WASHINGTON — Diplomatic is not a word commonly used to describe outspoken Harvard-trained scholar and activist Samantha Power.
In the early 1990s, as a recent college graduate wading into Bosnia’s civil war, she called the Clinton administration immoral for not using military strikes to halt ethnic cleansing. In 2003, she called for a “historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, permitted by the United States.”
In 2008, while advising then-candidate Barack Obama, she described as “extremely disappointing” the new head of the United Nations. Then she got in trouble for calling Obama’s primary rival, Hillary Clinton, “a monster.”
Now Obama has nominated the 42-year-old Irish-born mother of two to represent the United States in one of the most influential diplomatic posts: as ambassador to the United Nations, the very body she has criticized for failing to prevent the untimely deaths of millions of people around the globe.

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“She knows the UN’s strengths. She knows its weaknesses. She knows that American interests are advanced when we can rally the world to our side,” Obama said of his former aide on Wednesday, urging her quick confirmation by the Senate. “And she knows that we have to stand up for the things that we believe in.”
‘I knew you were a different kind of leader,and I knew I wanted to work for you.’
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Power — who spent half a dozen formative years in the Boston area — and who until earlier this year served as a senior director on the National Security Council — has been one of the strongest advocates inside the White House for confronting humanitarian crises.
She was a leading voice for military action in Libya in 2011. One of the most pressing issues in her new job will be how to bring an end to the grinding civil war in Syria.
Her rise to prominence in American foreign policy circles has been swift, beginning when she was a 22-year-old freelance journalist covering the civil war in Bosnia, where she witnessed first-hand the atrocities committed by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims.
“She thought what was happening was horrible and nobody was paying attention to it,” said Gary J. Bass, a professor at Princeton University who has known her since 1992. “She wanted to go and bear witness. She was fresh out of Yale and decided this was something she had to do. That was an incredibly brave thing to do. Lots and lots of reporters were being killed.”
Her dispatches at the time, including for The Boston Globe and the Economist, led to a job as an analyst for the nonprofit International Crisis Group, where she evaluated the warring factions’ adherence to the peace accords reached in 1995.
In 1996 she enrolled at Harvard Law School and was recruited two years later to head up a project on human rights at the Kennedy School, where she was soon named the executive director of the school’s newly established Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
Her research took her to Chad and the Darfur region of Sudan in Africa to chronicle some of the worst human rights abuses in decades.
“Samantha is intellectually serious and grounded, has a strategic perspective, and has demonstrated in the past four years at the [National Security Council] that she can get things done,” said Graham Allison, who first recruited her to Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Power’s 2002 book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” a survey of genocides in Armenia, Rwanda and other nations in the 20th century, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and helped convince the Bush administration to label the systematic killing of civilians in Darfur as genocide.
In 2005, she went to work for then-Senator Obama, a fateful decision she remarked upon Wednesday at the White House announcement.
“From the day I met you,” Power told the president, “and you told me that you had spent a chunk of your vacation reading a long, dark book on genocide, I knew you were a different kind of leader, and I knew I wanted to work for you.”
But it is not only the complexities of global affairs that captivate her. Sometimes it is baseball.
In a 2005 column for The Boston Globe, Power recalled one of the most poignant memories of her immigrant arrival in America.
“In 1979 my mother moved my younger brother and me to Pittsburgh from Ireland,” she began. “She somehow knew enough to take her 9-year-old daughter to a ball game within 48 hours of landing. All my life I’d been told that Ireland had the greenest grass in the world, but from my new vantage point in the upper deck in Three Rivers Stadium, I was sure I’d been duped: America’s grass was greener.” But it was her first visit to Fenway Park in 1997 that made her a fiercely loyal Red Sox fan.
After working on the 2008 campaign — where she was remembered most for resigning after her impolitic comment about Hillary Clinton, for which she later made amends — Power joined the Obama administration as part of a power couple that included her new husband, Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor who served in the first term as Obama’s chief of regulatory affairs before returning to Harvard.
Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, does not believe Power’s lack of diplomatic experience will be a hindrance in her new job in New York.
“She has a very clear sense of idealism, but she is also a pragmatist,” he said. “She knows how to get things done.”
On Wednesday, Power sounded like her normal self, lauding the UN for its successes but also scolding it for its many failures.
“The question of what the United Nations can accomplish for the world and for the United States remains a pressing one,” she said. “I have seen UN aid workers enduring shell-fire to deliver food to the people of Sudan. Yet I’ve also seen UN peacekeepers fail to protect the people of Bosnia. As the most powerful and inspiring country on this Earth, we have a critical role to play in insisting that the institution meet the necessities of our time.”