My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  I pointed out further that from our country’s birth, the American people had resisted the idea of a standing army. One author of the Constitution recommended a limit of two thousand troops. And I quoted George Washington’s response: “An excellent idea—if only we can convince our collected enemies to maintain no more than an equivalent amount.” And I pointed out that I, as chairman with my four stars, was not the highest-ranking military figure in America. That person was the commander in chief, the President, a civilian. And I reminded this audience of allies, adversaries, and potential enemies of the fundamental purpose of American arms: “The American people have insisted that when we have to raise armies, their posture must be defensive and the rationale for their size must be relentlessly examined. As I sit here today, my Congress is at home thinking up ways to shrink our Army. This is the way it is in a democracy, and I would want it no other way.”

  I had tried to set a tone of conciliation and nonbelligerence. Therefore, I was eager to see what approach the new chief of the Soviet armed forces would take when Moiseyev’s turn came to speak. I was disappointed. He sounded like the Soviet counterpart of America’s knee-jerk Cold Warriors. Out came all the stock, stale, confrontational clichés, all neatly printed in a bound booklet his aides distributed. Moiseyev took questions after his speech and came off like a recorder spouting canned Kremlin tapes. I was concerned because I had stuck my neck out claiming that the world had become a different place, while Moiseyev’s performance said that little had changed.

  I whispered my concern to Ambassador Maresca. I needed to get to know this man better, I said, to see if there was anything more here than an old Soviet warhorse. Maresca arranged a small private dinner in his Vienna apartment for that evening. I took with me Tom White, my executive assistant, and Peter Afanasenko, a superb Russian interpreter from the State Department.

  When our guest came through the door that night, I thought maybe we had the wrong man. All the bluster was gone. Moiseyev seemed warm and relaxed. We sat down to dinner, and he quickly demonstrated that at least one thing still worked in the Soviet Union, the intelligence system. “You entered the Army in 1958?” he said.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “And so did I. You were married in 1962?” “Yes,” I answered again.

  “And so was I. You have a son, and he was commissioned in the Army?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I too have a son in the army.” Then Moiseyev wagged his finger at me and said, laughing, “But I have accomplished all this at fifty-one, while you are almost fifty-three!”

  That broke the ice. As the vodka flowed, the atmosphere continued to warm up. Moiseyev told us about his boyhood in Siberia, where his father had been a gandy dancer on the Trans-Siberian Railroad who never missed a day no matter how low the temperature dropped. His mother still lived in their hometown in Siberia. Only when the subject of the Baltics came up—the United States still regarded them as occupied nations—did I glimpse the old Soviet belligerence and this man’s toughness. He had lost seven uncles in World War II, Moiseyev said, soldiers who died liberating places like Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia from the Nazis, and now they hated the Soviet Union?

  Toward the end of the evening, he and I had become two old infantrymen swapping war stories. I felt comfortable enough to start raising some questions. “We all know the Soviet Union’s in the midst of change,” I said. “What’s the point of peddling that old threadbare party line?” He also knew that the Soviet armies were going to pull out completely from bases in the bloc countries. “Why don’t you do it faster?” I asked. “Because the children have to finish the school year,” he said. The answer was so perfectly understandable from one soldier-parent to another that I burst out laughing. I do not know if any of my advice got through that night, but as we parted, Moiseyev threw a bear hug around me and said, “I feel like I have known you all my life.” For my part, I felt that I had met someone hovering between an old-fashioned communist adversary and a new army buddy.

  Room 2118 of the Rayburn Building, the hearing room of the House Armed Services Committee, has a plaque in front of the dais that reads:

  U.S. CONSTITUTION—ART I, SEC 8

  THE CONGRESS SHALL HAVE POWER …

  TO RAISE AND SUPPORT ARMIES …

  PROVIDE AND MAINTAIN A NAVY …

  MAKE RULES FOR THE GOVERNMENT AND REGULATION OF THE LAND AND NAVAL FORCES.

  I assume the plaque is there in case anyone does not understand who, in matters of defense, controls the pocketbook. On February 1, Cheney and I were in Room 2118 to defend the proposed Pentagon budget for 1991–92. In the past, determining what we needed militarily had been easy. Lay out the Soviet threat and come up with whatever was required to meet it. But with the Soviet military shrinking, we faced a likely stampede by members of Congress arguing that there was no threat, hence no need for a large military. “Peace Dividend” had become a fashionable phrase. Since we did not need so many guns, we could start shifting money to schools or housing or crime prevention. The day before, President Bush had delivered his State of the Union message, and in it he had reflected the changed world by proposing the first deep cuts in American troops in Europe.

  Cheney and I went before the House and Senate armed services committees to promote the Bush defense budget as proof that the administration was responding to the new world climate. Yet, as we left Capitol Hill, we knew that unless we came up with an overarching strategy to guide reductions, the Pentagon’s political enemies were likely to come after us with a chain saw. Consequently, while still not embracing my Base Force concept, Cheney urged me to continue to refine it.

  Inside the Defense Department and in talks to members of Congress, I began promoting a rationale for the Base Force, a shift from a solely threat-based force to a threat- and capability-based force. We might not face the old threat from the Soviet Union, I said, but we had to maintain certain fundamental capabilities. For example, we might no longer have a specific airlift requirement to move X million tons of matériel to Europe to meet a potential Soviet invasion. But we still needed the capability to move huge stores to unpredictable trouble spots around the world. We might no longer face the 8th Guards Army across the Fulda Gap, but we still needed the capability to project power elsewhere. I proposed forces capable of performing four basic missions: one to fight across the Atlantic; a second to fight across the Pacific; a contingency force at home to be deployed rapidly to hot spots, as we did in Panama; and a reduced but still vital nuclear force to deter nuclear adversaries.

  I made some early converts among my colleagues. Norm Schwarzkopf understood what I was after, and so did General Jack Chain, heading the Strategic Airlift Command. Another powerful ally was General Jack Galvin, SACEUR, commanding all NATO as well as U.S. forces in Europe. The Joint Chiefs were coming along. Yet, I was astonished by the death grip of old ideas on some military minds. The Navy kept arguing for more aircraft carriers. Why? Because it knew that the Soviet Union was building more carriers. How did it know? Because satellite photographs taken years before showed a keel plate laid down in a Soviet shipyard. Obviously, the keel was for a carrier, and therefore Soviet carriers were still coming on line. I argued with Navy bosses that it made no sense to believe that the Soviet Union was pulling out of its old empire in Eastern Europe, yet building a navy to rule the seas. Today, the Russians are selling their aircraft carriers for scrap.

  I was rethinking other verities too. I remembered, in the Weinberger era, sitting in the Tank with my old mentor John Wickham, the Army Chief of Staff, for a briefing on a new artillery weapon, the Copperhead, which could be guided electronically to a target. Wickham argued, “With accuracy like this, we don’t need to have messy tactical nuclear firepower on a battlefield.” The nukes were like an old-fashioned artillery barrage, laying down a blanket of random destruction in order to destroy anything under it. The new smart weapons were more like accurate rifle fire.

  Shortly after I became chairm
an we faced a problem with a certain nuclear artillery shell. It was not as safe as we wanted. Consequently, the Army had performed a vasectomy on these rounds, rendering them sterile by gas injection. Then the nuclear bomb builders solved the safety problem, and they wanted to reverse the vasectomy. That struck me as foolish. At a time when we were dismantling huge intermediate-range nuclear missiles, why should we be putting money into refitting small tactical nukes of questionable value? My argument ran into a stone wall. The Army did not want to give up its battlefield nuclear firepower. Hard-line Pentagon civilian policymakers opposed me too, including Dick Cheney. Still, I was becoming more and more convinced that tactical nuclear weapons had no place on a battlefield.

  … … …

  On February 18, I stood on a stage at The George Washington University’s Charles E. Smith Center, with the sensation of decades whirling by. The last time I had been on this campus was twenty years before, in the spring of 1971, winding up work on my M.B.A. At the invitation of Stephen Trachtenberg, GWU’s new president, I was back, the recipient of an honorary degree and commencement speaker at the winter graduation ceremony. I began by pointing out that this was my second GWU degree and that this one had cost the government a lot less. The serious point I wanted to register was the unimaginable change that had swept the world since I had left the campus. When I was a GWU student, I pointed out, Nelson Mandela had been a convict in a South African prison. A few days ago, Mandela had finally been freed. And before the year was out, Mandela would address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress. When I was a grad student, 600,000 Soviet troops had been stationed in Czechoslovakia. Now a playwright and former dissident, Vaclav Havel, was the Czech president. When I was at GWU, studying business administration, the Warsaw Pact armies had been running offensive maneuvers designed to carry them all the way to the Atlantic. Now the pact was a shambles. I reminded the audience that in 1947, George Kennan, the diplomat-historian, had counseled that if we contained communism, the system would eventually fall of its own weight. Kennan had been proved right “The Soviet system shuddered and stopped,” I said. “And now we are watching it collapse.”

  After the ceremonies, as I was getting into my car, I stopped for a moment and thought about the day I had walked from Smith Center to Capitol Hill, tear gas burning my eyes, to watch hundreds of Vietnam veterans fling their medals at the Capitol. While I was a GWU student the largest mass arrest in America’s history had taken place, with over thirteen thousand antiwar protesters jailed in Washington. At the time, I had felt deeply depressed about the public’s attitude toward my profession. We had managed to turn that situation around. The challenge now was to maintain our restored respect. And matching today’s force to today’s realities, I felt, was key.

  Praise the Lord. A long shot was coming in. Not that Alma and I had ever doubted the talent of our daughter Linda. But the laws of theatrical supply and demand work against even the most gifted. Yet here we were on a March evening, all dressed up, headed for Lisner Auditorium at The George Washington University to watch Linda performing with a road company in Play to Win, the story of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball. Linda had a lead, as Jackie’s wife. She was marvelous. And she was getting paid!

  About this time, Linda got another break. She went out to California for a month to film a summer replacement series. While there, she was invited to dinner at the home of Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver. It was a thrill for Linda, getting an inside peek at Hollywood life. But she decided Hollywood was not quite real and preferred to come back and pursue her career in the East. Frankly, I was relieved.

  Dick Cheney urged me to keep pushing ahead with the Base Force, though he still reserved judgment. As part of my missionary work, I granted separate interviews on May 3 to two journalists covering the Pentagon, Michael Gordon of the New York Times and R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post. I admitted to both that I had a tough internal selling job. I told Smith, “What I’m trying to put across to the department is that the military threat is different.” Smith kept pressing me for a hard-news peg, saying my story so far was too soft. What size cuts was I proposing? he asked. I resisted being specific, but Smith persisted. Finally, I relented and said, “Somewhere in the neighborhood maybe of twenty to twenty-five percent.” On May 7, in a front-page story, the Post reported that “the nation’s top military officer” predicted a restructured military could lead to “a 25 percent lower defense budget.” I was surprised at the fuss my remarks caused, not only in the Post, but later in the New York Times and all other major newspapers, and even in The Economist of London.

  Jim Baker, the wily Secretary of State, called to congratulate me, which suggested I might be in trouble. And I was concerned about Cheney’s reaction. He too had publicly proposed cutting the Pentagon budget, but by only 2 percent a year over the next six years after taking inflation into account. Dick Cheney was not a boss who enjoyed being contradicted. When we met the day of the Post story, Dick said only, “Pretty good piece.” As the day wore on, however, second opinions started rolling in. I learned through the Pentagon grapevine that the chiefs were unhappy; my cut recommendation had been too specific. Conservative Republicans on the Hill asked Cheney how they could defend the President’s budget when his own chairman was saying to slice even deeper. Our NATO allies complained. How could they go to their parliaments asking for serious defense spending when the United States was ready to cut so deeply?

  The next day the Secretary summoned me to his office, wearing the Cheney frown. “We have to talk about what you told those reporters,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I have to know if you support the President. I need to be sure you’re on the team.”

  I was taken aback. I made the cautionary count-to-ten before answering. “Maybe I spoke out prematurely,” I said. But what I had told the reporter was the writing on the wall. I regretted causing him a problem by speaking out of turn, I said, “but there can’t be any question about my being on the team.” It was a tense moment, and the air was crackling. We both, however, knew enough to pull back from the brink. And we continued work on the Base Force, and to achieve the 25 percent reduction.

  Seven years had passed since I started the campaign to erect a statue at Fort Leavenworth to honor the Buffalo Soldiers. Just before leaving that post, I had passed the torch to Alonzo Dougherty, an Army civilian official and now a National Guard brigadier general. Lonnie did what he could, but without much support or money the project languished. Then Commander Carlton Philpot, a black naval officer, reported to Leavenworth as an instructor at the Command and General Staff College. Philpot became enthralled with the Buffalo Soldiers project. He took charge of the moribund effort and breathed life back into it. Philpot was not content with a statue of a soldier on horseback. He wanted a park with a reflecting pool and the statue. He wanted a foundation established to raise money for a Buffalo Soldiers Museum and to finance educational programs in black military history. Philpot contacted me and asked me to reenlist in the campaign. How much money would his plan take? I asked. “Half a million,” he said. I gagged, but agreed to see what I could do.

  Walter Annenberg, the wealthy publisher of TV Guide, was a former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. I had become friends with Walter and his wife, Lee, through my trips to California during the Reagan years. I wrote to Walter and told him about our dreams for Fort Leavenworth.

  He called back and said that the kind of memorial we were talking about could not be accomplished with $500,000; it would take more like $850,000. It was not the news I wanted, but Walter did agree to give the project an initial $250,000, if we could raise a matching sum.

  I became a part-time fund-raiser. Money began to come in—$25,000 from cousin Bruce Llewellyn; $50,000 from Zachary Fisher, a remarkable New York philanthropist and friend of the military. After a few months, Walter called again. He hated loose ends, he said. What was happening to the Buffalo Soldiers campaign?
I explained our modest progress. He believed in this project, he said, and wanted to see it move ahead. He was sending the fund a check for $250,000. We could worry later about the matching funds.

  Thanks to Walter’s jump start, I was able to travel to Fort Leavenworth on July 28 for a groundbreaking ceremony. I stood in an empty field where the barracks of black cavalrymen once rose, while a band played and flags fluttered. Among the dignitaries at the ceremony were Lieutenant General Leonard Wishart, the Leavenworth commanding general, Commander Philpot, and Brigadier General Dougherty. But the stars that day were Sergeant Major William Harrington and First Sergeant Elisha Kearse, both ninety-five years old, authentic Buffalo Soldiers who had served long ago in all-black regiments. As I shook their gnarled hands, I felt connected to my past, to Lieutenant Flipper, and to blacks who fought on the Western plains and charged up San Juan Hill, all but invisible to history. As we drove the ceremonial shovels into the ground, the story of those two old soldiers was a hole in history about to be filled.

  Quarters 6 is a substantial brick structure with a wide veranda, set on Grant Avenue in Fort Myer’s historic district. The house was built in 1908 at a cost of $19,202 as a duplex to accommodate the families of two lieutenants. In 1961, Quarters 6 was remodeled as the residence of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Behind Quarters 6 were two garages, where I parked my Volvos and worked on them. I also managed to persuade neighbors to let me store more of my adult toys in their garages.

  I enjoyed bringing foreign guests to Quarters 6 for lunch or dinner. Afterward, I took them outside, where America’s history lay spread before us. Standing on a broad lawn overlooking the Potomac River, I could point out the Capitol, the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial, and attach a little history lesson to each site. There was just one glitch. A young tree stood right in the middle, marring the panoramic view. And it was still growing. One day, I summoned my aide at the time, Major Tim Livsey. “Tim,” I said, “that tree has to go.”