| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Samantha Power Interview: Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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Samantha, welcome to Berkeley.
Good to be here.
Where were you born and raised?
Well, it's a complicated story, but basically in Ireland. I lived the first nine years of my life in Ireland, and came to this country in 1979.
And looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your character?
My parents are epic individuals, and so just watching them take stands, I guess, day to day. But, mainly, we moved around a lot, and that made me care about the world. My mother came to this country because there was no divorce in Ireland. It was at a time before a European country decided to modernize and actually get with the program. And so they came here in '79, and then we moved around in the United States a fair amount over the course of my teenage years. But they just always cared about the world, and cared about doing the right thing.
Did you read a lot as a young person?
From the ages of zero through nine, before I came to this country, I was a great reader, an avid reader. Once I discovered American sports, I began reading just the sports page and listening to the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Pittsburgh Steelers on the radio, and it was all downhill from there.
But you came back at a certain point.
Something happened, yes.
Any sport, in particular, that you were interested in?
All I wanted to be was Bob Costas. I wanted to have your job, but with Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan in the other chair.
I see, interviewing them. Right.
No, I have a big baseball problem, or I did have a big basketball problem, but now I've confined it.
I actually got into human rights as I was working at CBS Sports and the affiliate in Atlanta, which is where I had gone to high school, after my freshman year in college. I was shock-sheeting an Atlanta Braves/San Diego Padres games, meaning, taking notes on the game, a very important duty that I had. And on the live feed, the CBS feed, as I was doing this in preparation for cutting the sports highlights for the news, the footage came down live from Tiananmen Square. This was June of 1989. [It was] the most shocking things I had ever seen, this uncut stuff before it went on air. It was really sort of chilling, and I thought, "Oh, my God. What am I doing with my life?" So that was actually a pretty discrete memorable moment in time, where I decided to revisit my career plans.
Where were you educated?
In college, you mean?
Yes.
Yale College. I went to Yale from Atlanta, and then later went to law school.
And at Yale, did you wind up taking courses in human rights or its history?
Not as such. Back then, there might have been a course....
I was not a do-gooder, definitely you'd want to state for the record. I was a sports fan who began to realize that there was a big, bad world outside. But I majored in history, and I had some amazing teachers, not who necessarily led me to U.S. foreign policy, but who led me to care about reading, and, again, to care about a world outside. It motivated me, especially, to learn how to write. If I picked up anything there, it was to work on communication in service of whatever it was that I was writing about. Whether I was covering the Yale men's basketball team for the school paper or writing on U.S. foreign policy for Gaddis Smith in one of my classes, it was an incredibly eye-opening experience. For somebody who had just come from a public high school in Atlanta, Yale was nirvana.
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