And, frankly, I was hoping to become chief of staff of the 101st Airborne Division after I gave up brigade command. I could learn a lot more about soldiering by doing that job for the wise John Wickham. But for now, I was off to Washington, hoping against hope that I could escape the Beltway vortex and stay with the division.
A few days later, I found myself back in a familiar haunt, the Old Executive Office Building, where I had worked as a White House Fellow at OMB. The OEOB has an aura of quiet power with its endless pillared, silent corridors. History practically seeps out of its walls. At the beginning of World War II, this building had housed the Department of State and the War Department, until the Pentagon was built. This day, I treated the buttoned-down staff in the OEOB to a rare sight, an Army colonel in jump boots, bloused pants, and greens. I was making a statement. I am a brigade commander, 101st Airborne, and happy where I am. You’ve got the wrong guy. I made my way up a wide curving staircase to the third-floor location of the National Security Council. I was ushered into an ornate nineteenth-century office where I met Dr. Brzezinski, a man with sharply planed Slavic features and an intense manner. With him was his deputy, David Aaron. Dr. Brzezinski asked me to take a seat, which I did, flat-footed, with the boots on prominent display.
After showing surprising familiarity with my past, particularly the White House Fellowship, Brzezinski got down to business. “We’re looking for a soldier who knows how to operate at this level. Frankly, we’d like you to run the NSC’s defense program staff,” he said.
It sounded like a golden opportunity. I told him I was flattered, but not interested. “I’m not even halfway through my command,” I said. “I really don’t want to leave Fort Campbell. And this work you’re describing isn’t me. I don’t know anything about it.”
Instead of dampening Brzezinski’s enthusiasm, my resistance only whetted it. “That’s exactly what we want,” he said. “Not an academic, but someone who can bring us fresh thinking.”
I continued to demur, saying, “I’d rather stay with the troops.”
By now, David Aaron’s expression and his line of questioning seemed to be saying, what is this guy with combat boots doing here anyway? He says he doesn’t want the job. Let’s not waste any more time on him. Yet, my reluctance continued to fan Brzezinski’s ardor. He seemed fascinated that anyone could resist the siren song of White House power. Finally, he said, “Let’s leave it this way. When you’re closer to the end of your command, we’ll talk again. It may not be the job we’re discussing now. But we want you.”
I had started to leave when Brzezinski added, “Before you go, I want you to meet the fabulous team we’ve put together.” I spent the rest of the afternoon moving from office to office along the third floor, much of the time listening to frighteningly naive arms control proposals, which were to fall flat as Kansas when later presented to the Soviets.
When I got back to Fort Campbell, General Wickham was eager to hear about the trip. “Colin, you didn’t take this job,” he said, “but they’ll be back, or somebody else will. You’re not going to have a conventional Army career. Some officers are just not destined for it.”
I quickly put Washington behind me, went on with the training exercises, the boxing matches, the pleasures of command. I had inherited one crack battalion and two that were becoming so. My goal was to make all three tops before I left.
“You’d better have that thing looked at, sir,” Sonny Tucker said. The way my exec fussed over me, I did not need parents. The “thing” Sonny was concerned about was a growth that had appeared one morning on the left side of my neck. It did not hurt, but it did not go away. It just kept getting bigger.
I went to the post hospital, where one of the examining physicians said, “We don’t know what it is, but it could be cancerous.” He explained that they would have to perform a needle biopsy, and then cut out the mass. If the biopsy proved cancer-positive, he said, “we’ll have to go all the way to your throat. You may wake up not speaking.”
I was forty years old, the father of three children, in the prime of my personal and professional life, and I was scared. Within days, they had me in the operating room. Alma stood vigil. So did Sonny Tucker. I remember him looking at the doctor as if to say, “You mess up my colonel and I’m gonna bust your arms.”
I did not have a malignancy. After the biopsy, the doctors clamped the incision and let it heal, which it did, inside out, leaving me with a dimpled scar on my neck. It looks like a bullet wound, and since I am a combat veteran, people assume it is a wound. If they ask, I tell the unheroic truth. I smoked in those days, but became increasingly uneasy after this experience. Today, I’m no longer a smoker.
As my command of the 2d Brigade wound to a close, Dr. Brzezinski, good as his word, again asked me to come to Washington. I wondered if John Wickham’s prophecy was proving right.
Part Three
THE WASHINGTON YEARS
Ten
In the Carter Defense Department
ALTHOUGH I SERVED MOST PUBLICLY DURING THE REAGAN-BUSH YEARS, I actually cut my teeth on national security during two and a half years in the Office of the Secretary of Defense during the Carter administration. In May 1977, I again went to Washington to meet with Zbigniew Brzezinski at the National Security Council. He told me that the job I had initially been offered, running his defense program staff, had been filled by Victor Utgoff, who now needed an assistant. I found the offer highly resistible, since I had already rejected the top job. Still, turning down the White House does not come easily to a soldier schooled in obedience. This time, I told Brzezinski that I needed to think the matter over.
While I was in Washington, I got another call, this time from the Pentagon. I was to see someone named John Kester, who had a title a mile long, “Special Assistant to the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary of Defense.” I had my sources in the building, and I used them to get a line on Mr. Kester. I learned that he was an ambitious, driving young lawyer, close to the Defense Secretary, Harold Brown, and that Kester’s hard-nosed style had ruffled feathers all over the Pentagon.
Kester’s huge office was on the E-Ring, the Eisenhower Corridor, and right next to the Secretary of Defense’s office. He was indeed young, at thirty-eight two years younger than I, not always the desirable relationship between a prospective superior and subordinate. And John Kester was brash. He made clear that he and the deputy secretary of defense, Charles Duncan, ran this show for Secretary Brown. And Kester made no bones about his position as a de facto chief of staff who was determined to gain control over this sprawling bureaucracy and ride herd on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kester had created a four-person team of military officers to help him, and he wanted me to run the unit as his executive assistant.
So far, in this first encounter, Kester had done all the talking. Finally, it was my turn. “How did you happen to send for me?” I asked.
“I checked you out,” Kester replied, “and I heard a lot of good things.” He had access to a nomination book profiling a half-dozen Army officers, including me, who had been considered for the job of junior military assistant to the Secretary of Defense. The assignment, however, went to Air Force Colonel Carl Smith, who was to cross my life at critical points in the future. Kester had used this book to recruit for his own military assistant. He had been particularly impressed by my White House Fellowship and my having been a Vietnam veteran and field commander.
“I checked you out, too, and everything I heard was not so good,” I said with a smile. He appeared amused by my bluntness. A good sign; he was not looking for a yes-man. We finished the interview and I went back to Fort Campbell.
I now had two high-level job offers, neither of which I wanted. I had had enough off-track assignments. My hope still was to move up from brigade commander to chief of staff of the 101st Airborne and have Washington forget about me. On my return, General Wickham, as an alumnus of the Defense Secretary’s office, wanted to hear the latest gossip from the E-Ring. He also made c
lear that I was not going to become his chief of staff. Of his brigade commanders, I was junior and not an aviator, a key qualification for this assignment. “Besides,” Wickham said, “I know the system, and the Army is not going to pass up an opportunity to have one of its people in either of those key jobs.” However, he did not want to influence me as to which one I should favor.
For that advice, I called another trusted friend, Carl Vuono, a fellow DePuy protégé recently promoted to brigadier general and now working for the Army Chief of Staff, General Bernard Rogers. “Carl,” I said, “I lean toward the Defense job. I’m not eager to leave the Army again. But I’ll go wherever the chief thinks it best.” Carl checked with General Rogers, and the answer came back: we want Powell in Kester’s operation. Kester and Rogers had been toe-to-toe on several turf issues, and Rogers may have seen some advantage in having an Army man in Kester’s operation. After expressing my regrets to Zbigniew Bzrezinski, I went to work for John Kester.
The family returned from Fort Campbell to the Washington area, and we contracted to have a home built in Burke Center in Virginia’s suburban Fairfax County, a move which swallowed up all the profit we had made on the Dale City sale. Our new home was closer to the capital. “Close-in” is the magic phrase in Washington real estate. In those days, every mile nearer to town added about $10,000 to the price of a house.
A brigade commander at Fort Campbell has about as much idea of what shapes defense policy as a Chevy dealer in Kansas knows what happens inside the General Motors boardroom. I was in for an education. John Kester installed me in a small office outside his suite. From that vantage point, I watched him, a tall, lanky man who stayed that way through disciplined jogging and who spoke in a high-pitched voice that belied his authoritative manner. I was intrigued by Kester. Though plain of speech and style, he was something of a Renaissance man. Classical music purred in his office. I occasionally heard him on the phone speaking French. He was widely read and wrote so clearly and in such a lively style that you would never suspect he was a lawyer and government official.
Kester was a player. I soon observed that all significant Pentagon power lines ran through his hands. The Secretary, Harold Brown, a physicist, a former Johnson administration Air Force Secretary and director of defense research and engineering, and most recently president of the California Institute of Technology, made the final decisions; but Kester had so arranged it that nobody or no piece of paper got to Secretary Brown without going through him first.
There are in-boxes, there are out-boxes, and with Kester there was limbo. I was talking to John one day as he flipped through a paper that an assistant secretary of defense had submitted to Harold Brown for a decision. Kester flung the document into a box behind him. Limbo. A few days later, the author of the memo called to ask about its fate. John’s secretary stalled him. Mr. Kester was out of the office. Mr. Kester was on another line. Mr. Kester was in conference with the Secretary. The document was still in Mr. Kester’s briefcase. The document had been temporarily mislaid. More days passed before Kester finally allowed the distressed official to see him about the fate of his paper. John went off on a tangent. Had this fellow hired the very able candidate that John had sent to him? The man mumbled excuses, and finally saw the light. He was sorry; he had not had time to get around to it. He would see the man right away. That was wise, Kester said. And that afternoon, the languishing memo came out of limbo and went sailing into the Secretary’s office. That was the Kester style, punishment and reward, one for you and one for him (and sometimes two for him).
On another occasion, John announced that no promotions above GS-13, the middle management range, could be made in the Office of the Secretary of Defense without Brown’s (read Kester’s) approval. On still another occasion, he ordered that nobody in the Pentagon could hire an outside consultant without his say-so.
As a career soldier and a colonel, I stood in awe of three-star and four-star generals. John Kester did not. Not only had he gathered civilian promotions into his hands, but he went after senior military promotions as well. No longer would lists for brigadier and major general be signed pro forma by Secretary Brown. Kester would carefully review them. John also changed the service chief’s traditional prerogative of recommending generals and admirals for promotion to three and four stars. Past practice had been for the chiefs to submit a single name for each opening. No, Kester said, they must now submit two candidates, and the Secretary of Defense would choose. The chiefs were not happy. General Rogers had informed one general that he was going to have him promoted to four stars and give him FORSCOM, command of all Army forces in the United States. Kester stepped in and said, oh no, give us the required two nominations, which Rogers did. Defense Secretary Brown, Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander, and Kester then reviewed the candidates’ qualifications in their own good time, while Rogers fumed. Finally, Secretary Brown made the decision, and it was not Rogers’s choice.
Shortly afterward, I was summoned to Rogers’s office, where I proceeded to serve as a punching bag. “This is the worst personnel experience I’ve had in thirty-five years of service,” Rogers said, venting his annoyance over Kester. “I cannot understand how some civilian special assistant can override the judgment of the Army’s senior general.”
When he finally stopped to take a breath, I spoke up. “Sir, I understand your frustration,” I said, “but Kester is just trying to make clear that these positions belong to Secretary Brown, and he has to have a choice.” Rogers, of course, knew that, and he cooled down. When he dismissed me, he acknowledged, just as he had when he first assigned me to the job, that my loyalty remained with Kester, even when decisions went against the Army.
Kester had gained control over the flow of people, paper, and promotions in America’s huge defense establishment. His approach was as direct as the man himself. Rewards for good little boys and girls and punishment for naughty ones. He sought and exercised power not for his own ego—John’s ego needed no stroking—but because he believed he was best serving the interests of his boss and the Carter administration.
Kester was the political horse in a troika. The other two members were Tom Ross, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, and Jack Stempler, assistant to the secretary of defense for legislative affairs, the department’s liaison with Congress. Every morning, Secretary Brown held a meeting of his closest staff in his office. I sat at the back of the room, like a fly on the wall, next to a grandfather clock that chimed solemnly every half hour. The Secretary of Defense clearly needed these players. Harold Brown was brilliant, one of President Carter’s best appointments; but this physicist-intellectual preferred paper to people. I always had the impression that Brown would be just as happy if we slipped his paperwork under the door and left him alone to pore over it or to work out theorems. If his wife, Colene, wanted to have dinner with her husband, she often had to come to the office, where Harold nibbled and scribbled his way through a pile of papers in a tiny, hieroglyphic scrawl.
Harold Brown had earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University. Jack Stempler’s degree in practical politics came from the back streets of Baltimore. One morning, the Secretary opened the meeting muttering about a congressman who had angered him. The man was a hypocrite, Brown complained. He told you one thing one day, then voted the opposite way the next. “I refuse to have anything more to do with him,” Brown announced.
“All right, Harold,” Stempler said, “you’ve got that out of your system. Feel better now? But the congressman happens to be one of the people’s elected representatives, and you need his vote on the Armed Services Committee. You’ve got to kiss him. You’ve got to love him. In fact, I want you to have lunch with him tomorrow.”
Brown groaned.
And if that did not win the congressman’s heart, John Kester chimed in, we’ll put a military base in his district on the hit list.
On another occasion, Secretary Brown was upset by a story in the Washington Post that he thought was unfair. �
��I’m writing a letter to the editor,” Brown declared.
“Not on this one,” Tom Ross, the PR man, said. “They’ll love that. It’s just what they want you to do to keep the story alive. Harold, when you wrestle with a pig, the pig has fun and you just get dirty.” Still, Brown insisted he was going to write. “Harold,” Tom went on, “just take the hit. Never get into fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.”
I sat there taking my notes and thinking that if the National War College had been my classroom in military politics, I was now out doing field work.
As Christmas 1977 approached, I got in touch with my sister, Marilyn. She and her husband, Norm, had finally had it with the snows of upstate New York and had moved from Buffalo to southern California. I urged them to come East for the holidays. For the past year, I had watched the change in my father. The man who had fussed over his little plot of land like a plantation owner now preferred sitting indoors all day. The man who could talk the birds out of the trees went silent for hours on end. I thought it wise to get the whole family together this year at Elmira Avenue. It turned out to be a happy but muted Christmas. One thing was obvious—Pop had slipped from ringmaster to spectator.
A couple of months later, early in 1978, I went home to accompany my mother on a visit to Pop’s doctor. The doctor went straight to the point. Pop had cancer of the liver. It was terminal, maybe a year, probably less. My mother took it hard. When we were alone, she cried inconsolably. She and my father had contained their feelings toward each other for so long that I was surprised by the flood of emotion. I now found myself on the shuttle from National Airport to La Guardia in New York almost every weekend as Pop continued to decline.
My American Journey Page 29