My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  Graham Claytor was sixty-seven years old, a gentleman of the old school with an occasional cantankerous streak. He had graduated from Harvard Law School, clerked for a Supreme Court Justice, and become a powerful Washington lawyer, but scored his greatest success as an executive running the Southern Railway. Trains were his passion. He had accumulated a priceless collection of toy trains, many dating to the nineteenth century, and he had them displayed from floor to ceiling all over his Georgetown home. My first exposure to Claytor had occurred while he was still Secretary of the Navy and I was working for Duncan. The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Saratoga was scheduled to be overhauled, at considerable cost, and the Navy had analyzed the issue exhaustively, concluding that the most economical place for the job was the naval shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia. Claytor, as Secretary of the Navy, concurred in the recommendation. Vice President Walter Mondale, not always the mild gentleman of his public persona, heard about this decision and called Duncan to say that there apparently had been a misunderstanding. He had promised the people of Philadelphia, during the 1976 presidential campaign, that the Saratoga would be rebuilt in their shipyard. So make it happen.

  Duncan, a realist, called me in and said, “I want you to disappear somewhere and come back with a rationale for overhauling the ship in Philadelphia rather than Norfolk.” Since I had no naval and less shipbuilding experience, this was going to be an exercise in creative writing for me. I did the best job I could, and a few days later handed Duncan a single-spaced, three-page argument for rebuilding the Saratoga in Philadelphia.

  The next thing I knew, Graham Claytor came barging in, 16-inch guns blazing, flinging my report on Duncan’s desk. His naval experts had made a professional judgment of the best yard in which to rebuild the Saratoga, he said. And he supported their conclusion. He was Secretary of the Navy, and he did not expect to be overruled. “I’m the one,” Claytor said, “who has to go before the House Armed Services Committee and argue this flip-flop after I’ve already recommended Norfolk.” Duncan managed to calm him down. They were men of the world, Charles said. They understood the game. And the administration wanted Philadelphia.

  Claytor grumpily snatched back my paper, returned to his office, and told his Navy analysts to come up with a recommendation the exact opposite of their first conclusion. The Virginia delegation in Congress got word of what was happening and cried foul. And, as he had feared, Claytor had to go up to Capitol Hill and defend the department’s new position. I was astonished. He made the ease for sending the Saratoga to Philadelphia so persuasively that you could not imagine rebuilding the ship anywhere else. Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes under, your ego goes with it. Graham Claytor, an old lawyer, knew this. Vice President Mondale was on the bridge when the Saratoga sailed into the Philadelphia yard.

  Thursday, April 24, 1980, was a clear, sunny day in Washington. I arrived at the office at my usual time, 7:00 A.M. Graham Claytor was already there, looking preoccupied. As the morning wore on, I could feel tension mounting along the Eisenhower Corridor. Claytor kept slipping out of meetings and into Secretary Brown’s office, keeping me at arm’s length. “The Secretary doesn’t want any military assistants in on this,” he kept saying, whatever “this” was. I drove home that night as much in the dark as any other commuter.

  The next morning at 7:00 A.M., a knot of early birds gathered around a television set in the deputy secretary’s office as President Carter, his face ashen, explained what had happened the day before. An attempt had been made to rescue the fifty-three American hostages seized by Iranian “students” and held captive in the American embassy in Tehran for the past five months. The mission, the President said, had failed. “It was my decision to attempt the rescue operation,” Carter went on. “It was my decision to cancel it when problems developed. The responsibility is fully my own.”

  It took a while longer for the details to dribble out. The operation, designated Desert One, involved eight Navy RH-53 helicopters and six C-130 Hercules transports with a force of commandos aboard drawn from the four services; most of them were Army paratroopers. They had set out for Dasht-e-Kavir, the remote Great Salt Desert in Iran. The plan was to have the helicopters fly next to another staging area near Tehran. Agents on the ground, working for the United States, were to provide trucks to bring the commandos from the helicopters to the American embassy, where they would attempt to overpower the guards. The helicopters would fly out of their hiding place, land at the embassy compound, pick up the freed hostages, and take them to transport planes at a seized airfield nearby from which they would be flown to freedom. The planners had figured that six of the eight helicopters, minimally, were necessary for the success of the mission. But mechanical malfunctions knocked out two helos before the rendezvous in the Great Salt Desert could occur, and a third suffered a hydraulic failure on arrival. Upon getting this news, the President aborted the mission. Though a technical failure at this point, Desert One was not yet a publicly known embarrassment or a human tragedy. That was still to come. As one surviving helicopter maneuvered to get into a refueling position for the return flight, its rotor struck the fuselage of a C-130. Both aircraft burst into flames. Ammunition exploded. Eight men were killed outright and four more severely burned.

  I had never heard a whisper about Desert One. Yet, I had had enough experience in helicopter operations in Vietnam, Korea, and the 101st Airborne to be surprised at the way this operation had been conceived and conducted. Helicopters are notoriously temperamental. For a mission this demanding of men and machines, far more than eight helos should have been launched to make sure that six would still be airworthy to carry out the demanding second leg of the mission. Desert One also erred in counting on a “pickup” team drawn from all four services and brought together just for this mission in which men from one service flew helicopters of another. Weaknesses in the chain of command, communications, weather forecasting, and security further contributed to the failure. There can be no question of the bravery of the men who headed out into the Iranian desert. But more than bravery was required. Consequently, the mission failed, and men paid with their lives. Colonel Charles Beckwith, the Delta Force commander, said it best: “You cannot take a few people from one unit, throw them in with some from another, give them someone else’s equipment, and hope to come up with a top-notch fighting outfit.”

  I would remember Beckwith’s words in the future when it became my responsibility to plan combat operations at the highest levels. You have to plan thoroughly, train as a team, match the military punch to the political objective, go in with everything you need—and then some—and not count on wishful thinking. I would have rated Desert One’s chances of success at a hundred to one, foolhardy odds for a military operation. And the failure may well have fatally wounded the Carter presidency.

  I also felt that the handling of this affair had been a public communications fiasco. I blew off steam by writing a facetious “Guide for Handling Disasters” that went as follows. Release facts slowly, behind the pace at which they are already leaking out to the public. Don’t tell the whole story until forced to do so. Emphasize what went well, and euphemize what went wrong. Become indignant at any suggestion of poor judgment or mistakes. Disparage any facts other than your own. Accuse critics of Monday-morning generalship. Finally, accept general responsibility at the top, thus clearing everybody at fault below.

  Our civilian leaders eventually recognized the need to forestall future Desert Ones even before the military did. Several years later, in 1987, against the opposition of the Defense Department, Congress enacted legislation creating the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) under a four-star general, to provide the planning, coordination, and supervision lacking in Desert One. In Just Cause, the mission to restore democracy to Panama, and in the 1991 Gulf War we were to find out how well this overhaul worked.

  I continued working for Graham Claytor for the next eight months. I liked and admired all my Pentagon bosses,
Kester, Duncan, and Claytor. Consequently, I approached election day in 1980 with mixed feelings. I had supported Jimmy Carter in 1976. This time, I could not. The Carter administration had been mauled by double-digit inflation and the humiliating spectacle of the Americans held hostage in Iran. Desert One had been a military and psychological disaster. The record on national security, admittedly, was not all bad. During Harold Brown’s watch, work had begun on nearly all the weapons systems that matured by the time of the Gulf War. A Brown subordinate who deserved major credit for this pioneering was William Perry, director of research and engineering, who later became Secretary of Defense himself. But on the whole, the vibrations coming out of the Carter White House were not comforting to the military profession. Dropping the B-1 bomber was wise, but other force cuts were so damaging that the Army Chief of Staff, General Meyer, went before Congress complaining of a “hollow Army,” thus handing the Reagan forces a potent campaign issue. Carter withdrew the meat cleaver and started to build up the country’s defenses, but it was too late. By then, the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had made his administration look naive in its expectations of a harmonious era of East-West relations in which we could drop our guard.

  The case of Master Sergeant Roy P. Benavidez epitomized for me an insensitivity toward the military during this time. Benavidez had earned the Army’s second-highest decoration, the Distinguished Service Cross, for valor in Vietnam, where in 1968 he had saved the lives of eight trapped Special Forces troops, in the course of which he was wounded nine times. Years later, after additional evidence of his bravery was reviewed, Benavidez’s award was upgraded to the Medal of Honor. This highest military decoration was traditionally presented by the President, which would have given a boost to the battered ego of the armed forces at the time. But President Carter never got around to pinning the medal on Benavidez.

  That November 1980, I checked my absentee ballot for Ronald Reagan and mailed it back to New York. I knew officers who did not vote in presidential elections in order to remain politically pure, depriving themselves of registering a preference for their commander in chief. That was going too far for me. I also split my ticket. I had no hesitation about crossing party lines as my way of expressing nonpartisanship.

  Ronald Reagan was elected handily. At the Pentagon, we now waited for the other shoe to drop. Who would be the next Secretary of Defense? Soon after the election, a Reagan transition team showed up at the department. Old career hands warned me that the transition would follow a predictable course. Victorious Young Turks would fan out to assigned offices, making a few peremptory courtesy calls on leading lame ducks, but otherwise treating them as if they had leprosy. After all, they were the opposition. They had lost. What could they know? The newcomers would be attracted to the disgruntled in the department, those just waiting to tell them how terrible the previous administration had been. Since these complainers had not gotten along with the losers, the transition team would assume that they must know what they were talking about. Little thought would be given to why the grumblers had fared poorly. Every gripe would be taken at face value. Out goes the baby, the bathwater, and the bathtub.

  The first Reagan wave to hit the Pentagon beaches was led by William Van Cleave, heading the Defense Transition Team. Van Cleave and his band prowled the corridors finding all kinds of misdemeanors and felonies and were impatient to poke into classified military plans. They prepared fat transition books of issues to be resolved, failings to be fixed, people to be dumped. At this point, a new Secretary of Defense had not yet been named, and Mr. Van Cleave and company were working in splendid isolation.

  Finally, the other shoe fell, and a shudder went through the Pentagon. Caspar Weinberger, his reputation honed in the Nixon Department of Health, Education and Welfare as “Cap the Knife,” was to be Secretary of Defense. We tried to comfort each other. At least Weinberger was known as a strong manager. He was close to Ronald Reagan. His knife might make the department leaner, but also tougher and more efficient.

  Van Cleave and his transition team happily presented the Secretary-designate their blueprint for a new, improved Pentagon. Weinberger quickly showed his management style. He asked Van Cleave when he would finish his work. The following June, he replied. Weinberger thanked Van Cleave and told him his services were “no longer required.” Van Cleave had fallen victim to the same psychology the outgoing administration had suffered from him. He was not Weinberger’s man. What could he know?

  Early in January 1981, Weinberger’s own advance party arrived. One member was Richard Armitage, a Naval Academy graduate and recent member of Senator Robert Dole’s staff. Armitage was in his mid-thirties, big, bald, brassy, built like an anvil, he looked as if he could step into the ring next Saturday at the World Federation of Wrestling. I was one of the people he talked to about the transition. I learned that Armitage had spent six years in Vietnam, which gave us much to talk about, and that he pumped iron every morning, which gave us less to talk about.

  I was told one day to give a hand to another newcomer, Weinberger’s director of political appointments. The title suggested a grizzled Republican former state chairman or a defeated GOP congressman who needed a job. I was introduced instead to a young woman in her mid-twenties, Marybel Batjer, the daughter of a Nevada judge. She had worked for California’s Bechtel Corporation, as had Cap Weinberger. Ms. Batjer’s political mentor was Senator Paul Laxalt, Republican from Nevada. Despite her youth, she struck me as bright, capable, and mature beyond her years.

  One thing could be said for the newcomers, especially Armitage and Batjer. Unlike the previous transition know-it-alls, they were shrewd enough to realize that a new broom may sweep too clean. They discovered a base of knowledge in the department worth preserving. They recognized that some people actually knew what they were doing and need not be fired on the spot. They willingly sought help from older hands, instead of stumbling around in the corridors of their own ignorance.

  Because Weinberger had once been director of the Office of Management and Budget, and because I had served my White House Fellowship there, I was dispatched one evening, shortly before the inauguration, to bring him to the Pentagon to look over his new office. The lobby of his hotel was filled with prosperous-looking Republicans, flushed with victory, eagerly awaiting the inaugural festivities. I had myself announced from the desk and went up to Weinberger’s room. The Secretary-designate opened the door. He was dressed impeccably but soberly, his manner somehow formal yet warm. He greeted me with a kind of Victorian cordiality. He flattered me that he remembered me from OMB and said that he was delighted we would be working together again. While honored, I wondered what those words might augur for my hopes of going back to the Army.

  That was what Alma wanted too. She pointed out something of which I was unaware: I was much more relaxed, much more a man in his natural habitat, much more fun in straight military assignments. In the Army, I was working with a band of brothers who shared backgrounds, memories, and values. The political assignments were far more frustrating and tension-ridden. There was a comparison with working on cars. You could fix things more easily under the military hood than in the messier gearboxes of politics. And while assignments abroad had kept me away from my family for long periods, working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense had almost the same effect. I was gone before my children were awake and came home after they had gone to bed.

  On January 20, 1981, I arrived at the office early as usual. The executive suites were empty. An unnatural quiet had settled over the Eisenhower Corridor. Passing the torch from one administration to another leaves a brief vacuum in the halls of power. A few days before, I had chatted with Graham Claytor as he cleared out his desk. He and the rest of the Democratic Defense appointees had fought the good fight and lost. Yet, I had a sense that they were not devastated by Carter’s departure, at least not from the national security perspective. I liked and admired Graham Claytor and was going to miss him. He was soon back on his
favorite track, becoming president of Amtrak, and deserved much of the credit for saving the country’s rail passenger service.

  On his last day in the Pentagon, Claytor held a small awards ceremony. At the end, he shook my hand and said, “Colin, don’t be surprised if you end up as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff someday.” I remember thinking that it was a nice compliment, but an unlikely prophecy.

  Eleven

  The Reaganites—and a Close Call

  I WAS WALKING PAST THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE’S OFFICE JUST AFTER THE inauguration when a familiar figure with the compact, wiry frame of a wrestler (which he had been) stepped into the hallway. He wore no jacket and his shirtsleeves were rolled up, very un-Pentagon. “Mr. Carlucci,” I said, “welcome to the department.”

  He stopped. “Oh, yeah, Colin Powell,” he said with a smile. “I remember you from OMB. Good to see you again. You’re going to be my military assistant, I understand.”

  In the years since we had been together at OMB, Frank Carlucci had become an inside-the-Beltway star. He had served as ambassador to Portugal between 1975 and 1978, a time when the administration was worried about that country swinging from a rightist dictatorship to communism. Carlucci had enabled the United States to steer a subtle center course until Portugal could find its own way to democracy. He had been number two more often than Avis, deputy at OMB, undersecretary at HEW, and deputy director at the CIA. He was now waiting out Senate confirmation as Weinberger’s number two at Defense. His talents had been recognized and employed by both parties, which tainted him in the eyes of some conservative purists. To them, Carlucci had committed an especially grievous sin. During the Carter administration, he had served in the CIA under Admiral Stansfield Turner, whose name provoked rage on the right for Turner’s wholesale firing of covert operatives. White House politicos did not want Carlucci at Defense, nor did powerful Senator Jesse Helms. But Weinberger did want him, and purists be damned. As I had observed in Weinberger’s handling of Bill Van Cleave, the Secretary, with his polished, Old World manner, had a will of steel. Also, as part of this portable entourage, Weinberger had brought William Howard Taft IV to Defense as his general counsel, the position Taft had filled for him at HEW.