Running with Samantha Power

By James Astill

I show up at Samantha Power’s handsome clapboard house outside Concord, Massachusetts, a little after 8.30am, bleary-eyed and rather nervous. I have not merely arranged to interview Barack Obama’s former human-rights guru and ambassador to the UN. She has also suggested we run together. And having been up half the night reading Power’s doorstopper of a new memoir, a late arrival from its publisher, I am slightly dreading whatever workout she might have in mind. Almost as an aside in her book, “The Education of an Idealist”, she describes running the Boston marathon in her early 20s (for the first of several times). Her running mates wrote witty slogans on their T-shirts to draw shouts from the crowd. Fresh from a stint of war reporting in Bosnia, she wrote on hers: “Remember Srebrenica – 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys murdered”. Power is not to be taken lightly.

Tall, athletic and still flame-haired at 48, the former diplomat answers the door in running gear – purple shorts and a grey T-shirt – and fixes me in the eye. “Have we met before?” she asks. Then, noting that I’m not dressed to run, she wants to know why.