My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  I told Cheney that I did not want to pass along any more such orders. “If the press has to cover a war,” I said, “there’s no way we can eliminate the risks of war.” Cheney called Scowcroft and asked him not to issue any more orders from the sidelines. This was a new, tough age for the military, fighting a war as it was being reported. We could not, in a country pledged to free expression, simply turn off the press. But we were going to have to find a way to live with this unprecedented situation.

  Early on Christmas Eve, I was in my garage trying to relax by pulling the engine on one of my Volvos when my cellular phone started ringing. My exec, Tom White, was calling with the news we had been hoping for. I let out a whoop and a holler and ran back into the kitchen. “They found Noriega!” I shouted to Alma. Our troops had been searching for him for days in hideouts and hinterland villages. We had missed him on the first night while he hid in a whorehouse. Noriega had just sought sanctuary, Tom had told me, in the Papal Nunciatura in Panama City. He had called the papal nuncio, Monsignor Sebastian Laboa, and asked to be picked up in a Dairy Queen parking lot near San Miguelito. There the strongman was found waiting in a dirty T-shirt, shapeless Bermuda shorts, and an oversize baseball cap pulled low over his all too recognizable face.

  My relief was even greater ten days later on January 3, when Monsignor Laboa persuaded Noriega that the game was up and that he should turn himself over to the Americans. The Vatican looked on Noriega as an accused criminal with no legitimate claim to political asylum. As soon as the Panamanian people learned that Noriega was in U.S. custody, they started dancing in the streets. Until then, they had been afraid that he might yet return to power.

  I flew to Panama in early January for a firsthand look and to visit the troops. While with the 82d Airborne, commanded by Major General Jim Johnson, I was carried away. “Goddam, you guys did a good job!” I said. Fred Francis of NBC caught my outburst on camera, and I made the evening news. Anyone fearing a moral decline in this country may be heartened to know that the Joint Staff mailroom was soon flooded with complaints about the chairman’s language.

  Our euphoria over our victory in Just Cause was not universal. Both the United Nations and the Organization of American States censured our actions in Panama. Reports circulated of heavy civilian casualties. Some human rights organizations claimed that the invasion had resulted in thousands of Panamanians killed. At the time, Max Thurman’s SOUTHCOM staff estimated Panamanian casualties in the low hundreds. Subsequently, the House Armed Services Committee carried out a thorough investigation, which estimated that three hundred Panamanians were killed, of whom one hundred were civilians and the rest members of the PDF and the Dignity Battalions. The loss of innocent lives was tragic, but we had made every effort to hold down casualties on all sides.

  A CBS poll conducted soon after the installation of President Endara showed that nine out of ten Panamanians favored the U.S. intervention. President George Bush had been vindicated in a bold political decision. Generals Thurman and Stiner and all the troops under them had achieved a victory for democracy with minimal bloodshed. The American people supported the action and were again proud of their armed forces. We had a success under our belt.

  The lessons I absorbed from Panama confirmed all my convictions over the preceding twenty years, since the days of doubt over Vietnam. Have a clear political objective and stick to it. Use all the force necessary, and do not apologize for going in big if that is what it takes. Decisive force ends wars quickly and in the long run saves lives. Whatever threats we faced in the future, I intended to make these rules the bedrock of my military counsel.

  As I write these words, almost six years after Just Cause, Mr. Noriega, convicted on the drug charges contained in the indictments, sits in an American prison cell. Panama has a new security force, and the country is still a democracy, with one free election to its credit.

  Seventeen

  When You’ve Lost Your Best Enemy

  I MAY OWE ONE OF MY BEST PIECES OF WORK AS CHAIRMAN OF THE JCS TO the unlikely figure of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I had managed to whip myself into good physical condition at FORSCOM. But now, back in the Beltway pressure cooker, I was starting to get out of shape. One night I found myself sitting next to Arnold at a charity dinner and confessed that I had relapsed.

  “You need a Lifecycle,” Arnold said. “I’ll send you one.”

  “I can’t take anything from a contractor or a manufacturer,” I pointed out.

  “You won’t have to,” he answered. “Consider it a personal gift from me.” A stationary bike with computer-controlled resistance soon arrived, and I now started my day working out on it as soon as I got up at 5:30 A.M. I did some of my clearest thinking during the half hour on the Lifecycle.

  I was pumping away on a Saturday morning, November 4, some weeks before the Panama operation, when I started to crystallize what I really wanted to accomplish as chairman. I saw it as my main mission to move the armed forces onto a new course, one paralleling what was happening in the world today, not one chained to the previous forty years. As soon as I was out of the shower, I went to my study and started jotting down thoughts on purple-bordered notepads. The color had been chosen deliberately to symbolize that the chairman belonged to no individual service.

  What I was hatching amounted to analysis by instinct. I was not going on intelligence estimates, war games, or computer projections. And I intended to avoid the still rather ponderous, paper-churning machinery of the Joint Staff. My thoughts were guided simply by what I had observed at world summits, by my experience at the NSC, by what I like to think of as informed intuition. I was going to project what I expected to happen over the next five years and try to design an Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps to match these expectations. I wrote at the top of the pad, “Strategic Overview—1994.”

  I wrote down what I foresaw in the Soviet Union: “Rise of opposition parties, Western investment, market pricing, and Gorbachev still supreme authority.” (You can’t win ’em all.) I predicted Soviet military budget cuts of 40 percent, manpower cuts of 50 percent, a cap on naval shipbuilding—in short, a Soviet force intended strictly for a “defensive posture.” And then I really stuck my neck out: by 1994, “No Soviet forces in Eastern Europe”; “Warsaw Pact replaced”; “East Germany gone”; all Eastern-bloc countries “neutral states with multiparty systems.” I also wrote, regarding Germany, “reunified,” and Berlin, “undivided.” In South Africa, I anticipated by 1994 a “black majority government,” and in Latin America, “Cuba isolated, irrelevant.” Of course, trouble spots would persist, and I identified them as “Korea, Lebanon, the Persian Gulf, Philippines.” I made another heading, “Potential U.S. involvement,” and under it listed two places, “Korea, Persian Gulf.”

  I began matching these projections to a commensurate strength and structure for the U.S. military. And here, going almost entirely on gut feelings, I wrote, “From a 550-ship to a 450-ship Navy, reduce our troop strength in Europe from 300,000 to between 75,000 and 100,000, and cut back the active duty Army from 760,000 to 525,000.” The Marines, the Air Force, and the reserves would be cut as well.

  These levels would be tough to sell to Cheney. He was still a hardliner and not ready to bet on a “kinder and gentler” Soviet Union. But he was also savvy, and not long out of Congress, where he had sensed the mounting political pressure to cut back on defense spending and declare a peace dividend. Cheney had already approved a budget for the next fiscal year that reflected real reductions in spending. But we had pasted that budget together without any overarching strategic vision. Early on, the Bush administration commissioned a major study, National Security Review No. 12, to come up with a new strategy. But NSR 12 was being drafted by career bureaucrats and few administration appointees. The study team did not have a vision or practical political guidance from the President and his NSC team. The principal value of this study seemed to be to provide the administration with a defense against critics of inaction—NSR 12 is looki
ng into that, the White House could say. But NSR 12 came up short, a bland work, full of generalities and truisms, doomed to the dustbin.

  Meanwhile, Congress, independent national security think tanks, and self-styled freelance military experts were blanketing the town with proposals. We had to get in front of them if we were to control our own destiny. Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary for policy, and his new team began to work. I was determined to have the Joint Chiefs drive the military strategy train, so I had scoped out certain ideas, even if they represented hunches more than analysis. I wanted to offer something our allies could rally around and give our critics something to shoot at rather than having military reorganization schemes shoved down our throat.

  After the weekend in which I had done my solitary brainstorming, Otis drove me to work in the chairman’s Cadillac. My mind was so afire with ideas that I hardly heard what Otis was talking about, until he extended an arm into the backseat holding a Beretta pistol. He assured me he had obtained legal permission to carry a gun, and that as my driver-bodyguard, he ought to be armed.

  Once in the office, I turned on the tape player and went over my jottings one more time with the help of a little subliminal Mozart. Then I called in Lieutenant General George “Lee” Butler and Major General John “Dave” Robinson, directors of the Joint Staff responsible for strategy and budgeting respectively. They and their aides had already done some work on restructuring. I gave Butler and Robinson my rough notes from the weekend and told them to recast them as briefing charts. And I wanted the graphics within two days. The title of this slide show was my own, “Strategic Overview—1994,” but I paraphrased a subtitle from Mikhail Gorbachev, “When You Lose Your Best Enemy.”

  Although I had been chairman for only a month at this time, I had cautioned the chiefs that change was inevitable and had shared my thoughts with them. These were bright, sophisticated men who could see what was happening in the Soviet Union. But each of them, as the head of a service, ran a huge bureaucratic institution with a massive investment in the past. And each chief naturally preferred to have force reductions fall more heavily on the other guy. Within the JCS, only the chairman and vice chairman could assume bureaucratic neutrality. After years of watching the chiefs, I knew that they would not willingly contribute more than loose change as the collection plate was passed. They would practically have to be mugged, and preferred to be mugged to prove to their institution that they had fought the good fight before the budget ax fell.

  The Army and Air Force were the most vulnerable. They had the most invested in fighting an air-land battle in Europe against the Red Army, a battle that was almost certainly never going to be fought. Army chief Carl Vuono and Air Force chief Larry Welch knew that they would have to cut deeply, but not as much as I had in mind.

  The Navy was next in line for a substantial whack, since its major mission was to protect the Atlantic sea-lanes so that we could get to Europe to fight World War III. Part of the rationale for the Navy’s aircraft carriers was to project power ashore against an invading Red Army, a role fast becoming obsolete. The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Carl Trost, who had only eight months left on his watch, was not disposed to give up much naval power just because the Army and Air Force might be losing their enemy. Trost argued that the Soviet navy was still growing and, until intelligence reports showed otherwise, the American fleet should not be shrunk drastically.

  The Marines were on somewhat firmer ground. With justification, they presented themselves as the nation’s “911” response force, with or without a Soviet Union. General Al Gray, the Marine Commandant (a colorful guy who chewed tobacco in our meetings), would fight to the death against anything beyond a symbolic nick in the size of the Corps. Yet, the Marines had also benefited from the Reagan buildup, which had been aimed at the now fading Soviet threat. The Marine Corps would have to take its hits too.

  There was no way I could get group consensus. The chiefs also knew, however, that with the new Goldwater-Nichols authority, I did not need consensus. I could give my recommendations to the Secretary of Defense and the President on my own. Still, realistically, I knew that we had to shape the new military as a team.

  A few days later, on November 10, the most brutal symbol of communist oppression, the Berlin Wall, cracked open, with the East German government’s acquiescence. East Germans came pouring through for a taste of freedom. The most hard-shelled anticommunist had to see that the old order was not simply changing; it was falling apart. On November 14, I took a deep breath and submitted my strategic overview to Secretary Cheney. He did not embrace it on the spot, but gave me a fair hearing. If our defenses had to be chopped back, Cheney too wanted his hand, not some outsider’s, guiding the ax. He was also concerned that in a few weeks Bush was heading to a summit meeting with Gorbachev in Malta and did not have a strategic concept for the future. After examining my charts, he said, “All right. We’ll take this to the President.”

  I went back to my office and told the staff to have a clean set of charts ready by the close of business, since the Secretary and I would be going to the White House the next day. They looked stunned, and I could understand why. In the past, sea changes far less radical than what I was proposing took years rather than days to work their way through the Joint Staff labyrinth.

  The next day, as we entered the White House Situation Room, Cheney displayed an uneasiness I had not seen before. Until now, he and Bob Gates, Scowcroft’s NSC deputy, had both been saying that the hard-line communists might well knock off Gorbachev and restore the bad old days. Now Cheney was letting his chairman make a pitch to the President premised on just the opposite. Uneasy or not, I gave Dick credit. He was willing to test his bedrock beliefs against fresh evidence; and he wanted the President to have the same opportunity. The Situation Room this day held the heart of the Bush team: the President; his Vice President, Dan Quayle; John Sununu, the Chief of Staff; Secretary of State Jim Baker; Treasury Secretary Nick Brady; Brent Scowcroft; and Gates. Dick Darman, director of OMB, was also there, about to be thrown into cardiac shock—a defense team proposing less spending.

  I made my presentation. The President listened but remained noncommittal. I had gained as much as I hoped for at this stage; neither a green light nor a red light, but maybe a yellow light. Proceed with caution. President Bush posed two questions. What was the bottom line that we should present to the Soviets, and what should we expect in return? Since he was about to embark on the summit with Gorbachev at Malta within days, the questions were crucial. Cheney said that we would have answers for him before he left.

  Carl Vuono had said that I could keep the chiefs in my corner by making sure of one thing—that I always kept them informed. I had just violated that rule. Although they were generally aware of my ideas, I should have given them the specific “Strategic Overview—1994” briefing before taking it to the President. My only excuse was the pressure of time. The next day, I gathered the chiefs in the “Tank,” the flag-draped secure room in the Pentagon reserved for meetings of the Joint Chiefs. (The expression “Tank” derived from a tunnel the service chiefs had to pass through to reach their first meeting room in the Department of Interior building before the Pentagon was completed in 1942.) Alongside each chief’s seat were the customary dishes of candy and dried fruit that some disdained and others devoured. I presented the same slide show I had given to the President the day before. I could see the raised eyebrows. I had blindsided them, not a mistake I intended to make again.

  Before President Bush departed for Malta, Cheney and I recommended to him that he let Gorbachev know the changes we were contemplating. In return, he should press Gorbachev to withdraw Soviet troops from Eastern Europe rapidly and bring them home where they would not present an offensive threat. He should also press Gorbachev for greater reductions in Soviet defense spending and the end of Soviet support of Third World insurgencies.

  I did not have to wait long before events began to vindicate my prediction of trouble spots.
In late November 1989, after the failed Giroldi coup and before Just Cause, we had to respond to a coup against President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines. I have read former Vice President Dan Quayle’s description of this uprising in his book, Standing Firm. “I was the one asking the questions, seeking the options and pushing for a consensus,” Quayle wrote. “I can remember Larry Eagleburger [the acting Secretary of State] saying afterward that if I hadn’t been there, we might not have stopped the coup in the Philippines. It was a great hour in the relations between our two countries, and a great moment for me personally.” Some of us remember the incident a little differently.

  On November 29, Cheney and I had just returned from a conference in Brussels. Cheney, exhausted and ill with the flu, went home and stayed there. I went to work the next day, returned home, and gratefully hit the sack soon after dinner. An hour later, the phone rang, and I was informed by Tom Kelly that a coup was under way in the Philippines headed by a General Edgardo Abenina. I went immediately to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, arriving just after 11:00 P.M. I entered a room designed specifically for dealing with such situations. It was small, low-ceilinged; my steps were muffled by gray carpeting. The room was cold, kept that way to aid the performance of the supersensitive electronic gear. We were using a new teleconferencing system that allowed people from various agencies to confer without leaving their buildings. This was the first time the system would be used in an actual crisis. I sat at a table facing five television monitors. On one I could see the White House Situation Room, with Vice President Quayle at the center of the table. Quayle was there because President Bush was in the air flying to Malta for his meeting with Gorbachev. The face of Larry Eagleburger at the State Department filled a second screen. On a third was Bill Webster, the CIA director, and on a fourth, Harry Rowen, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, who was upstairs in the Pentagon. I could see myself on the fifth screen. Next to me sat General Bob Herres, the vice chairman, who had also been a candidate for chairman. Herres was approaching retirement, but would be of enormous help to me down to his last day. Bob went home to get some rest after I relieved him so that one of us would be fresh in the morning. Also, by pure chance, the CINC for all our forces in the Pacific, Admiral Huntington “Hunt” Hardisty, was there too, having come from Honolulu to the Pentagon for budget talks.