoria sounded positively bizarre.

After Cass blared Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm,” we capped off my first night as a fancy ambassador by watching the two-hour season finale of the crime mystery series The Killing.

CASS HAD BEEN so thoroughly in my corner since the moment Obama selected me as ambassador that he had not thought much about how his own life would change once I assumed the role. Because he had taken a nearly four-year leave from Harvard Law School to run OIRA, he did not feel he could abandon his teaching position again so soon. As a result, he planned to continue teaching in Cambridge three days a week during the school year, spending the rest of his time with our family in New York. He anticipated a seamless transition. But not long after I arrived at the office for my first official day on the job, he called in a panic from our bedroom at the Waldorf, where he was working for the day.

“There are too many people,” he said, almost hysterical.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“There are people in our home. People in our bedroom.”

“What people?” I asked.

“All kinds of people,” he said.

He was referring to the staff that cared for the ambassador’s residence—a chef, an assistant house manager, and the Waldorf’s cleaning staff.

After I had left that morning, chef Stanton Thomas had knocked on the bedroom door.

“I’m in here,” Cass had shouted, hoping for privacy. When the knock came again, Cass trudged to the door.

“So sorry to bother you, Professor Sunstein,” Thomas said amiably. “But I’m going for groceries. What does the Ambassador like to eat?”

Cass’s mind, unusually, drew a complete blank. He viewed food as fuel—tuna sashimi from Nobu was indistinguishable from a tuna sandwich from a vending machine. He and I had been married five years, and he still had not dedicated mental space to logging my food tastes. However, wanting to be left alone, he knew he needed to come up with an answer, so he blurted, “Diet Coke.”

Chef Thomas looked back quizzically. All that mattered to Cass was that a person who was not me was still standing there.

“And cheese,” my husband added cheerfully, closing the bedroom door.

When I came back that evening, the refrigerator was filled with dozens of Diet Cokes and the largest variety of cheeses either of us had ever seen.

Every time Cass entered or exited the Waldorf, the concierge in the lobby greeted him as “Mr. Power.” After a few weeks, Cass decided he should tell the man his real name.

“Good morning,” Cass said. “You are so friendly to me, I just thought I would clarify . . . My last name isn’t actually ‘Power.’ It is ‘Sunstein.’ But you can call me ‘Cass.’ ”

The concierge looked mystified.

“That’s incredible,” he said, shaking his head.

Now Cass was the one who was confused.

“I just can’t believe this,” the concierge said. “You look exactly like Mr. Power.”

WHILE MY HUSBAND NAVIGATED his first experience of being viewed as what he called a “derivative person,” I adjusted to the fact that a protective detail of armed agents from the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service accompanied me virtually everywhere. Even when I went for a run in Central Park, I did so with these agents keeping pace beside me. For years, I had watched Cabinet officials disembarking from their armored black SUVs at the White House and felt the aura of importance they carried. Now, suddenly, I was one of them.

There were obvious perks. No longer permitted to drive, I did not have to jostle for parking in Washington or New York. I was prescreened for travel, so I could arrive at airports just minutes before the boarding gate closed. And because the protection officers had scoped the restaurants where I would be eating, I rarely had to wait for a table. The drawbacks, though, were not trivial: outside of our home, most conversations I had with Cass and the kids would happen in the agents’ company. Although I would grow personally close to many of the individuals who served on my security detail, I frequently found myself longing for privacy.

I also had far less time alone at my new workplace, the United States Mission to the United Nations, a twenty-two-story, 147,000-square-foot building on the busy corner of 45th Street and 1st Avenue in midtown Manhattan, directly across the street from UN Headquarters.

After more than four years at the White House, I had grown accustomed to reading intelligence about terrorist threats to US government personnel and facilities around the world. Since the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the September 11^th attacks in 2001, many American diplomatic facilities, including the US Mission to the UN, had undergone extensive overhauls. The building had been gutted, completely redesigned and rebuilt to endure even an enormously destructive attack. The glass windows in the bright atrium lobby were tempered to withstand explosions, and a special filtration system protected against chemical and biological agents. The offices were set back forty feet from the curb, and the first six floors had no windows.

My office was near the top of the building, and it looked out on the East River and UN Headquarters. At street level, I could see the 193 flags of the UN member states, as well as school groups lining up for tours throughout the day. I could also spot the UN’s most famous sculpture, known as Non-Violence: a mammoth, bronze Magnum revolver with its barrel twisted into a knot.

In 1945, after the devastation of two World Wars, the United Nations’ founding charter defined the aim of the organization in stark terms: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The UN is the one place on earth that brings together representatives of all the world’s recognized governments, large and small, rich and poor, in pursuit of this goal.^* China, with 1.4 billion people, sits in the UN General Assembly with the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, which has a population of 11,000. Russia, a country of 6.6 million square miles, sits alongside Monaco, which covers less than one square mile.

The UN founders recognized that conflict is often connected to economic deprivation and saw a role for the UN in helping to mitigate hardships that might fuel instability. As a result, thanks to the financial contributions of member states, UN programs over the years have lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty. Its food aid has nourished those at risk of starvation. Its refugee agency has resettled and sheltered people with no place to go. Its health efforts have eradicated smallpox and very nearly ended polio and guinea worm, while providing vaccinations to children who might otherwise have died of preventable diseases. And its environmental programs have mobilized countries to halt the depletion of the ozone layer, among other feats.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was himself a beneficiary of efforts like these. UNICEF, the UN children’s agency that has facilitated access to schooling for millions of kids, helped provide Ban with an education when he was a boy living in an impoverished, rural village in war-ravaged Korea.

And yet. On matters of war and peace, the UN has been less of an actor in its own right than a stage on which powerful countries have pursued their interests. Richard Holbrooke, who served as President Clinton’s UN ambassador, once observed, “Blaming the UN for a crisis is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the New York Knicks play badly. You are blaming a building.”

In 2010, Holbrooke had died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving a void in the lives of all who loved him. I missed him terribly and found myself constantly wishing I could pick up the phone to seek his counsel. Once I became ambassador, his wisdom echoed in my brain—and I often cited his analogy to Madison Square Garden, which vividly encapsulated the power and limitations of the UN.

As an organization, the UN has at its disposal whatever resources the governments within it choose to provide. It is the major players—countries like the United States, China, and Russia—that dictate how “the UN” handles crises. As a general rule, when politicians claim that a crisis is the “responsibility of the United Nations,” they are diverting attention from their own impotence or lack of political will. In actual fact, in order for the UN to “act” or to “reform,” a critical mass of countries must make that happen (or at least not actively block others from doing so). Much of the UN’s dysfunction stemmed from the actions of particular countries, especially powerful ones. Early on in my tenure, I was given a cartoon that circulated widely at the UN. The cartoon showed dozens of people listening to a speech. In the first panel, the speaker asks, “Who wants change?” and all audience members enthusiastically raise their hands. In the second panel, the speaker refines his question, asking, “Who wants to change?” This time, each audience member looks toward the ground, demurring.

Measuring the impact of UN standards and laws on state behavior is difficult, but a world without UN rules or without UN humanitarian agencies would be infinitely crueler. And while divisions within the Security Council severely reduced the body’s impact, doing away with the UN—or unilaterally exiting the organization, as some Republican politicians have proposed the United States do over the years—would greatly undermine collective efforts to end all conflicts.

While most countries, including the United States, sometimes balk at living by the ideals in the UN Charter, it is historically significant that none of the major powers have fought a war with one another since the UN’s founding. UN peacekeeping missions have fallen far short on many occasions, but they have also helped protect huge numbers of civilians from violence and prevented conflict from spreading across borders.

Former UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld may have best summed up both the UN’s track record and its promise when he said it was created “not to lead mankind to heaven but to save humanity from hell.”

WHEN I ENTERED THE LOBBY of UN Headquarters for the first time as US Ambassador, around two dozen reporters and photographers were waiting for me. I offered some brief comments, expressing my eagerness to make the UN work for Americans and for vulnerable people around the world. As the reporters thrust out their tape recorders, I noted that they were wearing the same UN press badge that I once wore. And they were chasing down leads in the same corridors where I had once walked as a reporter. I felt a warm connection with a group of people whose world helped shape me. But I also knew that I had to be guarded. I could not repeat the mistake I had made with the Scotsman during the Obama campaign.

Before I could assume my official functions, I was required to present my credentials to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.^* For reasons I cannot now fathom, I chose to wear a striped sundress that exposed both too much shoulder and too much leg. Upon seeing the official photo of me with the secretary-general, the French Ambassador to the UN, Gérard Araud, would later ask mischievously, “You wore your swim suit to present credentials?”

The picture showed me from the waist up, and, as I shook hands with Ban in his dark suit, one could have reasonably thought that I wandered into the UN from a local pool. I later heard from Kurtis Cooper, my deputy spokesperson, that a Spanish-speaking reporter had pulled him aside to ask about my attire as well, but managed only, “Samantha is very . . . hippie, no?” As a woman diplomat, I had to come to grips with the fact that, while I wished to focus on substance, my wardrobe would be scrutinized right alongside my negotiating skills.

Despite the UN secretary-general’s grand title, he was named in the UN Charter as the administrator of the organization. For this reason, former secretary-general Kofi Annan described the position as “more secretary than general.” In 1935, when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was asked to help enlist the Pope in efforts to counter the threat of Nazism, he reportedly answered, “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?” The UN secretary-general is in a similar bind: he commands no armed forces and has no authority over heads of state, so he lacks the means to enforce UN rules that are supposed to govern how countries behave. In all areas, he must rely on collective action by UN member states. Nonetheless, the secretary-general can use the prestige of his office to pursue diplomacy, and he can employ his bully pulpit to urge countries to respect human rights and international law. In our short meeting, which included our spouses, I told Ban Ki-moon that I looked forward to building a strong working relationship with him and warned that I had a long list of issues I hoped to raise when we next spoke.

THE KEY TO SUCCEEDING as ambassador, I knew, was to get the most out of the remarkable team of people who worked for the US Mission to the UN. Less than 10 percent of the 150-person staff were political appointees like Jeremy, Hillary, and myself. The vast majority were permanent staff, including foreign service and civil service officers who had worked previously for President George W. Bush’s administration. Some civil servants had been at the Mission for more than thirty years, serving as far back as the Reagan administration. Many worked punishing hours, including weekends.

The career staff had generally internalized an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) rule of government to await instructions from those above them in the hierarchy before taking initiative. I had left my job at the National Security Council with a heightened appreciation for the importance of inclusive and transparent government processes. Yet now I urged the members of my team to show less deference to the system. Before they leaped to implement a direction, I asked them to take a moment to consider whether they agreed with the course of action envisaged.

Many had lived in the conflict-prone countries we were discussing. Some were experienced in the fields of international law or humanitarian relief. Several were Chinese, Russian, or Arabic speakers who brought invaluable insight to US negotiations. And almost all of them had institutional memories I lacked—knowing what had and hadn’t worked in the past. I reminded them of the expertise they brought to their jobs and encouraged them to make their own recommendations to help shape US policy.

I knew that Holbrooke, Mort, and Jonathan had surrounded themselves with people who both challenged them and generated ideas, even if they were considered “junior.” I wanted to do the same. One didn’t have to be seasoned to be creative, and I needed ideas from wherever I could get them. I also tried to encourage an ethos of never being satisfied by merely raising an issue, making a public statement, or holding a meeting, stressing that we “care less about inputs and more about outcomes.” When USUN diplomats committed the cardinal sin of “admiring the problem,” I would handwrite on their memos, “If you were Obama, what would you do?”

Jeremy started organizing “deep dive” discussions during which we would carve out two hours to look afresh at policy problems, asking our in-house Africa, China, or sanctions experts to imagine formulating new policies from scratch. If we felt we had come up with something worth considering, I would talk to John Kerry to sound him out. We also urged staff to dedicate a specific time in their week to talk to someone outside government who knew about the issues they were working on. For understanding a place like Syria, where our embassy had closed down, those who worked in civil society could offer us a perspective that we could not get from within the US government. And we created a speakers’ series, where academics and journalists would come to the Mission to share their experiences.

My team and I knew the danger of being overwhelmed by what we called “the tyranny of the inbox.” As a result, after soliciting ideas from my staff and the four deputy ambassadors,^* I settled on several human rights concerns that I would try to address without much involvement from Washington—issues that would not only help specific individuals, but also perhaps boost the confidence of US diplomats who sometimes seemed to doubt America’s potential impact. We chose initiatives that I knew President Obama would support wholeheartedly, but which much of the bureaucracy beneath him did not prioritize.

At a time when American society seemed to be increasingly divided on the subject of immigration, I decided to find occasions to highlight the impact being made by refugees and immigrants in the United States. In addition, I would work with my team to embed LGBT rights within the DNA of the UN and to try to secure the release of political prisoners.

I wanted to highlight these issues from the very start. The same day as my meeting with the secretary-general, I visited a Refugee Youth Summer Academy, where dozens of local elementary and junior high school students who had been refugees were preparing for the upcoming school year in America. I met kids from places like Sudan, China, and Iran, and they told me about the traumatic situations they had escaped. I noted that I too had come to the United States as a young child, not knowing a soul, but had been lucky enough not to have experienced the hardships they had fled. I said that I was in awe of their courage and resilience.

After my confirmation hearing six weeks before, several newspapers had published a photograph of me with Declan, who had jumped into my arms when the gavel sounded. Since then, I had received notes from women all over the country describing how heartened they were to see someone attempting a national security cabinet role with small children in tow. I understood the reaction because, decades before, the photo of UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick standing alone among so many men in Reagan’s cabinet must have somehow shaped my own sense of the possible. I hoped my presence would show these young people where they could end up.

As I was leaving, one of the students, a refugee from Afghanistan, asked a question I had not been anticipating: “What do you think about communism?”

A small group of UN reporters who had accompanied me on the school visit leaned in to hear my response. Once I got over my surprise at the question, I expressed my disdain for the suffering caused by communist rule. Kurtis whispered to me as we walked out, “It is my job to be paranoid, but that was a fine answer.”

Kurtis added, though, that I needed to get comfortable not answering questions. My press spokeswoman, Erin Pelton, would soon sit me down for media training, rattling off the list of “safe harbors” I could turn to when confronted with a question that was either new or difficult:

“I’m not fully familiar with what you are describing, but I will look into it, and we will get back to you with a response.”

“Rather than commenting on the specifics, let me say this generally . . .”

“I’m not going to speculate on . . .”

“What we should all be focused on is . . .”

I joked with Erin that I was reminded of the scene in one of my favorite baseball movies, Bull Durham, where Kevin Costner’s veteran character lectures a rookie pitcher played by Tim Robbins. “You’re gonna have to learn your clichés . . . they are your friends,” Costner advises, before sharing several favorites, like “We’ve gotta play ’em one day at a time” and “I’m just happy to be here. Hope I can help the ball club.”

Erin and Kurtis understood that I was someone who tended to speak from the heart. I also tried to answer the questions reporters actually posed rather than the questions I wished they had posed. But we all recognized that these habits could become liabilities. Over the course of President Obama’s first term, I had seen how easily administration officials’ words could be taken out of context, and I did not want to supply the sound bite for the next manufactured scandal on Fox News.

I WOULD SPEND THE LARGEST SHARE of my time as ambassador in the UN Security Council. The UN founders assigned the Council the task of maintaining peace and gave it broad enforcement powers, making it the UN’s most important body. The Council has fifteen members, but operates on a two-tiered structure of permanent and nonpermanent members. The five permanent members are the United States, China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom, while the other ten seats are held by countries elected to serve two-year terms before rotating off.²² The competition for these nonpermanent seats is fierce.²³

The Security Council tends to be ineffective when the major powers are divided (as was true during the Cold War) and when they are largely indifferent (as was the case during the Rwandan genocide). But when the divisions can be managed or overcome, the Council has enormous influence. It can impose economic sanctions, initiate emergency mediation, and launch peacekeeping missions. Above all, it has the power to legalize actions that would otherwise be illegal under international law.^*

The work tempo at the Security Council had changed a lot over the years. In 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall fell, the Council met just 55 times. In 2014, my first full year in the job, the Council met on 263 occasions—but we issued resolutions licensing concrete actions in only one-fifth of those sessions.

The presidency of the Council rotated alphabetically each month, and when I arrived in August, Argentina controlled the agenda. At my first Security Council meeting as ambassador, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the country’s populist president, presided, and the UN secretary-general and fourteen foreign ministers attended. Kirchner, who arrived twenty-five minutes late, used her remarks to slam the United States and other permanent members for using their veto power to block important initiatives.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who conceived of the UN with Winston Churchill, insisted that the Security Council’s five permanent members be given the power to reject Council measures they didn’t like. FDR had seen Congress vote against US membership in the League of Nations after World War I, and foresaw that providing the United States the veto as a lever of control would make it possible for the US Senate to support joining the UN, which it voted overwhelmingly to do.

Over the decades, the United States has used its veto power to prevent nondemocratic countries (which remain a majority at the UN) from joining forces to weaken international norms or to take other actions that harm US interests. That said, as of my arrival in 2013, the veto had been used more than 250 times, sidelining the Council on some of the world’s most devastating conflicts.²⁴

Although I did not find my first Council meeting as ambassador terribly enlightening or practical, a head of state was presiding, and my staff advised me not to get up and leave after I had spoken. Colleen King, my new special assistant, handed me background reading for my other meetings that day, and I remained in the Council from 9:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m., when the meeting was “suspended.”

“It isn’t over?” I asked the US diplomat sitting behind me. When he told me that the meeting would resume after lunch, I offered the old adage, “I guess everything has been said, but not everybody has said it.”

The afternoon session, which one of my deputies attended, consumed an additional four hours and forty minutes.

Many Council sessions were far more valuable. I found those on specific crises an important means for us to mobilize global support for the US position. Their occurrence also allowed me and my team to use the days or hours in advance to urge our colleagues in Washington to reconsider what were sometimes stale US policy positions. We tried to use the Council debates as occasions to articulate fresh stances on behalf of the United States—for example, challenging foreign autocrats for doing away with term limits, or condemning human rights abuses about which the US government had not previously spoken. And of course, in my time at the UN, the Council would use its enforcement powers to condemn lawless actions in many parts of the world, to dispatch peacekeepers, and to impose economic sanctions on those who had violated international law.

Narrowing negotiating differences with other countries happened not in formal Council sessions, but in one-on-one meetings with my fellow ambassadors or in the calls and overseas visits I made to foreign ministers and heads of state around the world. With this in mind, I delegated attendance at some Council meetings to my deputies. However, even this calculation of when to show up was more complicated than it seemed. When the American ambassador made a habit of skipping Security Council sessions, it offended the country presiding and other Council members. Because each of the ten nonpermanent members of the Council would rotate off the Council after two years, and in many cases would not be elected again for decades, their ambassadors were regularly present. I would need support from them on close votes, so every decision on skipping a meeting entailed an intricate calculus involving issues beyond whatever was being discussed in the moment.

So much was happening at the UN that, when the prepared speeches went on too long, I would use the time to plow through more than a hundred pages of materials I received daily in order to deliver direction to my staff. At any given time, US diplomats working at the Mission were immersed in negotiations on issues ranging from whether to impose sanctions to how to rehabilitate child soldiers after conflict. In the General Assembly chamber, US representatives often sought to expand girls’ education programs while also fending off maddening efforts to create new UN positions, which would cost money that could otherwise be spent providing assistance to people in need.

Sometimes, leaving the office at nine p.m., I would see the size of the briefing book being sent home with me for the next day and wilt in disappointment, groaning to Jeremy, “So much for catching up on The Affair!” But as soon as I got home, I would inevitably devour the contents—preparatory material for my meetings and events the next day, classified updates on various conflicts I was tracking, lengthy analytic reports from organizations like the International Crisis Group, and updates from staff on our longer-term initiatives. Having consumed foreign policy news since I was eighteen years old, I found homework like this riveting.

AFTER THE FIRST PORTION of the Security Council meeting chaired by President Kirchner had wound down, her team escorted those of us who participated to a large UN dining room for lunch. I found myself seated next to Bruno Rodríguez, the foreign minister of Cuba, a country with which the United States had not had diplomatic relations since 1961. Because US officials did not then have contact with Cuba’s diplomats, I seized the opportunity to raise the case of Oswaldo Payá.

Payá was a fearless Cuban democracy activist who had gathered more than 25,000 signatures to press the communist government to allow basic freedoms. After mobilizing the largest peaceful movement in Cuba since Fidel Castro had taken power in 1959, Payá had been killed in a car crash in 2012. According to his family and the Spanish politician who was with him at the time of his death, government-backed thugs had run his car off the road.

The Castro government naturally denied wrongdoing, but its history of harassing and imprisoning those who pushed for reform left it little credibility. At the lunch, I pressed the foreign minister to allow an independent investigation of what had happened.

“If you have nothing to hide,” I said to Rodríguez, “what are you afraid of?”

I had just started an official Twitter account. Having returned to the US Mission, I tweeted: “Oswaldo Payá stood up for freedom. Just raised with the Cuban foreign minister the need for a credible investigation into his death.” Payá’s daughter tweeted back her thanks and urged the UN to “help stop the #Cuban government impunity.”

The Washington Post and newswires picked up the story, which appeared in media around the world. I was exhilarated by the seeming ease with which—from my new position—I could elevate the profile of an egregious injustice.

But a few days later, when I met the Mexican Ambassador to the UN for the first time, he chastised me for publicizing something I had discussed during a private UN lunch.

“You have to decide whether you are a diplomat or an activist,” he said. “You can’t be both.”

“I am both,” I told him, “and we should all be both. I’m not going to drink wine at a lunch with the Cuban foreign minister and pretend his government is not responsible for killing one of the country’s best.”

“I hear you,” he said, “but people won’t speak freely to you if they think you are more interested in making a media splash than engaging in real dialogue.”

I explained my rationale. “Cuban government goons ran Payá off the road. They know that and will never allow a proper investigation. The closest we may get to holding them accountable for murdering a Cuban activist are a few negative headlines. I don’t see how silence helps anyone.”

“Talk to me in a few months,” he said.

The Mexican ambassador became a friend, but I never came around to his view. I was not prepared to choose between public and private diplomacy; both have their place.