My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

The White House Fellows program had been the brainchild of John W. Gardner, while he was serving as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Gardner’s idea was to expose young comers, particularly from the private sector, to the federal government at the highest level. The goal was to give future American leaders a better appreciation of how public policy was shaped and how their government operated. Gardner had sold his idea to President Lyndon Johnson, and by now the White House Fellows program had been under way for seven years. Alumni eventually included CEOs of major corporations, leaders in the professions, outstanding academics, and a healthy sprinkling of military officers. The program proved so effective that some Fellows, having had a taste of Washington, did not want to leave. They ran for Congress or managed to come back through appointments to high-level federal posts.

  The key question on the application asked why we wanted to be White House Fellows. I did not particularly want to be one. Nevertheless, I had given the best answer I could. Because of the controversy over Vietnam, the American military had become alienated from its own people, which struck me as unhealthy in a democracy. Consequently, along with learning how the government worked, I wanted the civilian world to see that military officers did not have horns. How far that gulf had widened was brought home to me in June 1972 when CCNY abolished ROTC. The old drill hall, my home for four years, was torn down. From a high of fourteen hundred students, only eighty-one turned out for ROTC in its final year, as interest in the military hit rock bottom. This collapse saddened me, and not only because of sentimental associations. In a country where civilian control of the military is fundamental, I found it unfortunate to have this source of citizen officers reduced.

  A few weeks after applying for the White House Fellowship, I received word that I had survived the first cut. I was one of 130 applicants invited to be interviewed. I had to start taking this program seriously. Subsequently, the list was pared to thirty-three finalists, and I was still in the running. The pressure was on. Word had leaked out to the clan that “Colin is going to the White House!” “That’s right. Gonna help the President.” What if I failed now? I could hear the murmuring: “What do you suppose he did wrong?” “This is a scandal for the family.”

  On a May afternoon, I boarded a bus with the other finalists in front of the old Civil Service Building, headed for Airlie House, a posh estate near Warrenton, Virginia, that had been converted into a convention center. There we were to be prodded, poked, and pinched for the next three days in the final selection process. Seventeen of us would survive. On the bus we were handed an information packet that included biographies of each candidate, our first opportunity to size up the competition. I took a seat and was flipping through the packet when a young black man sat next to me. He introduced himself as James E. Bostic, Jr., from South Carolina. I glanced at his résumé—first black to get a Ph.D. from Clemson University, in chemistry. At age twenty-four, youngest of the White House Fellow finalists. “What am I doing in this league?” I said to Bostic. He looked at me, apparently considering my rank and advanced years, and seemed to be wondering the same thing. I learned on the ride out that Jim Bostic was one of several children from a poor Southern family, most of whom worked as laborers. Somebody had spotted something special in Jim, and mentors, black and white, had helped him fulfill a potential that might easily have withered from neglect.

  Once we were installed at Airlie House, the atmosphere fell somewhere between a fraternity rush party and a police interrogation. We were scheduled into a rotating series of interviews where we faced “commissioners,” who were impressive and occasionally tough. Their caliber is suggested by one whom I remember vividly, Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in economics. Their questioning was deliberately provocative, designed as much to judge our poise and character as to find out what we knew. I remember one young candidate cooing, “Dr. Friedman, I was so impressed by A Theoretical Framework for Monetary Analysis.” “Really,” Friedman said. “What was it about it that impressed you?” Dead silence. The poor guy had apparently not prepped for this moment beyond learning the titles of Friedman’s books.

  The final interview took place on a Sunday evening. The directors had devised a fairly fiendish way of delivering the verdicts. Sometime in the middle of the night, a note would be slipped under our doors telling us if we had made the grade. In the meantime, we were free for some unstructured sociability. Among the other military candidates, I had become friendly with Bob Baxter, John Fryer, Don Stukel, and Lee Nunn, Jr., from a distinguished Kentucky political family. All of us were accustomed to being graded, and we had faced tests more lethal than being judged for a high-class internship. And so we stayed up late partying, and by the time I got back to my room, there was the note. “Congratulations! It gives me great pleasure to inform you that you have been selected by the President’s Commission to serve as a 1972–73 White House Fellow. Sincerely, Arthur E. Dewey, Director.”

  The next morning, we reboarded the bus for a visit to the White House, for most of us a powerful and moving first. When the visit ended, it was back to planet Earth. I got into my ’63 Bel Air for the long drive back to Dale City. On the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 18th Street, I saw a little boy lost, Jim Bostic, who had also been picked, standing alone apparently with no place to go. I scooped him up and brought him home, where he and my family promptly hit it off. Jim went on to a brilliant business career with the Georgia-Pacific Corporation. I served as best man at his marriage to Edie Howard, the daughter of a military trailblazer, Colonel Edward Howard, who had graduated from West Point in 1949, soon after the services were racially integrated. Jim Bostic became the younger brother I never had, and we have remained fast friends for over twenty years.

  As I prepared to begin the fellowship, I said my goodbyes to General DePuy, General McChrystal, and other friends on the A-Vice staff. If good things were to come out of the Army over the next several years, they would result, in no small measure, from the vision and drive of the remarkable DePuy and his team. I can suggest the quality of the people around him by noting that some of the lieutenant colonels in his orbit went on to make four-star general. They included Max Thurman, the soldier par excellence, a thinker and leader before whom we all stood in awe, who became commander in chief of the Southern Command; Lou Menetrey, who became commander of U.S. Forces in Korea; Fred Mahaffey, on his way to becoming the Army Chief of Staff until felled by a brain tumor at the age of fifty-two; and Carl Vuono, who did become Army Chief of Staff.

  I knew where I wanted to spend my year as a White House Fellow—at an agency whose very name would cause most eyelids to droop, OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. I knew from my M.B.A. courses and my time in the Pentagon that budgets are to organizations what blood is to the circulatory system. And OMB had its hand on every department’s jugular. It is one of the least understood yet most powerful federal agencies in Washington.

  At OMB, I was interviewed by a small, wiry, engaging dynamo named Frank Carlucci, the deputy to the director, Caspar Weinberger. Carlucci was already making his mark among Beltway insiders. As a young career Foreign Service officer he had been stabbed while helping to put down a riot in Zaire. Later, the versatile onetime diplomat had helped salvage a foundering relief effort when floods struck Pennsylvania.

  I was accepted as the OMB White House Fellow and soon met another member of the Weinberger team, William Howard Taft IV, a grandson of the twenty-seventh President of the United States. Taft, Weinberger’s executive assistant, was not the sort of person I had encountered in the Army. Will was an erudite figure, as interested in the classics as in the machinations of government.

  I spent the first four months parked in an OMB branch outpost, the New Executive Office Building, as contrasted to the main offices in the Old EOB, the magnificent nineteenth-century fortress next to the White House. I started out performing a makework job that actually turned out to be stimulating, even useful. President Franklin D. Roosevelt once observed that the federal bu
reaucracy was a huge beast: you kicked it in the tail and two years later it felt the sensation in the brain. Nothing had changed in the intervening years. President Nixon would issue directives and no one knew what, if anything, happened after his orders left the Oval Office. I was given the job of finding out.

  A woman came into my life at that point who considerably enriched my stay at OMB, Velma Baldwin, the director of administration. White House Fellows assigned to OMB came under Velma’s wing. No place to park your car? Velma found this newcomer a spot in the prestigious courtyard of the Old EOB, where I had the nerve to park the house-painted Chevy. Feel left out of serious department business? Velma would get you into key meetings. Need a travel advance? Velma found the money. The greatest service Velma performed for me, however, was to point out that in every agency there was somebody just like her, a career administrator who knew in what pockets the funds were hidden, how you hired somebody without being strangled by Civil Service red tape, and where the bodies were buried. These people, Velma explained, would still be in place long after the last cockroach died. Thanks to Velma Baldwin, I got to know her powerful counterparts in every cabinet-level agency, and had a catbird’s view of how the government worked, or failed to work.

  Not long after my arrival, Weinberger left OMB to head the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, where he sharpened the cost-cutting reputation as “Cap the Knife” that he had earned as Governor Reagan’s budget director in California. Carlucci also went to HEW as Weinberger’s deputy, and Will Taft as counsel. I had only brief exposure to these men at the time. But they were going to change my life.

  In the game of musical chairs that followed Weinberger’s and Carlucci’s departure, Fred Malek became deputy director of OMB. Malek was a West Point and Harvard Business School graduate who had made a fortune rescuing a failing tool company in South Carolina. He had earned an earlier reputation in the White House personnel office as a hatchet man. Malek had cemented his status as the administration’s kneecapper by going to the Department of the Interior and telling Interior Secretary Walter Hickle, who had fallen from favor, to be gone by sundown. When a secretary called saying, “Mr. Malek is on the line,” it was like hearing the Mafia tell you that the money was due by midnight and no excuses.

  Malek had been one of my interrogators at Airlie House. I dropped Fred a note congratulating him on his appointment, told him that I was working in the bowels of OMB as a White House Fellow, and asked that he let me know if I could be of any assistance. Almost immediately, he phoned, asking me to stop by his office. Fred was hawkish-looking, lean, erect, soft-spoken yet decisive. I was soon installed as his special assistant in an office in the Old EOB overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, and became his gatekeeper. If you wanted to see Malek, you had to see Powell first.

  Fred was not much interested in the departmental pulling and hauling that produce the federal budget. What he really wanted was to gain control over the bureaucracy for the White House. The people elect a President to run the country, but Presidents soon discover that they don’t necessarily control the machinery of government. Their wishes are often thwarted during that two-year lapse between the kick in the beast’s butt and the sensation in its head.

  Fred went about gaining control of the government in a way that opened the eyes of this fledgling student of power. Just as OMB is the nerve center of the federal bureaucracy, the budget and personnel offices are the nerve centers in individual departments. Fred started planting his own people in the key “assistant secretary for administration” slots in major federal agencies. Let the cabinet officials make the speeches, cut the ribbons, and appear on Meet the Press. Anonymous assistant secretaries, loyal to Malek, would run operations day to day, and to the Nixon administration’s liking.

  I learned much in Professor Malek’s graduate seminar. For example, Fred wanted to breathe fresh life into OMB by getting rid of layers of career bureaucrats and replacing them with new “management associates,” young Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton hotshots. Fred, however, had a space problem. He called me into his office one day and explained his strategy and my role. Thereafter, I started phoning agency officials, explaining that I was calling on behalf of Mr. Malek with good news. Their power was about to be broadened. A function currently being handled by OMB was going to be transferred to their agency. Wonderful. More positions equal more funding, which equals more power, music to any bureaucrat’s ear. Whoa! Let me explain. You are getting only the function and the bodies. OMB is keeping the positions and funding. (We needed to keep these slots and salaries for Malek’s young stars.) “But where can we put the people you’re sending us?” the administrators would plead. “We don’t have jobs for them. We haven’t budgeted funds for them.” “Mr. Assistant Secretary,” I would say, “Fred Malek has every confidence that between attrition and some imagination on your part, you will work something out.” Soon the unwanted OMB bureaucrats were gone, their offices and titles freed up, and Malek’s youngbloods moved in. Out of that experience emerged one of my rules: you don’t know what you can get away with until you try.

  In January 1973, the White House Fellows gathered in an anonymous downtown office used by the CIA. The great adventure of the Fellows’ year was to be a winter trip to the Soviet Union followed by a trip to Red China the following summer. While we waited to be briefed, jokes flew back and forth about microfilm concealed in imaginative apertures and the likeliest defectors in our group. The actual briefing by a CIA operative turned out to be tame. Instead of giving us intelligence targets and instructing us in the use of microdots, he merely warned us against bugged rooms, tapped telephones, and overly pliant Russian ladies.

  The White House Fellows were looked after by Lieutenant Colonel Bernard Loeffke, a combination shepherd/chaperon/tour guide, a man who remains indelible in my memory. Bernie Loeffke had been born in Colombia of an American father and a Hispanic mother. He combined perfect military bearing with dark good looks and had a résumé in technicolor. Bernie was a West Pointer, a former White House Fellow himself, a master parachutist, a pilot who taught himself to fly, a physical fitness freak, a scuba diver, an Olympic-class swimmer, and a man who practically inhaled foreign languages. He had picked up three Silver Stars, four Bronze Stars, and a Purple Heart in Vietnam, which was remarkable even by the inflated standards of that era. Bernie was to lead us on our trip that winter behind the then still formidable Iron Curtain.

  Our memories of the bitterness of the Cold War have already faded considerably. But when I first set foot on Soviet soil in the winter of 1973, the ground was still hard with suspicion and distrust. We entered in February at Khabarovsk in eastern Siberia, north of Vladivostok, on a flight from Japan. The first Russian I met was Alla Fedorova, our Intourist guide, who spoke impeccable American English and was rather attractive. Part of her attraction grew out of the novelty and mystery of someone from the other side, a dark-haired Russian and, we assumed, KGB.

  We were put up at a no-star hotel in Khabarovsk. I have only fleeting impressions of this dour, dingy city, with its forests of cranes, derricks, and smokestacks, permanently leaden skies, and cold that felt like ice water poured down your back. We were not allowed to approach people, and they became uneasy if we tried.

  Our first night at the hotel, the Russians chose to entertain us with a movie on seal hunting. As soon as the auditorium turned dark and the film started, Bernie Loeffke whispered to me, “This is a bore. Let’s go.” We managed to slip away, but stayed inside the hotel, since we had been warned not to leave. I don’t think we would have if we could. The temperature outdoors was forty below zero.

  We followed the sound of music to some sort of club in the hotel. Inside there appeared to be the entire senior officer corps of the Soviet Eastern Siberian Command, in uniform, with wives and girlfriends. Bernie and I stood in the doorway in our blue business suits with little American flag pins in our lapels, looking as if we had stumbled into the bear’s cave. The music stopped. Every head i
n the place turned toward us. Bernie spoke in Russian to a waiter: “A table for two, please.” The waiter looked petrified. His fear and the silence in the room were quickly explained. Our KGB handlers had tracked us down and were standing behind us. We were no doubt unaware, they explained, that the seal hunting film was not yet over. Perhaps we would like to see the end.

  The next day we boarded the Trans-Siberian Railroad for Irkutsk, the old Siberian exile city. My most powerful first impression of the Soviet interior was its endlessness. We rode that train for three days and still had not reached a destination less than halfway across the country. The first day we spent watching a Dr. Zhivago landscape unfold before us, the limitless horizons of Siberia, slim white birches and herds of reindeer, which we observed while sipping sweet tea from glasses.

  The second night, Bernie said, “This is boring. Let’s see how the other half lives.” We slipped back to what seemed to be a third-class carriage full of bundled-up peasants. Bernie introduced us as Americans, and their faces lit up. “Ah, our brave allies in the Great Patriotic War. Our comrades in defeating the fascists.” They began passing around vodka bottles. No sooner had we started to enjoy ourselves than our friends from the state security apparatus showed up again. They were sure we would be more comfortable in our first-class car, a superior product of East German industry. On the way back, we passed a compartment where I saw off-duty customs officials leafing through a familiar-looking magazine and laughing bawdily. When we got back to our car, we learned that one of the White House Fellows had had his copy of Playboy confiscated as obscene material not allowed in the Soviet Union.

  We made an interim stop at another military outpost, the city of Chita. At the time, the tension crackled along the nearby border between the Soviet Union and China. We were allowed out of the train to stretch our legs, but not permitted into town. And we were not to take any pictures. We heard the whistle blow, warning everybody to reboard. Bernie made a quick head count, realized two of the Fellows were not back, and alerted Alla Fedorova. She disappeared, and the next thing we saw from the train window was a half-dozen uneasy “passengers” pacing an otherwise empty platform. Not until our missing friends showed up did these Russians board the train. And that was how the rest of our KGB detail blew its cover.