My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  He and I had never, in nearly four years, spent a single purely social hour together. We were, however, remarkably close in our attitudes. We thought so much alike that, in the Tank or in the Oval Office, we could finish each other’s sentences. I had developed not only professional respect but genuine affection for this quiet man. On the day before the inauguration, I went up to Cheney’s suite to bid him goodbye. I said hello to his secretary, Kathy Villalpando, and started into his office, which was strewn with cardboard boxes holding the books and mementos accumulated over the past four years.

  “Where’s the Secretary?” I asked Kathy.

  “Oh, Mr. Cheney left hours ago,” she said. I was disappointed, even hurt, but not surprised. The lone cowboy had gone off into the sunset without even a last “So long.”

  The next day a young President, shaped by the sixties, took the torch from a man who had been the Navy’s youngest fighter pilot in the war years of the forties. I felt like a bridge spanning the administrations and the generations.

  Twenty-one

  Mustering Out

  IT WAS SUNDAY NIGHT, FOUR DAYS AFTER BILL CLINTON’S INAUGURATION AS the forty-second President. Alma and I were having dinner at the Watergate apartment of Cap and Jane Weinberger. I was enjoying a relaxing evening with old friends, and not particularly looking forward to what I faced the next day at the White House. The phone rang, and Cap took it. “It’s for you,” he said. “It’s the President.”

  I suspected why Bill Clinton was calling. The following afternoon, the Joint Chiefs were to meet with him to discuss his campaign promise to lift the ban on gays serving in the military. The already burning controversy had been heated up further that morning by the odd performance of the new Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, on CBS’s Face the Nation. Discussing how the administration and Congress would deal with the President’s pledge, Aspin told his interviewers, “If we can’t work it out, we’ll disagree, and the thing won’t happen.” In effect, he had publicly predicted the failure of Clinton’s first presidential initiative.

  I took the phone from Weinberger. “Good evening, Mr. President,” I said.

  “General, I’ve just learned that Justice Thurgood Marshall has died,” Clinton told me. He went on to explain that the Marshall family was hoping the Supreme Court associate justice could be buried in Arlington National Cemetery even though he was not automatically eligible. The President’s staff had advised him that a waiver was possible for distinguished Americans, but he wanted to check it out with me.

  “That’s right,” I said. “There won’t be any problem.” I was pleased that the President wanted to see this civil rights giant buried at Arlington and that he was thoughtful enough to touch base with the military on a matter affecting hallowed ground.

  “And I thank you and Mrs. Powell for coming to my inauguration,” Clinton added, ending the conversation. He had said nothing about Aspin’s interview or the gay issue.

  The next afternoon, Secretary Aspin, the four service chiefs, the vice chairman, and I found ourselves arrayed on one side of the table in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, facing the President; Vice President Al Gore; the new White House Chief of Staff, Mack McLarty; Anthony Lake, the National Security Advisor; George Stephanopoulos, the White House spokesman; and other members of the President’s staff. Aspin asked me to lead off with a quick briefing on current Pentagon concerns, the status of forces, troop levels, and the defense budget. We figured the commander in chief’s first meeting with his top military advisors ought at least to raise a few purely military issues. As soon as I finished, however, we spent the next 105 minutes solely on homosexuals in the armed forces.

  “Mr. President,” I said at one point during the discussion, “we know gays and lesbians serve ably arid honorably—but not openly. If they are allowed to do so, that’s going to raise tough issues of privacy.” I suggested that he hear from each chief from the perspective of his service, since they were the ones who would have to make any new policy work. The chiefs spoke in turn, making clear that they were not just voicing personal opinions; they were concerned about maintaining morale and good order. They had gone back to their constituencies—the field commanders, senior NCOs, the troops, service spouses, chaplains—and they had run into a solid wall of opposition to lifting the ban. Only the last to speak, the Air Force chief, Tony McPeak, seemed somewhat conciliatory, possibly feeling sympathy for a President who had just heard an unbroken chorus of nays. I smiled to myself, since during our talks in the Tank, McPeak had been the most truculent opponent of allowing homosexuals to serve.

  Throughout the meeting, the President displayed the capacity for intent listening that I had observed when we first met. When he did speak, his voice was raspy from all the inaugural ceremonies. “I made a campaign promise,” he said. “And I sure want to keep it.” Then, turning toward me, he added, “But I also took an oath last week as commander in chief, and I have to consider the well-being of the armed forces. I don’t want to see soldiers holding hands or dancing together at military posts, but that’s just a matter of regulating behavior, the same as we do for heterosexual soldiers. What I don’t like is barring homosexuals who want to serve, whether they’re in or out of the closet.”

  The talk continued, respectful but tense. I felt increasingly disappointed that this issue had been allowed to become the new administration’s first priority. I also thought I understood why. Bill Clinton had already backed off from other campaign stands. For example, as a candidate, he had criticized the Bush policy of sending Haitian refugees back home, and he had already recanted on that one. With his credibility at stake, I assumed that some of his advisors must have told him, “Mr. President, you can’t back down again. Just issue an executive order allowing gays to serve, and tell those generals to do it.”

  The chiefs continued to bring up practical problems that gay integration presented on crowded ships, in cramped barracks, and in other intimate situations. At one point I proposed a change to the current policy that Aspin, the chiefs, and I had discussed earlier. “We could stop asking about sexual orientation when people enlist,” I said. Gays and lesbians could serve as long as they kept their lifestyle to themselves. This change would no doubt still be condemned as discriminatory by gay rights activists, and military traditionalists would probably call it a surrender. “But,” I concluded, “this way might provide a practical compromise.”

  The President decided to stick to the current policy for the time being, while the military was to carry out a six-month study of the issue. In the meantime, he said, enlistees were not to be asked about their sexual orientation. “I know these issues are tough,” he concluded, as the meeting broke up. “If they were easy, somebody would have solved them long before us.”

  As contentious as the issue was, the chiefs and I left the meeting feeling optimistic. The President had given us a fair hearing. He knew where the military stood, and he had shown a willingness to compromise. At least he was not going to ram an immediate end to the ban down the throats of the armed forces.

  The next day, the New York Times hit me and the chiefs with both barrels. A Times editorial charged us with being “defiantly opposed, almost to the point of insubordination.” Times columnist Abe Rosenthal said that Colin Powell would never have become chairman but for President Truman’s racial integration of the military in 1948. I came under fire from the Washington Post: “Powell… is on the wrong side of this issue”; the Chicago Tribune: “The military could use a dose of tolerance”; the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Of all people, Powell should know the arguments for dropping the ban”; the Atlanta Constitution: “Colin Powell, of all people, is enforcing bigotry.” Time magazine dubbed me “the Rebellious General.” I became the target of cartoonists who portrayed me as a uniformed Neanderthal. Much of the criticism seemed to suggest that my earlier advice on this issue should be changed simply because we had changed Presidents.

  Bill Clinton had asked my views and I had given them, knowing
they were not what he wanted to hear. I felt honor-bound to do so. My life would have been easier if he had simply lifted the ban by executive order. The military would have said, “Yes, sir.” But, as Les Aspin knew, almost immediately, Congress would have enacted a ban as a matter of law, forcing the President to veto it and confronting him with an almost certain veto override. The President and his advisors had picked the wrong issue, and they had misread the public’s attitude. While I was being torn apart by the media, my office was receiving more than three thousand letters and phone calls a day, never running less than six to one in favor of keeping the ban.

  My objections to removing the ban were not knee-jerk traditionalist. I did not, for example, oppose having women perform certain combat roles, such as flying fighter aircraft and serving aboard ship. And I recognized that some of those who wanted to keep the ban on gays did, in fact, spout arguments similar to those used to resist racial integration in the armed forces forty years before: “Next thing you know, they’ll want to live in our housing, eat in our mess halls, go to our clubs, sit next to us in church.” Nevertheless, I continued to see a fundamental distinction. Requiring people of different color to live together in intimate situations is far different from requiring people of different sexual orientation to do so.

  On February 10, the New York Times used the gay issue as the peg for a front-page story about me that I could not let stand. The article was headlined “Joint Chiefs Head Is Said to Request Early Retirement.” When I arrived at the Pentagon at 7:00 A.M., a CBS TV crew was already waiting in ambush to question me about my alleged departure. The Times account contained a grain of truth. I had told Aspin—and Dick Cheney even earlier—that I might ask to leave the chairmanship a month or two before my term was up, but mostly for the convenience of my successor before the next budget cycle. And Alma and I hoped to use the summer months to move into a new home we had bought in preparation for our reentry into civilian life. I flatly denied to CBS that I had any intention of quitting over the gay issue. Instead, I expected to help the President solve the problem. After talking to this network, I told Bill Smullen to get me on everything else on the air. By the end of the morning, I had appeared on all three major networks and CNN and had slam-dunked the early-retirement story.

  Over the next couple of weeks, I took the most scathing public criticism of my career. As George Bush had said about losing the presidency, it hurt. Unknown to Tony McPeak, his driver asked Otis Pearson one day if he might test-drive the chairman’s limo. McPeak, as Air Force Chief of Staff, was one of those mentioned in the Times as my possible successor.

  Nine months later, Congress approved the policy we had discussed with the President that January afternoon, now shorthanded as “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.” I expect that the courts will ultimately decide the issue once and for all. And when they do, whichever way they rule, the U.S. military will comply with the law of the land. I stand by what I have done. My position reflected my conscience and the needs of the service at the time. I say this realizing that, as time passes, public attitudes may change on this volatile subject just as they have on so many burning social controversies in recent years.

  Almost my only satisfaction during the first weeks of the Clinton administration was getting rid of the uniformed guards who had been assigned to stand outside the doorways of the Secretary of Defense and the deputy secretary ever since the phony Libyan assassination hit team scare twelve years before. Weinberger, Carlucci, and Cheney had all fallen in love with these resplendent sentinels. All I saw were good troops going to waste. Since Les Aspin was oblivious to this sort of pomp, I managed to persuade his assistants to disband the guards before he noticed them.

  My other victories included earning two merit badges of American pop distinction; my name was in the New York Times crossword puzzle, and I was the subject of a question on television’s Jeopardy.

  Soon after the inauguration, the Clinton national security team gathered in the Situation Room for the first time. The issue was Bosnia. Although I was a member of the team, I still felt a little like a skunk at the picnic. I had been up to my eyeballs in Reagan and Bush national security policies that were held in some disrepute by my new bosses. They nevertheless welcomed me, aware that my institutional memory might prove useful. This meeting was my introduction to the new administration’s decisionmaking style. Tony Lake, the new National Security Advisor, sat in the chairman’s seat, but did not drive the meeting. Warren Christopher, the Secretary of State, sat on one side of Lake, somewhat passively, quite a change from George Shultz and Jim Baker, who strode into such meetings and immediately acted as the chieftains of U.S. foreign policy. Christopher, lawyerlike, simply waited for his client group to decide what position he was to defend. Les Aspin flanked Lake on the other side. He did not try to lead either, and when Aspin did speak, he usually took the discussion onto tangents to skirt the immediate issue. The rest of the seats were filled by other members of the new national security team.

  Vice President Gore arrived after we had been talking for over an hour, and we had to shuffle around the table to find a chair for him. The President showed up a little later; fortunately, by then, a place had been saved for the nation’s chief executive.

  This meeting set the pattern for all that were to follow. As President Reagan’s National Security Advisor I had run structured meetings where the objectives were laid out, options were argued, and decisions were made. I had managed to adjust to the looser Bush-era approach, and I would somehow adapt to the Clinton style. But it was not going to be easy.

  At subsequent meetings, the discussions continued to meander like graduate-student bull sessions or the think-tank seminars in which many of my new colleagues had spent the last twelve years while their party was out of power. Backbenchers sounded off with the authority of cabinet officers. I was shocked one day to hear one of Tony Lake’s subordinates, who was there to take notes, argue with him in front of the rest of us.

  Bosnia was the foreign policy issue over which candidate Clinton had criticized Bush most sharply. Clinton had promised more aggressive action in that tormented place. Now he had the opportunity, and the meetings we held on Bosnia were full of belligerent rhetoric. But what aggressive action were we to take, and to what end? So far, none of the European countries that had sent in troops to help the war’s victims favored fighting a ground conflict or using their forces to impose a truce. They placed their faith not in might, but in diplomacy.

  My own views on Bosnia had not shifted from the previous administration. In response to constant calls by the new team to “do something” to punish the Bosnian Serbs from the air for shelling Sarajevo, I laid out the same military options that I had presented to President Bush. Our choices ranged from limited air strikes around Sarajevo to heavy bombing of the Serbs throughout the theater. I emphasized that none of these actions was guaranteed to change Serb behavior. Only troops on the ground could do that. Heavy bombing might persuade them to give in, but would not compel them to quit. And, faced with limited air strikes, the Serbs would have little difficulty hiding tanks and artillery in the woods and fog of Bosnia or keeping them close to civilian populations. Furthermore, no matter what we did, it would be easy for the Serbs to respond by seizing UN humanitarian personnel as hostages.

  My constant, unwelcome message at all the meetings on Bosnia was simply that we should not commit military forces until we had a clear political objective. Aspin shared this view. The debate exploded at one session when Madeleine Albright, our ambassador to the UN, asked me in frustration, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” I thought I would have an aneurysm. American GIs were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board. I patiently explained that we had used our armed forces more than two dozen times in the preceding three years for war, peacekeeping, disaster relief, and humanitarian assistance. But in every one of those cases we had had a clear goal and had matc
hed our military commitment to the goal. As a result, we had been successful in every case. I told Ambassador Albright that the U.S. military would carry out any mission it was handed, but my advice would always be that the tough political goals had to be set first. Then we would accomplish the mission.

  Tony Lake, who had served on the NSC during the Vietnam War, supported my position. “You know, Madeleine,” he said, “the kinds of questions Colin is asking about goals are exactly the ones the military never asked during Vietnam.” Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, in his confessional book In Retrospect, admits to similar confusion over our ends in the Vietnam War, leading to the tragic results with which we are all too familiar.

  I always felt more comfortable when the President was present at these discussions. Bill Clinton had the background to put history, politics, and policy into perspective. Yet, he was not well served by the wandering deliberations he permitted. He had an academic streak himself and seemed to enjoy these marathon debates. As the talk dragged on, the participants eventually persuaded themselves that they had found a solution to the problem at hand that turned a sow’s ear into a silk purse. But after a few days of exposure to critical light, the solution started looking suspiciously like a sow’s ear again. In one case, early in 1993, the President was persuaded to propose lifting the weapons embargo against the Bosnian Muslims and to allow air strikes against the Serbs until the Muslims were better able to defend themselves. Secretary Christopher went off to sell this strategy to our allies, even though they had made it clear it was dead on arrival. He came back a week later and we spent another Saturday thrashing out another solution.