THE RETIRED CHAIRMAN OF THE joint chiefs of staff, Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr., hurried through security at the Pentagon’s River Entrance in the early afternoon of Tuesday, November 27, 1990. He was late for a private 1 p.m. lunch with his successor, Army General Colin L. Powell. As soon as he entered the building, Crowe, who was 65, felt the Pentagon’s familiar, oppressive atmosphere—the colonels, bursting with self-importance, rushing around the E-Ring, the outermost corridor. It was a building dedicated to appearing busy, he thought.
Wheeling to the right, he slipped into the first doorway, Room 2E878, the office of the Chairman. He passed through a reception area and entered the room where he’d worked for four years, until Powell had taken over from him 14 months earlier.
At 53, Powell was the youngest Chairman in history and the first black to hold the post. He usually conveyed a sense of energy and stamina, but today he looked tired.
The general had redecorated. New windows offered a magnificent view across the Potomac River to the national monuments. There was a rich, dark blue carpet, and a comfortable couch and matching chair upholstered in a delicately patterned maroon fabric.
As they sat down at a small antique table set for lunch, Powell joked that he wished he’d never accepted the job. Why didn’t you warn me? he asked.
Crowe knew he didn’t mean it for a minute. It was the classic, transparent lament of a man who loves being at the top.
A steward from the Chairman’s mess in a bright yellow jacket took their orders. Both chose light lunches.
In the previous four months, Powell had overseen the largest American military deployment since Vietnam. Some 230,000 U.S. military men and women had already been sent to the Persian Gulf as part of Operation Desert Shield, following Iraq’s invasion and takeover of Kuwait. Three weeks earlier, President Bush had announced his decision to nearly double the troop strength, to give himself the option of using offensive force to expel Iraq from Kuwait. The decision had set off a fierce debate, and the national consensus that had been supporting Bush now seemed to be unraveling.
“I hear you’re going to testify,” Powell had said when he had called Crowe the previous week to invite him to lunch. Crowe had agreed to give public testimony on the Gulf crisis before the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat.
Although he had supported Bush’s initial deployment of forces to defend Saudi Arabia from Iraq, Nunn had publicly criticized the decision to create an offensive military capability. He was demanding to know how Bush had determined that it was in the vital interest of the United States to liberate Kuwait. What was the hurry? Why not give the unprecedented United Nations economic sanctions that had shut down trade between Iraq and most of the world time to work?
Crowe now recounted how he had been traveling around the country giving speeches, and had heard serious doubts raised about whether the liberation of Kuwait was worth a war. There was great concern in the country about the prospect, duration, objectives and necessity of war.
Yeah, I have detected the same thing, Powell confided.
Crowe’s guard went up. Over the years, he’d watched Powell operate up close, especially in 1988 when Powell was Reagan’s national security adviser. Powell had a tendency to read people and then tell them in a very general and circumspect way what he thought they wanted to hear, Crowe thought.
Despite the President’s statements that he did not want war, Crowe felt that Bush was too anxious to throw hundreds of thousands of troops into combat. One was Crowe’s son Blake, a Marine captain commanding a company of 200 in the Saudi Arabian desert.
“Not everyone is going to like what I’m going to say,” Crowe said. He didn’t want to give a full dress rehearsal of his testimony, so he resisted telling Powell the specifics.
Powell sensed the reserve.
Crowe said he wondered about the apparent rush to go to war. “Everyone is so impatient.” Some seemed to think the U.S. military had trained its soldiers for combat and hostile fire, but not to be patient and wait.
Patience had paid off handsomely in the Cold War. Waiting out the Soviet Union for 40 years would be marked as one of the great victories of all time. Why can’t we think in the long term? he asked. A war in the Middle East—killing thousands of Arabs for whatever noble purpose—would set back the United States in the region for a long time. And that was to say nothing of the Americans who might die. War is messy and uncertain, he said.
Powell neither agreed nor disagreed. He listened, nodded, and seemed to encourage Crowe to go on.
As Crowe spoke, he sensed that Powell was trying to dope him out, to learn something that would give Powell an edge.
Crowe wanted to ask some of his own questions. Where is Cheney on this? he asked. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney was Powell’s immediate boss.
“Beats me,” Powell replied.
What does that mean? Crowe asked, lowering his voice.
“He holds his cards pretty close, as you know,” Powell replied.
Crowe knew that, indeed. His last six months as Chairman had coincided with Cheney’s first six as Secretary. He’d seen how unrevealing Cheney usually was.
Cheney comes back from the White House and tells nothing, Powell said. As a member of the cabinet, Cheney had meetings with Bush apart from the formal National Security Council meetings that Powell attended.
Imagine, Crowe reflected to himself, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff not knowing where the Secretary of Defense stands on the most important military-foreign-policy decision of the day, perhaps the last several decades.
Where are you on the Gulf deployment? Crowe inquired.
“I’ve been for a containment strategy,” Powell replied, “but it hasn’t been selling around here or over there.” He pointed out the window, north across the river.
Crowe knew that gesture well. The orders and the political decisions that guided the life of the Chairman came from there. “Across the river” meant the White House.
To a military man like Crowe, “containment” had a definite meaning—standing firm to resist further advances by an opponent. In this case, it would mean keeping the economic sanctions and the diplomatic pressure on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, without attacking him, with the hope of eventually forcing him to withdraw from Kuwait. It was something very different from President Bush’s decision to double the forces to provide an offensive option.
Powell said he had been trying to keep the administration tamped down, attempting to dampen any enthusiasm for war.
Crowe grasped the problem. He didn’t have the nerve to ask whether Powell had made these arguments explicitly to the President. The Bush administration was presenting itself publicly as one happy team marching in unison. If Powell was being honest, he disagreed with Bush to some degree, and might have a genuine moral dilemma on his hands. The law designated the Chairman as the “principal military adviser” to the President, Secretary of Defense and National Security Council. It directed that when he advised them, the Chairman, “as he considers appropriate,” give “the range of military advice and opinion with respect to that matter.”
As Crowe interpreted the law, the Chairman had an obligation, at least on the major questions, to honestly and fully give the President his views. Had Powell told Bush what he thought about containment? Would Bush tolerate a chairman who had a fundamental disagreement with administration policy? From his nine months in the Bush administration, Crowe knew its obsession with consensus, and with loyalty to the President and his positions. What was Powell’s concept of his duty and job as Chairman?
Crowe believed that the Chairman had to give more than just military advice. For a presidential adviser—even the principal military adviser—to talk only about the military at White House meetings was a sterile exercise. Those who disagreed with him would tell the President: that’s just military advice, but when you factor in the political, diplomatic and economic recommendations, here’s what you ought to do.
No, Powell had to give his overall policy advice. If it was rejected, he could choose to resign, or stay on and accept the decision. There was no way around giving advice direct and undiluted.
In White House meetings during the Reagan and Bush administrations, Crowe had observed a common gimmick that some cabinet officers used as a halfway measure. They would say that a certain option ought to be discussed and examined, in the interest of a full debate. It was a way of putting an idea on the table without getting in trouble. In Crowe’s view, that was a cop-out. A presidential adviser had to be willing to place his personal prestige on the line and say, here’s my overall conclusion. Advice without a bottom line meant little. It was a lot to ask, but that’s what they were paid for, Crowe believed.
He had no notion what Powell had done, and he felt it was neither his place nor the moment to ask him. But God, he wanted to believe that Powell had presented his thoughts fully. He had never felt more empathy for Powell, or put so much hope in him.
“I’ve been thinking,” Crowe said, “it takes two things to be a great president and I ought to tell you because you may be President some day.”
“No, no,” Powell said insistently, dismissing the reference to his political prospects—a subject of endless forecasting in the media.
“Yes, you may and I want to tell you,” Crowe said. “First, to be a great president you have to have a war. All the great presidents have had their wars.”
Laughing, Powell acknowledged the truth of the statement.
“Two, you have to find a war where you are attacked.”
Powell nodded in agreement.
Crowe could see Powell understood him.
When they finished their meal, Crowe thanked Powell for lunch and left. He realized that Powell had not even attempted to persuade him that the current policy of developing an offensive military option was correct. He hadn’t defended the administration position.
Afterwards, Crowe brooded about Powell’s possible dilemma. He recalled that he himself had been Chairman for a year before he had unraveled the secret of the job. When he was convinced he was right, the Chairman had to stand up to the President. Crowe’s chance had come after the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, when Reagan had proposed the elimination of all ballistic missiles. Crowe had been under intense pressure to endorse the plan, but he had gone to a National Security Council meeting and said that he could not go along because the Reagan proposal “would pose high risks to the security of the nation.” Afterwards, the Reagan inner circle had listened to him more. He’d won respect.
The simple truth was that the Chairman could not be a player unless he disagreed at times and fought the White House. It was risky, but sometimes the best choices were the most dangerous. In 1987 he had made an alliance with his Soviet counterpart, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the chief of the Soviet General Staff. Although they were the leaders of the world’s two great military adversaries, Crowe and Akhromeyev had hit it off personally. Both believed it was too easy for politicians to let a misunderstanding throw the superpowers over the brink to nuclear war. That would be suicide, they agreed, and they had to do everything they could to avoid it. They had set up a secret, private communications channel, with the understanding that each was to contact the other if he saw any hostile, dangerous or confusing action by the other side that might lead to war.
Crowe knew it was a dicey move for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to enter into such an agreement without clearing it through the administration. But it had been worth the risk. Two years later the two militaries had signed an agreement that effectively legitimized military communications to avoid war.
• • •
After the lunch, Powell concluded that the Bush administration was probably in for a mild blast from Crowe’s testimony the next day. He generally found Crowe’s musings thoughtful, but often somewhat abstract. Crowe had taken an intellectual’s approach to the chairmanship. He had bequeathed Powell a Joint Staff that operated as a think tank—hesitant, inclined to debate and to churning out papers endlessly. Powell had remade it in his own image, transforming it into an action staff that got things done.
As far as the Gulf operation was concerned, Powell had given up pushing the containment strategy. He had his orders. He wasn’t giving the slightest thought to containment now. The President had decided, unequivocally, to build the offensive option. The Chairman had thrown himself into preparing as effective an offensive force as possible.
Powell recalled vividly the efforts he had made to present all the options in the Persian Gulf—including containment of Iraq—to the President, to make sure the full range of possibilities had been considered. It had been hard.
The previous month, he had written down some notes for himself that laid out the arguments for containment. Several times he had used the term “strangulation,” a more active word than “containment.” It referred to the tight U.N.-mandated blockade of Iraq and all the other allied measures that were putting the squeeze on Saddam. He’d taken these notes and the argument to Cheney—twice. Then to the national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and to Secretary of State James A. Baker III.
One Friday afternoon in early October, Cheney finally had said to Powell, “Why don’t you come over with me and we’ll see what the man thinks about your idea.” Cheney had a private Oval Office meeting scheduled that day with the President. This was time reserved for the key cabinet members—“the big guys,” as Powell called them. Normally he was not included.
Cheney and Powell had gone to the Oval Office to see Bush and Scowcroft. The sun was streaming in. For some reason the atmosphere wasn’t right. There were interruptions; it was the President’s office, the wrong place for this kind of discussion, Powell felt. He preferred the formality of the Situation Room, where Bush could stay focused. The mood in the Oval Office was too relaxed, too convivial—the boys sitting around shooting the shit before the weekend.
It was a general problem with these kinds of meetings, Powell felt. Often they had no beginning, middle or end. They would kick the ball around. Feet would be up on the table, cowboy boots gleaming. Powell was being given his chance, but he felt his presentation was not going as well as it had in his individual talks with Cheney, Baker and Scowcroft. Still, he plunged ahead.
To achieve the policy of forcing Saddam out of Kuwait, Powell told the President, there are two courses of action. One, build up the forces for an offensive option. Two, containment, which would take longer. But either way, the policy success could be achieved.
“There is a case here for the containment or strangulation policy,” he told the President. “If you do not want to make more military investment, here is the alternative.” The force level associated with containment, the Chairman said, was what they would reach by December 1, about 230,000 troops. Saddam would be fully boxed in. Containment would grind him down.
“This is an option that has merit,” he said. “It will work some day. It may take a year, it may take two years, but it will work some day.” He tried to speak as an advocate, adopt the tone of an advocate, support it with his body language. He sat on the edge of his seat, his hands were in the air emphasizing his points, he spoke with conviction. But he did not go so far as to say to the President that containment was his personal recommendation.
In military terms, Powell said he could live with either containment or an offensive option.
The others, Cheney and Scowcroft, had a few questions. No one, including the President, embraced containment. If only one of them had, Powell was prepared to say that he favored it. But no one tried to pin him down. No one asked him for his overall opinion. Not faced with the question, Powell was not sure what his answer would have been if he had to give it without support from one of the others.
“Where do you want to go, Mr. President?” Powell finally asked. “As each week goes by, I am doing more. There are more and more troops going in.”
“I don’t think there’s time politically for that strategy,” Bush said, referring to containment.
Powell took this to mean that the President hadn’t made up his mind completely. He felt that the President had not yet fully shot down containment.
Afterwards, Powell said his conscience was clear. He had presented the military implications of each choice. There was only so much he could do.