by Colin Powell
I probably learned as much from failures and my naysayers as from my supporting rabbis. Failure comes with experience.
I recall a few years ago speaking at an elite and very highly structured Japanese high school. The kids were from good families and mostly very bright. After my remarks, designated kids from the honor roll lined up to ask me questions typed out on cards and fully vetted by their teachers.
After the first couple of questions, I turned away from the line and invited questions from anyone in the audience, with my eyes particularly focused on the back rows, where I used to try to sit.
One girl about thirteen years old raised her hand, and I called on her. “Are you ever afraid?” she asked. “I am afraid every day,” she continued. “I am afraid to fail.” How brave she was to ask that question in public in a very structured Japanese high school.
Yes, I told her, I’m afraid of something every day, and I fail at something every day. Fear and failure are always present. Accept them as part of life and learn how to manage these realities. Be scared, but keep going. Being scared is usually transient. It will pass. If you fail, fix the causes and keep going.
The room was deadly silent. Every one of the young high achievers had the same question before their mind, even if they were too scared to put voice to it.
Failure is often solitary. Not so success. I am reminded of Michael Phelps, the swimmer who won a record eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. His physical ability and determination in the loneliness of a swimming lane are legendary. Yet he never fails to give credit to his parents, his coaches, his trainer, his team members, and all the others who helped him overcome attention deficit disorder and many other obstacles.
As successes come your way, remember that you didn’t do it alone. It is always we.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Hot Dogs
One of my favorite things to do is simply to walk along Park Avenue or Fifth Avenue in my hometown, New York, on a beautiful spring or fall afternoon. I love looking up at the classic buildings and churches and window gazing at the elite shops. Watching all the people go by is deeply moving; the whole world is represented, proving once again that we are a nation of nations.
Seeing all the varieties of people reminds me of the story of the Japanese billionaire who was asked by a Japanese TV interviewer which was his favorite city as he traveled around the world tending to his conglomerates. “New York,” he said immediately.
“Why New York?” the interviewer asked him. “Why not Rome, Paris, London?”
“Because,” he said, “New York is the only city in the world, where, when I walk down the street, people come up to me and ask for directions.”
True, the whole world is there, and in so many other American cities.
On my walk, I always stop at the corner of a numbered cross street, where a Sabrett hot dog cart manned by an immigrant will always be stationed. I love those hot dogs, affectionately known to New Yorkers as “dirty water dogs” because they sit in a pot of near-boiling water.
I always must have one of them, adorned with mustard and that unique red onion relish I’ve only found in New York. It takes me back to my youth, when they only cost ten cents.
I even found time for it when I was Secretary of State. I would come out of my suite at the Waldorf-Astoria and stroll north up Park Avenue or perhaps over on Fifth Avenue. In those days I was surrounded by bodyguards, and there were usually a couple of New York City police cruisers rolling alongside to keep me from being whacked as I walked.
With my entourage I would walk up to the nearest hot dog peddler and order my hot dog. One poor guy, put off by the attention and all the police and guards, immediately stopped preparing my hot dog, thrust his hands up, and shouted, “I’ve got a green card, I’ve got a green card!” I assured him all was well and this was all about me, not him.
I still have to have a hot dog on my walk, but all the bodyguards and police cars are gone, as is the Waldorf suite. Shortly after leaving State, I went up to a hot dog stand on Fifth Avenue and ordered my standard fare. As the attendant was finishing up my hot dog, a look of recognition came across his face, but he struggled to pull up my name. “I know you,” he said. “I see you on television.” Then, as he handed me the hot dog, it hit him. “Ah, yes, of course, you’re General Powell.” I handed him the money, but he refused to take it. “No, General, no, you don’t owe me anything. I’ve been paid. America has paid me. I will never forget where I came from, but now I am here, I am an American. I’ve been given a new life, and so have my children. Thank you, please enjoy the hot dog.”
I thanked him and continued up the avenue, feeling a warm glow as the recognition came over me once again. What a country . . . still the same country that gave my immigrant parents that open door and welcome ninety years ago. We must never forget that has been our past; it is certainly our present and future.
There’s a cute addition to this story. In 2009, I endorsed Mayor Mike Bloomberg for his third term as mayor of New York. His staff was looking for a photo op that would publicize the endorsement. They thought that a photo of the two of us at a restaurant would be a good idea. I suggested that a street corner purchase of hot dogs would be more New Yorkish and show the mayor in a more humble, “with the people” environment. They loved the idea, and the photo shoot was set up.
It was a cold morning, but I didn’t have a coat on as I approached Mike on the corner. He was wearing an overcoat. Cameras started clicking and reporters and campaign staff were hovering. We walked up to the counter and I ordered two hot dogs. Mike interrupted and said to the guy, “I’ll have my bun toasted.” Ho, boy, this was not exactly a man-of-the-people request.
Nevertheless, it worked, and the photo was on page one, above the fold, of the New York Times the next morning.
I have even brought my love of hot dogs to the highest levels of diplomacy.
In April 2002, when he was still the vice president of the People’s Republic of China, Hu Jintao visited Washington. While there, he was careful to keep his remarks very close to his government’s positions. So, as we say in Washington, we pretty much exchanged standard official talking points.
One evening, I hosted the vice president at a State Department dinner where I wanted to do more than exchange position statements. Hu had just come from a visit to New York. I asked him about the visit. There were UN and other formal meetings, he told me, but not much else.
I told him he had visited New York, but hadn’t seen it. The next time he visited I wanted to be his host. We would minimize the official events, and we and our wives would go to Broadway shows, walk along Forty-Second Street, and visit a variety of neighborhoods, to include Chinatown.
Above all, I told him, I wanted to buy him a hot dog from an immigrant peddler on a street corner. It took a while for the translator to figure it all out, but once he did, Hu broke into a smile. He thanked me and he told me he looked forward to it.
In November 2002, Hu became the president of the People’s Republic of China. I have seen him several times over the intervening years, including a formal dinner in Washington after my retirement. He always spots me and has his aides escort me over to him. We shake hands and hug briefly. His first words, always in American English with a big smile, are “When do we get hot dogs?”
Hot dog diplomacy may not be earth-moving, but it allows two people to develop a human relationship that will help sustain an official relationship in good times and bad.
And remember, our country’s opening to China began with a Ping-Pong match. I’m better at hot dogs.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The Gift of a Good Start
During my time as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I often met senior foreign military leaders during my travels. Sometime during our initial meetings, I came to expect this question to come up: “When did you graduate from West Point?” Apparently they were still of the view that a West Point commission was the only way to get to the top.
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“I didn’t go to West Point,” I replied, “as much as that would have been an honor.”
“Well, did you attend the Citadel, the Virginia Military Institute, or Texas A&M?” they would then ask, referring to very well-known officer-producing institutions.
“No,” I answered. “When I was entering college, a black person couldn’t attend those colleges.”
An embarrassed cough usually followed, and then came the next question: “Oh, well, where did you go?”
The answer was the City College of New York, in Harlem, not far from where I was born. I was commissioned through CCNY’s ROTC program—the first ROTC graduate, the first black, and the youngest ever to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
They immediately became curious. They had never heard of CCNY.
“It’s a great school,” I told them, “open to everyone.” I’d usually go on to explain that CCNY was founded in 1847 and was then called the Free Academy. It was the first fully open, free college in America—a daring innovation in those days, as its president, a West Pointer, Dr. Horace Webster, declared on opening day in 1849:
“The experiment is to be tried, whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated, and whether an institution of the highest grade, can be successfully controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few.”
The experiment succeeded. CCNY became a college of the first rank, but since it was free and drew from the immigrant and lower-income populations, it became known as the “Harvard of the Poor.”
Time passes and I show up on campus in February 1954. I’m not sure how I got in. I was in no way an academic star. My high school grades were below the CCNY’s admission standards. Was I given a preference? I don’t know.
Earlier, when I was a teen looking at high schools, like most New York City kids I had dreamed of getting into the Bronx High School of Science, then the most prestigious high school in New York. (The story goes that Bronx Science has produced more Nobel Prize winners than France.) I didn’t have a prayer.
Forty years later, I came across a devastating note from my junior high school guidance counselor: “Young Powell wants to attend the Bronx High School of Science. We recommend against it.”
So, I went to Morris High School, where they had to let you in. I wasn’t a bad student there, nor was I a great one, but I graduated and went on to CCNY.
At CCNY I was initially an engineering major, but quickly dropped it. Later I settled on geology, but by then I had discovered ROTC. I fell in love with ROTC, and with the Army.
After four-and-a-half no-cost, undistinguished academic years, the CCNY administration took pity on me and allowed my ROTC A grades to remain in my overall average. This brought my average up to a smidgen above 2.0, high enough to qualify for graduation. To the great relief of the faculty, I was passed off to the U.S. Army.
Nearly sixty years later, I am considered one of CCNY’s greatest sons. I have received almost every award the school can hand out; an institute at CCNY has been named after me, the Colin L. Powell Center for Leadership and Service; and I have been titled a Founder and Distinguished Visiting Professor. Most of my professors have to be spinning in their graves over all that.
My city believed that kids like me deserved a shot at the top. The people of New York City were willing to be taxed to educate the “whole people”—poor kids like me with immigrant parents, Jews who couldn’t get into other schools because they were Jews, young adults with jobs who could only go to night school (it might take them seven years to finish), kids who lived at home and came in every morning by subway or bus. Education like the one I got at CCNY was how the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free were integrated into America’s social and economic life. Education was—and still is—the Golden Door.
Though I only walked away with a diploma by the skin of my teeth, I did come out of college with a wonderful liberal arts education. I found in the years to come that I was able to perform well alongside my West Point, Citadel, VMI, and A&M buddies . . . as well as my buddies from other colleges and universities all over the country. We were all a band of brothers.
When I left the State Department in January 2005, time opened up for me to visit CCNY and see what the Powell Center had been doing since its founding eight years earlier. I sat in the college president’s conference room and listened to each of about a dozen Powell Fellows tell me about themselves, what they were studying, and what they wanted to do with their lives. They were mostly minority, mostly immigrant, mostly first in their families to go to college, and mostly from low-income families. Many of them worked. But their eyes were bright, they were excited, they were hungry to do well. They had big ambitions, hopes, and dreams, and were working hard to succeed. Their words deeply moved me. They were just like I was more than fifty years earlier. CCNY was still the Harlem Harvard preparing another generation of public school winners. I told them how proud they made me and how I would be spending a lot of time at the Center.
In the years since that meeting, our programs have expanded enormously, with a focus on leadership training for these future leaders and on service learning so they could take their academic work into the community to help others. We changed the Center’s name—originally the Center for Policy Studies—to the Center for Leadership and Service. The Center rapidly outgrew its two-room corner office. I hope that soon a Powell Center building will rise on the campus. It will not only house the Center, but also become a centerpiece for the entire campus and a gathering place for the people of central Harlem.
I’m proud that the Center has been named after me, but I’m no less proud that some seven new elementary and middle schools have also been named after me. I have adopted a school in Washington, D.C., and partnered it with the parishioners of my church in suburban Virginia. These mean more to me than any medal I have received. And additionally, as part of my passion for youth development, I served on the boards of trustees of Howard University and the United Negro College Fund and on the board of governors of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.
I am frequently asked why youth programs and education have become a priority in my life. My answer is very simple: I want every kid to get the chance I had. No, West Point wasn’t in the cards for me, but it showed me the standard I needed to attain. Morris High School and CCNY gave me the means to reach those standards.
I’ve learned a simple and obvious truth from my own education experience: We have to give every kid in America the access to public education that I received. We need to place public education at the top of our priorities and the center of our national life.
Education has become my family’s great crusade. In 1997, at the request of President Clinton and our other living former presidents, I founded the America’s Promise Alliance to mobilize the country to give all our kids the basic skills and support they need to succeed in school and in life. Alma is now the chair of the Alliance, and our son Michael is on its board of directors.
America’s Promise focuses on five basic promises we must make and deliver to our children. We promise them a responsible, caring loving adult in their lives to guide them along the right path. Where the family is unable to do that, we need to provide mentors. We promise them safe places in which to learn and grow, protected from the negative influences encountered in too many of our communities. We promise to try to provide every child with a healthy start and access to continuing health care. We promise our kids a good education with marketable skills. Finally, we promise them an opportunity to serve others so that they grow with the virtue of service embedded in their hearts. We have created a powerful alliance of partnerships with schools, nonprofit youth organizations, governments, and businesses to make sure we once again become a nation of graduates, not dropouts. We need to do this for the sake of the kids, for the sake of the future of the country we all love, and for the sake of our noblest ideals.
I love telling the story of my rocky education ca
reer to youngsters. My point is, it isn’t where you start in life that counts, it is where you end up. So, believe in yourself, work hard, study hard, be your own role model, believe that anything is possible, and always do your best. Remember that your past is not necessarily your future.
Shortly after I retired from the Army in 1993, I was in West Palm Beach, Florida, giving a speech at the Kravis Center to a group of civic leaders raising money for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Palm Beach County. Before the event, I visited the Delray Beach Boys and Girls Club, also in West Palm Beach, a city where many of the less affluent and the workers who serve the affluent live. Maybe a hundred kids were sitting on the floor in front of me, ages ten to eighteen. I talked about growing up in Harlem and the Bronx and about my family and school experience. I tried to give them a Horatio Alger pitch. When I finished, I asked for questions. The little kids asked little-kid questions, like how much do you weigh, have you ever shot anyone, and what is your favorite color. The teens asked about my aspirations and my thoughts about running for president or vice president. Then a ten-year-old member raised his hand and asked, “I want to know if you think you would be where you are today if your parents didn’t care whether you were alive or dead.” He was talking about himself. My initial response was “I don’t know.” Then after a few seconds to gather my thoughts, I said, “You know, if your parents are not there for you, it doesn’t mean the answers aren’t there for you. The answers are here at the Boys and Girls Club and at your church and in your school. You come to this club every day. People are here waiting to help you, to teach you, to make sure you have fun. You can make it if you believe in yourself as much as they believe in you. I am not saying it will be easy, but the answers are there. You have to find them.” I don’t know if I convinced him, but I knew I had to do as much as I could to help him and others like him.