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Lean On

Whenever I worked at home at night and during the weekend, Declan seemed to delight in making his presence felt. “Mommy,” he said during one of my calls with the secretary-general, “Can I ask you something?”

I shook my head and whispered, “I’m on the phone.”

“Mommy, it’s important.”

“This is important too,” I said, cupping my hand over the receiver. “I’ll be off in a minute.”

“Mommy,” he persisted, “what’s the score of the Nationals game?”

Another time, after failing to get my attention as I participated in a White House conference call on Russia sanctions, Declan stomped away, muttering, “Putin, Putin, Putin . . . When is it going to be Declan, Declan, Declan?”

Rían, who has an unusually generous heart, tended to forgive my distractedness.

On days when I took her to the YMCA for a swim, or stayed off my phone during her weekend soccer practice, she had a habit of graciously awarding me extra credit.

“That was incredible,” she would say. “You watched me play the whole time!”

María regularly packed a snack and a change of clothes in Rían’s backpack for these outings. But when she was away, I was prone to leaving home empty-handed.

Rían would shake her head knowingly and ask, “Did you forget again?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” I would admit. “But, remember I—”

And then, in a kind of game that developed between us, before I could finish, she would say: “I know what you are going to say, Mommy: You have other qualities!”

NOT LONG BEFORE I BECAME UN AMBASSADOR, Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In, her influential book about the significant obstacles that women confront on their paths to professional and personal achievement. Sandberg, who had worked in the US government before moving to the private sector, argued that women needed to raise their voices in meetings, put themselves forward for advancement, and demand more equal contributions from their partners at home.

Because I was juggling my job in the Obama administration with raising two young children, I was often asked by journalists where I came down on Sandberg’s argument. In responding, I sometimes said that the weight of my balancing act often made “fall down” a more apt description of my life than “lean in.” But usually I invoked Hillary Clinton, who I once heard say, “It’s not so much lean in as lean on.”

With Cass teaching in Cambridge during the week, I myself leaned most heavily on María, Mum, and Eddie. But I also depended on friends like Laura, who after working a long day at Human Rights Watch faithfully dropped by the Waldorf every Wednesday night to play with the kids. Hillary, John, my law school classmate Elliot, and a legion of other friends carved out time to act as an extended family. Without this support network, I don’t know how Declan and Rían would have transitioned so smoothly to our radically different life in New York City.

My friends and family helped me adapt the ornate Waldorf apartment for the kids. We taught Rían to use a scooter by jogging alongside her as she trundled across the hardwood and carpeted floors. And we took turns pitching Wiffle balls to Declan in the spacious “great room” where I generally held receptions with foreign ambassadors and dignitaries.

“Pure power!” Declan would exclaim after whacking a Ping-Pong or squash ball the length of the room, as John attempted to make a diving stop before the ball clattered against the grand piano. Fearing a fire hazard, every few weeks Mum, María, or I would recover balls from the chandelier. Once, as I stood on top of a dining room chair and used Declan’s bat to dislodge a ball that had gotten wedged among the glass pendants, I said to Cass, “I just can’t see Adlai Stevenson or Jeane Kirkpatrick doing this.”

Early mornings were precious because, thanks to María, I could focus on the kids themselves, rather than the frantic last-minute preparations for school. At around 6:30 a.m., before Washington or UN meetings began, Declan and Rían would pile into Cass’s and my bed as María packed their lunches, and we would take turns ranking the highlights of the previous day. When Cass was in town, he would play Steve Earle’s “Galway Girl” from his laptop, in honor of his dark-haired, blue-eyed daughter, and show Declan YouTube highlights of the baseball greats. Both kids would watch endless videos of dogs—German shepherds, Rhodesian ridgebacks, and yellow Labs—preparing for the choice Cass promised they would have when we moved as a family back to Massachusetts. Rían developed an all-consuming interest in ChapStick and lip gloss, slotting the different flavors into a neon pink plastic briefcase as methodically as I had once stored my baseball cards. As I got ready for work, and as María turned to getting Declan dressed, Rían would recruit me to test out her latest exotic acquisition.

After breakfast, María would walk Rían by stroller to her daycare a few blocks from the Waldorf, while I would accompany Declan to his more distant school in my armored car. On these morning trips, thanks to the fact that an agent on my security detail did the driving, I was able to sit beside Declan in the back and help him learn to read. With the agents often complimenting him when he sounded out a hard word, this regular “read-time” allowed Declan to master the Batman phonics books, graduate to chapter books, and eventually devour the whole Harry Potter series. Whenever he managed to read five pages aloud during our trip, I would buy him a donut in his school cafeteria. On days he managed even more, I threw in a bonus side of bacon.

Because so many of the agents who provided security were parents themselves, they were wonderfully sensitive to the awkwardness of people in dark suits staking out a school pickup or hovering as I pushed Rían on the swings at the playground. They did their best to be unobtrusive.

Sometimes, I was overwhelmed by the agents’ thoughtfulness. From the time she was a baby, Rían had been plagued by frequent ear infections, and when she was three years old, began to show signs of hearing loss. Her doctor told us that he could fix the problem by removing her tonsils and adenoids and inserting tiny tubes in her ears. On the day of her operation, Cass and I helped her into the back of the armored vehicle just after dawn as we prepared to head to New York-Presbyterian Hospital. She squealed with delight when she spotted what was sitting strapped into her car seat: a stuffed white bunny adorned with a pink bow.

“This is the best surgery ever,” she proclaimed. With all that was going on, I hadn’t remembered to get her a good-luck gift—but the agents delivered.

The other UN ambassadors were similarly generous toward my family. Halfway through my tenure, Boubacar Boureima, Niger’s Ambassador to the UN, told me that the African ambassadors were “all talking” about how much they enjoyed getting to know Mum and Eddie and seeing Declan and Rían race around the apartment. The inclusion of three generations of my family in large gatherings, he said, “was creating a different impression of the United States,” one with which they could identify. “Family matters so much to Africans,” he explained. “The big power seems much more open to us.”

I had not been trying to make a statement by including Mum, Eddie, and the kids when I held events at the Waldorf apartment. With a job that didn’t allow much free time, I was simply hoping to maximize every moment with them.

Animal-obsessed, Declan and Rían quickly realized they could talk to my colleagues from around the world about their home countries’ wildlife. The normally reserved Namibian ambassador, Wilfried Emvula, became an effusive storyteller when he had the chance to talk about his country’s cheetahs. At one reception, Declan and Rían convinced Egyptian ambassador Amr Aboulatta to leave the main gathering and visit their bedroom, where they showed off their diverse stuffed animal collection. Amr eyed the array, and then shook his head in mock outrage, affecting injury. “How can you have a pink flamingo and not have a camel?”

“I am so sorry,” Declan said with great seriousness. “I will ask Santa for a camel.”

Declan’s favorite animals were elephants, leading him to fixate on Zimbabwe—the country that his National Geographic map depicted with the highest elephant concentration. When other ambassadors invited him to visit their countries, he would apologetically say that he was planning to visit Zimbabwe first. After hearing a version of this exchange several times, I decided to describe Robert Mugabe’s repressive rule to Declan in accessible terms.

I told him that the leader of Zimbabwe was not terribly nice to the people who lived there. He locked up those who criticized him and gave the country’s riches to his friends.

“Why don’t they get somebody else?” Declan asked, leading me to explain that Mugabe would not allow the Zimbabwean people to choose a new leader. As a result, I said, we were not likely to visit anytime soon.

Declan considered this new information and, solutions-oriented, asked, “How old is Mugabe?”

When I answered “ninety-one,” he broke into a large smile. “Great,” he said, “so we will be able to see the elephants pretty soon.”

I didn’t bring up the topic again, but every few months he would ask for an update on Mugabe’s health. In 2017, when the Zimbabwean president was forced out of office, I showed Declan video footage of the street celebrations. But by then he was canny enough to ask, “Is the new guy better?”

At times, I wasn’t sure if I was wise to translate aspects of my work life into language the kids could understand. Declan’s favorite books at the time were the British Mr. Men series. The characters each bore the names of their personalities: Mr. Mean, Mr. Chatterbox, Mr. Greedy, Mr. Lazy, Mr. Strong, and so on. I would sometimes spin the globe around, point to a country, and then describe that country’s ambassador, giving him a Mr. Men nickname. In light of the many events held at the residence, though, it was inevitable that Declan would personally encounter one of these “characters” from our game. Luckily, even at a young age, he had the sense not to cause a diplomatic incident, and would only whisper to me excitedly when he realized that an ambassador he had just met was the Mr. Impossible we had been discussing a few weeks earlier.

The morning President Obama was intending to announce a plan to open relations with Cuba, I was bursting to tell someone, so I decided to disclose the news to Declan, who was then five years old. To give him context, I summarized more than fifty years of US–Cuba relations, describing how the US government had put in place something called an “embargo” to cut off the flow of goods between our two countries. In just a few hours, I told Declan, “President Obama is going to try something new.” He nodded along as I spoke, seeming to absorb my simplified history lesson.

Later that day at the US Mission, I gathered my team to watch Obama’s televised announcement. Just as the President started speaking, the nurse from Declan’s school called to tell me that he had been playacting as an animal during recess when his friend Sawyer had accidentally kicked him in the face, giving him a bloody lip.

Declan grabbed the phone from the nurse.

“Mommy,” he said, his voice conveying urgency. “We need an embargo for Sawyer.”

I told myself that the exposures the kids were getting to the world beyond America’s shores would compensate in a small way for the shortage of time they had with me. But I knew nothing could substitute for parental attention. I also worried that my kids would grow accustomed to a penthouse apartment and special treatment. I remembered the gratitude I felt as a child when Mum scored a seat in the upper decks of Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium for a Pirates game. Yet when I took Declan to Washington Nationals’ spring training each year, he got to go onto the field and meet the players. When Mum and Eddie had taken me to Disneyworld, we had queued for hours to ride Space Mountain, making the thrill all the more immense. Yet when I brought Rían back to the scene of my childhood delight, I looked at the other parents guiltily as my security escort moved us to the front of the long lines. At such moments, I made sure to tell the kids, “This. Is. Not. Normal”—a good reminder to myself as well.

“LEAN ON” ENCOMPASSED more than this invaluable support from family, friends, and coworkers. It also spoke to the importance of women having each other’s backs. I saw this dynamic play out in powerful ways at the male-dominated United Nations. While men had held the majority of positions during my time working at the NSC, only when I got to the UN did I regularly find myself the only woman in the room.

When Obama had nominated me for the job, I went to see Madeleine Albright, President Clinton’s UN ambassador during his first term (before she became America’s first female Secretary of State in his second). Albright told me that in 1993 she had assembled the seven female ambassadors at the UN (out of 183 countries at the time) in what she called the G7—the “Girl Seven.” The way she described her gatherings with the women who represented Canada, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Lichtenstein reminded me of the Wednesday Group. Albright’s G7 developed into both an informal sisterhood and a cross-regional lobby that managed to secure the appointment of two female judges to the bench of the UN war crimes tribunal.

Fortunately, I had far more female company at the UN than Albright. When I arrived in New York, I was the thirty-seventh woman permanent representative out of 193 countries.^* Inspired by her initiative, I convened the G37 as often as I could. I invited my female colleagues to dinners at the apartment, including an evening featuring the authors Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, who discussed their book The Confidence Code, which argues that “success correlates more closely with confidence than it does with competence.”⁴¹ I also invited all of the G37 to the Public Theater’s Eclipsed, a play about sexual violence in Liberia that was written, directed, and performed solely by women.

Whenever we got together, we would inevitably commiserate about how tired we were of being asked how it felt to be “one of only X women” in whatever venue we were in.⁴² We would also lament how some in the broader international affairs community still dismissed the push for enhanced female participation as a form of special pleading.

We knew that advocating for inclusivity was more than just a gender or moral issue. In fact, progress toward gender equality has broad, intrinsic benefits for whole societies. One of the best predictors of a state’s peacefulness is the way women are treated within that state. In addition, progress at closing the gender gap in employment significantly increases GDP, reduces income inequality, and leads to higher incomes for men. Learning from one another that we shared a frustration with the narrow way in which gender issues were sometimes treated emboldened us to be more outspoken.

Still, I was acutely aware that my circumstances as a woman at the UN were not comparable to those of my female colleagues. Because the United States was the most powerful country in the world, the fact that I was American was far more salient to UN officials and foreign diplomats than the fact that I was a woman. I suffered few of the slights endured by female diplomats from other countries.

I also knew I had it easy compared to Albright and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who President Reagan had made America’s first female UN ambassador. During my time interning for Mort, I had watched Kirkpatrick confidently interrogating guests at the Carnegie Endowment. We had vast policy differences, but I read up on her UN experience and discovered that, as tough as she looked, even she had grown weary of the constant sexism in New York and Washington.

Once, President Reagan’s chief of staff, Mike Deaver, approached her with a sensitive request: Could she urge Reagan to pursue an opening with the Soviet Union?

“Everyone notices you have influence with the President,” Deaver explained to her.

When Kirkpatrick shrugged, he went on. “No, no, everyone notices. He always listens when you speak. He looks at you and his eyes light up. Maybe it’s because you’re a woman.”

“Maybe it’s because he’s interested in foreign policy,” Kirkpatrick shot back.⁴³

WHEN IT WAS TIME for the UN to elect a new secretary-general in 2016, I thought that a woman might be selected for the first time. When I mentioned this to a European ambassador, he told me that he was open to it—“as long as she is competent.”

I relayed this comment to Jordan’s UN ambassador Dina Kawar, who had become a close friend. She rolled her eyes. How, she asked, could anybody seriously think that an unqualified woman might just slip through the cracks to become UN secretary-general? As Dina joked to me, “Are they afraid that some woman will say, ‘Oh, I was going to do my hair today, but thought I would become Secretary-General instead!’ ” Such qualifiers would never have been considered necessary for male candidates in the race.⁴⁴

Of the five countries that held permanent seats on the UN Security Council, only the United States had ever appointed a woman as permanent representative, and often I was the only woman in the Council as a whole.^* When school groups were escorted into the viewing gallery to listen to our debates, I wondered what the young girls thought when they saw one woman seated among fourteen men. Surely, their ambition—or at least their sense of possibility—would be influenced by such a striking disparity. The boys’ sense of what was “natural” would undoubtedly also be shaped by snapshots like this.

In 2014, thanks to rotations among the ten nonpermanent members of the Council, I had the chance to serve with five other women, the ambassadors representing Argentina, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Nigeria, and Jordan. We were the largest female contingent on the Security Council in the seven-decade history of the UN.

Although we still accounted for less than half the ambassadors on the Council, and although our number would dwindle back to one female representative in 2016, the excitement around the UN was palpable. Young women would pull me aside in the restroom to say how proud they were to see the six of us duking it out in the traditionally male chamber. Our deliberations changed in subtle ways; I noticed that the female ambassadors tended to refer back to their colleagues’ comments more frequently than the men did.

Having six women on the Council didn’t deter male ambassadors from occasionally taking outlandish positions, such as questioning well-documented cases of sexual violence. Once, when we were discussing what to do about allegations that Sudanese Army soldiers in Darfur had perpetrated mass rape, one of my African colleagues dismissed the detailed reports.^*

“Why would the soldiers have done this when they have their wives to come home to? Where is the proof?” he asked, insisting, “If these rapes really happened, the women would have spoken openly about it—even if the security forces were present.”

I interjected. “Oh, are you speaking from your vast personal experience of having been raped and then being asked what happened while security forces affiliated with your rapists leer over you?”

On another occasion, Vitaly memorably criticized the UN’s Yemen envoy for spending too much of his precious time talking to women. “Your job is to make peace, and that is hard enough,” Vitaly said. “Why are you wasting your time having meetings with women who aren’t even involved in the conflict?” On such occasions the women ambassadors—and a few of the enlightened men—would fling our hands up to demand the floor in order to respond.

More impactfully, we pressed for action by the UN secretary-general to punish those who had perpetrated sexual violence, including, horrifyingly, UN peacekeepers themselves. Over Egypt’s objections, we secured the passage of a Council resolution that required the UN to expel whole peacekeeping units whose soldiers were accused of sexually abusing civilians. As a result, in 2017, Secretary-General Guterres sent home the entire deployment of more than 600 Congolese peacekeepers that had been stationed in Central African Republic, following numerous accusations that a number of them were perpetrating abuses.

While I could do little to affect whom foreign heads of state selected to represent their countries at the UN, I tried to make the US Mission to the UN friendlier to women and mothers—even by making small changes like installing the US Mission’s first lactation room. I also pressed to include women experts in Security Council debates—and not just on those topics explicitly branded as “women’s issues.” When the US ambassadorships under me opened up, I actively recruited women to apply and recommended several of them to the White House. In the end, President Obama named women to three of the four posts.

When I traveled abroad, I added a stop on each trip to interact with teenage girls. I especially loved playing sports with them—the epitome of the “lean on” ethos, in which team members set one another up for success. In Mexico, I played soccer with a group of underprivileged girls. In war-ravaged northern Sri Lanka, I played the local sport of Elle (a bat-and-ball game) in the rain with Muslim girls who had only recently returned to school after years of conflict. And in the Middle East, I played basketball with Israeli and Palestinian girls who hoped to become engineers, architects, and even politicians. In each instance, the shy teenagers who had barely spoken before we began playing began to open up once I was in my gym clothes, no longer looking like a senior US official.

When I met with young women in the United States, I erred on the side of oversharing, describing my self-doubt in the Bat Cave and the tradeoffs between my dream job and the family I longed to see more of. I did not gloss over the challenges they would face if they pursued ambitious careers in public service or foreign policy, but I encouraged them to take the leap.

I also offered a dose of perspective, highlighting the stories of women and girls who were breaking through barriers I found almost unimaginable. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, for example, girls had been denied almost all access to education. Yet by the time I arrived at the UN, three million Afghan girls had risked violence and enrolled in schools. Finally allowed to run for seats in Afghanistan’s Parliament, women had won 28 percent of the positions—a higher proportion than in the United States Congress.

I often spoke publicly about the Afghan Women’s National Cycling Team, which was banned under the Taliban but had been re-established in 2011. Since then, the team had grown to around forty women. Afghan men frequently yelled at women cyclists to get off the road, and motorcyclists had even been known to grab at the women as they pedaled past (causing several to crash). Yet the women kept on riding.

I would ask my audiences—whether my fellow UN Security Council ambassadors or a group of students—to think about the impression these women left:

Imagine just for a minute what it must feel like to be a little girl from a rural town in Afghanistan—and to suddenly see those forty women, in a single file, flying down the road. To see something for the first time that you couldn’t have believed possible. Think about where your mind would go—about the shockwave that image would send through your system. Think what it would allow you to believe possible. You would never be able to think the same way again.

Agency. Self-determination. Dignity. Solidarity. We could not discount the potential impact of even one such altered perspective on a young girl, her family, and, eventually, on an entire community.