My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  As we walked, the election loomed like the nine-hundred-pound gorilla, unmentioned but unignorable. I did not bring up the subject, since the President did not seem in the mood for postmortems. At one point, though, he said, “Y’know, I was disappointed with Bill Crowe. Thought I treated him pretty well.” The President went on, “Offered to let him stay on as chairman for another term.” Crowe had been my predecessor, which I suppose is why Bush brought up what was on his mind to me. Bill Clinton’s draft record and personal character had been campaign issues. Admiral Crowe had led twenty-one other retired admirals and generals to support Clinton publicly, which pretty much took the curse off the draft-dodger charge and the character issue.

  President Bush shook his head. “I just never thought they’d elect him.” The tone of voice clearly conveyed his deep sense of rejection. “Don’t understand it.” He gave me a pained smile. “But life goes on.”

  That night, after dinner, we all gathered in the living room of the President’s cabin and watched a charming movie, Enchanted April. The next morning, as we said our goodbyes, Barbara Bush seemed to read the question in my eyes. “We needed to be with real friends at this time,” she said. “Close friends.” Alma and I were deeply moved. President or not, First Lady or not, these two exceptional people would be our close friends for life.

  Just two days before the election, on November 1, I had been to dinner at Vernon Jordan’s home, and at one point, Jordan asked me, “Are you interested in State or Defense? Warren Christopher would like to know,” he said, referring to a Carter-era State Department alumnus who was expected to be a leader of Clinton’s transition team if the Arkansas governor won.

  “Vernon, I don’t want either job. I don’t want any political appointment,” I said. All I really wanted was to finish my term and retire from the Army in September 1993. Furthermore, the election had been so focused on the economy that I had no clear idea where the new team stood on foreign policy and defense issues.

  With the Jordan conversation still fresh in mind, I was a little apprehensive when, two weeks after the election, I got word that President-elect Clinton wanted to see me. On November 19, at 3:00 P.M., ducking a heavy rain, I ran into the Hay-Adams Hotel, one block north of the White House. On entering the President-elect’s suite, I was greeted by George Stephanopoulos, the Clinton deputy campaign manager, who looked like a high school valedictorian with a good tailor. “The governor’s running a little behind,” Stephanopoulos said. “But he’s anxious to see you.”

  Clinton arrived shortly afterward, and Stephanopoulos left the two of us alone. The President-elect took off his jacket, asked me to sit down, and settled into an easy chair. I had never met Bill Clinton in person and found him even bigger and more vital-looking than his TV image. He seemed relaxed and unawed by what he had just accomplished.

  “I’ve been wanting to meet you ever since I saw a tape of your Morris High School speech,” he said as he poured me a cup of coffee. He went on to mention several points from my talk. I was impressed. I had given this speech over a year and a half before, when Bill Clinton was still a small state’s governor. The man, as I was about to learn, had spongelike powers of absorption and retention. He put a cigar in his mouth; he constantly seemed about to light it, but never did. A plate of cookies rested on a coffee table before us. Finally, I took one. He took one. I took a second, and we began to polish off the pile.

  He asked me about Bosnia. Wasn’t there some way, he wanted to know, that we could influence the situation through airpower, something not too punitive? There it was again, the ever-popular solution from the skies, with a good humanist twist; let’s not hurt anybody. “Not likely,” I said. But not wanting to sound too negative on our first meeting, I told him that I would have my staff give the matter more thought.

  We discussed Iraq, Russia, and what initiatives the new President might take to prod the peace process along in the Middle East. He was better informed on foreign policy than his campaign had suggested. When it seemed we had covered the globe, I brought up something much on my mind, especially regarding this first nonveteran American President since FDR. “Sir,” I said, “to the rest of the country you’ll soon be our President. But to me and millions of troops, you’re also our commander in chief. You’ll never find any group more faithful to your orders. So allow me to make a few suggestions. Try to meet with the Joint Chiefs and visit the troops soon. Don’t keep us at arm’s length.”

  Clinton readily agreed. Since we were on the subject of the military, he told me that he was looking over three candidates for Secretary of Defense. “What’s your judgment of Sam Nunn, Dave McCurdy”—an Oklahoma congressman at the time—“and Les Aspin?” he asked.

  Obviously, I had not made the short list. At least one unwanted job was out of the way. But was this an ambush? Would my endorsement, as a Reagan-Bush appointee, be the kiss of death? “Nunn’s very good, but you might find him a little independent,” I answered. “And I’m not sure Sam wants to give up the power he has on the Hill. But he’s definitely first-class.” Dave McCurdy? “Okay, but maybe a bit erratic.” Les Aspin? My objectivity was being tested to the limit. Not that I had any objection to Aspin personally. This rumpled, professorial MIT Ph.D. was brilliant, and I liked him. But, except for his support of Desert Storm, Aspin had been beating my brains out almost since I had become chairman. He had tried to scuttle the Base Force. We were already cutting the services by half a million, and Aspin had primed candidate Clinton to lop off another 200,000.

  “You know, Les is real smart,” Clinton commented in a way that led me to believe that I knew who my next boss was going to be.

  “Smart’s not everything in running the Pentagon,” I pointed out. I had worked with Aspin long enough to have observed the disorder in which his brilliance flourished. “Les might not bring quite the management style you’re looking for,” I said.

  The President-elect gave me a noncommittal nod. Retirement began to look appealing. Since Clinton was thinking of putting a former adversary over me, I thought I had better make another point. “You know I’ve spent most of the past twelve years serving Republican Presidents,” I said. “My fingerprints are all over their national security policies. But I’m a soldier first, and when you take office, you’ll have my total loyalty. My term’s up in September. But if you want me to go earlier, that’s fine. Also, sir, anytime I find that I cannot, in good conscience, fully support your administration’s policies because of my past positions, I will let you know. And I’ll retire quietly, without making a fuss.”

  “That’s all I can ask,” Clinton said.

  We talked for over an hour. I was amazed by Clinton’s fund of knowledge. He seemed to have an interest in everything and the kind of memory that never forgets anything. Finally, an aide came in and advised the President-elect that he had a state governor waiting to see him, and he was already running half an hour behind schedule.

  “Sorry we can’t talk a little longer, General,” Clinton said. “I was hoping Hillary would be back in time to meet you.”

  I rose, then hesitated. I had to say one more thing before I left. “Governor Clinton,” I began, “there’s something we haven’t covered.” During the campaign, he had promised to end the ban on gays serving in the military. “For whatever it’s worth,” I said, “let me give you the benefit of my thinking. Lifting the ban is going to be a tough issue for you, and it’s a culture shock for the armed forces. The chiefs and the CINCs don’t want it lifted. Most military people don’t want it lifted. I believe a majority in Congress are against lifting the ban too. The heart of the problem is privacy. How can this change be made to work given the intimate living conditions of barracks and shipboard life?”

  “I know,” Clinton said, “but I want to find a way to stop discrimination against gays.”

  “Let me make a suggestion,” I went on. “At the press conference when you announce your choice for Secretary of Defense, say right off the bat, ‘And I’ve asked Secr
etary-designate so-and-so to look into this matter and have a recommendation for me in six months on whether to and how to lift the ban.’ Give yourself some breathing space. Get it out of the Oval Office. Don’t make the gay issue the first horse out of the gate with the armed forces.”

  He nodded, and I had the impression he agreed with me. I was wrong.

  Within minutes, I was down the elevator and in the backseat of my car. I had been impressed. Clinton was self-assured, smart, curious, likable, and passionate about his ideas. He also seemed to be a good listener. And to my relief, he had said nothing to me about a political appointment.

  The world had a dozen other running sores that fall, but television hovered over Somalia and wrenched our hearts, night after night, with images of people starving to death before our eyes. The UN had planted a humanitarian relief effort there, and the United States had committed six hundred troops and provided C-130 transports to fly in food. We rarely knew what happened to the relief supplies. Local warlords stole the food from warehouses. They hijacked relief agency trucks. The UN effort was practically at a standstill, while images of the fleshless limbs and bloated bellies of dying children continued to haunt us. I was not eager to get us involved in a Somalian civil war, but we were apparently the only nation that could end the suffering.

  The day before Thanksgiving, President Bush called a meeting that I attended with Cheney, Scowcroft, and a handful of others. The new CINC CENTCOM, General Joseph Hoar, who had replaced Norm Schwarzkopf, had readied a contingency mercy mission for Somalia, Operation Restore Hope, which I now laid out for the President. Operation Restore Hope involved putting a substantial number of U.S. troops on the ground to take charge of the place and to make sure the food got to starving Somalis.

  “I like it,” the President said after I finished. “We’ll do it.”

  Brent Scowcroft looked uneasy. “Sure, we can get in,” he said. “But how do we get out?”

  “We’ll do it, and try to be out by January 19,” the President concluded. “I don’t want to stick Clinton with an ongoing military operation.”

  Cheney and I eyed each other. “Mr. President,” Dick said, “we can’t have it both ways. We can’t get in there fully until mid-December. And the job won’t be done by January 19.” I appreciated that Dick had spoken up, since after January 20 I would be the only one in the room left holding this particular bag.

  By December 8, Operation Restore Hope was under way as Navy SEAL commandos, the first of an eventual 25,400 troops, went ashore at night at Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. The only resistance the SEALs encountered was from about seventy-five reporters and camera crews beaming spotlights on them, determined to broadcast a military operation live, increasing the danger to everybody. I was not all that distressed, however, since I knew that Somali warlords seeing them would be impressed by the tough-looking SEALs.

  The mission succeeded from the start. We had a crack three-star Marine general in charge, Bob Johnston, Schwarzkopf’s chief of staff during Desert Storm. A few days earlier we had sent in Ambassador Bob Oakley, an old NSC colleague, who had previously served as the U.S. ambassador to Somalia. Bob was called out of retirement for this mission and agreed to do it only after I swore to his wife, Phyllis, that he could come home for his daughter’s wedding. In Somalia, Bob met with the warlords and persuaded them that it was not in their interest to interfere with the powerful force coming ashore. The warlords cooperated, and food began to flow to the countryside. Within weeks, we were so successful that we had upset the economics of the marketplace. So much free food came pouring into Somalia that it became tough to make a living by farming.

  Brent Scowcroft’s initial uneasiness, nevertheless, was justified. The famine had been provoked not by the whims of nature but by internal feuding. How were we to get out of Somalia without turning the country back to the same warlords whose rivalries had produced the famine in the first place? Clearly, we would not be gone by inauguration day.

  On December 22, President-elect Clinton nominated Les Aspin as his Secretary of Defense. Les and I met the day after Christmas at the Pentagon. I had long studied Aspin in his performance as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The man had a fine mind and a clear command of defense issues. He was also a gadfly, capable of policy by one-liners and occasional cheap shots. And he was immune to efficient organization, counting on his congressional staff to keep him from hurtling off the rails.

  “Les,” I said, “I want to tell you the same thing I told the President-elect. My term’s up in September. If you want your own guy, I’ll leave sooner. Say the word and I’m gone.”

  Aspin laughed. “You’re the only one around here who knows how the joint works,” he said. “We know each other. We’ll get along fine.”

  We went over the major pending defense issues, and his expression clouded only at one point. “I’m nervous about the gay business,” he said. If Clinton reversed the ban on gays by executive order, he believed, Congress was not going to roll over and play dead. I repeated to him the advice I had given to the President-elect about not rushing into the swamp. We parted with this time bomb still ticking.

  I had never expected to return to Phenix City, Alabama, and certainly not for the reason that brought me there in the final days of the Bush administration. Phenix City lies just across the Chattahoochee River from Fort Benning, Georgia, where I had reported in 1964 for the Infantry Officers Advanced Course. It was outside of Phenix City that Alma and I had managed to find a halfway decent house among a row of shanties. The town was typical of the Old South, a part of America where we were not allowed to live in a decent neighborhood; where after fighting in Vietnam I was refused service at a hamburger joint; where a state trooper could call an Army officer “boy” and tell him to get out of town. Twenty-eight years later, Alma and I were going back to Phenix City to dedicate the General Colin L. Powell Parkway, which intersected with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Parkway.

  We flew into Lawson Army Air Field at Fort Benning on January 7, 1993, a cold, drizzly afternoon. As the limousine sped us away, I gazed out at the five-mile course around the field that I used to run as a Pathfinder student. We drove across the Chattahoochee into Phenix City, where, in spite of the foul weather, a big crowd had turned out, whites and blacks. Every funeral home within fifty miles must have been hit up for the graveside canopies that people huddled under. The mayor made a gracious speech and presented me with the keys to the city (the city where, in the old days, I could not get a key to a gas station men’s room).

  After being feted and speechified at one event after another, Alma and I were driven back through Fort Benning. It was dusk, and through the trees we could just make out Riverside, the antebellum mansion where Fort Benning’s commanding general lived. It had been Alma’s dream house when I was a young officer. Now we occupied the chairman’s residence at Fort Myer. I had a street named after me where, previously, I would not have been allowed to walk freely. We had persevered, and we had lived the American dream.

  The waning hours of the Bush era were not particularly pleasant for me. Every day, more of my teammates over the past four years left, and I was starting to feel like the kid about to enter a new school full of strangers. And we had several loose ends still flapping. We had stemmed the Haitian refugee tide, but the clamor to put Father Aristide back in power was building pressure for U.S. intervention. We were frustrated by not knowing what we should do or could do to end the killing in Bosnia. Our troops were still enmeshed in Somalia. We even had to slap down Saddam Hussein that January after he sent aircraft into the no-fly zone and threatened UN inspection teams. I gladly passed along the order for a retaliatory missile strike on Iraqi air defense installations.

  On January 14, with only six days left before the changing of the guard, I stood with Dick Cheney and other Pentagon officials in the jammed Ceremonial Hall at Fort Myer as the U.S. Army’s Herald Trumpets announced the arrival of President and Mrs. Bush. We were going to do it u
p right for our departing commander in chief. The Army band swung into a medley of Texas tunes as the President reviewed troops representative of those who had triumphed in Desert Storm. We presented the President and the First Lady with farewell gifts from all of us in the Defense Department. And then I spoke. “Mr. President,” I said, “you have sent us in harm’s way when you had to, but never lightly, never hesitantly, never with our hands tied, never without giving us what we needed to do the job.” I turned to Barbara Bush. “She is the First Lady and the first service wife,” I said. “She is a woman who has served her nation through thick and thin, who won’t take guff from anyone who tries to give it, nor deny kindness to anyone who needs it.” When I finished, I introduced Dick Cheney, who gave a moving speech praising George Bush, the man, the President, the commander in chief. It was the closest I had ever seen Dick come to tears.

  The George Bush I served was a patrician born to privilege in New England, yet made it on his own in Texas oil fields; a well-bred gentleman who was also full of mischief and fun to be around. He was fair-minded in his judgment and treatment of individuals, yet seemed unmindful of the racial polarization being caused by the far right wing of his party. He had given America proud victories in Panama and the Persian Gulf, presided over the end of the Cold War, and left a world safer from nuclear catastrophe. He had sensed the public pulse on these issues just as he had missed it on America’s domestic concerns. He was honored for the one and penalized for the other. As for my personal relationship with George Bush, he had entrusted me with heavy responsibility and respected my judgments. He had also shown me kindness, loyalty, and friendship. I thought the world of him and always will.

  Toward the end, the chiefs and I also held a parade and farewell dinner for our departing Pentagon boss. At this time, I tried to convey what I thought lay underneath Dick Cheney’s controlled exterior. “He studied weapons and strategy and techniques,” I told the guests, “but… he learned that we are not a thing. We are not a bureaucracy. We are not a system. Instead, he learned that America’s armed forces are a human organism that must be cared for, that hurts, that must be trained, that bleeds, and that must always be tended to.” Dick Cheney had tended to us.