My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  Approaching Irkutsk, we skirted Lake Baikal, the largest body of fresh water on the Eurasian landmass. The shore was ringed by factories. I learned, after the Cold War had ended, that the pollution from those plants had killed off some of the world’s richest fisheries. Apparently, profit-seeking capitalists were not the only threat to the environment.

  The immensity of Russia struck me all over again after our day in Irkutsk. Besides the three days on the train, it took another seven hours to fly to Moscow. By now, Alla, who had started out as merely attractive, looked ravishing. The flight was our first experience with Aeroflot, and it had some of the quality of early barnstorming. The plane was barely heated, and as we walked down the aisle, one passenger’s foot went through the floor into the baggage compartment. We were a bit curious when the aircraft was towed to the end of the runway with the cockpit still empty. When the pilots did arrive, they did not rev the engines to test them as is usually done. They simply took off, full power, like a MIG-19 fighter zooming up to intercept an intruder into Soviet airspace. The towing, we learned, was intended to save fuel. And the rocket takeoff was indeed performed by former MIG-19 pilots no doubt nostalgic for the good old days.

  For someone who grew up during the fifties, whose first military assignment had been facing the Red Army across the Fulda Gap, who had spent two tours fighting the communists in Vietnam, there was something eerie about standing, during the Cold War, in the heart of what a future American President would call the “evil empire.” Much of American life for the previous twenty-five years had been defined by this adversary. American budgets, politics, weapons, foreign policy, science, research, and domestic priorities and the lives of millions of military-age Americans were influenced almost as much by what happened in Moscow as by what happened in Washington. And here I was, a member of the American military establishment, whose reason for being was to contain this giant, standing in Red Square and then being briefed by that elite of Soviet think tanks, the USA-Canada Institute, where they all seemed to speak American English and could probably give you the team standings in the National League.

  I began to get a visceral feel for this country, one that comes from touching, feeling, and smelling a place rather than only hearing or reading about it. What I sensed was the common humanity of all people, including these Russians who were then supposed to be our mortal enemy. The people I met on the train, passed in Red Square, and rubbed elbows with at the GUM department store were not political ideologues. They were the Soviet equivalent of my own family, a mother buying groceries for supper, a tired father headed home after a hard day at the ministry mailroom, kids thinking more about the soccer prospects of Moscow against Kiev than about spreading Marxism globally.

  At the same time, I also felt the immensity and power of this country, its terrifying capacity to intimidate its own people and its apparent ability to match whatever military might we could muster, weapon for weapon, system for system. What I could not see, from the superficial perspective the Soviets afforded us, was the fatal weakness that even then had to be undermining their system, dooming it to ultimate collapse.

  We left Moscow for Sofia, Bulgaria, and experienced a marvelous sensation. We were still in the communist bloc, but all of a sudden there were vivid colors. We went to Warsaw and there was life. Coming out of the Soviet Union, even to these countries, was like going from black-and-white still photos to a movie in color. Our senses, deadened by the grimness of Soviet existence, came to life again.

  In Warsaw, we visited the Year 2000 Institute, which was supposed to provide a vision of Poland’s future, come the millennium. I never forgot the words of a professor who talked to the Fellows, a big, shambling man with a bemused look. “Look where God put Poland,” he said. “Between Germany and the Soviet Union. Every generation, one or the other rolls over us. Sometimes both. We have been denied our Polish destiny.” His words intrigued me. This communist certainly did not sound like someone ready to die on the barricades for the Soviet Union. I had a sense that he and his countrymen would love to be free of their “ally.” A seed took root in my mind that day. Sixteen years later, when the communist bloc first began falling apart, I remembered the Polish professor, stuck my neck out, and predicted to an audience of high-ranking Army officers that, far from staying with the Warsaw Pact, these satellites would probably prefer to join NATO.

  The White House Fellows program meant instant entree to people one did not ordinarily encounter at Fort Devens or Chu Lai. Back home, we were taken to Georgia to meet the governor. We had been permitted to bring our spouses, and as our motorcade headed out of the Atlanta airport, with Georgia state troopers on motorcycles leading the way, sirens wailing, and traffic halted in all directions, I gazed out the window and said to Alma, “Tall cotton.”

  The governor turned out to be a boyish forty-nine-year-old with a blinding smile. He sat us down and mesmerized the Fellows with his vision for Georgia and his grasp of national politics. My knowledge of Southern politicians at this point extended to Bull Connor, George Wallace, and the former Georgia governor, Lester Maddox, who liked to distribute ax handles to fellow bigots. The governor now before us represented the New South, and I remember thinking, this man is presidential timber. Three years later, Jimmy Carter became the country’s thirty-ninth president.

  I had a brief exposure during this period to Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine, irascible, unreasonable, an officer who could make strong men weep. A friend who had applied for the Navy’s nuclear sub program once described to me his grilling by Rickover: “Why should I want you in my program? What makes you think you can drive a nuclear submarine? You don’t look as if you know diddly-squat.”

  I had been invited to a swearing-in ceremony at the General Services Administration, at which Rickover was expected to speak. The admiral said only a few words, but I have never forgotten his message. Organization doesn’t really accomplish anything. Plans don’t accomplish anything, either. Theories of management don’t much matter. Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved. Only by attracting the best people will you accomplish great deeds. Admittedly, Rickover’s approach to handling people could be brutal—breaking them down so that he could build them back up to his specifications. That could never be my style. But there was no denying the force of his insight. Truth from the mouths of curmudgeons is truth all the same.

  … … …

  “It’s like letting little children watch the sex act,” Joe Laitin, the public relations director at OMB, once told me. Joe was explaining why he did not approve of the White House Fellows program. Along with Fred Malek, Joe had become another OMB mentor. At the end of the workday, with traffic backed up twenty-six miles from the Old EOB to my house in Dale City, I would hang around until it lightened, listening to Joe’s bottomless fund of stories. He was Brooklyn-born, a former newspaperman who had become something of a movable institution in government PR circles. He had served for a time in the White House press office under Lyndon B. Johnson and regaled me with stories of how he told the President tales at night so that LBJ would go to sleep peacefully. He had once fed Johnson some made-up economic gossip, which the President leaked to the press, causing the stock market to go goofy for a session or two.

  When Fred Malek first took over as deputy, he had wanted to fire Joe, and the Nixon administration’s former headsman was not given to idle threats. I asked Joe if he had been worried at the time. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “Every new guy who comes here wants to dump me. It happens every few years. Week one, let’s get rid of Laitin. Week two, they learn that Laitin is a career official and not so easy to unload. By week three, they have gotten themselves into a public relations jam with the Washington Post or CBS and the old firehorse comes to their rescue. They start thinking, maybe this guy ain’t so bad. By week four, they love me.”

  I asked Joe what he had against White House Fellows. I was a Fellow, and he and I got along fine. Joe explained. Demo
cracy did not always function well in the light of day. Democracy is give and take. People have to trade, change, deal, retreat, bend, compromise, as they move from the ideal to the possible. To the uninitiated, the process can be messy, disappointing, even shocking. Compromise can make the participants look manipulative, unprincipled, two-faced. It was okay for me to witness this, Joe went on, because I was old enough and had experience. “But some of these bright-eyed kids start wandering around the West Wing and cabinet members’ offices and they’re horrified to find how things really get done.”

  The other side of the coin, Joe said, was that “some of them taste power before they can handle it. They get drunk on it.” In their intoxication, they tend to overlook the fact that the law eventually checks unbridled power, and they can get into trouble. “Now, there’s nothing wrong with sex,” Joe went on, “but there is something immoral about having children watch it, until they know what they are watching.”

  Laitin’s views are not far removed from the wisdom of our Founding Fathers. Men like Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson recognized that we are imperfect beings. Consequently, they invented a government of separate powers and checks and balances—to control the imperfections in human nature. Joe Laitin understood that, but was not so sure the young White House Fellows could grasp it yet.

  In the summer of 1973, I was in a village in China, a world that few Americans had ever seen, listening to the wizened local chieftain. We were on the final field trip of our White House Fellowship year. On July 23 we had arrived in Canton, where an endless river of bicycles glided noiselessly past us on immaculate streets. I was surprised that a city could be so huge, yet so clean and quiet. The Chinese took us to other major cities and the usual tourist stops—the Forbidden City, the Great Wall. At a primitive rural hospital we watched a woman undergo a twenty-minute thyroid operation while anesthetized by acupuncture. When it was over, she got up, drank a glass of lemonade, and walked out. In Shenyang, we visited a machine shop where it was hard to tell the men from the women in that age of padded, quilted, shapeless unisex dress. We learned that the workers put in a six-day week with an occasional holiday but no vacations and earned the equivalent of $52 a month, including foremen, supervisors, and all but top management. Despite conditions that would have sent American workers to the picket lines, they seemed content.

  One of our guides on the Chinese trip was a fifty-four-year-old professor who had studied in the United States. Early in his career, he told us, he had worked only to gain wealth and position. He had filled his students with book learning, conditioning them to strive for individual success. Neither he nor they had possessed a speck of practical knowledge or social conscience. And then came the Great Cultural Revolution. Our professor was dispatched to the countryside, where for the first time, he said, he performed “honest labor.” “Before that, I knew nothing. I could not even grow cotton. I, who had taught scholars, had to be reeducated by peasants.” He spoke with a sublime smile. I heard a lot of gushing among the younger White House Fellows. My own experience with manual labor in a Pepsi bottling plant helped keep my enthusiasm in check.

  What struck me about China, particularly after visiting the Soviet Union, was the absence of paranoia. Our Chinese guides seemed less frightened than their Soviet counterparts. They were not constantly searching our baggage, restraining our movements, or stopping us from taking pictures. Two distinctive threads, however, ran through the Chinese experience. You could ask an ordinary person in Beijing, Canton, Shenyang, or any village, “How are you doing?” and the answer was invariably a smile and “Fine. Under Chairman Mao we have a sewing machine, a radio, a bicycle.” The thoroughness of thought control in so vast a country was frightening. The second iron rule was that Chinese officials would admit shortcomings, but never error.

  One day when we were visiting along the Amur River, which runs between China and the Soviet Union, I asked our guide if we could see any military bases. He told me with a benign smile that it would be impossible, because peaceful China maintained no bases along this troubled border. In the course of a visit to a temple, we suddenly heard a deafening roar. We turned to see two Chinese MIG-19S streaking into the sky, apparently from a nearby airfield. “What was that?” I asked our guide, who continued to gaze ahead placidly and silently. “What was what?” he answered. End of discussion.

  In the village where the wrinkled old chief spoke to us, he explained how he and his people had burrowed through a rock mountain practically with their bare hands to reach fertile soil on the other side. They had then lugged broken stones up the mountain to build terraces to hold the soil in place. Just as they finished, the rains came and washed away all they had accomplished. But, armed with the thoughts of Chairman Mao and the quotations from his little red book, they started over again, until they had built this bountiful community. The chief invited us to share a meal from the harvest of these terraces. The menu, as near as I could determine, was millet with a little gravy and an unidentifiable vegetable. It was plain fare, our host admitted, but nourishing, and, along with the wisdom of Chairman Mao, it would sustain us.

  After the meal, he rose and said that he was sorry he had no gifts, but he wanted us to have a small rock with the date inscribed on it; the rock had been taken from a terrace and was given with the heartfelt friendship of his villagers. Colonel Loeffke jumped up and said that he had brought gifts for our hosts. With that, Bernie produced a shopping bag and started handing out buttons with happy faces, ballpoint pens, Nixon inaugural pins, and other trinkets in a scene suggestive of the purchase of Manhattan from the Indians. The village chief said with an enigmatic smile, “You have given us so much, and we have given you so little. Please forgive us.”

  As the White House Fellows’ year wound to a close, Fred Malek called me into his office. His television set was tuned to Senator Sam Ervin’s Watergate investigating subcommittee. “This’ll blow over,” Fred observed. He wanted to talk to me, he said, about my staying on at OMB for another year. I knew by now that my initial reluctance to become a White House Fellow was the error of a greenhorn. When the Fellows discussed the power of the executive branch, it was with President Nixon. When we studied the legislative branch, it was with U.S. senators. When the subject was social programs, we talked to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. In the foreign arena, we met with leaders of Japan, the Soviet Union, China, Poland, Bulgaria, and West Germany. We had lunches and dinners every week with journalists like Eric Sevareid, Dan Rather, and Hugh Sidey. The aim of the program was to let us inside the engine room to see the cogs and gears of government grinding away and also to take us up high for the panoramic view. In all the schools of political science, in all the courses in public administration throughout the country, there could be nothing comparable to this education.

  Still, I was ready to return to the Army. As a graduate student, a Pentagon desk officer, and a White House Fellow, I had been away from real soldiering for over three years. The Fellows program, particularly, had been a detour from a straight-line military career path, and I was eager to get back on track. I bore in mind the fate of an earlier Army Fellow who had made a big hit in the White House. He had been asked to stay on to work on domestic issues, which he did. And guess what? The Army did not promote him to full colonel. The White House put pressure on the Army, and eventually he was promoted. But an officer who had not yet commanded a battalion, who had missed a few other stations of the cross while basking in White House praises, who was passed over by his promotion board and advanced only through political pressure, was finished. He made colonel, all right—permanently.

  That was not the path I wanted. The Army was my life. I thanked Malek for his invitation, but told him I was ready to leave. And despite Malek’s optimism, the evidence that Sam Ervin and the Watergate special prosecutor were uncovering did not make the Nixon administration seem like a particularly seaworthy vessel. All I wanted was to cross over to the other side of the Potomac and find out what assign
ments the Pentagon had for a soldier eager to command troops again. I had not been in direct command since serving as a company commander at Fort Devens in 1962. For all practical purposes, I had been a battalion commander of Vietnamese troops during my first tour, though I was carried on the books as an advisor. But during my second Vietnam tour, I served solely as a staff officer. Now, as a lieutenant colonel, evaluated as qualified by Infantry Branch, I hoped for a battalion of my own.

  In the spring of 1973, in those last days as a White House Fellow, I went to the Infantry Branch assignments office, where a fellow lieutenant colonel took down a loose-leaf notebook and opened it before me. Listed, by hand, were all the battalions in the Army, followed by three columns: Column A, indicating who was currently commanding the unit; Column B, who was slated to get the battalion next; and Column C, who was scheduled to command it after that. I went down Column B looking for blank spaces, since I wanted something immediately.

  The process was not quite as simple as I am suggesting. In those days, office politics, the old-boy network, and favoritism could influence the assignment. If a commanding general, for example, wanted you in his division, that could clinch the deal. Today’s system is more objective and less subject to external pressure. The Army locks a board of officers in a room with a stack of personnel records on microfiche. There is almost no way for someone to intervene on behalf of fair-haired candidates. And the board is big enough so that one member does not have undue influence. The board pores over these records, weighs strength against weaknesses, and does not come out until the best potential commanders have been identified. Since there are more qualified commanders than commands, some candidates will inevitably be disappointed. The odd thing is that the old system and the new produce about the same proportion of successes and failures. But at least with the modern method, the credit or blame lies with human fallibility, not favoritism.