by Bob Woodward
Although he wanted Powell back in the Army, Vuono urged him to do what would make him and his wife, Alma, happy. If Powell wanted to come back, there would be a place for him. Vuono intentionally had kept a slot open: promotion to a fourth star to head the Forces Command. This was the nation’s strategic reserve of some 1 million land forces—most in the National Guard and Reserves.
While it was not a glamorous assignment, it would make Powell one of the ten commanders-in-chief—CINCs, pronounced “sinks”—of U.S. military forces and warfighting units worldwide. It was an important ticket to punch, and it would put him in line to succeed Vuono as Army chief.
“Carl,” Powell said, “if I decide to come, I’ll do what you want.”
Powell considered himself a soldier first. Beginning in 1958, he had spent his first 14 years as a garden-variety infantry officer, without a West Point ring or any other reason to think he was on a fast track. As a young officer, he wasn’t particularly dedicated to the Army. His plan was to stick it out for 20 years so he could retire with a 50 percent pension.
His introduction to the upper reaches of government came in 1972. That year, Lieutenant Colonel Powell was chosen for the prestigious White House Fellows program, which gives young businessmen, lawyers, military officers and other professionals a taste of the federal executive branch for one year. In 1977 he went to the Pentagon as military assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
His four years in that job, and then the three with Weinberger, were a chance to see the top military leadership up close. He had a notion that a new, more worldly brand of senior officer could be more useful to the Secretary and the President. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top uniformed echelon, were too insulated from the outside world, not sufficiently able or inclined to assess the political aspects of defense decisions. They also tended to be inept at public relations. Yet politics and public relations were the arenas in which the Secretary lived, where he flourished or failed.
Powell decided he had better stay in the Army. It was home, and the prospect of four stars held a certain mystique.
“I couldn’t be happier,” Vuono said when he heard the news. “We’ll send you to Forces Command.”
Powell knew he was in for a different kind of life down in Atlanta, where Forces Command had its headquarters. As security adviser, he’d felt a constant sense of risk. Risk in every word, every recommendation, every choice, every action. President Reagan had delegated an enormous part of his responsibility to his staff. Powell found that if he told Reagan he didn’t have to worry about something, the President would soon be happily gazing out the window into the Rose Garden. It was in Powell’s hands. Although Powell was on two medications for high blood pressure, he had enjoyed that risky, stressful existence.
He shared his decision with Reagan’s chief of staff, Kenneth Duberstein, a street-smart pol from Brooklyn. Powell said he was going to be a soldier again. It was his life. “Some day I’d like to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he confided. There was also a chance he could become Army chief, he said, but his political and policy experience in Weinberger’s office and the White House probably made him more qualified to be Chairman.
Duberstein made sure the fourth-star promotion, necessary before Powell could take over Forces Command, went through without delay.
Powell went to see Bush, thanked him for the offers, and said he wanted to move on. “Out with the old and in with the new,” Powell said. He knew the rules. The new President picked his own team.
The President-elect accepted his decision without argument.
Powell also told Reagan that he planned to become commander-in-chief of Forces Command.
“That is a promotion, isn’t it?” Reagan asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, okay.”
• • •
Retired Air Force Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft received a call on November 23, 1988, the day before Thanksgiving, from his close friend R. James Woolsey, Jr., a lawyer and former Undersecretary of the Navy. Woolsey had seen a recent editorial in The New York Times suggesting that Bush select Scowcroft for Secretary of Defense.
“It isn’t going to happen,” Scowcroft said.
Within an hour, Woolsey heard on the radio that Bush had just made the surprise announcement that Scowcroft would be his national security adviser, replacing Powell.
Woolsey laughed to himself. Scowcroft was certainly discreet, perhaps to a fault. Although they had worked together over the years on top-secret government studies, in addition to numerous articles and proposals on arms control and defense policy, Scowcroft wasn’t even going to hint to Woolsey a secret the President-elect wanted kept.
A model of the trustworthy, self-effacing staffer, Brent Scowcroft had been a low-profile presence in top national security circles for two decades. He’d started as Henry Kissinger’s deputy national security adviser, moved up to the security adviser’s post under President Ford (when Bush was CIA director) and then worked on various presidential commissions and as a highly paid international consultant at Kissinger Associates. He tended to stay in the background, as a mirror and implementor of the President’s views.
A head shorter than Bush, balding and slight, the 63-year-old Scowcroft was a Mormon who avoided the Washington social scene, and had a priestlike dedication to his work. It was his one interest. Scowcroft’s idea of recreation was attending a seminar on arms control, a subject he loved in all its obscure detail. He had once spent an hour and a half refereeing a debate over a single phrase proposed for a blue-ribbon commission report on strategic missiles. It was at such times, arguing policy issues he cared about—his voice rising almost to a screech and his arms waving—that he showed there was a passion beneath the pale exterior.
Scowcroft’s confidants knew that in recent years there was one subject that had made him emotional. Although he’d had many close ties to the Reagan administration, in private he’d been a scathing critic of its foreign and military policy. He thought that under Reagan the United States had first taken a naive and foolish hard-line approach to the Soviet Union, and then had turned around and rushed blindly into Mikhail Gorbachev’s arms.
He’d seen no coherent administration policy on nuclear deterrence, and had called Reagan’s 1986 Reykjavik proposal to eliminate all ballistic missiles “insane.” To Scowcroft, the administration’s vision of a shield in space to protect the United States against nuclear missile attack, the Strategic Defense Initiative, was a wild fantasy. He believed the Reagan national security team had failed to compensate for their boss’s inadequacy and romanticism in the realm of foreign affairs.
Since Scowcroft’s differences with the Reagan line were well known, his return to the White House as national security adviser was a clear signal that Bush intended to cut a new path in defense and foreign policy.
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2
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ON THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 7, 1988, at the United Nations in New York City, Mikhail Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would make unilateral military cuts of 500,000 troops and 10,000 tanks. The announcement was a departure, in both tone and substance, from the traditional Soviet way of doing business. Previously, Soviet leaders would not have considered giving up any of their military might without a reciprocal cut by the United States. But now, faced with serious internal economic pressure at home as he sought to reform the Soviet Union, Gorbachev was willing to make this grand gesture to reinforce his image as a statesman and peacemaker.
Gorbachev’s staff people had pushed hard for a meeting with President Reagan after the speech, and Colin Powell, finishing out his last few months as Reagan’s national security adviser, personally handled the request. Powell told the Soviets the United States had thought it was finished meeting with Gorbachev for the year. There were to be no tricks or surprises, Powell warned. The Soviets promised they were not playing games nor looking for trouble. After coordinating with the White House East Wing (meaning Na
ncy Reagan), and with Bush’s people, Powell told the Soviets that the meeting had been approved. But he reminded them that it was a meeting with President Reagan and Vice President Bush. The Vice President would stay in the background. The two sides decided on an informal lunch at Governor’s Island in New York Harbor.
As Reagan was greeting Gorbachev, Bush walked out of the 27-room Georgian mansion where the leaders were going to eat and strolled uneasily over to them. When Gorbachev spotted the President-elect, he brightened visibly and took Bush’s right hand in both of his.
Bush’s advisers had warned him to act skeptical, tough, even remote with the Soviet leader. Gorbachev, they said, might try to pick his pocket. High-level negotiations with the Soviets required preparation, and caution.
Before the lunch meeting began, Reagan and Gorbachev went into a small room to pose for press photos. Powell was standing with some of his Soviet counterparts when Alexander “Sasha” Bessmertnykh, the Soviet first deputy foreign minister and an expert on the United States, came up to him.
“Colin, how are you?” he asked. “Congratulations on your promotion.”
Powell’s elevation to four stars had come through that day.
“Sasha, that’s very kind of you. I’m surprised you learned about it so quickly. Yuri [Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador to the U.S.] must be reporting more quickly than he usually does, or maybe you’re using the new fax machine you guys put in.”
“No,” Bessmertnykh said, laughing, “I saw it on CNN.”
“Come on,” Powell replied, “you only had CNN during the [Moscow] summit in May. . . . You had it in all the hotels.”
“No, we have it there permanently. I have it in my office and I watch it all day long.”
Powell said he did too, joking that the two countries could save a lot on communications and intelligence just by relying on CNN.
Every Friday, Bessmertnykh continued, a week’s worth of The Washington Post and The New York Times was delivered to his office. “I take them all home and I read them all weekend, because reports that we get from our intelligence services simply don’t give me enough insight into America and into what Americans are about and what moves your country. So I have to use things like CNN and reading your newspapers.”
As Powell and Bessmertnykh chatted, Anatoly Dobrynin, the recently replaced, longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States, walked up and listened closely. He joked that he wanted to know how to get CNN in Moscow.
• • •
At the lunch meeting, the United States was represented by six men—Reagan, Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, Powell, Ken Duberstein and Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. From his side of the table, where six Soviets sat, Gorbachev opened with a ten-minute monologue about the problems he was having with his radical programs of economic restructuring and political openness—the famous perestroika and glasnost. The Soviet bureaucracy was fighting him at every turn, he said.
Reagan responded that bureaucracies were the same throughout the world. He was sympathetic to Gorbachev’s complaint.
Gorbachev remarked that there were those in the United States who were fearful of his reform movement.
Reagan replied that a recent White House poll had showed that 85 percent in the United States supported the new, positive U.S.-Soviet relationship.
“I’m pleased to hear that,” said Gorbachev. The relationship could not sustain itself in an atmosphere of suspicion. “The name of the game is continuity,” he said, reaching out for some assurance from Bush. The Vice President appeared unmoved.
Gorbachev brought up horses, a subject that always engaged Reagan, and they had a lively conversation.
Bush finally chimed in. “What assurance can you give me that I can pass to American businessmen who want to invest in the Soviet Union that perestroika and glasnost will succeed?”
Gorbachev’s eyes grew steely as he listened to the translation. “Not even Jesus Christ knows the answer to that question!” he replied.
Duberstein was astonished at the brush-off. Gorbachev had seemed to dismiss not only the President-elect’s question but Bush himself.
Powell thought Bush’s question was curious, and in a way naive. It was as if Bush was asking for Gorbachev’s assurance that the Soviet Union was safe for American capitalism, or the businesses of large Republican campaign contributors.
Bush was mostly silent for the rest of the long lunch, assuming a remote, you’re-not-going-to-pick-my-pocket stance. Everyone was aware that the Gorbachev-Bush relationship was the most important one in the room, and it seemed to be going nowhere.
Finally, Gorbachev turned to Bush. “Let me take this opportunity to tell you something,” the Soviet leader said. “Your staff may have told you that what I’m doing is all a trick. It’s not. I’m playing real politics. I have a revolution going that I announced in 1986. Now, in 1988, the Soviet people don’t like it. Don’t misread me, Mr. Vice President, I have to play real politics.”
Powell took note. He often told his staff not to hyperventilate at every Soviet statement or speech coming out of Moscow. But this one had the ring of truth. Gorbachev and the Soviet system had no choice—the reality of their revolution was that there were no alternatives. The statement was so unguarded. Powell had heard similar expressions from the Soviet leader before, but never one given with such conviction, such finality. It struck him as sincere and enormously accurate. After so many years, the Cold War was foundering on real politics.
After two and a half hours, Reagan lifted a glass of Chardonnay and said to Gorbachev, “I’d like to raise a toast to what we have accomplished, what we together have accomplished and what you and the Vice President after January twentieth will accomplish together.”
Gorbachev stood, raised his glass, lowered it, turned to Bush and said, “This is our first agreement.”
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3
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IN A PRESS CONFERENCE ON the morning of december 16, Bush announced his selection of John Tower, the former Texas senator, as his nominee to be Secretary of Defense.
Craig Fuller, Bush’s vice presidential chief of staff, watched in dismay. Along with Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, a longtime Bush friend, and Bush pollster Robert Teeter, he had run an unsuccessful behind-the-scenes campaign to derail the Tower nomination. Fuller and Teeter were worried about Tower’s reputation as a heavy drinker and womanizer. Brady disliked Tower personally.
Despite regular secret strategy breakfasts at the Treasury Department Building, and meetings they had set up for Bush with other possible candidates, the three had failed to come up with a consensus alternative.
During one discussion with Fuller about possible candidates, Bush had said that Tower had been there “in good times and bad times.” He had helped Bush in his losing 1964 and 1970 Senate races. He had come to Houston in 1968 when Congressman Bush was in reelection trouble because of a vote for fair-housing legislation, and had defended Bush to important conservatives. Tower had been one of the first senior Republicans to come out for Bush’s 1988 presidential bid, and had been a tireless campaign soldier, making appearances, giving speeches, advising on defense.
Fuller knew loyalty was a core value for Bush, and there was no budging him.
A preliminary FBI investigation had discounted many of the allegations swirling around Tower. Though the investigation was not complete, Bush told Fuller, “I know there are some problems, but I can get him confirmed.”
Fuller wasn’t surprised when Bush, often given to impulsive decisions, jumped out on Tower before all the information was in. Bush’s management style frustrated Fuller. As Vice President, Bush had been secretive, never sharing everything with one person, not even his chief of staff. Like an intelligence agent, Bush would “compartment” information, dividing it into pieces so that only he himself knew the whole. Sometimes he tested the system. He would act on some matter without telling his chief of staff, then wait to see how long it took to reach Fuller.
“I’m glad that got to you,” Bush would say when Fuller finally found out, sometimes more than six hours after the fact. Fuller often wondered what developments he might have missed entirely.
By early February 1989, just a few weeks into the Bush administration, the Tower nomination was in serious trouble. Rumors and allegations about Tower’s drinking habits and personal life were popping up everywhere. A former Tower aide who was now a congressman, Representative Larry Combest, recently had come forward to Senator Sam Nunn’s Armed Services Committee, which was preparing to vote on the nominee in two weeks, with stories about alcohol abuse by Tower during his Senate years.
On Tuesday, February 7, C. Boyden Gray, Bush’s White House legal counsel, ran into the President’s personnel chief, Chase Untermeyer, in a White House men’s room. Gray, who had been monitoring the troubled nomination for Bush, had just learned of a new allegation linking Tower to defense contracting corruption.
“Remember you heard it here first,” Gray told Untermeyer. “Start looking for a new defense secretary. He can’t bleed for another two weeks.”
At about 11 p.m. that night, Tower called Gray at home. “I don’t think the President should have to put up with this for two weeks,” Tower said. “I think I’m going to withdraw.”
“Don’t do anything more until you hear from someone,” Gray said.
Tower promised to wait until Bush had considered his offer.
Early the next morning Gray went to see Bush to report what Tower had said.
“You look relaxed about this and dapper,” Bush said.
Gray said he had in fact not slept very well. His recommendation, he said, was that Bush ought to consider pulling the plug on the nomination.