My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  Nancy Reagan’s interest in astrology was not out of step with a quasi-mystical streak in the President himself. He had been much affected by what had happened at Chernobyl. If an accident in a Soviet nuclear power plant could spread radioactive poison over so much of the globe, what would nuclear weapons do? The President had learned that the name Chernobyl derived from a Russian word meaning “wormwood.” Because of wormwood’s harsh taste, the plant is mentioned in the Bible as a symbol for bitterness. The President’s train of thought ran from Chernobyl, to wormwood, to rancor, to Armageddon. He told us that what had happened in that city was a biblical warning to mankind.

  December 7 came, Gorbachev landed, and we were sticking nicely to the script: arrival of the general secretary on the south lawn of the White House; a brief one-on-one meeting with the President in the Oval Office; Reagan’s eager presentation of the cufflinks, which Gorbachev pocketed with a simple “Thank you.” The two leaders then led their delegations to the East Room for the signing of the INF treaty. “For the first time in history,” President Reagan said, “the language of ‘arms control’ was replaced by ‘arms reduction.’” We had laid out two leather-bound copies, blue for the United States, red for the Soviet Union, which Reagan and Gorbachev signed, a little past 1:45 P.M.

  It was now time for substance over ceremony. Gorbachev still wanted to derail SDI, and he wanted to make a pitch for economic aid for his country. We wanted the Soviets out of Afghanistan and wanted Jews to be free to leave the Soviet Union. I had arranged for the principals and immediate staff to meet in the Oval Office at 2:30 P.M. But the State Department wanted so many people included, American and Soviet, that, at the last minute, George Shultz asked to move to the much larger Cabinet Room. My antennae started quivering. Sudden changes threw Ronald Reagan off his form. Unwisely, I yielded to Shultz.

  When everyone was seated in the now jammed Cabinet Room, the President invited Gorbachev, as his guest, to speak first. I started jotting down my impressions as the Soviet leader spoke from his handwritten notes: “Bright. Fast. Quick turning radius. Vigorous. Solid. Feisty. Colorful speech.” Gorbachev was tossing off terms like “MIRV” and “depressed trajectories” and the throw weights of SS-12S, -13s, -18s, and -24s, like one of Ken Adelman’s wonks in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. At one point Gorbachev said, “I am aware you are getting ready to produce new chemical weapons at your facility in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.” He even knew that these weapons would be fired from 155mm artillery shells, which I did not know. The President listened with a fixed, pleasant expression. Suddenly, he interrupted to say he had a story. We knew that he kept a stack of Russian jokes on file cards, most of the gags fed to him by the American embassy in Moscow. Gorbachev yielded the floor.

  “An American professor was in a cab on his way to the airport for a flight to the Soviet Union,” the President began. “It turns out the cab driver was a student. ‘When you finish your studies,’ the professor asked him, ‘what do you want to do?’ ‘Don’t know,’ the cabbie said. ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

  “At the other end of the flight the professor was taking a cab into Moscow and struck up a conversation with the Russian driver. He was a student too. So the professor asks what he’s going to do when he finishes school. ‘Don’t know,’ the cabbie says, ‘they haven’t told me yet.’ That,” the President said amiably, “is the basic difference between us.”

  As he finished the story the Americans wanted to disappear under the table, while Gorbachev stared ahead, expressionless. This was his third meeting with the President, and by now he knew Reagan’s style. He evidently considered getting what he wanted more important than being offended; he turned again to the agenda, as if he had heard nothing.

  The President’s performance continued to reveal his thin preparation. On diplomatic questions, he would turn to Shultz and say, “Well, George, you might want to say a word about that.” On military matters, he turned to Carlucci: “Frank, I’m sure you would like to address that point.”

  After the meeting ended, our side retreated to the Oval Office. George Shultz courageously said what had to be said: “Mr. President, that was a disaster. That man is tough. He’s prepared. And you can’t just sit there telling jokes.”

  The President knew the session had not gone well and took the scolding in stride. But he was not devastated. “Well, what do we do now?” he said.

  The President and Gorbachev had another working session scheduled for the next morning. I was determined not to repeat the mistakes of today, part of which I accepted as my fault. “The first thing we’re going to do is stay in the Oval Office,” I said. George Shultz now agreed. “And the next thing, Mr. President,” I said, “is to get you a better set of talking points.” Ronald Reagan’s ego was not going to benefit from any further lecturing this day. He was hosting a state dinner for Gorbachev in the evening, and I suggested he might want to go back to the residential quarters to get ready. I assured him we would have everything prepared for him by morning.

  As the meeting ended, Shultz still looked distraught, as though we had suffered a first-round knockout. I suggested we all take a deep breath, buckle down, and fix the problem. I went back to my office and had Florence Gantt round up Fritz Ermath, Bob Linhard, and Nelson Ledsky of my staff. As soon as they arrived, I gave them the classic five-paragraph Army field order: Situation: serious; we lost the first engagement.

  Mission: retake the initiative. Execution: counterattack by preparing the President better for the next day. Logistics: three or four pages of tightly written talking points to be prepared by this staff. Command and control: here in this room, with approval of the talking points by the Secretary of State. “I’ll see you around midnight,” I said, “after the state dinner.”

  The event went swimmingly, with Ronald Reagan doing the thing he seemed born to do, speaking warmly, convincingly, wittily—and he was well prepared. I got back to my office a little before midnight to the usual chaos of crash projects, men in rolled-up shirtsleeves, ties pulled down to half mast, women’s hair disheveled, people hunched over texts messy with scribbled edits, half-empty foam cups of cold coffee and plastic spoons littering desks, secretaries clicking away at word processors, printers spewing out the latest draft. I looked over the current version and said, “Good. But not good enough.” I gave some course corrections and went home to grab a few winks. I was back in the West Wing by 5:00 A.M. The staff, now draped over chairs and couches, looked bleary-eyed. Ermath handed me the latest version of the President’s talking points. I glanced at my watch. Shultz would be over by 7:00 A.M. for his shot at our work. “One more time,” I said, giving a few new directions. They roused themselves and sat down again around the conference table.

  Shultz came in on the dot, and I showed him what we had. “I think it’s good,” George said, “but let me take it back to the department. My people need to have a look.”

  “Better make it fast,” I said. “I still have to brief the President, and he sees Gorbachev at eleven A.M.”

  The President looked refreshed and relaxed as I reviewed the talking points with him. They were laid out double-spaced, like a script. The pages covered SDI, arms control, regional conflicts, human rights, and economic aid. He behaved as if yesterday had never happened. My own mood was determinedly upbeat. Things always look better in the morning. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier, even for Presidents.

  “Good stuff. I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” the President said, nodding as we went over the talking points.

  He was sitting in an armchair next to an end table. I opened the drawer to the table and slipped the three pages into it. “After we have the official opening ceremonies,” I went on, “we’ll be coming back here to the Oval Office.” Gorbachev’s aide (a sinister-looking KGB official whom Griscom had dubbed “Dracula”) would open his briefcase and hand Gorbachev a steno pad with the handwritten notes. “That’s when you casually take your talking points out of this drawer,” I told the
President. “Just make sure, sir, that you speak first.”

  Later that morning, the President greeted Gorbachev on his arrival at the White House, and the two men and their staffs then went to the Oval Office. We had the photographers in for a photo op, then settled down to business. Gorbachev already had his steno pad in hand. I looked to the President, who was drawing his notes from the end table. He began talking naturally and persuasively. He noted that yesterday had been a proud day. As the general secretary himself had said, however, the two of them still had much to do. He was encouraged by the Soviets’ willingness to limit ballistic missiles to between 4,800 and 5,100 warheads. Offensive missiles had kept the peace for over forty years, but our peoples deserved better. That was the purpose of SDI. It would improve world stability by removing any incentive to strike first in a crisis.

  The scene was playing perfectly, with the President setting the course we wanted the discussion to take. All the while, I eyed Gorbachev and again recognized what a quick study the man was. He knew in an instant what we had done to reverse yesterday’s direction. When the President finished, Gorbachev started talking, flipping through his pad. He soon abandoned it and was giving a fact-filled presentation out of his head, displaying total command of his material. He stated his still strong objections to SDI. Contrary to distortions in the U.S. press, Gorbachev said, the Soviet Union was not developing its own SDI. But if the United States wanted to proceed down that path, that was our business. The Soviet Union, however, would have a response. But his main thrust remained positive, to continue the search for agreements to reduce nuclear arsenals.

  The talk went on for over an hour and a half. Shultz, Carlucci, and I occasionally had to backstop the President on details. Though Gorbachev was clearly superior in mastery of the issues, there was not a trace of condescension in his manner, none of this business of Vienna in 1962, when Nikita Khrushchev had bullied a young, inexperienced President, John F. Kennedy. Gorbachev’s attitude was more like Margaret Thatcher’s. The British PM also stood heads above Ronald Reagan in absorbing and articulating complex issues. But both she and Gorbachev recognized in Reagan the qualities that had won over Americans in two presidential elections. The man was not only President, but in many ways the embodiment of his people’s down-to-earth character, practicality, and optimism. Wise fellow heads of state recognized this fact; more cynical leaders did not. And Mikhail Gorbachev was nobody’s fool.

  The morning of December 10 was dreary and drizzly, as crowds gathered on the White House south lawn for Gorbachev’s departure. Gorbachev, however, was as sunny as a politician who has just won a primary, which, in a sense, he had. Gorbachev had stopped his motorcade on 16th Street, on the way from the Soviet embassy to the White House, and started working the crowd, with great success, establishing, as we later learned, that he was more popular outside than inside the Soviet Union. We still, however, had one big, dangling detail to settle—the Soviets wanted a ceiling of 5,100 ballistic missiles, and we wanted 4,800. We had to resolve this difference before we could move from the INF treaty to a START treaty to limit strategic long-range nuclear systems, the weapons designed to be lobbed over the ocean at each other’s cities.

  We were huddled with the Soviets in the Cabinet Room arguing over the allowable number of ballistic missiles, while the Reagans and Gorbachevs were waiting for us to finish so that they could begin the departure ceremony on the rain-soaked south lawn. Finally, Carlucci suggested to Akhromeyev that we split the difference on the missiles at 4,900. Our team went to the President, who accepted the recommendation after Shultz and I assured him it was a good deal. I experienced the same sensation Carlucci had expressed earlier. Ronald Reagan trusted his people. He was going to take your advice, so you had better be right. The President once signed a photograph of me briefing him one day in the Oval Office with the inscription “If you say so, Colin, it must be right,” indicating a level of trust that could be a little frightening.

  Gorbachev also agreed to the compromise limit, and on that rainy Washington afternoon, the world continued to become a safer place.

  In January 1988, we entered the last year of the Reagan administration.

  It began on an interesting note for someone like me who had come out of the wings and onto the national stage barely one month before. I received copies of an exchange of notes between Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and Vice President Bush. Just after Christmas, Stevens had written:

  Dear George,

  I am really impressed with Colin Powell. In my judgment, he should be on your “short list” for potential vice presidents.

  A few days later, on January 5, 1988, Bush answered:

  Ted,

  You are right about Colin Powell. A class guy in every way.

  A nice compliment, but not exactly concurrence; and Bush never said anything about the matter to me.

  Democracy was triumphing in Latin America that season, but not in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas or in Panama under Manuel Noriega. I had known for some time that the Nicaraguan contras were never going to march through Managua, banners and rifles raised aloft in victory. They were not strong enough. Still, they were our leverage to keep the Sandinistas at the negotiating table, a tactic that was working. The two sides had entered into initial agreements the previous August. I believed that in order to keep the pressure on, we had to continue to supply arms to the contras, not through the back door, but with Congress’s approval. I was still spending some of my most frustrating days trying to sell a contra arms package. As February approached, we almost had a deal. If only the Republicans would agree to a few minor concessions, we could win the Democratic swing votes we needed. I had not reckoned, however, with the character of House Minority Whip Dick Cheney, whom I had briefed back at V Corps in Frankfurt. Cheney would not agree to any more concessions. He preferred losing on principle to winning through further compromise. Consequently, on February 3, the administration proposal went down to defeat. A month later, we had to settle for a less desirable deal to hold the contras together, just barely, with more nonlethal aid.

  On February 19, I flew with Secretary of State George Shultz to Finland en route to Moscow, where we would plan the next summit meeting, to be held in the summer. By now, Shultz and I had become close. He was one of the most distinguished public officials I had met, and the more I knew him, the more impressed I became. I admired Shultz not only for his intellectual powers, but for the way he determinedly managed to put the substance into Ronald Reagan’s vision. We met every morning at 7:00 A.M. in my office along with Frank Carlucci; and we three worked as a team rather than as heads of competing bureaucracies. In this administration, George Shultz was the single minister of foreign policy, and I made sure that the NSC staff understood that and backed him all the way.

  On this trip, we stayed in Helsinki at the lovely Kalastajatorppa Hotel to shake off our jet lag before going on to face the Soviets. Shultz graciously gave a dinner at the hotel for our traveling party of about fifteen, where we turned out to be intensely interesting specimens to a group of Japanese tourists at the next table.

  As our group started to break up, the Japanese swarmed around us with their cameras. They wanted to have their pictures taken with the famous man. Shultz and I primped ourselves a bit; but the Japanese were circling someone else. The celebrity they wanted to pose with was Charles Redman, the State Department’s assistant secretary for public affairs. Redman was the one who went before TV cameras every day to brief the press. Redman was the one the Japanese recognized from their own television. We had entered an age where TV images formed perceptions, and these perceptions eclipsed reality. I was going to see this distorting phenomenon increasingly at work in our foreign policy deliberations.

  When we got to Moscow, I met with a figure right out of Cold War history, Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet ambassador to the United States in the eras of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Dobrynin must have been made of cork. He had survived all these hard-line commun
ist regimes and was still a senior advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev in the era of glasnost and perestroika. We had spent the day at Osobnyak, an old czarist mansion, now a guesthouse belonging to the Foreign Ministry, working with Dobrynin and Eduard Shevardnadze on the upcoming summit.

  At the end of the day, Dobrynin sidled up to me and said he thought we ought to have a little chat, just the two of us. His driver took us in a Zil limousine to a massive grand hotel across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The lobby was almost deserted, and I asked Dobrynin, “What kind of place is this?” “For the big guys,” he said, in his comfortable American English. “Politburo, KGB.” We took an elevator to the fourth floor, where Dobrynin led me into a private dining room. One did not ordinarily travel to the Soviet Union for the cuisine, but this meal was sumptuous. And it was served by a set of twins, briskly efficient young Russian women.

  Dobrynin had a big, open, avuncular face and a disarming manner. I was on my guard. “Colin,” he said, as we ate, “you must understand what’s going on here. Gorbachev is the first lawyer we have had running this country since Lenin. That is a more critical point than you realize. A society run by bureaucrats issuing diktats can’t function, because there is no recourse to these apparatchiks. There is no remedy for reform. Gorbachev is trying to make this a nation of laws instead of a place run by party hacks.” Dobrynin went on to point out that the new leader’s approach to the military was unprecedented. “He’s driving the generals crazy,” Dobrynin said. “Gorbachev says, ‘Why do you tell me we have to have this weapon or that weapon just because the Americans have it? I’m not out to conquer the Americans. So tell me why do we need this for our own security?’” Nobody had ever questioned the military before, Dobrynin said. In the past, the military always got anything it wanted.