George Bush evidently had similar reservations, since Cheney next said, “The President wonders if your appointment would be a problem for you with the other more senior generals and admirals.”
I knew I could count on Vuono’s support, and I had good relations with the other service chiefs. “I’m not worried about that,” I said. Never let ’em see you sweat.
“Fine,” Cheney answered. “I’m going to recommend you. But, as you know, it’s the President’s decision.”
I said nothing to Alma until we were in the Learjet headed back to Atlanta. “Here we go again,” she said.
The next day, Wednesday, August 9, Cheney called to say the President had approved his recommendation; I would succeed Bill Crowe. The President wanted me back the next day for a Rose Garden announcement. I flew to Washington that night. Alma chose to remain in Atlanta, where she had a prior commitment. My daughters, Linda and Annemarie, were also tied up, so Mike stood in the Rose Garden with me on August 10 as President Bush congratulated Bill Crowe for his outstanding performance as chairman and then announced his intention to nominate me to be the twelfth Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I had six weeks to detach from FORSCOM and prepare for Senate confirmation. Over the next few days, each of the chiefs and the major four-star commanders checked in to offer their congratulations and support, which I was certainly going to need. The President’s concern had been answered.
I ran into one more hurdle. On the day my nomination as chairman was announced, I was in my office receiving congratulations from friends when a young lieutenant wearing rubber gloves appeared in the doorway. The Army takes drug abuse seriously and looks for drug users through random urinalysis testing. My number had come up. I excused myself and took the test. I passed.
Parade came out with a cover story on me the Sunday after my announcement. The timing seemed to indicate that someone at the magazine had an inside track on the chairmanship. Actually, Parade lays out its issues weeks in advance, and in this case, well before I was the President’s choice. Either David Wallechinsky’s instinct or luck was right on. The story did produce one surprising side effect. Wallechinsky had been looking for a human-interest angle, and my secretary in Atlanta, an able Army sergeant named Cammie Brown, tipped him off that I kept motivational sayings under the glass cover of my desk. David called and asked if I would read him some of them, which I did: “It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning,” “Check small things,” “Be careful what you choose. You may get it,” and other lessons life had taught me. He collected thirteen of these thoughts and ran them in the Parade article as “Colin Powell’s Rules.” I began getting hundreds of requests for the rules from all over the country, to a point where I had to have them printed in quantity on cards. In case readers are still interested, the rules are included in the back of this book.
Three days after the announcement of my nomination as chairman, I was yanked back, suddenly and sadly, to the roots of my calling. Ronnie Brooks, my model, mentor, and inspiration during the days of the CCNY Pershing Rifles, died of a massive heart attack at the age of fifty-four. I flew up to the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Albany, New York, and spoke at Ronnie’s funeral, praising this good man, his courageous wife, Elsa, and the three fine sons they had raised. As I looked at my other PR pals present, Roger Langevin and Gabby Romero among them, I could not help being struck by the randomness of life. Had I never met the inspiring Brooks, the perfect cadet who preferred to become a civilian chemical researcher, would my life have taken the course it did?
Just two weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Prime Minister Winston Churchill came to Washington with the “Chiefs of Staff Committee,” the heads of British land, sea, and air forces. This body, which had existed since 1923, coordinated his majesty’s soldiers, sailors, and airmen’s fight against the Axis powers. The United States had no comparable body to work out combined operations with the British, and so President Franklin Roosevelt created a “United States Joint Chiefs of Staff,” representing the Army, the Army Air Forces, and the Navy. Admiral William Leahy, Roosevelt’s confidant and assistant, presided over the group and served as liaison to the President. Leahy carried the title “Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Army and the Navy.” The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff became the organization that led us through World War II.
In 1947, a permanent Joint Chiefs of Staff was established by act of Congress, and in 1949, the position of chairman was created. General Omar Bradley became the first to occupy the position. This remained the structure that ran the U.S. military for almost forty years, with occasional amendments to the law. The Marine Corps Commandant, for example, was authorized to participate in most JCS deliberations in 1952 and became a full member of the JCS in 1978.
The system was seriously flawed. Each chief, except the chairman, was the head of his own service yet also expected to vote against service parochialism in the national interest. It was a tough balancing act. The chiefs had trouble going “purple,” the metaphor used in the Pentagon for mixing green, blue, and white uniforms. The deck was stacked against the very thing these dual-hatted leaders were supposed to achieve, “jointness,” the word we use in the military to describe teamwork. Yet, almost every great military campaign of the modern era has been a joint effort—General Ulysses Grant’s joining with the Union Navy to move down the Mississippi and split the Confederacy; MacArthur’s brilliant landing at Inchon during the Korean War; and the greatest combined enterprise of all, D-Day. Jointness in our time was more often produced out of the necessity of the moment rather than built into the machinery.
The JCS also had the responsibility to provide military counsel to the Secretary of Defense and the President. But it had to be consensus advice, not separate opinions. Almost the only way the chiefs would agree on their advice was by scratching each other’s backs. Consequently, the sixteen-hundred-member joint staff that worked for the JCS spent thousands of man-hours pumping out ponderous, least-common-denominator documents that every chief would accept but few Secretaries of Defense or Presidents found useful. The tortuous routines worked out for processing this paper flow would have done credit to a thirteenth-century papal curia—successive white drafts, buff drafts, green drafts, and finally the sanctified, red-striped decision paper. These failings in the JCS were more than bureaucratic. In my judgment, this amorphous setup explained in part why the Joint Chiefs had never spoken out with a clear voice to prevent the deepening morass in Vietnam.
The flawed arrangement persisted until General David Jones, the ninth chairman, spoke up in frustration in 1982 just after he retired. Jones recommended that the JCS Chairman become the “principal” military advisor to the Secretary of Defense and the President and be given greater authority over the staff serving the chiefs. Shy Meyer, while Army Chief of Staff, wanted to do away with the Joint Chiefs entirely and replace them with a National Military Council whose members would have no responsibility for their particular service and could therefore devote their full energies to coordinating the armed forces. These proposals sparked a debate that resulted in Senator Barry Goldwater and Congressman Bill Nichols sponsoring and winning passage of the Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, commonly referred to as the Goldwater-Nichols Act.
This act, for the first time, gave the Chairman of the JCS real power. As “principal military advisor,” he could give his own counsel directly to the Secretary and the President. He was no longer limited to presenting the chiefs’ watered-down consensus recommendations and then whispering his personal views. The chiefs, however, were still advisors and encouraged to give their counsel and even disagree with the chairman. Goldwater-Nichols also placed the sixteen hundred people on the Joint Staff under the chairman, not the multiheaded corporate body of chiefs. Even with this reorganization, the chairman was not in the chain of command, but the Secretary of Defense could require that military orders go through him to the field commanders, which Cheney had d
one.
Bill Crowe had been the transition chairman, since Goldwater-Nichols went into effect in the middle of his watch. Assuming I was confirmed, I would be the first full-term chairman to possess Goldwater-Nichols powers. I was formally confirmed by the Senate on September 20 to become the youngest officer, the first African-American, and the first ROTC graduate to fill this office. The immigrant’s son from the South Bronx now occupied the highest uniformed military post in the land. If only Colonel Brookhart at the CCNY drill hall could see me now.
I went to bed on October 1 content, but weary. Bill Crowe’s term had ended at midnight the day before, and this Sunday had been my first day in the chairman’s job. I had gone to my new office that morning in the practically deserted Pentagon just to look around and drop off some things. Crowe had kept a colorful collection of military headgear on the bookshelves covering the entire wall behind his desk. He had taken the hats, and the shelves were empty. I made a mental note to call my old Gelnhausen buddy Bill Stofft, now the Army historian, and ask him to send me the green-bound World War II histories. Later, when I did call, Bill’s assistant asked me how many books I wanted. I told him, “Thirty-five feet worth.”
The windows of the chairman’s office had been painted over for security purposes, since they were just a few feet from the busy main Pentagon River Entrance where the shuttle buses stopped. The paint denied me a stunning view across the Potomac River to the Capitol. I could not see the sailboats plying the Tidal Basin or even the Pentagon parade ground. That too had to change. The answer Doc Cooke’s people eventually hit on was one-way, bulletproof Mylar. I could look out, but employees lined up for the buses could not look in. Over the years, I found myself in an ideal position to watch the daily human drama, from little cabals of Pentagon officers to lovers arranging trysts.
On that first day, I placed on my desk the marble set with the Schaeffer pens that I had won at Fort Bragg in 1957 for being “Best Cadet, Company D,” and that has been on every desk I have ever occupied. I also intended to hang my going-away present from the FORSCOM staff, a Don Stivers print entitled “Tracking Victorio,” depicting the 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers on patrol against an Apache warrior. And I intended to put up the framed Lincoln letter that Stu Purviance had given me when I got my first star, the one in which the President said it was easier to make new generals than to replace lost horses.
That afternoon, Alma and I went to a family party in Washington thrown by my cousin Arthur S. “Sonny” Lewis, that extraordinary man who had gone from an enlisted Navy career to ambassador to Sierra Leone after picking up degrees at Dartmouth. My sister, Marilyn, and brother-in-law, Norm, and aunts, uncles, and cousins came from all over. We had a double-barreled celebration—my new job, and Mike and Jane’s first anniversary. All the fun and warmth of my Jamaican boyhood came flooding back, and the party went on to the last tot of rum. Alma and I got to bed at about midnight at Wainwright Hall, the VIP motel at Fort Myer where we were staying while the chairman’s quarters were being refurbished for us. I had been asleep only a couple of hours when the phone rang.
Sixteen
“Mr. Chairman, We’ve Got a Problem”
I HAD BEEN CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF JUST OVER TWENTY-four hours when the Joint Staff operations officer, Lieutenant General Tom Kelly, woke me up to alert me to a coup brewing against the Noriega regime in Panama. I could expect a call in a few minutes, Kelly told me, from General Max Thurman, who had just taken over in Panama as CINC SOUTHCOM, commander in chief of the Southern Command.
Welcome back to the big leagues.
Though Max Thurman had been in his job only a day longer than I had been in mine, it was reassuring having him in Panama during a potential crisis. Max was a legend, considered one of the smartest, toughest officers in the Army, a hardworking bachelor who appeared to have no interests outside of his job and who, because of his compulsiveness, had acquired the affectionate nickname “Mad Max.”
Noriega had been on and off my radar screen over the past six years. I had first met him on the trip to Latin America with Cap Weinberger in September 1983, when Ollie North had been so conspicuous a part of our party. During that visit, we had held a pro forma meeting with the new puppet president of Panama, Stanford-educated Ricardo de la Espriella; and then we went to meet the country’s real ruler, Brigadier General Manuel Antonio Noriega, chief of the PDF, the Panama Defense Force, in his headquarters building, the Comandancia. I found Noriega an unappealing man, with his pockmarked face, beady, darting eyes, and arrogant swagger. I immediately had the crawling sense that I was in the presence of evil.
Noriega had been on the payrolls of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency going back twenty-five years. He had also cut deals with Cuba, Libya, and other intelligence customers, and he permitted the KGB to operate freely in Panama. You could not buy Manuel Noriega, but you could rent him. We ourselves were using him as a conduit to get arms to the Nicaraguan contras in their guerrilla war against the Sandinistas. I remember thinking at the time of this first encounter how odd it was to be treating a thug like a respected national leader. Two years later, in 1985, when I met him again, we were still giving Noriega the kid-glove treatment. On this occasion, Weinberger had invited him to the Pentagon after Noriega promoted himself to four-star general. He was not, of course, the only despot honored at the Pentagon. Another I recall was President Mobutu of Zaire. But again, we had our uses for Mobutu, in his case, to funnel arms to anticommunist rebels in Angola. Cold War politics sometimes made for creepy bedfellows.
Noriega played a cunning hand. He kept on the good side of Director of Central Intelligence Bill Casey by supporting anticommunist covert operations in Nicaragua. He occasionally shut down minor drug operations to satisfy the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency while raking in millions by laundering Colombian drug money. Noriega, however, began to overplay his hand. His complicity in the PDF murder of his leftist enemy Hugo Spadafora in 1985 had drawn a flock of investigative reporters to Panama and brought down the wrath of Senator Jesse Helms. And by February 1988, Noriega’s drug deals had provided enough evidence for grand juries in Miami and Tampa to indict him. This was the indictment that George Bush, as Vice President, had told me we must not bargain away.
I had been National Security Advisor at the time and had to referee a debate over the wisdom of indicting a “friendly head of state.” We had gotten ourselves into a box. The administration had allowed the indictments go forward, yet we were still paying Noriega. The Drug Enforcement Agency had even awarded him a letter of commendation. The administration finally took a clear stand on Noriega. All U.S. agencies were to drop him. He could not be under criminal indictment and on the payroll at the same time.
After the indictment, the Panamanian people took to the streets to demonstrate against Noriega, assuming that the United States was now ready to help them get rid of this crooked caudillo. Noriega responded by dumping yet another puppet president, Eric Delvalle, and replacing him with Manuel Solis Palma, the education minister. George Shultz began pushing for aggressive action to remove Noriega, including U.S. military intervention. Frank Carlucci, then Secretary of Defense, and Admiral Bill Crowe, Chairman of the JCS, disagreed. As detestable as Noriega was, they argued, we could not justify the use of U.S. forces to remove him. Though it may surprise some people, the military is not necessarily eager to apply force to achieve political ends, except as a last resort. The intellectual community is apt to say we have to “do something,” and diplomats fire off their diplomatic notes. But in the end, it is the armed forces that bring back the body bags and have to explain why to parents. President Reagan had never really considered an invasion of Panama short of a direct provocation. He believed that the United States should avoid looking like the “gringo” bully, invading just because we did not like the way the Panamanians handled their internal affairs. And there was no serious communist threat lurking there.
I had thought all along that if we ever did get i
nvolved in Panama, dumping Noriega would not end the problem. His power base was the PDF. When we got rid of Noriega, another PDF goon would rise up to take his place. And so far we had not seen a man on a white horse to replace him and his henchmen. As National Security Advisor, I spent several PRG meetings trying to find a PDF officer a cut above Noriega or a Panamanian civilian leader who could survive PDF opposition. At one point, the CIA’s operations director told me that the agency might have found a savior, a bona fide anti-Noriega liberal who might help bring down the dictator. Who was this paragon? I wanted to know. He was Eduardo Herrera Hassan, I was told, Panamanian ambassador and military attaché to Israel, then on the outs with Noriega.
The CIA spirited Herrera out of Tel Aviv and brought him to Washington, where I met him in my White House office. He turned out to be handsome, charming, and slick. Herrera said all the right things against Noriega, though he suffered from the I-I-I syndrome. The words “freedom” and “democracy,” however, never passed his lips. He was most concerned about the welfare and future of the PDF. I concluded that Herrera was a smoother Noriega. Herrera returned to Israel, but Noriega got wind of his trip and fired him. The CIA brought him back to the United States and supported him in case he might still prove useful.
As the Reagan era came to an end in January 1989, President Bush inherited the Noriega problem. The strongman continued to show his contempt for democracy by roughing up the political opposition and making mass political arrests. He stopped the elections of May 1989 when his opponent, Guillermo Endara, seemed to be winning, and Noriega had his PDF toughs beat up Endara’s vice presidential candidate in full view of American TV cameras. By the time I became Chairman of the JCS in the fall of 1989, Noriega’s ouster and replacement by a democratic government was gaining priority in the Bush administration, and President Bush’s personal distaste for the dictator had not diminished.
My American Journey Page 51