I nevertheless tried to keep matters in perspective. I had been given responsibility at the highest level in a Republican administration. National Security Advisors to Presidents are not chosen as tokens. The job is real, demanding, and critical. Never in the two years I worked with Ronald Reagan and George Bush did I detect the slightest trace of racial prejudice in their behavior. They led a party, however, whose principal message to black Americans seemed to be: lift yourself by your bootstraps. All did not have bootstraps; some did not have boots. I wish that Reagan and Bush had shown more sensitivity on this point. I took consolation, nevertheless, in the thought that their confidence in me represented a commitment to the American ideal of advancement by merit.
The late Whitney Young, when he was director of the National Urban League, used to commute from his suburban Westchester County home to his office in Manhattan. And as the train approached the 125th Street station in Harlem, Young would ask himself, should he get out and demonstrate, or should he continue on downtown? Young appreciated the role of the movement’s hell-raisers. But he stayed on the train, concluding that what he did downtown to promote jobs for blacks in American corporations was a better use of his talents. The crusade for equa rights requires diverse roles, just as an Army needs clerks and cooks along with airborne Rangers.
On assuming command of FORSCOM, I had reached the nation’s highest military rank, four stars. I had been National Security Advisor to the President. My career should serve as a model to fellow blacks, in or out of the military, in demonstrating the possibilities of American life. Equally important, I hoped then and now that my rise might cause prejudiced whites to question their prejudices, and help purge the poison of racism from their systems, so that the next qualified African-American who came along would be judged on merit alone.
I am also aware that, over the years, my career may have given some bigots a safe black to hide behind: “What, me prejudiced? I served with/over/under Colin Powell!” I have swallowed hard over racial provocations, determined to succeed by surpassing. Had I been more militant, would I have been branded a troublemaker rather than a promotable black? One can never be sure. But I agree with Whitney Young. I admire the shock troops who marched, sat in, and demonstrated, and I admire the job makers who rode past 125th Street. I further admire those who serve by making an example of their lives. And I salute the countless thousands of ordinary African-Americans who, day in and day out, go to work, support their families, and are, along with Americans of all races, the backbone of this country.
As commander of FORSCOM, I now had under me a quarter of a million active duty troops and another quarter of a million reservists, and I presided over the training of almost half a million National Guard soldiers. I was constantly on the road, dropping in on these forces from Florida to Alaska. I came to know well the generals commanding every division. What I discovered far exceeded our most optimistic expectations from the Reagan-Weinberger buildup. We had a well-trained and well-equipped force in a high state of combat readiness. But to fight whom, and where? With the Cold War fast thawing, I found our commanders still fixated on a battle between us and the Soviet Union. I had been in a position to observe firsthand the cracks in the Soviet monolith. I had sat across from Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow and Washington and on Governors Island and heard him acknowledge defeat in the Cold War. I had watched Gorbachev unilaterally chop the Soviet military by half a million men. I had seen our old enemy cooperate with us in achieving peaceful settlements in Angola and Namibia and in the war between Iran and Iraq.
Some of my fellow officers foresaw the need to change course. My mentor John Wickham had created light, fast-moving divisions for operations unrelated to the Soviet threat. Army Chief of Staff Carl Vuono was anticipating the tough transition from the fat budgets of the past to inevitable shrinking funds for the military in the future. And a few others glimpsed what was happening. But for most of the American military establishment, it was as if our principal adversary had taken a U-turn and headed home, while we were still bracing for a head-on collision. I decided to use the pulpit of FORSCOM to deliver a dose of reality. A perfect opportunity presented itself when my old boss at the Combined Arms Combat Development Activity at Fort Leavenworth, General Jack Merritt, invited me to speak at a seminar sponsored by the Association of the United States Army, the service’s trade union, which Jack headed. I accepted, but warned Jack that what I had to say might not go down well with the Army leaders or defense contractors who attended these shindigs.
On May 16, at a hotel in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, near the Army War College, I stood before enough three- and four-star generals to form a galaxy and enough tycoons to arm half the world. I gave a speech entitled (with a bow to Yogi Berra) “The Future Just Ain’t What It Used to Be.” I pointed out that in spite of the vast changes staring us in the face, there were still those who saw Gorbachev as a Machiavellian schemer trying to trick us into letting our guard down. No, I said, the real explanation for his behavior was “Soviet domestic and foreign impotence and failure. The Soviet system is bankrupt, and Gorbachev is the trustee.” I described those areas where Gorbachev’s government had helped promote peace and said, “As a public and military matter, our bear is now wearing a Smokey hat and carries a shovel to put out fires. Our bear is now benign.” I had intended this speech as a wake-up call, and nobody had dozed off; I could feel the tension in the room.
I had two more ideas in my prepared text that I had crossed out, restored, and crossed out again. No reporters were present that day, and if I could not speak bluntly to my colleagues now, when could I? And so, back in 1989, I predicted: “If tomorrow morning we opened NATO to new members we’d have several applications on our desk within a week—Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, maybe Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and maybe even the Ukraine. In fact, members of the now public opposition parties in Soviet Georgia actually debated last week whether their region’s future should include nonalignment or membership in NATO.” My observations seemed about as likely to this audience as my predicting that we would join the Warsaw Pact. “The Soviet military machine,” I went on, “is still as big, bad, and ugly as it ever was. That fact hasn’t changed. But I believe it will.” What did that mean for the U.S. Army? The American people would still support a strong defense. But “the kind of growth we had in the early eighties is a thing of the past. You can count on it.” For the future, “we’ve got to spend wisely and well.” We had to put a hard question to ourselves before others put it to us: “Do we need this item?” And when the answer was no, we had to say no. Our challenge, I said, was to accept that we had to retrench, yet continue to maintain “the best damned Army in the world.”
I could not immediately judge the audience reaction. People stand up and cheer when they hear what they want to hear rather than what they ought to hear. But Jack Merritt said afterward, “Colin, that’s powerful stuff. It belongs in Army magazine.” The speech was reprinted in the magazine, where it was pounced on by a retired Army major general, Henry Mohr, a columnist for Heritage Features, an arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation. Mohr sent me a courteous but disbelieving letter, saying: “You may be interested to know that a planning conference in which I participated a few weeks ago on ‘National Strategy for the 1990s’ came to a much different conclusion than yours. The net assessment of key participants (including the personal views of a representative of the CIA) was that the Soviet Union will emerge in the early 1990s from its ongoing ‘reorganization and modernization’ much stronger militarily than it is today.”
It was going to take more than one wake-up call by one CINC to shake up a military conditioned by forty years of Cold War.
My travels and talks around the country had another purpose that was going to pay off in the future. I was able to judge, up close, the talents of men like Norm Schwarzkopf, now running CENTCOM in nearby Tampa, Florida. My FORSCOM deputy, Lieutenant General John Yeosock, an old National War College softball teammate, doubled
as commanding general of the Third Army, working out contingency war plans with Schwarzkopf. I watched tough Lieutenant General Carl Stiner drive the XVIII Airborne Corps to peak fighting trim at Fort Bragg. At Fort Lewis, Washington, I was much impressed by the commanding officer of the 9th Infantry Division, an artilleryman with a curious background. Major General John Shalikashvili had been born and raised in Warsaw. His mother was the daughter of a czarist general, and his father had left the Soviet Republic of Georgia to serve in the Polish army and later in the German army during World War II (in the Nazi Waffen SS, it was later discovered, unknown to John Shalikashvili). Shalikashvili had not come to the United States until he was sixteen and had entered the Army as a draftee. I remember concluding at the time that there was no limit to this officer’s potential. As we moved away from the Cold War, I was judging teammates for hot wars much closer than I imagined.
In peacetime, when a corps, a division, or a battalion is well run, the commanding officer has, frankly, a picnic compared to the dawn-to-dusk pressures of a place like the NSC. At FORSCOM, I had good people working for me. I set out a clear command philosophy. Once again, I could lead the good life: home by 5:30 P.M.; racquetball with my old V Corps driver, Otis Pearson, whom I had transferred to Atlanta; a fine Victorian mansion, Quarters 10, as the CINC’s residence; and time for Alma and me to enjoy our new status as grandparents. Jeffrey Michael Powell had been born to Jane and Mike just before our move to Atlanta.
I’d enjoyed many perks in my job as National Security Advisor, but no home-to-work transportation was authorized by Congress in my new post. So there I was, running a million-person operation and driving to work in a gasping, gas-guzzling sixteen-year-old Chrysler station wagon which left oil puddles in front of FORSCOM’s brand-new $40 million headquarters. But once I got to the office, Otis could legitimately chauffeur me around to my official appointments in a gleaming government-issue Mercury.
The Chrysler was my everyday workhorse for lugging tools, spare parts, and kids to college. But by now I was deeply involved in my love affair with old Volvos. One was a 1967 Model 122 with a balky twin-carbureted engine. When something went wrong that I could not figure out right away, I would retreat to my study in Quarters 10 and pull out the manual. I would sit there, schematics of the fuel and electrical systems spread out in front of me, and through the process of elimination trace the problem. When I had eliminated every explanation but one, I would go back to the garage and say, all right, you little SOB, I’ve got you. I cannot exaggerate the satisfaction it gave me to analyze and solve a car problem by reading a book. For me it was like hitting a hole in one or bowling 300 was for other guys.
My idea of a good time is to disconnect every wire, tube, hose, cable, and bolt of an engine, unhook the driveshaft from the transmission, sling a chain around the engine, hook the chain to the rafters, and winch the engine out of the hood, as I stand there, grease-stained and triumphant. I enjoy best working in solitude. I do not like having buddies drop by to kibitz. And that is how I spent much of my free time in Atlanta. I cannot see that my particular passion makes any less sense than hitting dimpled balls, fuzzy balls, or seamed balls.
One day in early summer I got word that Dick Cheney, the new Secretary of Defense (after John Tower’s nomination had fallen through), wanted to see me. As National Security Advisor, I had worked closely with Congressman Cheney, who was then House minority whip, responsible for rounding up Republican votes for Reagan administration policies. Cheney had not yet been to FORSCOM and wanted to stop by to be briefed on his way back to Washington from visiting CENTCOM and the Special Operations Command, SOCOM, also in Tampa. I went out to Atlanta’s Charlie Brown Airport to pick him up and brought him back to my headquarters, where my staff presented a briefing on the state of the country’s strategic ground reserves, which I commanded. Then we went to Quarters 10 for lunch.
He was the same Cheney I had first met in V Corps and worked with on the Hill, incisive, smart, no small talk, never showing any more surface than necessary. And tough. This man, who had never spent a day in uniform, who, during the Vietnam War, had gotten a student deferment and later a parent deferment, had taken instant control of the Pentagon. His congressional friends had apparently warned him that if he did not put his brand on the Defense Department right away, the generals and admirals would eat him alive. In his first week on the job, he publicly slapped down the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Larry Welch, at a televised press conference because Welch had discussed MX missile deployment options with Congress. The public chewing-out—“it’s inappropriate for a uniformed officer,” Cheney had said—ended with an ominous “Everybody’s entitled to one mistake.” Welch, I knew, had been done wrong. His talks with the Congress had been okayed by Cheney’s then deputy, Will Taft, and Brent Scowcroft, the current National Security Advisor. I had spent enough time in this game to recognize the move. Cheney had seized an early opportunity to say, I am not afraid of generals or admirals. In this job, I run them. He had made his point. But Welch also showed his mettle. A powerful group of retired Air Force officers wanted to go after Cheney’s scalp. Larry told them to back off. “I’ve been shot at by professionals,” this veteran Vietnam fighter pilot told them. “Let’s get on with our work.”
I was fairly sure Cheney had not stopped in Atlanta only for a briefing on FORSCOM training. But during our conversations, this close-mouthed man gave no hint of any other reason why he might have come. My message to him was that I was content where I was.
That June, I got a call from David Wallechinsky, a writer for Parade magazine, the newspaper supplement that goes to almost every American home on Sunday. “General, your life is a great American story,” David said. “Poor minority kid from the South Bronx rises to high office in the White House, earns four stars.” Parade wanted to profile me, probably for the edition coming out the week of July 4. I was to get the cover story, mug shot and all. I agreed, and Wallechinsky came down with Eddie Adams, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who in the Vietnam War took the unforgettable picture of the South Vietnamese police chief executing a Viet Cong officer in the street during the Tet offensive.
Parade finished the story; yet the Fourth of July came and went without its appearing. In the meantime, the purpose of Dick Cheney’s drop-in began to come into focus. In September, Admiral Bill Crowe’s second term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would end. Unexpectedly, Crowe declined nomination for another two-year term. He did, however, have a strong candidate to succeed him, his vice chairman, Air Force General Robert Herres, a superb choice. A half-dozen other names were also bandied about in the press, including mine. The succession sweepstakes was on, though nobody, including Cheney, had said a word about the job to me. And I was not seeking it. The way I read the tea leaves, Herres was a shoo-in. My thinking was that I would serve out my assignment at FORSCOM and possibly be a candidate for Army Chief of Staff when Carl Vuono retired. And, conceivably, I might have a shot at the chairmanship when Herres retired. Or I just might retire after FORSCOM. I had over thirty years in, and there were still attractive private offers out there.
On Sunday, August 6, I flew up to Baltimore for Carl Vuono’s annual Commanders’ Conference of senior Army generals. It was a sport-shirt-and-docksiders, let-your-hair-down affair, held this year at Belmont House, an estate-turned-conference center outside the city. I looked forward to the next three days. I would be among my fraternity—Carl as Chief of Staff; Butch Saint, a friendly rival, now CINCUSAREUR, commanding our Army forces in Europe; Norm Schwarzkopf from CENTCOM; and a dozen others whom I had grown up with in the service. We were going to brainstorm where the Army ought to be headed, my favorite subject.
That morning, coming up on the plane, I had seen a story in the New York Times headlined “Scramble on to Succeed Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff.” The reporter, hunting for an angle, had written that I had been keeping in touch with Secretary Cheney through “frequent letters.” Dead wrong. I had sen
t one quarterly report to Cheney, as required of all CINCs.
We were into the last day of the conference when at about 2:00 P.M. I received a note. Secretary Cheney wanted me to call him. I slipped out of the room, trying to look inconspicuous while all eyes followed me. Cheney had already left his office, but fifteen minutes later, with the conference ended, I got another message: would I come to the Pentagon right away. Vuono gave me a knowing wink and said, “I’ll fix you up with a helicopter.”
I picked up Alma and off we went. At the Pentagon helipad, we were met by a driver with a van. When we reached the Pentagon’s River Entrance, I asked Alma to wait while I, dressed in loafers, chinos, and a polo shirt, went in to see the Secretary of Defense. Cheney greeted me with a smile, oblivious to whether I was wearing casual clothes or something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. He is that kind of man. He wasted no time. “You know we’re looking for a chairman,” he said. “You’re my candidate.” He then ticked off my qualifications in his judgment. I knew my way around the Pentagon and the White House. I had the required military command credits. I understood arms control, an item high on the Bush agenda. And he thought he and I could get along. He asked me how I felt about the job.
“Of course, I’m flattered,” I said. “And, obviously, if you and the President want me, I’ll take it and do my best. But you know I’m happy in Atlanta and not looking to move.” Unspoken was my genuine concern. This would be a tough assignment. I was the most junior of the fifteen four-stars legally eligible for the chairmanship. My fourth star had been on my shoulder for barely four months, and several of the senior candidates had far more impressive military credentials.
My American Journey Page 50