My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  One weekend in July, my son, Mike, came to my office with a surprise. He was going to marry a young woman named Jane Knott, whom Alma and I knew and liked very much. Nevertheless, our reaction was mixed. On the one hand, this development marked Mike’s continuing recovery after, by now, fourteen surgical procedures to reconstruct his pelvis and repair internal injuries. He had moved from wheelchair to crutches to cane. Most promising, Mike had gone to work in the Pentagon as a specialist in Japanese affairs. Nevertheless, the idea of an interracial marriage made Alma and me uneasy, despite the happy nearly forty-year marriage of my sister, Marilyn, to Norm Berns. I stress the word “uneasy”—we were not actually opposed. The older generation knows what the younger generation may still have to learn. Making a marriage work is tough enough even under ideal conditions. You do not need to make it tougher.

  Mike had first dated Jane, a Navy captain’s daughter, years before, while they were students at William and Mary. They broke up after a time, and, I suppose, both families felt relieved. But after Mike’s accident, the courtship revived. The sensible next move was for the families to get to know each other. Alma and I invited the Knotts over to our place at Fort Myer for dinner. The atmosphere was stiff at first, until we started rediscovering an old universal truth: people are individuals first, not racial stick figures. When you come into personal contact with people, you are going to like them or not, respect them or not, depending on what they are, not what their pigmentation is. And by the end of the evening, the Powells and Knotts were getting along fine.

  That summer, the Army and the Navy were in a battle royal. U.S. military forces are divided into ten major commands led by CINCs (standing for “commander in chief” and pronounced “sink”), all four-star officers. One such commander, the CINC for CENTCOM, was about to retire. CENTCOM, Central Command, covered parts of the Middle East and Southwest Asia. The Persian Gulf nations, however, did not want American bases on their soil; consequently, CENTCOM was headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, served by a staff of seven hundred and able to call on U.S. units all over the world.

  Choosing the right CINC for CENTCOM was critical. If you had to put your finger on the hottest part of the globe, it would likely come down in CENTCOM’s domain. So far, the job had alternated between Army and Marine officers. Since the present commander, Marine General George Crist, was about to wrap up his tour, the Army expected its turn next. The Navy, however, since it now had forces in the Gulf escorting reflagged Kuwaiti tankers, thought it was high time a Navy admiral got CENTCOM. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were split down the middle. The Army and Air Force wanted an Army man, and the Navy and the Marines wanted an admiral. The chairman, Admiral Crowe, broke the tie, three to two, voting for the Navy man. The decision was now in the hands of the Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci.

  The Army’s candidate was Lieutenant General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, fifty-five, a burly, brilliant, volatile, six-foot-three bear of a man whom I had first come to know a few years before as a Fort Myer neighbor. We had never served together and were not close, but I knew his reputation as a superb troop leader. I was also aware of both the brilliance and the explosiveness that produced the apt nickname, “Stormin’ Norman.” As National Security Advisor, I was not formally in the personnel assignment loop; yet I had strong opinions about who should get CENTCOM, especially after long talks with my Pentagon confidant Rich Armitage. We agreed that having the Navy run military forces in a region where navies were few, weak, and insignificant made little sense. More important, CENTCOM had been designed as a rapid deployment task force to fight land battles in the desert region. The job clearly belonged to a soldier or Marine, not a sailor. And we had confidence in Schwarzkopf. I made my strong preference known to Carlucci. Frank himself was not keen on having an admiral at CENTCOM and overruled the JCS recommendation. And that is how Norm Schwarzkopf came to obtain the command that would propel him into history.

  On August 16, while I was on the road, my secretary, Florence Gantt, showed me a message from one of my NSC Latin American experts back in Washington, Jacqueline Tillman. “Please tell mi general,” it read, “that his ever alert, sharp-eyed staff immediately noticed he was nowhere to be seen when the President boarded Air Force One out of New Orleans…. Naturally, wild rumors are sweeping the halls of the third floor of the OEOB.”

  I was in New Orleans at the time with the President, who had gone there to make his final speech as party leader to the Republican National Convention before turning over the reins to the 1988 presidential nominee, Vice President George Bush. This was my first convention, and I thoroughly enjoyed the combination of circus and democracy. I also had a tiny bit part.

  The previous December, Senator Ted Stevens had sent the note suggesting me to George Bush as his possible running mate. That, however, was a private communication. Earlier in the year, Howard Baker had found himself on a television show being questioned about a lack of racial diversity in the Republican Party. By contrast, the Democrats had Jesse Jackson emerging from their ranks as a national political figure. Baker, political to his fingertips, saw an opening when he was asked about Republican vice presidential prospects. He threw my name into the pot. When I saw him later, I said, “Howard, why did you do that?” He answered with that oh-shucks Tennessee drawl, “I just thought it was a good idea.” Baker’s mention stirred several pundits, including George Will, Charles Krauthammer, William Raspberry, and Clarence Page, to write about me as a VP prospect. On the political Richter scale, this attention ranked below a boomlet. Still, at the convention, some of my friends had a little fun with the idea. I was sitting in the stands when I heard people laughing and smiling around me. I turned to see some White House pals holding up a sign proclaiming, “Bush/Powell ’88.”

  After President Reagan’s convention speech, the staff had gone out to the airport to fly to California, where the President planned a brief vacation. TV cameras filmed the entourage as it reboarded Air Force One. It was then, when my Washington staff failed to see me board, that Jackie Tillman had sent her message. Where was Colin? Amid all the speculation about George Bush’s running mate, the staff began wondering, is he staying behind with Bush in New Orleans? Could it be? The answer was far less exciting. I had boarded the plane by the rear door.

  On the airport tarmac, just before we took off, Bush had revealed his choice of running mate to Ronald Reagan: Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana. At the time, the choice of me, or a dozen other long shots, could not have been any more surprising. My fifteen minutes in the national political spotlight was fun; it was flattering. It also embarrassed me a little. And Vice President Bush certainly never said anything to me on the subject.

  I got a call from the President’s secretary, Kathy Osborne, late one afternoon that spring of 1988. “General Powell, I’ve got a man on the line,” she said. “I know he’s an old friend of the President, but I think you should talk to him first. He says he’s been in touch with Mr. Ghorbanifar about releasing hostages.”

  God help us. Here was one of our recurring headaches. We had two rules around the White House: we did not negotiate with terrorists, and we did not talk to the President about every harebrained idea that came down the pike for freeing the hostages. And here was an old California pal who wanted to talk to him about one of the charter phonies in the arms-for-hostages scam, a man with three dates of birth, three passports, and six aliases, a former source dropped by the CIA as an “intelligence fabricator and a nuisance,” a man who flunked every CIA lie detector test he ever took and who got only his name and nationality right on one of them, and a man who had almost destroyed Ronald Reagan’s presidency two years before. I thanked Kathy for alerting me and told her that, yes, I would take care of the gentleman.

  I could not get rid of him. From then on, this businessman was forever on the phone telling me excitedly of Ghorbanifar’s latest strategy. He knew Ghorbanifar was on the level, he said, because he had been a guest in the man’s Paris penthouse. He once r
eported that Ghorbanifar had paid half a million dollars of his own money to get the hostages released. We should be working with him, the President’s friend advised.

  I started out reasonably, explaining to the old Californian why he should not deal with Manucher Ghorbanifar, and why he must not bother the President on this matter. The friend, however, could not resist this opportunity for adventure. The calls kept coming all summer and into the fall. Finally, in October, I asked him if he might be coming to the Washington area soon; I needed to talk to him. He was on the next plane. We arranged to meet in the lobby of the Watergate Hotel on a Sunday morning. I took Barry Kelly with me, a CIA official who was my intelligence director on the NSC. We met a dapper, elderly man and escorted him to a remote corner.

  “Sir, you are playing a dangerous game,” I said. “You are dealing with one of the world’s leading sleazebags.” I let Kelly read him the rap sheet on Ghorbanifar. Then I said, “You aren’t going to free any hostages. You are only going to harm your friend, Ronald Reagan.” I stuck my finger under his nose. “When I leave here, I am going back to the White House, and I am going to instruct the telephone operators to disconnect you if you ever call again. You are forcing me to turn you into a nonperson. Don’t make me do it.”

  It apparently worked. We heard no more from him.

  Mike Powell and Jane Knott were married on October 1. I kidded my son about postponing his honeymoon so that he could accept a speaking invitation. Strange priorities for a red-blooded American youth, I said. The speech, however, meant a great deal to Mike. Frank Carlucci had asked him to speak at a ceremony honoring handicapped employees at the Department of Defense, where Mike was now working. Alma and I went to the Pentagon auditorium with our new daughter-in-law and Dick and Eleanor Knott, her parents. We had no idea what Mike intended to say. We watched him, supported by his cane, make his way slowly to the rostrum.

  He began to speak in a clear, firm voice. He likened the struggle of the handicapped to combat. He described his feelings in the hospital as the painkillers were reduced and the stream of visitors, cards, and flowers began to dwindle. He spoke of the day when two rehabilitation therapists told him, bluntly, that the easy part, being sick, was over, and the hard part, making his broken body work again, was about to begin. The next morning, he said, “I looked in the mirror. My hair was a mess, dried out by medication. I had lost a great deal of weight. My face was colorless and unshaven. I stood supported by my crutches with a catheter coming out of my stomach. I stood trembling, and I began to cry, uncontrollably. I was at the lowest point of my entire life. This war was real, and I was losing.” Mike went on to describe how he went from rock bottom that day to fight back to his present renewal of hope, the war that every handicapped person has to fight, and little different from the struggle of a soldier wounded in battle. “The power of human will is amazing,” he concluded. “It lifted me from a bed; it stood me up from a wheelchair; it handed me a cane; and it has allowed me to walk through life again.”

  Tears were streaming down my face. I glanced at Alma and Jane, who smiled. We did not have to exchange a word. The pride was in our eyes.

  That fall, the heavy lifting in the White House appeared nearly over. The spotlight had swung to George Bush and his campaign for the presidency against the Democratic nominee, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Since his first hearty greeting on my arrival in the White House nearly two years before, I had come to know Bush well. I had studied his behavior in Oval Office meetings with the President, where he said little, preferring to give his advice to the President privately.

  During one of my early days as deputy, I had met his wife, Barbara. I had gone to a luncheon given for the visiting French minister of defense at the French embassy and found myself seated next to her. “Mrs. Bush,” I said, “how are you today?”

  “Fine,” she answered, “and call me Barbara.”

  “My mother would never have allowed me to do that,” I said.

  “I’m not your mother,” she told me. “Call me Barbara.” She spoke with warmth, but with an unmistakable firmness. And from that moment on, Barbara and I began a close friendship.

  It was not until I had worked with George Bush for nearly a year and a half that I saw a different man from the unobtrusive figure in Oval Office meetings. It occurred over Panama. On February 4, 1988, the U.S. Justice Department had indicted Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian dictator, for drug trafficking and racketeering. The United States imposed sanctions against Panama. Thereafter, the political situation in that country continued to deteriorate. In March, Noriega put down an attempted coup. His PDF, the Panama Defense Force, started roughing up the opposition and making mass political arrests. President Reagan accepted Frank Carlucci’s advice that we send more troops to Panama, an unsubtle hint of what might happen to Noriega. Over the next several weeks in Washington, a hawks-doves debate seesawed over how best to deal with this tinhorn tyrant. We knew one thing: Noriega was worried about the indictment. It offered us our most powerful leverage in prying him from power. Secretary of State Shultz came up with a proposal in which I concurred: if Noriega would get out of Panama, the United States would lift sanctions against his country and drop the indictment against him.

  On a Sunday afternoon in May, I called the Vice President to brief him on this proposal. It was not the most wholesome deal, I admitted, but we had to keep our eye on the objective, which was to get this thug out of power, and try to bring democracy to Panama. The Vice President had no problem with this initiative, he told me.

  A couple of days later, he came back from a trip turned completely around. He had been to California and had spoken to the Los Angeles police chief, Darryl Gates, who told him that dropping the indictment would be a serious mistake. Nailing Noriega was a law-and-order issue, and the Shultz deal would do a terrible disservice to thousands of police officers laying their lives on the line every day in the war against drugs.

  At a meeting that weekend in the President’s second-floor residence, Bush did something none of us had ever seen him do before. He argued with the President directly in front of the rest of us. The deal was bad, bad, bad, and the President should not go through with it, Bush insisted. Reagan, I must say, was unmovable. “Ummm, George, that’s interesting,” he said, “but I think it’s a deal worth taking.” And that was that. No counterargument. No raised voice. Just “No.”

  The next day, outside his office, with his nose about one inch from mine, and punctuating his arguments with his finger in my chest, Bush told me the Noriega proposition stank. “I have never been so sure of anything in my life, and I will do whatever I have to do to kill this deal,” he promised. I had not been chewed out so professionally since my Gelnhausen days. In the end, we did offer the deal to Noriega, but it fell through. We would have to deal with him some other way. From this incident, however, I learned two things about George Bush. First, here was a far tougher man than I had seen before; and second, do not assume you are home free with Bush after the first reading.

  On November 9, after the presidential election, the White House staff held a simple ceremony in the Rose Garden to welcome the victorious George Bush back from the campaign trail. Afterward, I was returning to my West Wing office, and since we were next-door neighbors, the Vice President and I walked together. “Well, Mr. Vice Pres—excuse me, Mr. Pres—Mr. President-elect. What should it be now?” I asked. Bush laughed and said he did not know.

  When we got to his office, he said, “Come on in. Let’s chat for a bit. I need an update on what’s been happening.” I gave him a quick survey of the international scene. When I finished, he said, “You’re one of the few people in the White House I want to consider for the new team. I have some options I hope you’ll think about. Jim Baker would like you as deputy secretary of state”—which confirmed where Baker was going. “Or you can have the CIA. Or you can stay on as National Security Advisor for a while, until you decide what you want to do.”

  “I’m flatt
ered,” I said, “but I’m certainly not owed anything.”

  “No, no,” Bush said, “we want you. Take some time. Think it over.”

  That night I stopped by Carl Vuono’s house at Fort Myer. Carl’s brilliant career had culminated in his rise to the top as the four-star Army Chief of Staff. He led me to his upstairs study at Quarters 1, where I told him about my conversation with the President-elect. I added that the Army certainly did not owe me anything either and, with the NSC job coming to an end, this might be the time for me to retire. I had thirty years in, and I was getting interesting offers from the private sector. One retired military gray eminence had recently stopped by to tell me he was leaving the board of a major corporation and thought I would make a good replacement. When he told me the five-figure salary I would get just for sitting on a board, I was staggered. “Carl,” I said, “I’ve been away for a while, but what I really want is to stay in the Army, if there’s a job for me.”

  Carl is a no-nonsense guy and came right to the point. Forget this business about being away too long, he said. My standing with the Army college of cardinals was still good. He wanted me back, and the Army wanted me back. In fact, he said, he had a job for me, commander in chief of Forces Command, FORSCOM, responsible for all Army field forces based in the United States, almost one million troops, including National Guard and Reserve units.

  When I got home, I did what I usually do when faced with a personal decision: I drew up a balance sheet. I put “Stay” on the left side and “Go” on the right side, since staying in the Army or going out were my only intentions. I did not want to go to the State Department as number two. It would be a demotion. And I did not want to be the nation’s chief spook at the CIA. That was not me. And there was no point lingering at the NSC, since I knew Bush had his own man in mind, the able Brent Scowcroft. I wound up with nineteen reasons on the “Stay” side and only a few on the “Go” side, which came down to “new career, make some money.” After mulling the matter over for a couple of days, I went in and told Vice President Bush that I wanted to return to the Army, a decision which he accepted graciously. Immediately afterward, at our regular morning briefing, I told President Reagan what I had decided. “FORSCOM is four stars, isn’t it?” he asked. Yes, I answered, the Army’s highest rank. “Good, good,” he said.