The golden girl of America’s liberal foreign policy elite didn’t take long to bounce back from the “most bruising” setback of her charmed career, said Cara Buckley in The New York Times. Just two weeks ago, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Samantha Power abruptly resigned from her senior advisory role in Barack Obama’s campaign after attracting controversy by referring to Hillary Clinton as “a monster” in a newspaper interview. But the 37-year-old Harvard professor and expert on genocide hasn’t gone into hiding. She has a new book to promote—a biography of the late United Nations envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello called Chasing the Flame. And she’s carrying on with her U.S. book tour, she says, because Vieira de Mello’s legacy shouldn’t suffer because of her mistake.
Adjusting to life as a political embarrassment hasn’t been easy. Honoring a commitment to speak in New York last week, she told a university audience that if she got through her talk without crying, “it would be a first” since she became front-page news. She later said that her controversial remark about Clinton was “inexcusable”; she actually holds Obama’s rival in very high regard. Power’s real sin, said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times, was that she was “too open for her own good” whenever she spoke to reporters. Only time will tell if she’s learned her lesson. Her plans following the book tour, she says, are to “keep writing and doing my best.”
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