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 Colin
Powell
- Insider with star power
Gen.
Colin L. Powell has been lionized in stamps, baseball
cards, bronze medals, audiotapes and more than a dozen
biographies for children and adults.
But of all the icons venerating the retired four-star
general over the years, the one than stands out is the
limited-edition, G. I. Joe action figure that the toy
maker Hasbro produced two years ago.
The doll's face is fiercer, its shoulders broader, its
waist slimmer and its complexion fairer than the real-
life model. But it came dressed in a true-to-scale uniform
decorated with ribbons, insignias and stars and included a
press release that lauded General Powell as "a
real-life hero" and an "inspiration" to the
children of America.
Now General Powell will get the chance to channel some
of that star power to a Bush presidency. As the nominee
for secretary of state — the first black who will hold
the post — he brings 35 years of military service with
him, including four years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff both for the Bush and the Clinton
administrations.
General Powell brings savvy negotiating skills honed as
deputy national security adviser and then as national
security adviser in the Reagan administration, where he
was a key player at the summit meetings that brought the
United States and the former Soviet Union closer.
He is the ultimate insider, a policy maker's general,
touted as the model of the modern Army general in an era
when diplomatic finesse seemed as important as combat
experience. Indeed, except for four command assignments,
none more than 15 months, General Powell served in the
power corridors of Washington from 1969 until he retired
in 1993.
General Powell was offered the job of secretary of
state once before, in 1994, by President Clinton, when
Warren Christopher was thinking of leaving. But the
general said no, writing in his autobiography that when
Mr. Clinton summoned him to the White House, he said he
and his wife, Alma, wanted a "longer break from
public life." He added, "Left unspoken were my
reservations about the amorphous way the administration
handled foreign policy."
In private life, General Powell has made millions from
his speeches (about $75,000 an appearance) and his 1995
autobiography, "My American Journey," which
earned him a $6 million advance and was a runaway best
seller. Under an arrangement with his agent, he has barred
most video or audio taping of his speeches, which means
there is no definitive public record of his views since he
left government service.
In 1995, General Powell flirted with the idea of
running for president, and his deliberations tantalized
voters and for a time froze the Republican nomination. At
about the same time, he embarked on a successful book tour
for his autobiography. But his wife said that she would
worry about her husband's safety if he became a candidate,
and he announced that he would not run in 1996 because the
campaign would require "a calling that I do not yet
hear."
Two years later, he became founder and chairman of
America's Promise: The Alliance for Youth, an organization
that works with corporations, charities and communities to
encourage volunteerism to help disadvantaged youth. (The
organization, which has claimed to have mobilized millions
of volunteers and contributed $300 million to programs
helping 10 million children, has been criticized by some
experts on volunteerism for inflating its results.)
"He is," wrote the historian Ronald Steel,
"as Walter Lippmann wrote about Ike before he won the
Republican nomination in 1952, `not a real figure in our
public life, but a kind of dream boy embodying all the
unsatisfied wishes of all the people who are discontented
with things as they are.' "
The son of immigrants from Jamaica, Colin Luther Powell
was born on April 5, 1937, in Harlem, and reared in a
racially and ethnically integrated neighborhood in the
South Bronx. His father was a gardener and a building
superintendent, and a stock boy, shipping clerk and
foreman in Manhattan's garment district; his mother was a
seamstress.
He earned a bachelor's degree in geology from the City
University of New York, where he joined the Reserve
Officer Training Corps program. He was commissioned as a
second lieutenant and was sent to Fort Benning, Ga., in
1958. There, he found a career in the Army, probably the
most integrated institution in American life.
He met his wife, Alma Vivian Johnson, on a blind date
in 1961. They were married less than a year later.
"She came from a fine family, got along with my
circle of friends and was even a great cook," he
wrote about her in his memoirs. They have three grown
children, Michael, Linda and Anne, and two grandchildren.
Less than four years after his first commission,
General Powell was on his way to Vietnam. Although he
wrote in his memoirs that he knew the Vietnam War was
pointless, he completed two tours of combat duty. Wounded
slightly in combat, once by stepping on punji stick, once
in a helicopter crash, he was awarded the Purple Heart. He
also holds the Defense Distinguished Service Medal with
oak leaf cluster, the military's highest noncombat
decoration, and two Presidential Medals of Freedom.
After Vietnam, the Army sent him to George Washington
University, in 1969, to earn a master's degree in business
administration. When only a major, he was catapulted into
the political arena in 1972 with membership into an elite
club: the one-year White House fellowship program, working
in the Office of Management and Budget studying the
structure of government. After tours of duty in the field,
including command of an infantry battalion in South Korea,
he spent four years in the Pentagon under President Jimmy
Carter, followed by a year as a senior aide in the Energy
Department.
In 1983 he became military assistant to Secretary of
Defense Caspar W. Weinberger. In that job, General Powell
issued the secret order approved by President Ronald
Reagan to transfer 4,000 antitank missiles from the Army
to the Central Intelligence Agency for transshipment to
Iran to help free American hostages in Lebanon in
violation of the administration's stated weapons embargo
of Iran. (Despite the uproar that ensued, it was
determined that General Powell did nothing illegal.)
After three years, he returned to soldiering, when he
commanded the Army's Fifth Corps in Western Europe. But
the lure of Washington was too strong, and in 1986 he was
drawn back to the White House as deputy national security
adviser, becoming national security adviser the following
year. Before President Reagan left office he awarded
General Powell his fourth star, assigning him to head the
Forces Command, overseeing all troops in the continental
United States.
As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Bush
administration (the youngest ever), General Powell is best
known by the American public for wielding a mean baton at
the televised war briefings from the Pentagon as he
oversaw the war that forced President Saddam Hussein of
Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Criticized afterward as a
"reluctant warrior" for ending the war without
destroying all of Iraq's elite Republican Guards and
removing Mr. Hussein from power, he wrote in his memoirs:
"A reluctant warrior? Guilty. War is a deadly game
and I do not believe in spending the lives of Americans
lightly."
General Powell also opposed Mr. Clinton's pledge, made
in the 1992 campaign, to end the ban on gays in the
military. The unwieldy "don't ask, don't tell"
policy was the result.
Since his retirement, he has made no secret of his
disdain for the centralized decision-making process in
Washington. "I don't waste time in Washington,"
he said in an interview during this year's campaign
General Powell has not spent nearly as much time with
Mr. Bush as has Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's choice as
national security adviser, or Dick Cheney, the vice
president- elect. How the general's strongly held views
will fit with those of Mr. Bush and others on his team
will have to unfold along the way.
During the campaign, for example, Mr. Bush repeatedly
used the phrase "rogue state" to refer to North
Korea, Iran and Iraq.
"I detest the term `rogue state,' " General
Powell said in the interview during the campaign. "I
don't know what you gain throwing a lot of different
countries into a pot and calling them rogue states. They
are all so different."
And while Mr. Bush has said the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty should be scrapped if the Russians refused to make
changes acceptable to the United States, General Powell
has been more cautious, saying: "I think probably it
should be modified. But it's going to scare the bejesus
out of a lot of our friends."
General Powell has also split with Mr. Bush on the
issue of affirmative action. Mr. Bush has opposed policies
that have given preferences to minorities; General Powell
has fiercely criticized the Republican Party for
condemning affirmative action. "Some in our party
miss no opportunity to roundly and loudly condemn
affirmative action that helped a few thousand kids get an
education, but you hardly hear a whimper when it's
affirmative action for lobbyists who load our federal tax
code with preferences for special interests," he said
at the Republican convention.
There is also the question of whether the general, even
wearing diplomatic pinstripes, might outshine the
commander in chief. In serving in the administration of
George Herbert Walker Bush, General Powell served a
president who was a decorated combat pilot in World War
II.
In serving in a George Walker Bush administration,
General Powell will serve a president who avoided service
in Vietnam by joining the Texas Air National Guard. And
yet General Powell, in his memoirs, condemned as "an
anti-democratic disgrace" the way America's political
leaders chose who would and who would not serve in
Vietnam.
He wrote: "I am angry that so many of the sons of
the powerful and well-placed" managed "to
wrangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units."
"Of the many tragedies of Vietnam," he
continued, "this raw class discrimination strikes me
a the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are
created equal and owe equal allegiance to their
country."
Courtesy: NY Times
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