My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  Alma was in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher when I arrived, and she asked what had brought me home so early. I told her. At first she was quiet, and then I saw that steely resolve take over her expression. How soon, she wanted to know, could we see Mike? I would have a strong partner to lean on in this hour of trial, probably stronger than she would have.

  Grant Green, executive secretary of the NSC, had already alerted his wife, Ginger, about Mike’s accident. The Greens were among our closest friends, and Ginger, a lawyer, dropped everything to come to the house, helping us wait out the next desperate hours. Finally, the call came from the hospital. Mike had suffered a broken pelvis and serious internal injuries. His condition was critical. That evening, thanks to Florence and the Air Force, we clambered over the payload of a C-5 cargo plane up to a tiny compartment behind the cockpit and flew to West Germany.

  We found Mike in intensive care, looking terribly bloated, but smiling, thanks to the painkilling morphine. The pelvis carries blood vessels that, in Mike’s case, had been ruptured. He had been given eighteen units of blood, twice the body’s normal supply. The swelling resulted from thirty pounds of fluid accumulated in his system from the transfusions. The Army’s surgeon general in Europe, Dr. Frank Ledford, had come down from Heidelberg, and after our visit with Mike he took us into a small room to explain our son’s condition. Mike would need pelvic surgery of a kind still in the experimental stage. His other major injuries included a severed urethra. His recovery would take four to six months, Dr. Ledford said. The extent of his recovery was unknowable at that point.

  Not until months afterward did we learn through a friend of Mike’s exactly what had happened after the accident. The three Americans in the jeep had initially been taken to a German hospital. There, Lieutenant Brechbuhl, who spoke German, heard a doctor say, “There’s nothing we can do for this one,” referring to Mike. With that, the lieutenant leaped off the examining table and said, “No. You can’t leave him. Call the American hospital, right away.” And that was how Mike had wound up in Nuremberg, in desperate condition but holding on to life.

  I had to return to Washington the next day, while Alma remained at Mike’s side. A couple of days afterward, the hospital became a bedlam. A shell had exploded during a field exercise, killing two soldiers outright, and ambulances full of injured men arrived at the hospital. One soldier whom Alma saw brought into Mike’s ward had lost both legs and most of his fingers. As she watched the medical staff stretched to the breaking point, Alma volunteered to help. The staff put her to work at the desk, answering phones and directing visitors. General Otis later awarded her a citation for her contributions during the emergency.

  Within four days of the accident, Mike was in Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. There he was examined by Dr. Bruce Van Dam, perhaps the best orthopedic surgeon in the military and certainly one of the finest in the country. Dr. Van Dam was thoughtful and professional. He explained to Mike that he and the chief urologist would be performing procedures rarely attempted. As he was leaving, he added, “You know your military career is over, don’t you?” Mike had not known, or had blotted it out of his thoughts.

  Alma was there at the time, and Mike kept saying, “I want to talk to my dad. Get me my dad.” I got to the hospital as fast as I could, and for the first time since this ordeal had started, I saw my son demoralized. “I don’t know what else I can do,” Mike kept repeating. “I always expected to make the Army my life. What am I going to do now?”

  On my way out, I spoke to Dr. Van Dam regarding Mike’s shattered career. “I wish you had shared that news with me first,” I said.

  He was understanding but firm. “I’m sorry, but this is the reality,” the doctor said. “It had to be faced sooner or later.”

  The night of the first operation was terrible, most of all for Mike, but for the rest of us too. The pelvis, the doctor had told us, would heal by itself, but in a crippling, disfiguring way unless the surgery worked. A plate had to be bolted to the back of the pelvis and a rodlike contraption bolted across the front literally to hold Mike together. Afterward the pain would be unbearable, we were warned. And the amount of morphine necessary to kill pain at that level would kill the patient.

  After the operation, we were permitted to see Mike, who was a mass of tubes, with the morphine he was permitted barely reducing the agony. Alma busied herself in the room. But the three-star general, the great coordinator, facilitator, administrator, never felt more useless in his life. Just when I thought I could not endure witnessing my son’s ordeal any longer, a pert nurse came bounding into the room. “Hi,” she said. “How we doing here? Let’s cut back on this morphine. That’s enough of that. You’re going to be all right.” She moved to the rods and screws sticking out of Mike’s body. “Let’s see how this Erector set is doing,” she said, as she tightened the nuts with a Sears Craftsman wrench. Her name was Barbara Cilento, and something about her brisk, upbeat competence made us think everything was going to be all right. She reminded me of one of my own preachments, “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” In the Army we were always looking for ways to multiply our forces. And a positive outlook was one way. This time I was on the receiving end of the optimism, and it worked.

  Mike would have to undergo several more operations. Still we were grateful to skilled physicians, like Dr. Van Dam and Drs. Stephen A. Sihelnik and David G. McLeod, who brought our son from a point where his life had been written off to putting him on the road to recovery. And we rank, along with those M.D.s, Barbara Cilento, R.N. She became Mike’s angel of mercy, and, we thought for a time, maybe a budding romance as well.

  For the next six months, Alma’s life and mine centered on the hospital. I got there as often as I could between NSC crises. Our son was on the mend, partly through excellent medical care, but as much because of some unbreakable fiber within him in which we took enormous pride.

  One challenge in guiding Reagan foreign policy was to help the President rule with his head as well as his heart. By the fall of 1987, Middle East terrorists now held nine Americans captive. For all the near destruction of his presidency, Reagan would have gone for another hostage-freeing scheme at the drop of a Hawk missile. He was moved both by compassion and an awareness of the damage done to Jimmy Carter’s presidency by a hostage crisis. Carlucci and I worked on the President to tone down his public utterances about the kidnappings, not because the kidnappings were not cruel, which they were, but because the attention and publicity were exactly what made hostage-taking effective and led our enemies to seize more people. To put the matter into some kind of perspective, we pointed out that just as many Americans were lost on the streets of Washington every week to urban terrorism. We could not let our foreign policy be driven by the political karate of a handful of zealots.

  Similarly, the POW/MIA issue came up regularly. And again the President was moved, particularly by able leaders like Anne Mills Griffiths, who had a brother missing in action and who headed the respected National League of Families. But MIA families were also manipulated by con artists fabricating evidence and raising money under false pretenses for their own enrichment. It helped keep the issue in proportion to remember that there had been approximately 78,750 MIAs in World War II, 8,100 in Korea, and 2,230 in Vietnam. I knew that often a booby trap made from a bomb or a fighter plane exploding would produce an “MIA” about whom, sadly, we would never learn anything further. Despite this awareness, I believe that we must keep pressure on the Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians until we have the fullest possible accounting for all of our MIAs.

  In early November, Cap Weinberger informed the President that he intended to resign as Secretary of Defense. Jane Weinberger’s osteoporosis and other ills had worsened. The Secretary had spent seven grueling years on the job. This year marked the second time that Congress had resisted Weinberger’s budget boosts, and the White House had not backed him. He still had the President’s personal loyalty, but Weinberger’s standing wi
th Nancy Reagan, never strong, had continued to slip, no small setback in this administration. The pragmatic First Lady viewed Weinberger, with his unremitting hostility toward the Soviet Union, as swimming against the tide. In the chronic Weinberger-Shultz feud, she increasingly took Shultz’s side, which pained Weinberger. He was enough of a performer to recognize an exit line. He asked the President to relieve him as Secretary of Defense.

  The search for a new Secretary was short. Will Taft, Weinberger’s able deputy and close confidant, was a candidate. But the call went once again to Frank Carlucci, whose performance in every national security department made him a perfect fit. Taft would stay on as Carlucci’s deputy secretary.

  With Carlucci going to the Pentagon, I saw an opening for me to try to return to the Army. That is, until Chief of Staff Howard Baker cornered me one morning and led me into his office. “If we offered you National Security Advisor to the President,” he said, “would you take it?”

  “Howard,” I answered, “after Poindexter, you can’t possibly put another active duty officer in as head of the NSC. You’ll be crucified.”

  “The President can appoint anybody he wants,” Baker said. “What I’m asking is, what will you say?”

  It is not easy to say no to a President, and I had probably played out all my Army options by now anyway. “If offered, I would accept,” I said.

  On October 16, the NSPG, the National Security Planning Group, the inner circle of the NSC, met in the White House Situation Room. Frank and the President entered and sat down. Frank passed me a note. “Done,” it read. “He is delighted with you.” The President himself never spoke to me about the job, never laid out his expectations, never provided any guidance; in fact, he had not personally offered me the position or congratulated me on getting it. After ten months in the White House, I was not surprised. That was the Reagan way, and I was honored by the confidence he had in me.

  On November 5, 1987, a sunlit day with a hint of autumn crispness in the air, we filed into the Rose Garden. The President expressed the nation’s gratitude to Cap Weinberger for making the country strong again. He pointed out the superb qualifications of Carlucci as Weinberger’s successor. And he then announced that Lieutenant General Colin L. Powell would succeed Carlucci as the President’s National Security Advisor. Alma and my daughters were there; but what brought the mist to my eyes was the presence of my son, who had gotten out of his hospital bed, put on a suit, and stood, with the aid of crutches, for the first time since his accident.

  Over the previous ten months, I had been delegated so much responsibility as deputy that I felt fully confident about handling the top NSC job. I was the sixth Reagan appointee in that position, which someone referred to as the administration’s Bermuda Triangle. And I was determined to be Reagan’s last National Security Advisor. I confess that I also felt along with the pride a certain burden to prove myself as the first African-American to hold the position. As the columnist Carl Rowan put it, “To understand the significance of Powell’s elevation to this extremely difficult and demanding post, you must realize that only a generation ago it was an unwritten rule that in the foreign affairs field, blacks could serve only as ambassador to Liberia and minister to the Canary Islands.”

  Before I could be formally appointed, a hitch developed. Several influential people did object to having an active-duty officer heading the NSC. Critics included Admiral Crowe, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Alexander Haig, President Reagan’s first Secretary of State and once the deputy at NSC himself; and Brent Scowcroft, also a former National Security Advisor, to President Ford. I myself had told the New York Times in an interview that the National Security Advisor should be a civilian political appointee. Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa had, in fact, proposed legislation (S. 715) prohibiting an active-duty officer from being National Security Advisor. Passage of this bill would pose a real headache for me.

  The post of National Security Advisor did not require Senate confirmation. But as a three-star general, I would have to be confirmed for any job in order to hold on to my rank. If I dropped back to two stars, I could be appointed without Senate confirmation. But I was not eager to be demoted in the Army so that I could be promoted in a civilian post. A bit of suspense hung over my future.

  Fourteen

  National Security Advisor to the President

  ON DECEMBER 18, 1987, I GOT A CALL FROM SENATOR SAM NUNN’S SECREtary telling me to make sure that on the next afternoon I watched C-Span, the cable TV channel that, among other things, covers Congress. When the time came, I was curious, and a little anxious. After the Iran-contra fiasco, Nunn, powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had become strongly opposed to having military officers serve as the President’s National Security Advisor. By now, I had moved from the deputy’s cubicle to the grand West Wing corner office recently vacated by Frank Carlucci, and hoped nothing I heard on C-Span was going to require my departure.

  The next afternoon, I turned on the office television set, and there was Nunn, in his earnest drawl, bashing away: “A military officer knows that his next promotion depends on the Secretary of Defense and the top generals and admirals in the Pentagon,” Nunn was saying. “… any active-duty officer who serves in that position may be subject to an inherent conflict between his responsibilities to the President and his own professional future in the service. Assignment of a military officer to this senior, sensitive position also raises serious questions about the civilian control of the military.” But suddenly, Nunn took a 180-degree turn: “Why, then, make an exception now?” he asked, and proceeded to answer his own question. “… I believe that this is a rather unique set of cirumstances.” He pointed out that only about a year remained in the Reagan administration and “we have had considerable turmoil in the office of the National Security Council.” We needed continuity, Nunn said. Consequently, he was willing to support confirmation of this particular nominee.

  “Will the gentleman yield?” The C-Span camera turned to Republican Senator John Warner, the ranking minority member on the Armed Services Committee. Warner too had said it was a bad idea to put a soldier in this highly political spot, but praised “the unusual distinction that this fine officer has brought to the nation and himself.”

  Nunn moved that my nomination be approved, and I was subsequently confirmed by the Senate. Within minutes, Nunn and Warner were on the phone laughing like schoolboy pranksters, asking if I had enjoyed the performance. Of course, I was pleased. Not only had the exception in my case been a compliment, but Senate approval allowed me to keep the NSC position and still hold on to my three-star rank.

  While I felt up to the job, what had happened in this soldier’s life was still dizzying. Ten years before, I had thumped down the corridors of the Old EOB in my jump boots to tell Zbigniew Brzezinski, then National Security Advisor, that I felt no qualification for and wanted no part of his operation. And now I had the job that he and Henry Kissinger before him had held. I was no longer someone’s aide or number two. I would be working directly with the President, the Vice President, and the secretaries of State and Defense, who formed the NSC. I was to perform as judge, traffic cop, truant officer, arbitrator, fireman, chaplain, psychiatrist, and occasional hit man. And I would not only be organizing the views of others to present to the President; I was now expected to give him my own national security judgments. I had become a “principal,” with cabinet-level status, if not the rank.

  Around this time, I saw a story in the New York Times about New York City’s new landmarks commissioner, Gene Norman, the same Gene I had played stickball with on Kelly Street, whom I had seen just once since he went off to join the Marine Corps over thirty years before. I invited Gene and his wife, Juanita, another Kelly Street alumna, to join Alma and me for lunch at the White House mess. We talked about another old pal who had recently resurfaced, Tony Grant, now a lawyer and corporation counsel for White Plains, New York. All the while we were laughing and carrying on, an
unspoken undercurrent flowed: had all this really happened to a bunch of kids from Banana Kelly?

  In the mess, Gene noticed something that had always bothered me. Nearly all the waiters in the White House mess were Filipinos. The mess was a wholly Navy-run operation; I had been successful in integrating waiters in the Pentagon, but I did not have any leverage in my new job to crack this monopoly. The same held true for the White House ushers. They were mostly black, including those who served at formal dinners, creating an atmosphere suggesting a plantation in the antebellum South rather than the White House in the twentieth century. These jobs were practically handed down from father to son. They were prized. The ushers liked the situation just fine the way it was. And, no thank you, they did not need some upstart African-American general to break up a good thing in the pursuit of integration.

  Though not yet formally confirmed, I had been filling the advisor’s job on an acting basis since November 18, the day Frank Carlucci departed to take over at Defense. Just two days into the job, I had briefed a group of Knight-Ridder newspaper editors in the Roosevelt Room on the situation in Nicaragua. Among them was one black editor, Reginald Stuart, who so far had asked no questions. Finally his hand went up. “Being the first black person to occupy this position,” Stuart asked, “what do you feel are the chances no one will try to undercut you in the post, or bypass you?” I managed to conceal my surprise—the brother was asking if I was a token!—and ticked off the facts: I had already been with the NSC for ten months; I had dealt with every issue from arms control to Bermuda tax treaties; I had already worked directly with the President and the secretaries of State and Defense. I was neither undercuttable nor bypassable. I am afraid I let my annoyance show.