My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  The man who had done so much to shape my life, Frank Carlucci, and so much to save the Reagan-Bush presidency by rehabilitating the NSC after Iran-contra, was leaving too. After all Frank had done, I thought his departure as Secretary of Defense was not handled gracefully. He got a phone call from one of Bush’s aides, who informed Frank that the President-elect’s choice to replace him, former Senator John Tower, was about to be announced to the news media. My old friend Will Taft agreed to stay on at Defense, running the department during Tower’s confirmation proceedings (which turned out to be protracted and unsuccessful). I was delighted when the Bush administration later rewarded Taft’s talent and loyalty by naming him U.S. ambassador to NATO.

  In the dying weeks of the Reagan administration, I could feel the pressure subside. I accepted engagements I ordinarily would have had to pass up. In mid-November, I was attending a dinner at the National Academy of Sciences honoring the dissident Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov. I was about halfway into the meat course when a security man slipped me a note from George Shultz. Shultz needed to see me right away. The State Department was just across the street, and so I walked over and took the elevator to the seventh floor. George was behind his desk in his office, a small gem of Early American style. With him were Ambassador Roz Ridgway and his assistant, Charles Hill. They greeted me, and George explained the urgency of his call. He had been notified by Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador, that Gorbachev was coming back to the United States. We all gave out simultaneous weary sighs.

  “He’s going to address the UN, and he wants to see the President one more time,” Shultz said, handing me Dubinin’s communication.

  I read it. “And obviously Gorbachev wants to meet the next President,” I said, handing back the message. I suggested that we needed to remind Mikhail Gorbachev that in this country we had only one President at a time.

  The next morning, we briefed President Reagan on Gorbachev’s trip. He was willing to meet Gorbachev again, but at this late stage of the game the meeting was not to be treated as a summit.

  Gorbachev was going to address the UN on December 7, approximately three weeks away. Shultz thought he had an inspiring place for the President and the Soviet leader to meet. Since Gorbachev would be in New York to address the UN, why not use the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and give this Soviet man a taste of American culture? As a native New Yorker, that did not strike me as such a hot idea. A meeting at the Metropolitan, with the motorcades and entourages of the two world leaders running around Manhattan, would practically paralyze the city. As we shopped George’s idea around, the Secret Service complained that this site presented serious security headaches. The advance people claimed that the Met would create a logistics nightmare. They had a better idea—Governors Island, in New York Harbor. That site would not tie up anybody. The island was just a short hop from the UN via the East River, and security would be a cinch. Shultz still did not like the idea, but gave in to the White House stage managers.

  As the planning went forward, I called Ambassador Dubinin to hammer home one point. This was not to be a meeting on substance. It was too late for anything in the Reagan administration and too early for the Bush administration. No deals. No initiatives. No eleventh-hour surprises pulled on the old leader going out or the new leader coming in. Also, on this occasion, Ronald Reagan was still President, and George Bush, though President-elect, would be there only as Vice President.

  On the day of Gorbachev’s UN appearance, the President’s party waited on Governors Island for the boat that would bring the Soviet leader to us. We had taken over the residence of the admiral commanding the First Coast Guard District for the occasion, and while we waited, we monitored a stream of messages on Gorbachev’s progress: his arrival in the UN General Assembly Hall to thunderous applause; and his speech, which impressed us. On their own, with no quid pro quo from the West, Gorbachev announced that the Soviets were going to cut their armed forces by 500,000 men.

  At one point, Vice President Bush asked me to step out with him into the garden, where the foliage was now brown and withered. He had been unusually jittery ever since Gorbachev had asked for the meeting. He and Brent Scowcroft, who would soon succeed me as National Security Advisor, were concerned that Gorbachev was going to try to put one over on the new kid on the block. Bush was looking for reassurance from me that there would be no bolts from the blue today. “Mr. Vice President,” I said, “I have gotten all the assurances I can from the Russians, short of putting words into Gorbachev’s mouth. But he certainly knows our feelings. And the President is prepared to knock down anything they try to float on short notice.”

  Our lookouts reported that Gorbachev’s boat had been sighted. The President’s party gathered in front of the admiral’s house to greet the Soviet leader, Ronald Reagan out front, his face ruddy and glowing, his hair blown by a stiff wind.

  The lunch was warm and intimate. With no contentious matters on the agenda, the President was in his element. He told Gorbachev that he was leaving office with only one mission unaccomplished. He had not been able to reinstate the horse cavalry in the Army, and he loved horses. Nothing was better for the inside of a man, the President said, than the outside of a horse. Had he known the President’s wishes, Gorbachev answered, he could have helped. The Soviet Union was full of horses, which started him reminiscing about his own boyhood experiences on a farm.

  I was looking at my watch like a coach with a one-point lead praying for the clock to run out before any last-minute fumbles. And then George Bush spoke. He had said nothing until this moment. “We’re a nation of investors,” the Vice President said. “An investor wants to know what things are like today and is even more interested in the prospective situation. So, Mr. General Secretary, what assurance can we give an investor about conditions in the Soviet Union three or four or five years from now?”

  Gorbachev laughed. “Mr. Vice President, even Jesus Christ could not answer that question.” President Reagan smiled at the reference to the Savior. In spite of all the talk of godless communism, Reagan had told us often that he thought Gorbachev might have a religious streak, although it seemed to me that he was only using Russian idiom.

  There was no doubt in my mind that this meeting, for all the goodwill between Reagan and Gorbachev, had been engineered by the Soviets to get a close-up look at the next American leader, a conviction confirmed by Gorbachev’s next words. Looking straight at Bush, he said that he knew what Bush’s advisors had been telling him. He knew that skeptics still thought he was playing some kind of game, trying to lull America so that the Soviet Union could take advantage of us. Mr. Bush, he said, would soon learn, however, that he had no time for games. He had enough troubles of his own at home. “In 1985,” he said, “when I said there was going to be a revolution, everybody cheered. They said, yes, we needed a revolution. But by 1987, our revolution was on, and the cheering began to die down. Now in 1988, the revolution still goes on, but the cheering has stopped.” He still had to continue his revolution, he said, not for our benefit, but for his country. I had watched this man over the past fourteen months, and there was no doubt in my mind that he meant what he said.

  The final photo op at Governors Island had three men posing for the cameras on a small jetty with the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline in the background, Reagan, Gorbachev, and Bush, the past, present, and future.

  I had received several presents from Gorbachev during our encounters, but the one I prized most was a shotgun with a beautifully engraved metal breech. Since the gun was no doubt worth more than $180, I had to turn it in to the General Services Administration for appraisal. I could then have first crack at buying it back. Otherwise, it would go on the auction block. The GSA must have had Sotheby’s price the gun. I would have been better off with a pawnshop appraisal. Nevertheless, I wanted the weapon. I swallowed hard and wrote out a check, hoping Alma would be none the wiser. But in going over our checking account, she came across the stub, and
she confronted me: “Colin Powell, twelve hundred dollars for a silly shotgun!”

  My daily life in the West Wing amounted to constant decision-making and then passing along my recommendations, issues ranging from where best to hold a summit in New York to helping craft nuclear disarmament treaties at the summit. By now, I had developed a decision-making philosophy. Put simply, it is to dig up all the information you can, then go with your instincts. We all have a certain intuition, and the older we get, the more we trust it. When I am faced with a decision—picking somebody for a post, or choosing a course of action—I dredge up every scrap of knowledge I can. I call in people. I phone them. I read whatever I can get my hands on. I use my intellect to inform my instinct. I then use my instinct to test all this data. “Hey, instinct, does this sound right? Does it smell right, feel right, fit right?”

  However, we do not have the luxury of collecting information indefinitely. At some point, before we can have every possible fact in hand, we have to decide. The key is not to make quick decisions, but to make timely decisions. I have a timing formula, P = 40 to 70, in which P stands for probability of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired. I don’t act if I have only enough information to give me less than a 40 percent chance of being right. And I don’t wait until I have enough facts to be 100 percent sure of being right, because by then it is almost always too late. I go with my gut feeling when I have acquired information somewhere in the range of 40 to 70 percent.

  January 20, 1989, a Friday morning, inauguration day. I was sitting in my little office at home at Quarters 27A, Fort Myer, since I had not been invited to the inaugural ceremonies. No reason why I should be, since I was part of the departing old guard. The phone rang. It was Ken Duberstein, who had succeeded Howard Baker as White House Chief of Staff.

  “I’m coming over to pick you up,” Ken said. “I think we should be with the President in his office on his last day.”

  I had enjoyed working with Ken and was going to miss him. In the fourteen months that he had run the White House staff, he had achieved the smoothest, most congenial operation I had seen during the Reagan years. I ran the national security shop. Tom Griscom, as the public communications chief, oversaw the speech, press, and other information activities. And Ken directed the whole show. The three of us managed to do our jobs with few collisions and a touch of fun. At one point, my staff kept pressing me to get approval for a National Security Council seal for our stationery. Duberstein did not want the NSC to be identified separately from the White House. Nevertheless, he and his staff showed up one day at my office to present a seal. It was a little stuffed seal with a bracelet dangling from its neck that read “National Security Council staff.” And that ended our ego trip. Unlike some personality combinations I had known running the White House, our group proved that you could do a job without friction, even with pleasure, if you could get beyond the ego game. And Ken Duberstein deserved most of the credit for that atmosphere.

  On that last day of the administration, Ken picked me up and we arrived at the White House a few minutes before 10:00 A.M. I stopped by my office first. On the day before inauguration, the White House maintenance staff had come through the West Wing taking down every picture, cleaning out every desk, emptying all the files. With everything freshly painted and scrubbed and the sofa pillows fluffed, I felt like an intruder in my own office. I did not dare sit on anything. The room was now a neutral space suspended between me and my successor, Brent Scowcroft.

  I went to the Oval Office and found the President sitting behind his desk, wearing a black suit with a striped tie, as impeccable as ever. With him were Duberstein, Marlin Fitzwater, Kathy Osborne, and Jim Kuhn, the President’s personal assistant. The office was strangely naked, already stripped of any personal traces of Ronald Reagan. As we chatted, the President placed his last call. It was to Bonnie Nofziger, the wife of his political consultant Lyn Nofziger; the Nofziger’s daughter, Sue Piland, was terminally ill, and the President was calling to express his concern to the family. He got off the phone, and started reminiscing about the Yellow Room, his favorite in the residential quarters of the White House. Someone suggested he carve his initials on his desk. He laughed and said he had already removed the “kickboard” as a souvenir. “I left a note for George in the desk drawer too,” he said.

  The President turned to me. “Oh, Colin,” he said, “what should I do about this?” He pulled from his pocket the nuclear authentication code card he had carried all these years.

  “Hold on to it, sir,” Kuhn said. “You’re still President. We’ll turn it over after the swearing-in.

  “Mr. President,” he continued, “it’s time.” He let the press photographers in for the last photo op. They took several group shots of us standing behind the President, who was seated at his desk. The photographers then positioned themselves behind a sofa, cameras aimed at the door leading to the Rose Garden. “Now, Mr. President,” Jim said. Action. Camera. Reagan got up and headed for the door, with that familiar athletic spring in his step. As he reached the doorway, he turned around and took one last look back. And that is the image the cameras captured and sent out to the world of the end of an era.

  As the President left for the Capitol, I went back home to catch the inauguration on television. Just as the ceremony ended, I remembered that I had to call somebody at the office. I picked up my private White House line and it was already dead.

  I had just completed the most crowded, momentous year of my life. I was leaving the White House with two problems nagging at me, the unsolved issue of Manuel Noriega in Panama, and the contras, still hanging by a thread, while a Marxist regime ruled in Nicaragua. Yet, I had also taken part in the historic turning point in the second half of this century, the seismic changes occurring in the Soviet Union. I had worked closely with major world figures. And I had helped shape the Reagan policies that reversed the race toward nuclear Armageddon. The best part for me had been working directly with Ronald Reagan. He may not have commanded every detail of every policy; but he had others to do that. The editor and author Michael Korda once wrote a perceptive definition: “Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand….” That description fit Ronald Reagan.

  The man had been elected President twice by knowing what the American people wanted, and even rarer, by giving it to them. What he gave us was inspiration and pride, described best in, of all places, the New York Times, not ordinarily a bastion of Reagan support. In the lead editorial on the President’s last day in office, the Times noted: “… he remains to the end, both amazing and comfortable.” The editorial cited a key to the President’s secret, sticking to his guns on a few fundamental themes—“strengthen defense and cut taxes.” The piece also caught the essence of the man. “President Reagan,” the Times noted, “has come across as something like Professor Harold Hill,” from Meredith Willson’s 1957 hit, The Music Man, about the dream merchant who comes to town and promises, “River City’s gonna have her Boys’ Band—as sure as the Lord made little green apples….” Harold Hill, the Tones said, made the children of River City “swell in pride in their will, unity and potential. Ronald Reagan has done that for America.” The piece was entitled “Exit the Music Man.” The show happens to be my favorite, and I thought the tribute was apt.

  I was now leaving the service of this remarkable man, content with the job I had done, but eager to return to my first love, the uniform, the troops, the Army.

  Part Four

  THE CHAIRMANSHIP

  Fifteen

  One Last Command

  EVERY TIME I SAT DOWN IN THE FORSCOM CONFERENCE ROOM AT FORT McPherson, Georgia, I faced a legendary pacifist. Shortly after I took over there as commander in chief, I put up a framed poster of Martin Luther King, Jr., given to me by Mrs. King, and inscribed with Dr. King’s words: “Freedom has always been an expensive thing.” I wanted the poster there to rem
ind me, and everyone who sat in that room, of the leading role the Army had played in defending freedom and advancing racial justice. On one of my last nights in the White House, at a reception in the East Room, a black usher had come to me and said, “Sir, I was a private in the Army in World War II, the old segregated Army. I never thought I would see the day when a black general would be in this house. I just want you to know how proud we all are.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said, “but you don’t have it quite right. I’m the one who’s proud of what all of you did to pave the way for the rest of us.”

  I once quoted Dr. King’s words in a speech to the National Association of Black Journalists to express the idea that freedom is expensive and must be defended. I got a cool reception and took some editorial flak. I was probably stretching a point by trying to connect the champion of nonviolence to the military profession, and I never used the line again.

  Since I had served in the White House during the 1988 presidential election, people in Atlanta, and elsewhere, occasionally asked how I felt about the Willie Horton television spot used against Michael Dukakis, the Democratic candidate. Horton, a black convict, had raped a woman and stabbed a man while on a weekend pass from a Massachusetts prison during the time Dukakis was the state’s governor. Was the ad depicting this incident racist? Of course. Had it bothered me? Certainly. Republican strategists had made a cold political calculation: no amount of money or effort could make a dent in the Democratic hold on the black vote, so don’t try. Some had gone even further—if the racial card could be played to appeal to certain constituencies, play it. The Horton ad served that purpose. It was a political cheap shot.