My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  For good or for ill, instantaneous visual communication has revolutionized news coverage in our time. Jet travel, satellites, and minicams allow live, around-the-clock coverage, like CNN, and have removed the old print media filters between the reporter and the audience.

  The immediacy of television has made life more difficult for old-fashioned hard-nosed correspondents. In the old days, reporters could play the SOB, asking tough questions in a tough way to get the story. Their methods made little difference, since nobody was going to see the reporter, only the story, filtered through editors, and presented under neat column heads. But when the public got to watch journalists in action, shouting and sometimes asking unreasonable questions, even the best reporters sometimes came across as bad guys.

  By the time Cheney, Norm, and I went on television, we understood the dynamics. We were talking not only to the press assembled in front of us; we were talking to four other audiences—the American people, foreign nations, the enemy, and our troops. I would never, for example, say anything for domestic consumption and ignore its impact on Iraq, or vice versa. I knew that we had won the battle for public opinion during Desert Storm when I watched a Saturday Night Live skit just before the ground offensive got under way. In this spoof, an Army public relations officer, “Lieutenant Colonel Pierson,” appears in desert camouflage at a press conference and faces the usual forest of waving hands and shouted questions: “Colonel, where would you say our forces are most vulnerable to attack?” “Are we planning an amphibious invasion of Kuwait? And if so, where would that be?” “On what date are we going to start the ground attack?” To anyone who had watched the actual questioning at press briefings, there was a touch of truth in the hilarity. This time, the press, not some inept General Halftrack from the Beetle Bailey comic strip, was the butt of satire.

  During the Gulf War, we auditioned military spokespersons. In the twenty-four-hour coverage of the TV world, we could no longer put just anyone, no matter how well informed, in front of the cameras. We picked the Joint Staff operations chief, Lieutenant General Tom Kelly, as our Pentagon briefer because Kelly not only was deeply knowledgeable, but came across like Norm in the sitcom Cheers, a regular guy whom people could relate to and trust. Kelly’s partner for the press briefing, Rear Admiral Mike McConnell, was the perfect foil, playing the bookish authority to Kelly’s neighborhood sage. Norm Schwarzkopf and I, eight thousand miles apart, watched Marine Brigadier General Richard “Butch” Neal brief reporters in Riyadh for the first time. He was the third candidate we had auditioned. The press roughed Butch up a bit, but an unflinching honesty came through. After Neal’s debut, I called Norm and said, “I think you’ve got yourself a star.”

  Our priority, of course, was fighting. But in this new media environment we had to learn something as old as Clausewitz: how to make the people understand and support what we were doing. Polls conducted after the war suggest that we succeeded. These surveys indicated that 80 percent of Americans polled thought press coverage of the Gulf War had been good or excellent.

  Even before Norm Schwarzkopf came home in triumph, he wanted to discuss his future with me. SACEUR, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, a desirable and prestigious assignment, was already taken by Jack Galvin. “You probably could be chairman at some point,” I said, “but I’m not going anywhere yet. Of course, Vuono’s retiring. That would open up Army Chief of Staff.” He might be interested, Norm answered. “Sure,” I said, “but let me tell you what I really think. Now is the perfect time for you to retire. You’ve been away for a long time. You don’t realize what’s going to happen when you come home. You’re a national idol. People are going to go crazy over you.” I knew that no slot in the Pentagon was big enough now to contain a man of his fame and stature. “You’ve got thirty-five years in,” I said. “You’ll be getting all kinds of offers. Now’s the time to leave.”

  Shortly afterward, after talking to other friends, Norm called me back. “I’m going to retire,” he said. “I know what you guys will have to do over the next few years. You have to tear the services apart. I don’t have the stomach for that. And I don’t want to deal with the damn politicians and all the crap you’ll have to put up with.”

  I told him I hoped we would be reshaping the forces, not tearing them apart. Still, he had made the right decision. Norm Schwarzkopf did not suffer fools gladly, which you can get away with in the absolute command environment of the battlefield. But suffering the insufferable comes with the territory in Washington.

  For a moment, it looked as if the war might flare up again. In March, the Iraqi Shiites in the south rose up in arms to demand more recognition from Baghdad. Saddam responded by sending in his troops to suppress the uprising. In the north, the Kurds tried to shake off the Iraqi yoke. Neither revolt had a chance. Nor, frankly, was their success a goal of our policy. President Bush’s rhetoric urging the Iraqis to overthrow Saddam, however, may have given encouragement to the rebels. But our practical intention was to leave Baghdad enough power to survive as a threat to an Iran that remained bitterly hostile toward the United States.

  Nevertheless, we could not ignore the worsening plight of the rebellious Kurds. Saddam had lashed back, driving over half a million of them from their homes to barren mountains in southern Turkey. There, lacking food, shelter, or medical care, they began dying at a rate of six hundred a day. President Bush directed us to launch a relief operation, Provide Comfort, headed by now Lieutenant General John M. Shalikashvili. The Kurds, however, could not survive indefinitely in this bleak mountain-scape. Their best hope was to return home. The challenge was to get them back while protecting them from Saddam’s vengeance.

  Jack Galvin, operating out of Mons, Belgium, as our European commander, had long-distance control over our forces in this region. One Sunday afternoon, with me in Washington and Jack in Belgium, each with a map in front of us, we sketched out a “security zone,” a sector around Kurdish cities in Iraq that Saddam’s troops would not be allowed to enter. I felt like one of those British diplomats in the 1920s carving out nations like Jordan and Iraq on a tablecloth at a gentleman’s club. I called Galvin, in his trans-European role, “Charlemagne,” and I told him that now he was truly a kingdom maker. After lining out the security zone, we ordered the Iraqi military to get out. They refused. We rattled the saber, and they withdrew. In seven weeks, Provide Comfort brought nearly half a million Kurds home. I watched Shalikashvili run this political and military maze with masterful skill and concluded, once again, that here was a soldier up to any mission.

  The troops came home to a wildly cheering America. I took part in victory parades in Chicago and Washington and in a ticker-tape parade up Broadway in New York. Alma and I rode in a white 1959 Buick convertible. Ahead of us were Cheney and his wife, Lynne, and behind us Norm Schwarzkopf and his wife, Brenda. Our security people wanted the men to wear armored vests. “Not me,” I said. “I look chubby enough already.” Norm agreed, and Cheney went along with our military judgment. It was an emotional moment to be at the center of an event I had seen only in history books and newsreels, celebrating a Lindbergh, or an Eisenhower, or a MacArthur. Norm, a New Jerseyite, and I, a New Yorker, riding through a blizzard of tape, confetti, and balloons while thousands cheered their heads off, were two hometown boys who had made good. The generals and admirals marching in the victory parades, John Yeosock, Walt Boomer, Chuck Horner, Stan Arthur, all of us, were surrogates for the real heroes, the troops of XVIII Airborne Corps, VII Corps, and the U.S. Marines, the airmen, sailors, and Coast Guardsmen, who had given back to Americans pride in their country. Our allies were also represented in the parades, and Korea and Vietnam veterans marched too, finally getting long overdue recognition.

  Sitting in the stands, their contributions largely unsung, were the service chiefs who had so superbly prepared their forces and who had provided invaluable counsel to Cheney and to President Bush. The nation owes its gratitude to General Carl Vuono, Admiral Frank Kelso, General Tony McPeak, and Gen
eral Al Gray, as well as to the vice chairman, Admiral Dave Jeremiah, and the Commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Bill Kime. Desert Storm had been a team effort involving our commands worldwide, as well as the little-known defense agencies in Washington that provided the logistics, intelligence, communications, maps, and all the other unheralded elements of victory.

  All of us in uniform had been solidly backed by civilian leaders at State, the Pentagon, and the White House. Most deserving of praise was President Bush. He had kept his promise, “This will not stand,” and he had led a worldwide coalition to victory.

  The celebrations were no doubt out of proportion to the achievement. We had not fought another World War II. Yet, after the stalemate of Korea and the long agony in Southeast Asia, the country was hungry for victory. We had given America a clear win at low casualties in a noble cause, and the American people fell in love again with their armed forces. The way I looked at it, if we got too much adulation for this one, it made up for the neglect the troops had experienced coming home from those other wars.

  That spring I was invited to throw out the first ball at Yankee Stadium in the season opener between the Yankees and the Chicago White Sox. I am no great shakes as a jock, but I swear my pitch was a strike. Later, I rode down the East River Drive and gazed at the huge Pepsi-Cola sign across the river. Suddenly, I was a kid again, swinging a mop across the floors of the Pepsi bottling plant. The next day, I spoke at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to a breakfast meeting of the Association for a Better New York. “In my youth,” I said, “I belonged to Local 812, International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Is there anybody here from 812?” I guess they were not expecting that, and a table of Teamster officials let out a whoop and a holler.

  The most moving part of this trip was my return to Banana Kelly. The community that my parents had fled when it started to turn into a crime-infested slum was making a comeback. Our old building at 952 Kelly Street, abandoned, burned out, and finally torn down, was now the site of new garden apartments. I watched kids playing ball and skipping rope in Kelly Street Park, which had been a garbage-strewn lot just a few years before.

  Afterward, I walked a couple of blocks and up the worn stone steps of Morris High School. The wooden floors still creaked, the poles for opening and closing the tall windows still hung where I remembered, and the gym, where I was to speak, had the familiar smell of sweat and disinfectant. I looked over a sea of mostly Hispanic and black faces and I recalled what it had been like to be here as a boy thirty-seven years before. “I remember this place,” I told them. “I remember the feeling that you can’t make it. But you can. When I was coming up, the opportunities were limited. But now they are there. You can be anything you want to be. But wanting to be isn’t enough. Dreaming about it isn’t enough. You’ve got to study for it, work for it, fight for it with all your heart and soul.” I pointed out that 97 percent of GIs now were high school graduates. Their diplomas proved one thing: that they had the drive and discipline to stick it out. I appealed to them: “Don’t drop out.” Choose a role model, I said. “And feel free to choose a black or a white, a general or a teacher, or just the parents who brought you into the world.” I do not know if I reached a single youngster that day. But I was determined to leave Morris High with a message for those kids. Reject the easy path of victimhood. Dare to take the harder path of work and commitment, a path that leads somewhere.

  I had urged the kids to pick their role models from any race, because I am concerned that the admirable ideal of black pride can be carried to an extreme where it produces isolation. I am all for instilling pride and a sense of tradition in African-Americans, particularly among the young. I made the Buffalo Soldiers my cause so that blacks could look back on a proud past in another chapter of their history. I want black youngsters to learn about black writers, poets, musicians, scientists, and artists, and about the culture and history of Africa. At the same time, we have to accept that black children in America are not going to have to make their way in an African world. They are going to have to make their way in an American world. Along with their black heritage, they should know about the Greek origins of our democracy, the British origins of our judicial system, and the contributions to our national tapestry of Americans of all kinds and colors. My message to young African-Americans is to learn to live where you are and not where you might have been born three centuries ago. The cultural gap is too wide, the time past too long gone, for Africa to provide the only nourishment to the soul or mind of African-Americans. The corollary is equally true. Young whites will not be living in an all-white world. They must be taught to appreciate the struggle of minorities to achieve their birthright.

  On white-majority college campuses, in our inner cities, in almost every area of social interaction, we see an unhealthy resegregation occurring, sometimes self-imposed, sometimes imposed by economics. When disillusioned blacks go off by themselves, they withdraw from the promise of America. They then allow whites to walk away too, saying, “If that’s what they want, so be it.” Even justified, well-intended redistricting to increase the number of blacks in Congress has allowed nonwhite members off the hook in looking after black constituent issues. The black agenda has been given over to the Congressional Black Caucus. The concerns of African-Americans stand in danger of riding again in the back of the bus. We are a nation of unlimited opportunity and serious unsolved social ills; and we are all in it together. Racial resegregation can only lead to social disintegration. Far better to resume the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr.: to build a nation where whites and blacks sit side by side at the table of brotherhood.

  I have lived in and risen in a white-dominated society and a white-dominated profession, but not by denying my race, not by seeing it as a chain holding me back or an obstacle to be overcome. Others may use my race against me, but I will never use it against myself. My blackness has been a source of pride, strength, and inspiration, and so has my being an American. I started out believing in an America where anyone, given equal opportunity, can succeed through hard work and faith. I still believe in that America.

  On the morning of May 2, I went to the kitchen, poured my coffee, and glanced at the Washington Post on the table. I was front-page news. Bob Woodward’s book The Commanders was coming out in a few days, and the Post had a story based on it. This article proved to be the opening salvo in a publicity blitz. On May 5, the Post’s “Book World” made The Commanders its lead review. And on May 13, Post-owned Newsweek magazine had a cover story with my picture and a banner reading “The Reluctant Warrior: Doubts and Division on the Road to War.” The Post sure takes care of its own.

  I turned out to be a central figure in Woodward’s story of life in the Pentagon and the White House. I had no quarrel with the total picture of me that he presented. But the emphasis in the media barrage was on the few pages of the book implying that I privately opposed the President on the Gulf War, a publicity strategy designed to propel Woodward’s work into best-sellerdom through the booster rocket of controversy. The reluctant-warrior theme allowed members of Congress who had voted against the war and other opponents to say, “See, Powell really was with us.”

  Except for calls from a few close friends, my phone was eerily silent as I took a pounding from the media and the Beltway gossip circuit. I heard nothing from my boss, Dick Cheney. Part of me was saying, Cheney is probably happy to see me cut down to size. The better angels of my nature said, that’s just Dick; you get into trouble in this league, and you get yourself out.

  The same morning the story appeared, a White House operator called to say that President Bush was coming on the line. I waited uneasily. “Colin, pay no attention to that nonsense. Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Don’t let ’em get under your skin.”

  “Thanks, Mr. President,” I said.

  “Barb says hello. See ya.” Click.

  Later that day, at, of all places, a gathering on agricultural policy, reporters hit the President with more questions about me, as dep
icted in Woodward’s book. “Nobody’s going to drive a wedge between [Powell] and me,” he said. “I don’t care what kind of book they’ve got, how many unnamed sources they have, how many quotes they put in the mouth of somebody when they weren’t there….”

  I will never forget this loyalty from the President of the United States at a time when I needed a friend.

  On May 22, Cheney called me up to his office. “You’re going to be reappointed as chairman,” he said. I was a little puzzled, since my term was not up for over four months, on September 30. I thanked Dick. “It’s the President’s idea,” he said. “He wants to reappoint you early.”

  “He doesn’t have to carry my baggage,” I said. “He’s got plenty of time to think about this one.”

  “You don’t understand,” Cheney said. “He wants to end any speculation about your standing in the administration.”

  “When does he want to do it?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow.”

  The next day I found myself in the Rose Garden with George Bush pointing to me and telling the press and assembled officials, “I’m taking this step now to demonstrate my great confidence in his ability and the tremendous respect I have for him.”

  When the President finished, I followed with brief remarks. Brit Hume of ABC put a question to me: “General, would you care to comment on the recent account of the Gulf War suggesting that you had, at a minimum, some serious misgivings about the use-of-force option …”

  I had started to answer when the President adroitly brushed me aside. “I just want to be on the record as saying that he spoke his mind; he did it openly,” Bush said. He recalled the day I had suggested a deadline for Saddam to accept Gorbachev’s peace proposal. “It was Colin Powell, more than anyone else, who I think deserves the credit … after all options, in my view, were exhausted, for drawing the line in the sand.” The President pointed to the second floor of the White House. “Right up in that office.” That ended that line of questioning, and the controversy over The Commanders died down for the moment. George Bush had picked me up, dusted me off, and put his arm around me when I needed it. He is that kind of man.