I arrived at Elmira Avenue on Saturday, April 22, to see Pop, who was now bedridden and occupying my old room. The hospital could do nothing more for him, and the doctors had sent him home. The bed he lay in had a sentimental significance for me. I had bought it with an employee’s discount while I was working at Sickser’s, the first serious contribution I had ever made to furnishing our home. On the dresser were the two photographs Pop always had nearby, Marilyn at her high school graduation and me as a second lieutenant in Gelnhausen.
Mom and Miss Bell, still a boarder, were changing Pop’s sheets. He had become incontinent. It shook me. That proud man lay there helpless, while two women changed him and his son stood watching from the doorway. As they turned over his naked body, my mother said, “Will you look at that. I’m seeing more of him now than in all the years we were married.” I started laughing. Mom started laughing, Miss Bell burst out laughing too, and I saw a flicker of a smile cross Pop’s lips. The moment captured the irrepressible Jamaican family spirit, humor in the face of joy or sorrow. Tears rolled down my cheeks.
After they had cleaned Pop, plumped his pillow, and sprayed the room, the women left us alone. I talked to him, my words followed by awkward silences. I kept talking. Finally, Pop struggled to focus his eyes. He was trying to say something. I leaned forward. “Colin,” he whispered, pointing toward his head, “there’s nothing up there anymore.” They were the last words I ever heard him utter. The following Saturday, he died. The formative figure in my life was gone.
Mom, while grieved by her loss, did not let it interfere with a practical streak nurtured over a lifetime of penny-pinching. We had settled Pop’s estate, all but his ’64 Chevy. I asked if I might have it. Of course, Mom said, and gave me the car, for $400.
John Kester served two masters, Secretary of Defense Brown and Brown’s deputy secretary, the number two man in the Pentagon, Charles Duncan. Though a Democrat, Duncan had all the credentials of a country-club Republican. His business background had been capped by the presidency of Coca-Cola, he possessed wealth, and he combined shrewdness and charm. He ran the department day-to-day and handled the three service secretaries. He had a particular gift for handling defense contractors and politicking on the Hill.
Duncan’s military assistant, Major General Joe Palastra, was, like me, a DePuy alumnus and an infantryman. “I hate this job,” Palastra told me more than once. Joe enjoyed working for Duncan, but he chafed at any Pentagon duty and was never really happy unless he was in the field with troops. Joe had recently been promoted to major general and was in line for a division command. Duncan, however, was not going to let Palastra go until he had a suitable replacement. The military assistant’s job rated at least a brigadier general. Palastra expected that I would soon be on the list, and this possibility fired his imagination. The next thing I knew, Joe was asking if I would like a break from the daily grind. In October, Deputy Secretary Duncan was making a trip to Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and Egypt. I could go with him. The trip was already wired with Kester and Duncan, he said. I sensed that I was being set up for an audition. Palastra the warrior had become Palastra the matchmaker.
Iran was America’s bulwark in the Middle East. It occupied the center of the oil crescent. And Iran stood in the way of the Soviet Union’s historical hankering for a warm-water port on the Persian Gulf. Ruling Iran was America’s staunch ally, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a man who was beloved by his people, so we believed, and was leading them into the modern age. To support his reign, the United States had stuffed Iran with modern weaponry. The ostensible purpose of Duncan’s trip was to gauge how well these arms were being integrated into Iran’s armed forces. But there had been rumblings of late. A fanatical Islamic fundamentalist, the Ayatollah Khomeini, in exile in Paris, was calling for the overthrow of the Shah. Duncan was also going to Iran to see how well our ally was holding up.
We flew to Tehran on October 23, 1978, and were greeted by the head of the U.S. Military Mission to Iran, Major General Philip Gast. There I met my first Iranian generals, bemedaled, proud, imposing, all speaking excellent English. After a lavish meal of lamb served at the officers’ club, we mounted a reviewing stand to watch a parade of Iran’s crack troops, the “Immortals,” in tailored uniforms, berets, and gleaming ladder-laced boots, men who performed with much shouting and martial flair. The Iranian officer next to me explained, “Their loyalty is total. The Immortals will fight to the last man to protect the Shah.”
We visited Isfahan, an exotic city of the ancient world, and watched the centuries blur as a formation of one of the world’s most modern fighter planes, the F-14, which we had provided to the Iranian air force, streaked over the lovely Lutfullah mosque. During another feast, hosted by local officials, I heard a familiar rat-tat-tat sound coming from the street. It sounded like machine-gun fire, but our hosts played dumb.
We next visited the airfield at Shiraz, where the F-14S were based, an installation as sophisticated as any in the United States. I took aside a young American Air Force captain who was training the Iranians. How good was this air force really? I asked him. At first, he was uneasy. Then it came pouring out. “You’ve got two men in the F-14S,” he said, “and two social classes.” The pilots, he explained, came from the Iranian upper crust. They could take off, perform the flashy high-speed, low-level passes, and get the plane back on the ground. “But, hell, Colonel,” he said, “I could teach you that stuff in a week.” The one who really mattered in an F-14, he continued, was the WSO, the weapon systems officer. The WSO operated millions of dollars’ worth of the most advanced aeronautical technology on earth, including the plane’s attack systems. This critical though less glamorous function, however, was relegated to homofars, the equivalent of warrant officers, barely educated men from the humbler classes. “It’ll take a couple of generations before those guys have any real grasp of what they’re doing up there,” the captain told me. “Until they do, all you’ll see flying around here is half an airplane.” As the F-14S continued to roar overhead with flawless precision, I wondered, was this show the aeronautical equivalent of breaking starch?
Later that night, I came down to our hotel lobby to meet Secretary Duncan. We were supposed to attend a formal dinner that the Iranian air force was hosting at the commandant’s quarters. A beautifully uniformed escort officer met us, apologized profusely, and said that we would not be able to leave the hotel. Fighting had broken out between fundamentalist mobs and the police. The streets of Shiraz were not safe.
The next day, we took off for Saudi Arabia. I looked at those gleaming F-14S arrayed on the hardstand, and I thought of what the American instructor had told me. I thought of the turmoil in the streets the night before, and I began to wonder; had Charles Duncan and I seen the inside of Iran, or only the shell?
… … …
We were in a briefing room at a Saudi Arabian fighter base at Dhahran listening to the commander instruct his pilots when the door flew open and a Saudi officer wearing a flight suit and a checkered scarf strode in. He was only a major, but something about his presence sucked up all the authority in the room. He was introduced to Duncan and me as “Major Bandar.” I was meeting my first Saudi royal, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, son of the minister of defense and aviation, nephew of King Fahd, and a man who would eventually become the oil kingdom’s ambassador to the United States.
About a year after this first encounter, Bandar was living in Washington and attending the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. We started playing racquetball together at the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club, he and I against Charles Duncan and General David Jones, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I remember Prince Bandar coming out of the POAC after our first game. He had a gym bag slung over his shoulder. He flicked it off with a shrug, and an aide materialized out of the woodwork and caught it. The prince extended his hand into empty space, and pulled it back with a Coke can in it. It is good to be a prince, I thought. In the years to follow, we would ofte
n work together, and the vast social gulf between us began to shrink until the familiarity between the kid from the South Bronx and the prince from a royal palace approached the outrageous and the profane.
The 1978 trip abroad with Charles Duncan included a stop in Kenya, my first visit to Africa. Exotic as it seemed, the continent did not exert the pull I expected. My black roots were in West Africa, and that emotional experience lay in the future.
Less than three months after the trip, on January 16, 1979, the Shah was driven from his country. I saw in the Washington Post photos of the naked bodies of executed generals who had been our hosts, stretched out on morgue slabs. The homofar class went over to the Shah’s enemies. The Immortals had not fought to the last man. They had cracked like a crystal goblet on the first day of fighting. My suspicion of elites and show horse units deepened. Keep looking beneath surface appearances, I reminded myself, and don’t shrink from doing so because you might not like what you find. In the end, in Iran, all our investment in an individual, rather than in the country, came to naught. When the Shah fell, our Iran policy fell with him. All the billions we had spent there only exacerbated conditions and contributed to the rise of a fundamentalist regime implacably opposed to us to this day.
Nothing further was said about a change in my status after Duncan and I returned from our trip. Then, one day in December 1978, as Charles was passing by my cubicle, he gave me a wink and a wave before disappearing into Kester’s office. A minute later, John buzzed me to come in. I found both men wearing Cheshire-cat grins. “Congratulations,” John said. “You’ve made brigadier general.” Before I had a chance to absorb the news, Duncan added, “And I want you to come to work as my military assistant.”
Promotion from lieutenant colonel to full colonel is a step up. From colonel to brigadier general is a giant leap. I did not take this promotion coolly. I acted more like a kid on Christmas morning. We brought my mother to Washington for the promotion ceremony. Aunts, uncles, and cousins also flooded to Burke Center. Our home turned into a madhouse. Mom was nervous as a bride, constantly bugging Alma to help her fix her hair, iron her dress, and approve her wardrobe until you would think she was getting the star.
The formal promotion ceremony for me and Colonel Carl Smith, Secretary Brown’s military assistant, was held on June 1, 1979, in the elegant dining room of the Secretary of Defense. I walked into a room full of family and friends from past posts, even ROTC. Charles Duncan, now my boss, did the honors for me, and with great grace. The one gaping hole was Pop. Still, I felt that he was up there somewhere strutting among the other souls saying, “Of course, what did you expect?”
Secretary Brown’s protocol officer at the Department of Defense, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Purviance, presented me with a framed quotation by Abraham Lincoln. It seems a telegraph operator at the War Department had informed the President one day that the Confederates had captured a bunch of horses and a Union brigadier general. The operator was surprised when Lincoln expressed more concern over the horses. Lincoln supposedly explained, “I can make a brigadier general in five minutes. But it’s not so easy to replace one hundred and ten horses.” That was the quote Purviance had framed for me. On the back, Stu had taped an envelope marked: “Not to be opened for ten years.” I obeyed his wish. When I did open the envelope in 1989, the note inside read: “You will become Chief of Staff of the Army.” I smiled to myself. At that point, I had become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The framed utterance by Lincoln has followed me to every office I have occupied since, the perfect cure for a swollen ego.
After the formal ceremony, we had a Powell first, a catered affair for over 150 guests at home. Mom thought it was a terrible extravagance. She and the relatives had always done the cooking for family celebrations, but she adapted herself admirably to the luxury. The promotion made me, at age forty-two, the youngest general in the Army. My children were beaming. My relatives were beaming. I was beaming. And I hoped Alma was beaming. This really would be a coup, since I was always kidding her about her controlled enthusiasm in the face of my victories, large or small. When I told her I had graduated number two at Leavenworth, she’d said, “That’s nice, but I always expect the best of you anyway.” An unawed wife is also good for keeping your hat size constant. This night at Burke Center, however, Alma was beaming.
A rite of passage for new generals was to attend “charm school,” a series of orientations beginning with a welcome by the Army Chief of Staff, then General Rogers. Fifty-two of us gathered in a Pentagon conference room to hear words that I have never forgotten. After congratulating us, Rogers put everything into perspective. “Let me tell you how keen the competition is at this level,” he began. “All of you could board an airplane and disappear over the Atlantic tomorrow, and the fifty-two colonels we’d replace you with would be just as good as you are. We would not be able to tell the difference. Furthermore, many of you have to accept that you have had your last promotion. So do your best, and let the future take care of itself.” Half of us would make major general. At most, ten of us would make lieutenant general. And maybe four of us would make four stars.
He was proud of us, he said, and he expected us to do well. But he also warned of the tests of rank. “Some of your careers will stall out,” Rogers said, “because you think the star puts you above the rules, and you become little tin gods. Some of you will top out because you can’t handle the responsibility. Some of your careers will falter because your wives start acting as if they got the promotion. I am not speaking hypothetically,” Rogers went on. “Everything I am saying will happen to somebody in this room.”
With that, he wished us Godspeed and good luck. As the years went by, most of the new generals in that class fulfilled Rogers’s expression of confidence. But I also saw his prophecies borne out by others.
Charles Duncan and I had become fast friends. We played racquetball almost every day, we traveled the world together, and on one or two occasions, we had been known to take a drink together. One night, as I was getting ready to leave work, he asked me to stay awhile. The Carter administration was in upheaval. President Carter had recently retreated to Camp David, discovered a malaise in the country, and resolved to renew the nation’s battered spirits. Part of the renewal included shaking up his cabinet to remove, among others, Joseph Califano, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, and James Schlesinger, Secretary of Energy.
I sat down on the couch in Duncan’s office and waited to hear what he wanted. “Colin,” he began, “I’m leaving. The President wants me to take over the Department of Energy.” I was sorry to hear this but, frankly, saw a ray of sunshine breaking through. Here was my chance to escape the front office and go back to the Army. Charles went on, “And I want you to come with me.” I had been sidetracked before, but this was going over the cliff. As I started to object, he raised his hand. It was all set. He had already cleared the matter with the new Army Chief of Staff, General Edward “Shy” Meyer. Duncan promised that he would let me go as soon as he had his feet wet at DOE. I had no choice but to accept.
Also joining the DOE transition team was the general counsel for the Department of Defense, Deanne Siemer, a tough player to whom I offer the ultimate accolade: she was a match for John Kester. Deanne was supposed to reorganize the entire Department of Energy, while I set up its front office. And I had an unwritten duty. Since I had managed to stand up to this juggernaut at Defense, I was now to provide a shock absorber between Siemer and Duncan at DOE.
The transition team also included a sharp, ambitious lawyer named Bernard Wruble, who was to make a permanent contribution to my philosophy. One day we were having a particularly fiery debate, and another DOE lawyer went off in a sulk when his position was demolished. Wruble walked over to him and said, “You forgot what you learned in law school. Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.” Those words stayed with me.
For the first time since I had mann
ed the bottling machine at the Pepsi plant in Long Island City, I found myself in a purely civilian job. The Department of Energy was a patchwork of the old Atomic Energy Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and three other once independent agencies. They behaved like stepchildren from different marriages forced to live together and not happy about it. Congress, however, loved the new arrangement. DOE was going to save Western civilization by supporting experimental energy schemes in congressional districts all over the country—solar windmills, solar mirrors, gas from coal, oil from shale. The quest for energy independence was a golden wand wafting federal funds over the land.
My job in organizing the front office really involved deciding who stayed and who had to go. I was assigned this always unpleasant task so that Secretary Duncan would not come out as the heavy. Thankfully, after two and a half months, Duncan had as firm a grip as he was ever going to get over this bureaucratic jury-rig. I had done my part and told him that I was eager to leave. Duncan was gracious about releasing me. Parting from DOE was easy. Leaving Charles was hard. Our personalities meshed. We both believed that you work hard, play hard, and take the job seriously, but not yourself. He awarded me the Secretary of Energy’s Distinguished Service Medal, and when he pinned it on, there were tears in his eyes and mine.
The DOE episode marked the first time I ever saw my name in a national news magazine. In its September 3, 1979, issue, Newsweek described me as one of Harold Brown’s “whiz kids,” brought to DOE to wage, in the energy field, “the moral equivalent of war.” Wow!
My hopes for a return to the Army were torpedoed. W. Graham Claytor, Jr., previously Secretary of the Navy, had moved into Duncan’s spot as the number two man at Defense, and Claytor asked me to become his military assistant, working alongside Navy Captain Jack Baldwin, a superb officer who was Claytor’s current assistant. Because Claytor came out of the Navy side of the Pentagon and already had one naval military assistant, Army Chief of Staff General Shy Meyer saw it as a tactical advantage to have an Army man at Claytor’s elbow. My escape route had been sealed.
My American Journey Page 30