Getting through these dark times.

At Salon.com, By Leigh Flayton
Foreign policy whiz Samantha Power sheds light on a legendary diplomat killed in Iraq, advising Barack Obama and how America can emerge from the Bush era.
In 2003, Samantha Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her book "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," in which she chronicled the United States' responses to the major genocides of the 20th century. But that's just one of her accomplishments. Power, 37, is a Harvard professor and founder of that university's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She is a prominent voice on stopping the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, and addressing numerous trouble spots around the world. She has shot hoops with fellow Darfur activist George Clooney, and once proclaimed herself the "genocide chick."
Beneath her sense of humor is a fierce idealism and dedication to improving world affairs. Now, Power is immersed in what she considers the toughest challenge yet in her action-packed career: serving as a senior foreign policy advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
The demands of that job have only risen since she first began working for Obama when he joined the U.S. Senate in 2005. But Power also found time to produce another book, published last week: "Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World." The new volume is a biography of the revered United Nations envoy -- once described as a cross between Bobby Kennedy and James Bond -- who was killed in the catastrophic bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad by insurgents during the early stages of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The book is also a treatise on why the world needs the U.N., and the lessons Vieira de Mello learned throughout his career, now more than ever.
"He is the man for dark times," Power says of Vieira de Mello, whom former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan once called the U.N.'s "go-to guy." "He had a 35-year head start thinking about how to mend broken people and broken places, these questions that are consuming us now."
During Vieira de Mello's career with the U.N., as Power details, he met with members of the Khmer Rouge and Serbian genocidaires, his attempts to broker peace with the latter earning him the nickname "Serbio." Power says she sees a strong synergy between Vieira de Mello's principles and Obama's concept of foreign policy -- with their emphasis on justice, human rights, security and, perhaps most controversially, direct diplomatic engagement with foreign adversaries.
Power sat down with Salon recently in New York for a wide-ranging conversation about Vieira de Mello's legacy, going to work for Obama and the colossal challenges facing whichever candidate becomes the next U.S. president.