Samantha Power on ‘the right kind of U.S. leadership’

Samantha Power went to college with the intention of becoming a sportscaster.

The summer of her freshman year, while interning as a reporter at a baseball game in Atlanta, she saw video footage from the protests in China’s Tiananmen Square. She recalls that moment as a kind of epiphany.

Power went back to school to set a different course. She became a war correspondent, then studied law at Harvard, then served as the founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.”

Power went on to work for Senator Barack Obama, then on his presidential campaign. She joined President Obama’s cabinet, serving as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. She is now a professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at the Kennedy School. Her new memoir is “The Education of an Idealist.”

Samantha Power spoke at Town Hall Seattle on September 16. She was joined in conversation by John Koenig, former United States Ambassador to Cyprus, who lectures at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. KUOW’s Jennie Cecil Moore recorded the conversation.