My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  President Corazon Aquino, I was informed, had reported that the presidential palace in Manila was being bombed and strafed by rebel planes. She had requested U.S. military intervention to stop the attacks. Eagleburger argued hard in favor of answering Aquino’s appeal. “We sponsored this democratic government,” he said, “and we have to respond.” Sporadic reports kept arriving; there was gunfire here and there, and a possible need to rescue Aquino from the palace. But we were hearing more confusion than hard information.

  Our ambassador in Manila, Nicholas Piatt, reconfirmed an official request that we bomb an airfield under rebel control. Mothy old T-28s, World War II prop-driven trainers, based at this field, were the planes attacking the capital. Again, State was eager to respond. I called Dick Cheney to update him. He intended to handle his end this night from his sickbed, since he could reach the President’s plane by secure phone. I also suspected that Cheney preferred to stay home rather than deal with Quayle on the monitor. It seemed to me that in military decision-making Cheney wanted to deal directly with the President.

  The Vice President said he needed to contact President Bush soon with a recommendation. I had taken a media beating for holding back on the Giroldi coup in Panama in October. If I wanted to overcome any impression of indecisiveness, I should have plunged ahead now. But I was not about to be stampeded. I started asking questions. We could bomb the airfield, but did we know who we would be bombing? Who would we hit, rebels or loyalists? The State Department probably pictured a neat, surgical strike. Instead, I envisioned anxious young pilots flying their first combat missions, not precision-tooled automatons. My concern was that if we started shooting up planes on the airfield, we were inevitably going to kill people, and I warned the other teleconferees, “I can guarantee you that the Filipinos are going to blast us at their funerals, no matter which side we hurt.” We were still, in some quarters, viewed and resented as former colonial masters.

  Before we did anything rash, we needed more on-site information. I wanted to talk to Fidel Ramos, the Philippine defense minister, to get an eyeball account. It just happened that the American military attaché ordinarily posted to our embassy in Manila was also in the Pentagon this night, upstairs with Harry Rowen. This officer had a little black book with the phone numbers of all top Filipino defense officials. I told him to send it down to the command center, where I handed it to a Navy watch officer. “Just keep dialing,” I told this officer, “until you get me a military officer at the top.”

  You might think, given the billions we spend on defense communications—direct lines, secure lines, scrambled lines, satellites—that my request would be a cinch. Instead, the Navy officer informed me, “I can’t reach their guys with this hardware, General. I need a plain old telephone.” In this supersophisticated center we did not have a single ordinary line. A sergeant popped up and said, “I can get you one, sir.” Go to it, I said, and he started tearing up the floor panels to run a line in. Our resourceful sergeant quickly produced a functioning commercial telephone.

  In the meantime, I described to Quayle and the others a plan that Hardisty and I had devised: have our F-4 Phantom jets stationed at Clark Air Force Base buzz any T-28S daring to come onto the runway at the rebel-held airbase. In short, scare hell out of them. If any of these planes started to take off, fire in front of them. And if any took off, shoot them down. I concocted a phrase to include in the order to convey the desired sense of menace. Our aircraft were to demonstrate “extreme hostile intent.” I called Cheney, who agreed. He contacted Air Force One and called me back within ten minutes to tell me we had the President’s approval. In short, we had a clear line of authority for graduated military action, commander in chief to Secretary of Defense through me to the appropriate military units. “Go,” Cheney said.

  While all this was happening, Dan Quayle had also called the President’s plane, and just as I was about to have Hardisty transmit the order for the F-4S to take to the air, Andrew Card, John Sununu’s deputy, came up on the screen and said, “Hold up—the Vice President is getting new instructions from Air Force One.” I already had instructions from Air Force One! I waited uneasily before calling Cheney back to tell him of the crossed wires. This was untidy crisis management. On my screen, I saw Quayle come back into the Situation Room wearing an unconcerned expression. “I’ve talked to the President,” was all he said.

  “Does that mean we can go?” I asked.

  “Oh,” he replied. “I thought you already had.”

  I turned to Admiral Hardisty and gave him the go order. For a few hairy minutes I had been in the uncomfortable position of serving two masters, a prescription for confusion. The F-4S were launched. They buzzed the airfield repeatedly, and no Filipino pilot took off to see what would happen next.

  Finally, after dialing for nearly forty minutes, the Navy watch officer managed to locate Fidel Ramos, the Philippine defense minister, and his chief of staff, General Renato De Villa. They told me that the situation was dicey, but under control. Bombing? Who was asking us to bomb anything? Don’t bomb, we were told. Within hours, the coup collapsed without our getting further involved and without the F-4S shooting up anybody or anything. And we learned that there had indeed been forces loyal to President Aquino at the airfield. A few days later, General Abenina, the coup leader, said, “We were about to take over the government. Then the U.S. warplanes appeared. We simply cannot hope to win against the stronger power of the United States Air Force.”

  The night the coup ended, I left the Pentagon feeling good. I had applied Clausewitz’s teachings, or Weinberger’s Maxim No. 3, and my own rule in forming military advice: take no action until you have a clear objective. We had applied restrained, proportionate, calibrated force, linked to a specific goal. And it had worked.

  A few days later, Dick Cheney was well and back in the saddle. After a morning staff meeting, he asked me to stay behind. “That went reasonably well,” he said of the Philippine episode. “But don’t worry, you will never be put in that situation again. From now on, the channel of communication will be clear at all times. You can be sure of that.” I could read between the lines. There had evidently been a discussion at the White House as to how instructions from the President would be passed during a crisis.

  When I read Dan Quayle’s book, I could understand why, after the media drubbing he had taken over the previous months, he wanted to look presidential. And he did perform well in the Philippine situation. But when it was over, his aides put a spin on the story that exaggerated Quayle’s role. The Los Angeles Times reported, “… it was a chance to shine and one that [Quayle] seized with gusto.”

  With the Philippine crisis resolved, and Just Cause ended in Panama, we could get back to redesigning the armed forces. In February 1990, Secretary Cheney would have to submit a defense budget for fiscal 1991–1992, and I hoped to use the time in between to win his support for my plan to reshape the force. What I had shown him and the President thus far had been influenced by my experience years before in Bill DePuy’s operation when we had tried to project the smallest Army that could still meet our world responsibilities. This time around, I came up with a label, the “Base Force,” to describe such a minimum level for all the services. The question now was how far below present levels we could safely set that base. I was thinking in terms that I knew would jar the JCS—15 percent, 20 percent, even 25 percent.

  After three stimulating months as chairman, I was finally getting into a comfortable routine. I wanted a congenial atmosphere in the chairman’s office. I favor a light touch with my associates, which you can achieve only with those in whom you have absolute trust and who do not mistake an easygoing style for lax standards. I like staff members who take their work seriously, but not themselves. I like people who work hard and play hard. I long ago concluded that organization charts and fancy titles count for next to nothing. I told my staff that they should go in and out of my office without exaggerated ceremony. I was well on my way to achieving thi
s atmosphere by surrounding myself with able, compatible souls who did not lose their cool even when I was bouncing off the walls. And since I am not one of those managers who believe the new broom has to sweep clean, I happily retained a gem from my predecessor, Admiral Crowe, to handle media relations, Colonel F. William Smullen.

  I next took a look at the directors of the Joint Staff. These were two-and three-star admirals and generals who ran a large staff and worked directly for the chairman and not the Joint Chiefs. The chairman’s more powerful position made the Joint Staff an attractive assignment. More to the point, Goldwater-Nichols had made service in a joint position a criterion for promotion to higher rank. Consequently, I had no trouble recruiting first-rate talent. The Joint Staff became the finest military staff anywhere in the world.

  I think it is important for a boss to be frank about his temperament and work habits so that people working for him have a chance to understand and adjust. I warned the staff that when I am preoccupied, I can be short-tempered over interruptions or questions. In high-pressure situations, I tend to snap into a single-minded mode. I become intense, focused, oblivious of the world around me. On those days, I might walk into the office without so much as a hello. If my executive officer brought me some issue not immediately relevant, I might growl and tell him to keep out of my way. I advised the staff not to overreact to these mood swings. Ride them out, and I would soon be back on an even keel.

  The more senior I became, the more precious became my time, the one commodity I could not stretch. I developed some simple rules: the staff was not to commit me to any meeting, speaking or social engagement, trip, or ceremony without my approval. Not even for five minutes. And when I did schedule a meeting, it was to start on time. People who keep other people waiting are being inconsiderate. I react to waiting for people who show up late about as patiently as I do to a taxi meter clicking in stalled traffic. And my office was to return phone calls promptly.

  I instituted Kester’s law on signatures. John Kester taught me that every time I put my name to something, I created a legal document. Consequently, no one should sign anything for me but the most innocuous paper. I knew of bosses who allowed their secretaries to sign their names to correspondence of substance, a practice I never permitted. Kester also taught me that a dated document became even more legal. Consequently, no pre- or postdated signings. I sign only on the actual date on the document.

  I ordered my staff not to prepare any “bedbug” letters for my signature. The expression originated with an old story about the New York Central Railroad. A passenger writes to the railroad’s president reporting his outrage at being bitten by a bedbug in his Pullman bed. A letter of apology comes back from the president of the railroad explaining the lengths the company went to to ensure that such things never happened, and assuring the passenger that it would not happen again. The passenger reads the letter feeling pretty good until a little scribbled handwritten note from the president to his secretary falls out of the envelope: “Send this SOB the bedbug letter.”

  My staff might get a letter from some citizen with a gripe and draft a form reply for me saying, “Thanks for your concern, but these things happen”; or “Sorry, wrong department.” I would scrawl across the top, “Find out the problem and see if we can fix it. And if we can’t, tell the writer who can. But no bedbug letters.”

  As chairman, I stuck by my old maxim to check small things, reinforced long ago at Pathfinder school when I had discovered the sergeant’s static line unconnected. Checking small things achieves two purposes. It reveals to the commander the real state of readiness in contrast to a surface appearance of readiness. And a general’s attention to detail lets the soldier far down the chain know that his link is as vital as the one that precedes or follows.

  In running the large Joint Staff, I relied on techniques picked up from Brown, Weinberger, Carlucci, and others over the years. Every morning at precisely 0831 hours I entered the Joint Staff conference room for an 0830 meeting. My principal staff officers, mostly two- and three-star generals and admirals, about twenty in all, knew that they had one minute to avoid being considered late. I abolished the formal briefing format used by previous chairmen, which kept the graphics staff up all night running off charts. I went around the table and had the generals and admirals tell me what was going on in their area. If the honest answer was “nothing,” that was what I wanted to hear, without any penalty for this straight response. The meeting lasted from five to thirty minutes. I used it to check signals and launch the day, rather than to resolve issues. The meeting also had another more important purpose. I wanted the staff directors to check me out. Was I mad? Was I in a joking mood telling old war stories? Was I passing out compliments or “dammits”? I always tried to be upbeat, especially if something was going bad and we faced trouble. The boss’s mood infects the organization. The worst situation is when no one knows what the leader’s mood is. My staff could tell first thing in the morning. By the same token, I could detect the same in them. When you meet with people every day, you learn to read them at a glance, you know who has a problem, who needs help or bucking up, who is expecting a butt chewing. The morning meeting was meant for team building. The serious work was done in small groups around a little round table in my office.

  In bureaucracies, small matters can have large symbolic value. One day, Al Gray, the feisty Marine Corps Commandant, pointed out that a document had gone to the Secretary of Defense over my signature on Joint Chiefs of Staff stationery. “If you’re going to send out stuff in the name of the chiefs,” Al said, “we all have to okay it, and I never saw that piece of paper before it went up.” Al was right.

  Under Goldwater-Nichols, I was principal military adviser. I did not have to take a vote among the chiefs before I recommended anything. I did not even have to consult them, though it would be foolish not to do so. But I needed a symbolic gesture to make the point of the chairman’s independence. I ordered a batch of stationery that had “Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff” printed across the top. I threw out the old stationery and with it threw out forty years of JCS bureaucratic tradition. I was not the pipeline for the composite opinions of the chiefs. I was speaking for myself to the Secretary and the President. A one-word change in a letterhead made that clear and legitimate.

  I initiated a couple of other new techniques for doing business. Increasingly, I had the chiefs meet alone without any staff officers or notetakers present. Not very good for historians, but a great way to encourage candor. I also preferred meeting with the chiefs in my office instead of the Tank, which carried the baggage of the old corporate body. I also stopped putting out fixed agendas for the JCS meetings. The chiefs did not mind, but their staffs did not like it. Without an agenda, they did not know what papers to prepare for their bosses before the meetings. As a result, the chiefs did not come to my office loaded with positions that they felt they had to defend. They actually had greater freedom in speaking their minds. Since we no longer voted, they did not have to go back to their bureaucracies and defend a vote. Some will no doubt dispute me, but I believe this new style gave the chiefs more clout than they had enjoyed as a more formal body. If I bought their ideas, I was ready to take them to Cheney and advocate them as strongly as my own. In this way, their advice got real consideration, rather than the almost automatic dismissal accorded to the ponderous, toothless consensus reports of the past.

  At the time we were brainstorming a reshaped military at home, I had a chance to see up close what shape our old adversary was taking. Jack Maresca, our ambassador to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, was involved in organizing a CSCE seminar designed to defuse East-West tensions. It was unprecedented. The military chiefs of the NATO nations and the Warsaw Pact countries and nonaligned European countries were going to meet in January 1990 at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, where the Congress of Vienna had taken place in 1814 to redraw the map of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon. Maresca asked me to attend the seminar, and I
agreed.

  Entering the gilded conference hall on January 16, I took my place at a huge U-shaped table and saw across from me a man I would have spotted as a soldier even if he had not been in the uniform of a Soviet general. He was Mikhail Moiseyev, who had replaced Sergei Akhromeyev as chief of the Soviet general staff. What a switch—Akhromeyev, in his seventies, World War II vintage, small, grandfatherly; and Moiseyev, fifty-one, big, energetic, forceful in manner and bearing.

  In my remarks, I wanted to make a point that I thought had been lost ever since history had thrust the United States into superpower status. With all our power, it was still not easy being a military figure under our political system. “I was required to take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” I pointed out. And I explained that this document “looks at the military and, in particular, at my service, the Army, as a necessary but undesirable institution, useful in times of crisis, and to be watched carefully at all other times.”