My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  What was I, he demanded, anti-bachelor? “I’m damned if I’m going to travel all over the world without the company of a pretty lady.” My answer was still no.

  “Suppose I just show up at the airport with her?” he asked.

  “The pilot will refuse to fly her,” I said, “and you shouldn’t put an officer on the spot like that.” He blew more smoke and hung up.

  I was disappointed a few days later to get a letter from Congressman Wilson reminding me that he would still be around if I ever came up for three stars. I wrote him and said, “Please do what you think is right and I’ll keep trying to do what I think is right.” What he thought was right was to cut three C-12 attaché aircraft from the next defense budget, making no pretense about why he was doing it. Open vindictiveness was not going to hurt a good ole boy from a safe east Texas district.

  The girlfriend episode marked my first serious run-in with a member of Congress, and I came away with this conclusion. You can afford adversaries, but not enemies. Today’s adversary may be tomorrow’s ally. I managed to remain friends with Charlie and to accommodate his substantive requests. And we continued to get his vote on key issues. Sometime after the airplane incident, at a formal dinner, I met Charlie’s girlfriend, a stunner. “See what you cost me,” he said. He had a point.

  My boss was a good man to be on the right side of, but he was the wrong man to cross. Richard Perle, a determined Cold Warrior, had come into the department as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy. Perle, known around the building as “the Prince of Darkness” for his unremitting anti-Soviet stance, had brought with him a kindred soul, a bearded and brash former congressional staffer named Frank Gaffney. I watched Gaffney’s debut at a Weinberger staff meeting. He lectured the Secretary on the evils of softness toward the Reds and referred to the four-star Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, as “Jack.” After the meeting broke up, Weinberger took me aside. “Who is that young man?” he asked. “What is his name?” I told him, but for the following year, no matter how often Frank Gaffney surfaced, he remained to Weinberger the man without a name. I gave Perle’s protégé a course in bureaucratic table manners, and Weinberger was eventually able to utter “Gaffney,” even eventually to nominate him for a higher post. But second chances with Cap Weinberger were rare.

  Early on, I accompanied Weinberger when he went to the White House for a meeting he had to attend in the Situation Room. I waited outside until he and the President came out and headed for a small nearby office for a private chat. It was the first time I had ever seen Ronald Reagan up close. Weinberger gestured me to come forward and introduced me to him. What struck me as the President took my hand and gave me a melting smile was a radiance the man generated. He was perfectly attired, not a hair out of place, the tie knotted just so, the snowy white shirt looking as if he had just broken starch. We exchanged a few pleasantries, and he and Weinberger turned to the business at hand. What stayed with me after this brief first brush was the paradox of warmth and detachment Reagan seemed to generate simultaneously, as if there could be such a thing as impersonal intimacy.

  I was a juggler trying to keep the egos of three service secretaries, four service chiefs, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and other Pentagon pashas all in the air at once. They expected instant access to the Secretary, who did not always welcome their attentions. Dealing with them was the toughest part of the job, and not everyone applauded my performance. One Pentagon powerhouse tried to get me fired. John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy, was probably the ablest infighter in the building. Lehman would never budge an inch in the competition among the services. To him, the Navy position was always the Alamo. Not content to run the Navy, Lehman was forever pressing on Weinberger his ideas for running the entire defense establishment. Weinberger did not enjoy Lehman’s aggressiveness, and I had to play the heavy, keeping him at bay. Not surprisingly, Lehman blamed me for depriving the Secretary of the benefit of his brilliance. He went around the building claiming that I was not serving the Secretary, but ingratiating myself with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to guarantee my future. His displeasure reached a point where he went to see Will Taft and urged Taft to have Weinberger get rid of me. Will jokingly told me of the incident. I was not amused. I called Lehman’s military assistant, Paul Miller, and told him that if his boss was displeased with my performance, he ought to tell me to my face, not try to sandbag me. Nothing changed. Weinberger continued to resist Lehman. Lehman continued to blame me. And I did not get fired. In the course of these clashes, however, I did pick up from John Lehman’s vocabulary a new twist on an old bromide: “Power corrupts; but absolute power is really neat.”

  My father had already passed away, and so had Alma’s mother, in 1972. As we entered 1984, Alma was about to lose her father and I my mother. R. C. Johnson died in Alma’s arms on February 5, 1984, at the age of eighty-one. I had started off as a suspect son-in-law, a soldier, and possibly worse, a West Indian. By the time R.C. died, I had overcome these demerits and could affectionately kid this sober educator, get him to take a rare drink, and tease him about tools somehow migrating from my toolbox into his.

  I took on the responsibility of wrapping up R.C.’s estate. I had gone through the Birmingham house and rounded up the arsenal of guns he had accumulated in drawers, closets, and the basement. I put the weapons in the trunk of my car and took them back to Washington. Jim Brooks, who ran the message center for the Secretary of Defense, was a gun collector and wanted to see what I had brought back. Jim was interested in a Smith & Wesson .38, a couple of Magnums, and an old Japanese army rifle of my own. He bought the pistols, and finally we got down to the rifle. During one lunch hour, we went to the parking lot so that I could show him the piece, stowed in the trunk of my car. Jim looked it over and said he would think about it and left. I had put the rifle back into the trunk when a patrol car pulled up. Out came an officer from the Department of Defense police force.

  “Is this your car?” he said.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Please open the trunk.”

  I started to explain about the gun collection.

  “Open the trunk, please,” the cop said.

  I opened it to reveal a weapon that would have been obsolete even when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

  “Come with me,” he said, taking my rifle.

  “Look, I’m Major General Powell,” I said. “I’m Secretary Weinberger’s military assistant.”

  “Please come with me, sir.” He tried to lock me in the caged-off backseat. I refused. I told him, as they say in the movies, that I would go quietly, but I intended to ride up front.

  We entered the police station in the basement of the Pentagon, where a sergeant sat behind a desk ready to book people and read them their Miranda rights. I was not looking forward to this scene. Suddenly, a police lieutenant appeared. “General, what are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I think I’m being arrested,” I said.

  “I’ll take over,” he told the patrolman. And turning to me, he said, “You can go back to your office, sir. I’ll see that your rifle is returned.”

  When I got back, my secretary, Nancy Hughes, explained what had happened. A vigilant secretary on the fourth floor of the Pentagon, up in Air Force country, had seen two people down in the parking lot handling a rifle. Terrorists! She had immediately called the police. The savvy and tactful Nancy got wind of what was going on and notified a man called Doc Cooke.

  The Secretary of Defense ran the department, but David O. “Doc” Cooke ran the building. Formally, Doc was deputy assistant secretary of defense for administration. Functionally, he was the chief fixer. Need to kick somebody upstairs who was not doing his job? See Doc Cooke. Want a private bathroom worthy of your rank as assistant secretary? Doc can install it. Can’t get a parking place in the prestigious River Entrance lot? Try Doc. Need to spring a major general who is about to get busted? Doc’s your man. His power was formidable, this
Godfather of the Pentagon. Doc was the one player whom even crafty John Kester had been unable to outwit. Doc had all the understanding of the military bureaucracy of a Navy captain, which he had been, and the wiles of a lawyer, which he was. Without Doc Cooke, the Pentagon would not open in the morning. No one else would know where the keys were. Doc and Nancy had arranged my release without bond, bail, or further embarrassment.

  My mother died a hard death. She had had a heart attack five years before. She survived only to get cancer, requiring a mastectomy. Then she had a second heart attack. Toward the end, as with my father, I found myself flying up to New York almost every weekend. Even in her constant suffering, her spirits never flagged. When she knew there was no hope, she uttered the typical Jamaican sucking sound followed by the untranslatable “Chuh!” “Chuh, Colin, you just put me out there, throw some ivy over me, and forget it.” I thanked God for Ida Bell, by now a twenty-five-year boarder in my mother’s home. Miss Bell had helped my father during his terminal illness. Now she was doing the same for my mother. I will always be indebted to Ida Bell.

  Maud “Arie” Powell died on June 3, 1984. The week before, knowing the end was near, I had driven the whole family to New York for what I sensed might be the last visit. It touched me, the closeness that bound my wife and all three children to my mother. The kids all called her “darling,” a pleasing sound they had picked up because that was what she called them.

  My father had been the formative figure in my life. The role of my mother was no less important. I absorbed from her as well lifelong habits of hard work and self-discipline. She had never stopped working until incapacitated. Yet the necessity to earn a living had never interfered with her perfect mother love. I never understood how she could work so hard away from home every day, yet never allow my sister or me to feel anything but mothered. Parents are a luck of the draw. With my mother and father, I could not have been luckier.

  The funeral service was held at St. Margaret’s, our old family church in the South Bronx. By now, the modernists had taken over. All that had meant so much to me, the imagery, the poetry, the liturgy, had been changed. The church had adopted a new service, and the present young priest at St. Margaret’s had taken modernism to the extreme, rendering God genderless and ordinary. I knew my attachment to the forms of the past was more emotional than intellectual. But I found it disconcerting to discover that the rock of faith I was raised on could move. My mother received a unisex, low-key, nontriumphant burial service. I do not recall hearing the word “God” mentioned once. I found myself whispering, “Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll do something better later, because this is not the way you would want to go.”

  Cap Weinberger was an avid Anglophile. His manner, speech, and appearance, his patrician never-apologize-never-explain attitude, had a certain Englishness, minus the accent. Consequently, when the Secretary received an invitation to take part in the famed Oxford Union debates, he could not resist. The students had invited him to compete against an Oxonian Marxist professor, E. P. Thompson, on the issue “Resolved, there is no moral difference between the foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union.” American embassy officials in London, on learning the news, begged the Secretary not to do it. The Oxford students were heavily leftist, capable of vocal abuse, and unimpressed by anybody. Such an argument could not be won, the embassy staff argued, and a loss would lead to embarrassing stories in the European media. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, staunch ally and friend of the Secretary, urged him to reconsider. It was unseemly for an American Secretary of Defense to take part in a venture involving unavoidable risks and a doubtful prize, the opponents argued. Their arguments only hardened Weinberger’s resolve.

  We left Andrews Air Force Base late in the evening of February 27, 1984, and arrived in London early the next morning. Weinberger was busy with other matters and, I noticed, had given his debating notes only a cursory glance during the flight. That evening I accompanied him through the halls of the Oxford Union, walking past portraits of prime ministers whose own debating skills had been perfected here. I took my place and watched my man mount the stage to argue the “con” position carrying his No. 2 pencils. The students in the packed house reminded me of Romans at the Colosseum waiting for a Christian to be thrown to the lions. Professor Thompson had a formidable reputation as a debater.

  What we had forgotten in the hurly-burly of running the department was that our chief had been a former television talk show host, a book reviewer, and a highly paid lawyer. His peroration that night was masterful. Were the Western and Soviet systems different? “I leave you with one thought,” he concluded. “When you leave here tonight, there will be no midnight knock at your door.” By a close margin, he won. Weinberger was as excited as I have ever seen this emotionally contained man. Though his victory was clear-cut in our eyes, we had taken out a little insurance. The way the debate winner is determined at Oxford is by counting how many people leave via the “pro” exit and how many by the “con.” We made sure that every member of our security detail and every staffer and secretary left via the “con” exit.

  I knew that Weinberger, for all his outward self-possession, had been deeply troubled by the tragic bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. I did not realize how deeply until a singular draft document came out of his office. He asked me to take a look at it and circulate it to the administration’s national security team. Weinberger had applied his formidable lawyerly intellect to an analysis of when and when not to commit United States military forces abroad. He was put off by fancy phrases like “interpositional forces” and “presence” that turned out to mean putting U.S. troops in harm’s way without a clear mission. He objected to our troops being “used” in the worst sense of that word. He had come up with six tests for determining when to commit American forces.

  Weinberger’s antagonist, George Shultz, was dismissive of Cap’s approach. I had watched the irony of their squabbling for months. The Secretary of State was often ready to commit America’s military might, even in a no-man’s-land like Lebanon. What was the point of maintaining a military force if you did not whack somebody occasionally to demonstrate your power? On the other side was the man responsible for the forces that would have to do the bleeding and dying, arguing against anything but crucial commitments.

  Not only did Weinberger want to sell his guidelines inside the administration; he wanted to go public that summer. We started considering possible speaking platforms, but White House political operatives nixed any such controversial speech until the presidential election was over. After Reagan’s reelection, Weinberger addressed the National Press Club on November 28. I went with him to hear him describe the tests he recommended “when we are weighing the use of U.S. combat forces abroad.” (1) Commit only if our or our allies’ vital interests are at stake. (2) If we commit, do so with all the resources necessary to win. (3) Go in only with clear political and military objectives. (4) Be ready to change the commitment if the objectives change, since wars rarely stand still. (5) Only take on commitments that can gain the support of the American people and the Congress. (6) Commit U.S. forces only as a last resort.

  In short, is the national interest at stake? If the answer is yes, go in, and go in to win. Otherwise, stay out.

  Clausewitz would have applauded. And in the future, when it became my responsibility to advise Presidents on committing our forces to combat, Weinberger’s rules turned out to be a practical guide. However, at the time of the speech, I was concerned that the Weinberger tests, publicly proclaimed, were too explicit and would lead potential enemies to look for loopholes.

  In May 1985, I was invited to speak at the ROTC commissioning ceremony at the College of William and Mary. Twenty-seven years had passed since I had stood in Aronowitz Auditorium at CCNY to receive my own second lieutenant’s bars. Among the cadets I was to commission this day was Michael Powell. When it came time for me to administer the oath, I instructed the cadets to do an about-face so that they wer
e looking out at the audience of parents and loved ones, a gesture I had appropriated from Gunfighter Emerson’s retirement parade. When it was Mike’s turn to come across the stage, he got an embrace along with his commission, a powerful moment of continuity for father and son. In the audience, besides Alma, were Mike’s sisters, Linda, a William and Mary sophomore, and Annemarie, soon to be a freshman there. I like to think that Thomas Jefferson, an uneasy slaveholder, would have appreciated the Powells’ getting a first-rate education at the college from which he graduated.

  As a just-commissioned second lieutenant, Mike wanted to take a new car to Fort Knox for his basic training in armor, his assigned branch. I tried to persuade him to wait until he got to Germany, where he was going eventually, and where he could buy a European car. No way. Mike had had enough of my hand-me-down Volvos, especially after the night when he had to steer while I towed a broken-down Volvo on the end of a rope for ninety miles from Richmond to our house, a hair-raising experience for the towee. Enough of Pop’s penny-pinching. Mike wanted a new Honda now. I took him to a Honda dealer and introduced him to the art of the deal. To Mike’s utter humiliation, I spent three hours haggling with five salesmen and two managers. But in the end, we got our price.

  By now, I was buying Volvos presumably dead and bringing them, like Lazarus, back to life. People started seeking me out for my Volvos. Others happily gave me their moribund models. I would fix them up, slap $99 worth of Earl Scheib paint on them, and resell them. Business became brisk. I even tried to get a dealer’s license, but the state of Virginia would not consider Fort Myer a legitimate business address. Over the past ten years, over thirty Volvos have passed through my hands. If only Sweden awarded a Nobel Prize for recycling its cars.

  A large part of my day in the Weinberger office involved going through correspondence addressed to him to decide what required his personal attention. The document dated June 17, 1985, was a stunner, a draft National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) entitled “U.S. Policy Toward Iran,” printed on White House letterhead, addressed to Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz, and classified top secret. Our copy of the eight-page NSDD was also marked “Sec Def: Eyes Only for You.” Weinberger nevertheless expected me to screen everything. As I read through the NSDD, I realized what it represented: Bud McFarlane, the current National Security Advisor, was making a bid for Kissingerian immortality. Kissinger, former holder of the job McFarlane now held, had demonstrated, along with President Nixon, the conceptual audacity to think the unthinkable, to open a door to Communist China that America had kept shut for a generation. The NSDD proposed opening a dialogue with Iran to include sending U.S. arms to the Iranian government of the Ayatollah Khomeini, a regime that had held fifty-two Americans hostage for over a year, that the United States had formally declared a terrorist state, that President Reagan had said the United States would never deal with, that the United States had boycotted and was urging all its allies to boycott as well, and that was linked to the bombing deaths of 241 Marines in Beirut? Could anything be more audacious? I shot this document in to the Secretary with a suggestion that Rich Armitage also take a look at it. I was eager to hear Weinberger’s reaction.