Without question the most confident and experienced member of Clinton’s team, the one holdover from the Bush administration, was General Colin Powell. He knew what the administration wanted to happen in Bosnia. But that policy was, he believed, based on hope, not on reality, and hope was not an acceptable basis for a military commitment. Powell and much of the top-level military based their construct of Yugoslavia on the ferocity and skill with which the partisan guerrillas had fought the Germans during World War II. In situations like this, Powell thought, the head of the JCS had to ponder and estimate the unexpected, not the expected. A lot of bright young people at State and even some in the CIA were saying that the JNA was an overrated army with a high desertion rate and a high level of alcoholism, but Powell remained skeptical. People had said similar things about the Vietcong and the NVA, too. That they had been forced to fight, that their morale was terrible, that kids too young to be of draft age were chained to their machine guns. But it was not true, certainly not when they fought the Americans. Their morale had been quite high, thank you. Perhaps the JNA troops had problems when they fought their own people. But what if they fought what were perceived to be invading Americans on Yugoslav territory? That might be very different, with a far stronger appeal to their nationalism. Powell remained dubious.
Clinton, at the head of an administration that was unsure of itself and wanted to avoid any foreign policy commitments, had entered office at the exact moment that Colin Powell was at the apex of his reputation. The Clinton people had won the election, but they were just starting to learn their way. They were members of a political party that had been out of power for twelve years. In contrast, no one inside the government was as experienced, as respected, and as deft in dealing with the Washington power structure as Powell—be it the White House, the Pentagon, the Congress, or the media.
By the fall of 1992, Colin Luther Powell, General of the Army and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had emerged as the most compelling—and trusted—public figure in America. He was many different things to many different people. As a general he was the principal architect of the successful American military intervention in the Gulf War. But like Dwight Eisenhower before him, he did not seem particularly bellicose, and when one critic had spoken of him disdainfully as a reluctant warrior, he had quickly agreed with the characterization. He saw it as a favorable description. He was obviously intelligent; his speeches and his informal television appearances marked him as a man who used language exceptionally well. He had great natural grace and humor; he was a skillful and exceptionally nimble bureaucrat. But Powell was, above all else, a great American success story, a black man who had made it, against considerable odds, to the top in a white man’s world, not in some soft, politically correct Ivy League world, but in one of the toughest institutions of all, the U.S. army. Perhaps even more remarkably, he was an ROTC-trained graduate of CCNY in a world of men who had gone to West Point. He had risen to the top by dint of hard work and excellence, and perfect historical timing.
He grew up in the Bronx, the son of Jamaican immigrants, both of whom worked in the garment district; his mother was paid for piecework, and Powell had clear boyhood memories of her every Thursday counting the paper tags that were attached to each garment she sewed, then putting them together in little bundles bound by rubber bands. “That was the way you were paid, a certain amount of money for each tag,” he remembered.1 He was part of a large, extended family of Jamaicans who were either related or knew each other from the old country, and who had become successful in the United States. Education had been central to their experience and success. For a time when he was a boy, he seemed to be slipping behind other members of the family, and below their expectations, someone who was not particularly good at school and had not quite found his niche. He ended up at CCNY instead of NYU in 1954, after a middling high school career, because it was cheaper, and for a while he floundered there as well.
Then he joined the college’s ROTC unit, and for the first time he found something he was very good at, the drills and the discipline. He loved it, and the people in the unit liked him and responded to his abilities. He graduated from CCNY in 1958, when the civil rights movement, which would have such an important effect on so many institutions, was still embryonic. There were not that many opportunities for young black college graduates. But the army was changing far more quickly than the country: there were more and more black enlisted men, and much of the professional army cadre was, in the years just after the Korean War, becoming black. Enticed by the many benefits the army offered and the lack of opportunity in civilian life, blacks were staying in and becoming career NCOs, even as whites, with a better shot in the outside world, were leaving, their tours finished. Clearly more black officers were going to be needed.
Powell was obligated upon graduation from CCNY for a three-year tour, and when that tour was up in 1961, just as many white officers, like white NCOs, were getting out, he re-upped. In fact the idea of leaving the army never really entered his mind. What other career was there for a young black man of limited means and connections? he once noted. Work in the garment district like his father and mother? Show oil company executives his CCNY degree in geology and find work drilling for oil in Texas or Oklahoma? If he stayed in the army, he could make $360 a month, or $4,020 a year, which was acceptable middle-class money in those days, especially with the peripheral benefits. The army was, he later wrote, the rarest of professions, one that allowed him to go as far as his talent would take him.2
Powell discovered that he was good at being a soldier. He ran into little prejudice on base, even if on occasion he encountered significant prejudice off base, particularly in the South. He liked the camaraderie, the loyalty of men not just to the army but to each other, and that unusual, for modern, affluent America, sense of shared purpose. He liked the fact that what the army wanted of him was always so clear. There were no mixed signals and he usually knew what to expect from the men above him. With a natural gregariousness and charm, blended with great ambition and discipline, he would do well in the army. When the army’s own leadership during the war in Vietnam and in the years immediately following betrayed the ethical codes of that institution and severely damaged it, they might as well have been messing with his family—for the army was in a real sense his second family.
For someone who had risen from so humble a beginning to so high a position, Powell had made remarkably few enemies. On occasion he invoked resentment of a traditional kind on the part of those officers who had risen to their positions by dint of command—pure battlefield brilliance—toward those who had risen even a bit higher though they lacked comparable command skills but had served brilliantly as staff men. Or as Norman Schwarzkopf wrote of Powell, when they first started to work together, “His reputation [within the army] was mixed. A lot of people thought of him as half-general, half-politician. In his rise through the ranks, he’d never commanded a division—an important proving ground.”3 Powell was a good guy, talented as hell, but he was a staffy, the combat guys would say on occasion and then note that he had not really been that highly regarded during his two tours of Vietnam. In the first he had served as an adviser, and in his second, he had served with the Americal, a division patched together from other units, one of the worst divisions in army history. Its most ignominious officer was Lieutenant William Calley, who had commanded the troops at My Lai.
Powell enjoyed for a long time—the first fifteen years or so—a good career. But then, just when the promotion lists started to narrow sharply and many talented field officers confronted their weaknesses in other areas and begin either to slip or tread water, his career took off. In an America that was changing rapidly on race, or at least wanted to change, doors that might in the past have remained closed started to open, and his race—which might only recently have worked against him—began to work for him. The army had been a leader in post–World War II America as an equal opportunity employer, constantly well ahead of the national curve, particularly at the entry level. Its leadership realized that it had to match its successes at the bottom of the structure with comparable successes at its upper levels. In 1972, Powell was named a White House fellow and his career began to soar.
As a military man working with civilians, he had no peer. The better he did, the higher he rose, and the higher he rose, the better he did, because the people judging had an ever greater appreciation for the unique quality of his talents. What had been a very good career became a great career. All his special qualities, his intelligence, wit, sensitivity to and awareness of others, and his exceptional discipline and self-confidence, began to set him apart. Powerful civilians in the bureaucracy, men at the cabinet and immediate subcabinet levels, fought for his services, but not because they wanted a token black man sitting in their outer office. They did it because he was very, very good and, they soon began to realize, his talents served to make them look good.
No small part of that came from Powell’s discipline. All army men who rise to the top are disciplined, but some seem to be more disciplined than others. That was especially true of the generation of young black officers to which Powell belonged, who entered the officer corps when prejudices were stronger than they would be fifteen years later when he was in midcareer. They were, they knew, always being inspected. These young black officers—as Powell’s close friend Mike Heningburg once noted—were bonded together by two powerful forces. First, they were black in a white man’s world, but a white man’s world that seemed to be getting better. Second, they all had had it drummed into them by their parents that if they intended to succeed, they had to be better, much better, than any white person.
Powell was very good, always at his best, because the price for not being good, if you were black, was severe; not only did you not rise quickly, you descended quickly. But what worked for him was more than intelligence and discipline. He had an exceptionally refined sense of anticipation, so important in a bureaucracy, particularly a military one; the ability to sense what was going to happen next, and thereby to help his superior stay ahead of the play. That was valuable at this stage of his career, as he moved into the world of what was called the horse holders, the inner circle of the army’s bright young officers who moved up because they were assistants to powerful senior officers. In an earlier time when there was still a horse cavalry, they had held the horses for their superiors as they got ready to mount up.
Powell understood how the army and the upper level of the civilian bureaucracy worked. His job was to protect his superior at all times, know everything that might have an effect on his superior’s decision-making, know where potential bureaucratic enemies lay in wait, where the bureaucratic land mines had been planted, and whether anything new had been added to an existing equation in the last twenty-four hours. He also began to exhibit the caution of a man of the bureaucracy. In his book It’s My Party, a young Republican speechwriter named Peter Robinson wrote that when he had come up with what would be Ronald Reagan’s single greatest line—“tear down this wall”—the entire bureaucracy, including the NSC chief Colin Powell, wanted to cut it out. Only Reagan wanted to keep it in.
In time Powell became so talented a figure in the upper level of the bureaucracy that different departments kept trying to pull him into their corner, and he was repeatedly faced with difficult choices between what powerful civilians thought should be his career track, and the very different career track he would have chosen himself. He came to fear that accepting these civilian posts, no matter how flattering the offer and how important the job, was going to cost him his army career. Again and again he was reassured by his army superiors that this would not be true, that in the end the rewards would even out. The civilians who borrowed him and the senior army officers who assured him that he had better take the job being proffered were, in fact, telling the truth.
In a country that loved wonderful stories, particularly those with a Horatio Alger twist, Powell’s was one of the best and it tended to please almost all political groups. He was the latest and most admirable personification of the American dream. To many conservatives, resentful of what they saw as government-mandated racial change, he defied the stereotypes of how a black man would behave in a high-level, pressurized, predominantly white world, although their acceptance of him had in some cases taken a bit of time. On the day that Powell’s appointment as head of the Joint Chiefs was announced on the front page of the New York Times, his friend Vernon Jordan was at the Manhattan heliport when he ran into a leading industrialist, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. “Vernon, have you seen the paper?” the businessman asked. Jordan said he had not. “Vernon, you know me, and therefore you know better than most people that I’m an equal opportunity man,” the man said. “But chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Shit!”
Powell was by the summer of 1992 an imposing and charismatic figure. His hold over the nonideological center of American life was demonstrable. Those in the center of both political parties eyed him eagerly as a future candidate for national office—even for the vice presidency. He was a Republican, a relatively newly registered one to be sure, a Reagan-era Republican, which meant that he had been underwhelmed by the Carter administration’s positions on defense, especially its unlikely attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran with a daring heliborne raid that turned out to be a predictable disaster. Powell had emerged politically in the eighties as a centrist, a rather conservative man on national security, and a moderate on larger social policy. He viewed the Republicans he knew as more realistic about national security, and tougher-minded as well. He was conservative, but probably more a Bush centrist than a Reagan conservative. He embodied the best of the country’s dreams and possibilities, a Jackie Robinson–like trailblazer working in the military and the national security arena who represented old-fashioned patriotic values and an old-fashioned work ethic. In the early nineties, in the unlikely event he had been able to navigate the tricky shoals standing between any moderate and the Republican presidential nomination, he would probably have been elected to the presidency.
Clinton was aware that Powell, with his exceptional popularity that cut across party lines, might surface as a potential candidate for the presidency four years down the road. Not only was Powell’s record on Vietnam in stark contrast to his own, but Powell would deprive Clinton of the support of many liberals, independents, and, of course, blacks, who had until then backed Clinton because he seemed committed to racial equality. Clinton might speak of racial equality, but Powell represented it. If there was a struggle for a benign political center in American public life, something that Clinton had always sought, he knew that Powell would have clearer title to it than he did. In a contest between two American biographies, being a small-town white boy from Hope was not half bad, but it greatly paled beside being the son of black immigrants from the Bronx who went on to lead the nation’s military. Powell not only emphasized Clinton’s weaknesses, but neutralized his strengths. Clinton, who was always running and scrutinizing the opposition, never took his eye off Powell during his first term.
In a Washington world where most people’s social lives had become narrower in recent years because of the rising partisanship, Powell and his wife, Alma, were an exception. They were well connected with the Republican right and the Congress, but they were the rare regulars from the inner Reagan-Bush circle regularly invited to the New Year’s Eve party thrown by Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn of the Washington Post, who tended to favor the media elite of the city. It was a reminder of how good Powell was in making a variety of personal connections in a Washington where many people were the products of much narrower professional experiences, were suspicious of anyone with a different experience, and had a hard time finding common ground with each other. Powell, like many military men, might not always like the members of the media, but he got along exceptionally well with them at many levels, the stars as well as the grunts. He never saw the media as some conservatives did, as a liberal enemy incarnate, nor as others who were less sophisticated did, as a monolith. He understood the variables, the vulnerabilities, the dangers, and the uses of the media.
Not by chance was his autobiography called My American Journey. The photo on the back showing Powell at about nine was captioned “The life story of a young boy from the Bronx who grew up to live the American dream.” It was a sign of his virtually unique position in American life that, at a time when political and military memoirs were usually bombs on the market, his book was a singular success, and his tour of America, run personally by the head of his publishing house, Harry Evans, seemed more like a presidential or at least a prepresidential political campaign than a book tour. His star quality could be evidenced by book sales alone in a publishing world where sales had become more and more a celebrity rather than a literary index. My American Journey sold 1,359,000 copies, while A World Transformed, a book about the titanic events of the end of the Cold War by George Bush and Brent Scow-croft, sold 49,500.
Like many self-made men, Powell knew his own value. He had been tested again and again in the way few young civilians now coming to power were. He had not only served his country well in Vietnam, he had also gone through the equally difficult post-Vietnam era, when the military was at a low point in its morale and social standing. He had been among the leaders who had brought the army back from those terrible post-Vietnam days. By the time the Clinton people arrived in office, Powell was at the apogee of his power and prestige and was acutely aware of where he stood on the landscape. He had earned his authority in things related to national security, even if the president, in terms of constitutional authority, was more powerful. Powell’s greatest strength—his résumé—was Clinton’s greatest weakness; both of them knew it, and they knew that the Congress and the public at large knew it as well.
Powell knew exactly who he was, what he believed in, and what he represented—the armed forces of the United States of America. He also knew precisely what he wanted to avoid—the careless, poorly thought out, deliberately disingenuous decision-making that had led to the debacle in Vietnam. “In government one of the great undervalued strengths is the power of conviction,” noted Les Gelb, a former top-level bureaucrat himself, columnist for the Times, and eventually head of the Council on Foreign Relations, “and Colin Powell in many critical meetings was a man of powerful convictions—unshakable ones, born of his own experiences, and it made him a very strong figure inside the government.”4 Powell’s feelings about Vietnam and the failure of leadership—both military and civilian—were strong and still emotional, like the anger of a young person toward a willful uncle who has done something both stupid and unethical, squandering the family’s wealth, and blackening its name as well. He hated the idea of sending other people’s sons off to fight in a war so haphazardly planned, with the military decisions tied to covert domestic political considerations. He despised the class distinctions that had determined who had gone to Vietnam and who had not, which he called an “antidemocratic disgrace.” (“I can never forgive a leadership that said in effect: These young men—poorer, less educated, less privileged—are expendable (someone once described them as ‘economic cannon-fodder’) but the rest are too good to risk. I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well placed and so many professional athletes . . . managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units.”5) He hated the lying that many senior officers had participated in, making progress in the war seem greater than it was as a means of selling it politically back home, and thus protecting their own careers.
In waging that war, the top civilians had completely dominated and, in Powell’s view and the view of many of his peers, co-opted the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The generals and admirals had been manipulated by the civilians, most notably Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, played off against each other, and in time bought off with parochial packages and goodies. Roles, missions, strategy, and troop levels had never been clearly defined. It was, Powell thought, an earlier commitment based on hope rather than reality. Hope that our military technology would work. Hope that the North Vietnamese would choose not to react if we sent combat troops to the South. Hope that the talented, battle-hardened North Vietnamese infantry, which had fought the French with such skill and bravery, would collapse because it was now fighting Americans and it was no longer a colonial war.
The worst thing about the war—so destructive to the military, so costly to the country, and so grievous to many families—Powell thought, was that the Joint Chiefs had become, willingly or not, coconspirators in so many deceptions. He was an extremely prudent man and a gifted writer who used words carefully. What the Joint Chiefs had done, he said, was a “catastrophe of leadership.” They had allowed the president of the United States and his secretary of defense to do something that was truly sinister—to send America to war without forcing its civilian leaders to do it in an honest way. The bill had never been put on the table. “It was outrageous!” he said. For Powell and other officers of his generation, the loss of integrity within the army was as shattering as the failure to fight the war effectively. They had seen the corruption reach down into even the lowest levels. “Many of my generation, the career captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels seasoned in that war, vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not acquiesce in halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support,” he later wrote. “If we could make good on that promise to ourselves, to the civilian leadership, and to the country, then the sacrifices in Vietnam would not have been in vain.”6
As he faced Bill Clinton and his civilian advisers in the arguments over Bosnian intervention in 1993, Colin Powell was a very cautious and conservative man representing a very cautious and conservative institution. He was unquestionably the single most influential member of Clinton’s top national security team, whose other members were new to their jobs and not especially confident of their abilities. Moreover, they all served a new and untested president who had rather carelessly made a number of commitments during the campaign that he might not be able to fulfill. Eighteen years after the last Americans had left Saigon, two strong forces were about to meet in the White House with very different attitudes about the uses of American power.