The Education of an Idealist

Schu and I then traveled north to Poland, which had experienced its first free election on the same day in June of 1989 as the Chinese crackdown in Tiananmen Square—a coincidence that would cause the landmark Polish vote to go almost unnoticed in the American media (a cold competition among world events that I would learn more about later on). Our most inspiring visit of the summer was to the Gdańsk Shipyard, where, in 1980, Lech Wałęsa had organized workers in a strike that would launch the Solidarity trade union. Solidarity turned into an opposition movement that eventually counted nearly a third of the country’s 35 million people among its members.

Yugoslavia, a country in southeastern Europe bordering the Adriatic Sea, was the one place that Schu and I did not warm to that summer. While we had been blessed to form new friendships in the other countries we visited, in Yugoslavia we struggled to make connections. The trains and buses were crowded and hot, and the Cyrillic alphabets in Serbia and Macedonia made finding our way more difficult. “It just seems there isn’t much laughter here,” I wrote in my journal.

Before we visited, Schu and I had thought of Yugoslavia as a single entity. But in Croatia, one of its six republics, the people we met expressed little allegiance to the confederation. Given that the country’s dictator, Josip Broz Tito, had died a decade before and that communism had now collapsed, it was not clear what or who would unite the country’s diverse inhabitants. “I wonder if the state will have a reason to exist,” I wrote to myself at the time. While fissures were evident even to an ill-informed tourist like me, I could never have imagined that the beach resorts where Schu and I swam would soon be subjected to intense bombardment by the Serb-led remnants of the Yugoslav Army. Indeed, the fall of the Iron Curtain had left us with the impression that the world was on its way to becoming more democratic, humane, and peaceful.

THE TRIP SCHU AND I TOOK to Europe cemented our relationship. But the closer we became, the more I worried about him. In the eight years since my father’s death, I had been trailed by a morbid fear that my loved ones would suddenly die. If Schu was even an hour late returning to our dorm, I was often in a full state of panic by the time he arrived.

I also began to suffer bouts of what Schu called “lungers.” Whether on campus or on our travels, every few weeks I would find myself struggling to breathe properly. I could identify nothing tangibly wrong, and I never rasped for breath or experienced asthma-like physical symptoms. I just felt, moment to moment, as though my lungs had constricted and I simply could not take in enough air.

Because I never experienced lungers when I was in a tense situation—playing for the team collegiate national championship in squash, or taking final exams, for instance—I dismissed Schu’s gentle suggestion that my breathing problems might be related to anxiety. After a few days during which I could think about little else, the feeling would usually pass. Instead of seeking professional counsel and delving more deeply into the roots of this occasional phenomenon, I began pushing away the person closest to me.

The summer after my junior year, I lived with Schu in Washington, DC, taking up an internship with the National Security Archive, a listing I came across at Yale’s career services office. As I read about the Archive, I momentarily thought it was a quasi-governmental outfit given that it shared an acronym with the National Security Agency. But far from being a cloak-and-dagger intelligence enterprise, the National Security Archive was, in fact, a progressive nongovernmental organization (NGO) whose scholars and activists spent their days submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to secure the declassification of US government records. They then used the previously classified information they unearthed to better understand US involvement in events like the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile.

The Archive’s senior researchers were skeptical about US conduct abroad and determined to hold American officials accountable by exposing their deliberations. I found it fascinating to wade through piles of declassified transcripts of government meetings and telephone calls and to study decision memos and talking points that US officials had relied on to carry out their business. Much of what I read was intensely bureaucratic. But I recognized that these sterile pages were the vehicles by which American policymakers made decisions that, in some cases, impacted the lives of millions of people.

As I grew more interested in US foreign policy, Schu was beginning to consider a career in medicine. Having been a history major at Yale, he returned after he graduated to his hometown of Cleveland to take the preparatory science classes he needed to apply to medical school. After three years together, we decided to go our separate ways, though at the time I felt sure that we would find our way back to each other.

As I looked ahead, I envied the clarity of Schu’s professional plan. He would have to break his back taking vexing science classes, but he knew the steps required to one day be able to treat patients. I was interested in trying to find a career that would allow me to work on issues related to US foreign policy. Although I would not have dared express my hopes aloud, I wanted to end up in a position to “do something” when people rose up against their repressive governments—or when children like Anne Frank found themselves dependent on the actions of strangers.

But I did not see a clear path ahead.

6

DOERS

Mort Abramowitz and Fred Cuny were in some respects an unlikely pair. When I met him in December of 1992, Mort was a fifty-nine-year-old retired diplomat who had spent more than three decades abiding by the strictures of the US government in roles that included ambassador to Thailand, ambassador to Turkey, and Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research. The son of Lithuanian immigrants, he had grown up in New Jersey and held degrees from Stanford and Harvard. Mort lived in his mind and sometimes lost sight of practical details, arriving in the office wearing mismatched shoes or a woman’s coat he had mistaken for his own after a breakfast meeting.

Fred was a six-foot-three, forty-eight-year-old Texan who had been kicked out of Texas A&M and, as a young man, had listed sailing a Chinese junk ship across the Pacific as one of his life goals. Eventually trained as an engineer, Fred had become renowned as the Master of Disaster for his relief work in more than thirty crisis zones. Wearing his trademark cowboy boots, Fred had responded to famine in Ethiopia, an earthquake in Armenia, and war in places like Biafra, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and Somalia.[1]

Mort was the ambassador to Turkey when he and Fred had first worked together in an effort to aid Iraqi Kurds who had been attacked by Saddam Hussein and were huddling as refugees on the Iraq-Turkey border.[fn1] Fred’s methods were unorthodox—Mort recalled fielding calls from US military commanders in the area asking “Do you know what that goddamned Fred Cuny is doing?”—but the US-led operation helped save some 400,000 people. From then on, Mort provided Fred with credibility among Washington decision-makers, while Fred inspired Mort with his resourcefulness and daring.

I had the good fortune to get to know both men when, as a recent college graduate, I took up an internship at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington policy institute. I had heard about Carnegie from a friend at Yale, and I had applied because several of the interns served as editorial assistants with Foreign Policy, the Carnegie Endowment’s quarterly journal. This seemed the perfect way to combine my experience in a different kind of journalism (sports) with my burgeoning interest in foreign policy. I could not think of a more perfect first job out of college.

I had pulled my grades up at Yale and written a senior essay on foreign policy that the history department gave an award. I wrote essays for the application and was invited for an interview with one of Carnegie’s senior associates. A few weeks later, I was told I was one of ten graduating seniors who had been admitted to the program, and I had been assigned to Foreign Policy. I was thrilled.

Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, the head of the program called to tell me that the president of the Carnegie Endowment, Mort Abramowitz, had reassigned me to his office. Imagining an administrative internship from which I would learn little, I pleaded with the program head to revert to the original plan. She was firm. “Samantha,” she said in a thick Southern accent, “you can’t turn down the president.” What felt like an unlucky turn of fate would end up being a tremendous stroke of fortune.

In December of 1992, six months after graduating from college, I moved to Washington, DC, transferring my dorm room furnishings to a studio apartment near Dupont Circle. I had long ago framed the Time magazine “Tank Man” cover, and I now placed it on my book shelf, along with photos of Mum, Eddie, Stephen, Bam Bam, and my now ex-boyfriend Schu.

Mort was the first person I came to know well who had helped make foreign policy at such rarified levels, and over time he would drill into me a simple truth: governments can either do harm or do good. “What we do,” he would say, “depends on one thing: the people.” Institutions, big and small, were made up of people. People had values, and people made choices.

I would learn later that Mort was famous in the diplomatic corps for eschewing hierarchy and tracking down the best-informed officials in his embassies, irrespective of their rank. He also took care of “his people”—making phone calls on behalf of junior officials whose work he admired. But none of this was apparent to me in the first couple of months I served as his intern. When I offered edits to drafts of his speeches and op-eds, he would say, “Very helpful, Susan,” and then incorporate almost none of what I had proposed.

My tasks at the outset were as administrative as I had feared: making sure Carnegie’s public materials did not have typos and helping seat the VIP guests who attended Carnegie events—from former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and legendary journalist Bob Woodward to Tom Lantos, a human rights champion who was the only Holocaust survivor in Congress. Although I didn’t yet work closely with my boss, people whose names I had underlined in the newspaper during college were suddenly handing me their coats—and occasionally even looking me in the eye.

I was especially intrigued by Carnegie visitor Jeane Kirkpatrick, President Ronald Reagan’s first UN ambassador, and the first woman in the United States ever to hold a national security cabinet position. Strangely, Kirkpatrick had first come to my attention when I was a child in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s and had somehow noticed a photo of President Reagan’s senior team in Eddie’s copy of the New York Times. Amid all the suits, the diminutive Kirkpatrick stood beaming at the center of the shot—the only woman among Reagan, Vice President Bush, and the seventeen other members of the cabinet. I had been far too young to follow her career at the UN, but the moment I glimpsed her, now a private citizen, at Carnegie, I immediately flashed back to the picture I had seen more than a decade earlier.

During Kirkpatrick’s visits, she would offer acerbic commentary on the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, who had just taken office. As I watched from the back of the room, I was struck by her bluntness, which seemed to puncture the otherwise clubby, polite atmosphere. Men usually dominated the proceedings, but she was a notable exception.

Mort seemed to respect people like Kirkpatrick who had served in government and could offer informed views. But he was impatient with the “blowhards” who circulated in the think-tank world. “These people speak so much,” Mort said about the proliferation of self-styled experts in Washington, “and yet they manage to say so little.”

He was even harder on himself. After he had chaired a meeting or published an op-ed that I found persuasive, I sometimes made the mistake of complimenting him. “What a load of horseshit,” he would respond. I was never sure if this referred to his work or my praise. When I once thanked him for publicly challenging a visiting head of state, Mort looked at me blankly and said, “You do know I don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, don’t you?” His humility often manifested itself as self-criticism, which seemed an extremely uncommon—but to me a very appealing—trait for a person so respected in Washington.

Mort’s standoffishness did not deter me, and his cutting commentary was familiar from years of watching my dad in action at Hartigan’s. But I wondered whether I had what it took to win his confidence. I saw in him someone who could help teach me how the world really worked. He seemed to be guided by only one criteria, the question he would ask every time I approached him with an idea (as I often would in the coming decades): “Will it do any good?”

I noticed that Mort always rearranged his schedule to see Fred when he was in town. “He is a practical man,” Mort said of the Texan. “He doesn’t just tell us ‘something must be done.’ He tells us what should be done and how we should do it. I’ve never known anybody like him.”

Fred was useful. And Mort valued usefulness.

IN EARLY 1993, both men were working to improve conditions in Bosnia, where a savage war had begun the previous April.

The core of the conflict arose from the collapse of Yugoslavia, whose six republics each contained a range of ethnicities and religions: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, ethnic Albanians, Macedonians, Bosnian Muslims, and others. Tito, who had ruled the country for decades, had tried to forge a single Southern Slavic identity among the people and had stymied ethnic and religious expressions of difference.[fn2] After Tito’s death in 1980, however, nationalism—of the kind Schu and I had witnessed on our trip to Croatia—had surged among the country’s various ethnicities. After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union itself headed toward collapse, four of the six Yugoslav republics took steps to secede.

While the eventual outbreak of fighting had many causes, Serbian president Slobodan Milošević bore the greatest responsibility. As Yugoslavia’s largest single nationality, Serbs had enjoyed plum jobs and privileges. But as the Croatian and Slovene governments moved toward declaring independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, Milošević used state media to whip up fear over what he portrayed as the coming existential struggle.[fn3] If Serbs were trapped as ethnic minorities in newly independent Croatia or Bosnia, he warned, they would become second-class citizens.

In 1989, Milošević had notoriously declared “No one will ever dare beat you again!” to a crowd of Serbs in the predominantly ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo, shrewdly tapping into the once-dominant group’s fear that they would become the losers if people of other ethnicities gained more power. Using tactics common to strongmen past and present, Milošević told the Serbs that their “enemies outside the country are plotting against [them], along with those inside the country.” He capitalized on his followers’ nervousness about their place in a rapidly changing world.

In 1992, Bosnia was the most ethnically mixed of all of Yugoslavia’s republics. After following Slovenia and Croatia in declaring independence, it descended into the deadliest and most gruesome conflict in Europe since World War II. Milošević funneled soldiers and guns from Serbia to support Bosnian Serb militants, who quickly seized some 70 percent of the country in what they called Republika Srpska, their own ethnically “pure” republic. Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo had hosted the Winter Olympics only eight years before, but by April of 1992, Bosnian Serb rebels, backed by the remnants of the powerful Yugoslav National Army, began bombarding the city. Across the country, Bosnian Serb Army snipers and heavy weapons began firing at Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and others.

Not long before I joined Carnegie, a group of intrepid journalists had uncovered a network of concentration camps where Serb guards were starving and beating men to death, and disposing of their bodies in mass graves. The Bosnian Serb militia also set up rape camps where they sequestered Muslim and Croat women and systematically brutalized them. For the people of Bosnia, history had not “ended,” and the “New World Order” had brought terror and misery.

Campaigning for president, Bill Clinton had compared the atrocities in Bosnia to the Holocaust, promising that he would “stop the slaughter of civilians” if elected. Mort’s top priority was to use his platform at Carnegie to pressure the Clinton administration to translate those words into action. He turned the redbrick building at the corner of 24th and N Street into a hub where the most influential voices from the former Yugoslavia shared their perspectives with Washington’s top officials and journalists.

By then, Fred was doing humanitarian work on behalf of philanthropist George Soros’s foundation with the goal, as Fred modestly put it, of “breaking the siege of Sarajevo.” But he made a point of visiting Washington every few months, and Mort would invite key influencers to hear his insights on the humanitarian conditions and what could be done to improve the situation. Mort’s perennial sense that he did not know enough fueled his curiosity and caused him to pose fundamental questions that few were asking. He never seemed afraid of looking uninformed—which, to me, seemed to be the highest form of confidence.

As I dug into the news reporting and listened to what visitors from the region said, the war started to feel closer. The more I heard from Bosnia’s crusading representative at the UN or Serbia’s human rights lawyers, the more unnerved I was by the atrocities being committed.

This response marked a change for me. Between my college graduation and taking up my Carnegie internship, I had taught English in Berlin for six months. I had seen the gaunt faces of Bosnian families as they arrived at German bus and train terminals, but I had not been moved to action by their suffering. It never occurred to me that I personally could do anything for them. Although I had felt horror toward the Tiananmen massacre several years before, in Berlin I had gone about my business, teaching and exploring the city, despite encountering the war’s survivors.

Now, just a few months later at Carnegie, I was devouring the dispatches from Balkan war correspondents. I was working for someone who believed he could make a difference; if I could help him, I felt I might be making a modest contribution of my own.

As I learned more, Mort began asking me to fact-check his opinion pieces for the Washington Post and other publications. I slowly started developing views and tried my hand at writing editorials. At first, all I did was read the drafts to Mum and Eddie over the telephone. When I finally got up the nerve to show one to Mort, he eviscerated what I had written, decrying my “purple prose” and telling me to “tone down” the language. Crestfallen, I reflected on the rejection in my journal. “I think what Mort detests—and I can’t say I blame him—is my voice. I’m too young, too lacking knowledge and experience, to assume such airs.”

Even if I didn’t yet have a knack for such writing, Mort was exposing me to a different mind-set. I now shared his impatience with commentary that detailed the contours of a problem without offering realistic, concrete ideas for how the United States and other actors might improve matters. And I now understood why Mort had all the time in the world for Fred, someone who was a font of constructive ideas for how to respond to the Bosnian Serb Army’s devastating siege of Sarajevo.

In addition to terrorizing and killing civilians, Bosnian Serb soldiers had cut off gas and water supplies to the city, sapping the will of its inhabitants to resist. Fred and his team of humanitarian engineers had resuscitated a natural gas line, thereby enabling some 20,000 Sarajevans to restore heating to their homes during the frigid winter. But the Serbs had also cut off the power to pumps that delivered water into the capital, a tactic that had even more dire effects. In order to get water, thousands of Sarajevans were hauling large plastic containers from their homes to the town’s main river or its other water sources. The river was polluted and terribly exposed to sniper fire. Because the queues at the water distribution points often stretched whole city blocks, the waiting crowds spent hours vulnerable to shelling.

“What is the most powerful weapon the Bosnian Serb extremists have?” Fred asked me and the other interns one day on a visit to Washington. “Their siege,” he answered, explaining, “If we can find a way to restore water, they can still shoot people, but the city will not surrender. We will foil their plans and give the Bosnians the time to muster the means to fight back.”

Fred’s plan was audacious in the extreme. He planned to smuggle water pumps and other large machinery past the Bosnian Serb gunners and then jury-rig a vast water purification plant inside a Sarajevo tunnel, where it would be shielded from Serb fire. If the plan worked, Fred said, 120,000 gallons of water would flow, giving a third of the city’s residents water around the clock.

Fred was just one person with a small team. His idea seemed unbelievably risky. “If this is doable,” I asked, “why wouldn’t the United Nations do it?”

Fred dismissed the question, telling me, “If the UN had been around in 1939, we’d all be speaking German.” He was galled by UN peacekeepers’ neutrality in the face of what to him seemed clear-cut aggression.

As Mort deepened his advocacy and Fred began to implement his bold plan to restore water, I also got to know Jonathan Moore, a sixty-year-old former US official based at Carnegie who had been Mort’s colleague in President Richard Nixon’s State Department. Jonathan had a rumpled look. When I first met him, he was wearing brown corduroys and a light green Oxford shirt under a maroon V-neck sweater—attire from which I rarely saw him deviate. For many months, he held together his Rockport shoes with silver duct tape.

A Republican for most of his life, Jonathan had served as a Senate aide and as a presidential campaign adviser. Working under six presidents, he had also held positions in several governmental agencies, including the Departments of State; Defense; Justice; and Health, Education, and Welfare.[fn4] Most impressive to me at the time, he had coordinated the US response to refugee issues under President Reagan, and had gone on to work as one of George H. W. Bush’s top officials at the US Mission to the UN, helping to create the position of a full-time UN coordinator for humanitarian emergencies.

When I marveled at the variety and significance of all Jonathan had done, he downplayed his achievements. He stressed that he owed his “herky-jerky” career to finding himself in the “right place at the right time,” emphasizing how much each job had given him rather than what he had contributed. He was the first person I met who talked about public service with boundless delight—as a source of camaraderie and fun. To him, even government officials who got themselves into trouble were objects more of fascination than of judgment. “He was so devious, it was neat to watch!” he would exclaim. Jonathan keenly weighed the moral ambiguity inherent in high-level decision-making.

My first substantive conversation with him occurred after he poked his head into my office to discuss the Bosnian war. “Do you think what is happening in Bosnia is because of the absence of good or the presence of evil?” he asked.

I was carefully tracking developments in the Balkans, but I had no adequate answer to his question. That didn’t stop him from continuing to drop by my office, recommending readings from scripture or leaving on my chair a news article he had clipped. Jonathan reminded me of Eddie—he had insatiable curiosity.