My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  In 1994 and 1995 the UN and NATO, at U.S. prodding, did conduct limited strikes, and the Serbs employed the expected countermeasures. The harsh reality has been that the Serbs, Muslims, and Croatians are committed to fight to the death for what they believe to be their vital interests. They have matched their military actions to their political objectives, just as the North Vietnamese did years earlier. The West has wrung its hands over Bosnia, but has not been able to find its vital interests or matching commitment. No American President could defend to the American people the heavy sacrifice of lives it would cost to resolve this baffling conflict. Nor could a President likely sustain the long-term involvement necessary to keep the protagonists from going at each other’s throats all over again at the first opportunity.

  At the Pentagon, Les Aspin was experiencing his own growing pains. Aspin had a management style that was the complete opposite of Cheney’s. He was as disjointed as Cheney was well organized. We never knew what time Les was coming to work in the morning. Staff meetings were sporadic. When meetings were held, they turned into marathon gabfests, while attendees for subsequent meetings stacked up in the hallways. Aspin brought to the Pentagon key members of his congressional staff who acted as a palace guard. They had to be dealt with before anything got through to the Secretary of Defense. Aspin’s new press secretary, Vern Guidry, made it a condition of his employment that he did not have to brief the press corps. Guidry saw his job as managing Aspin’s personal public relations. These aides were slow to grasp the difference between handling Capitol Hill intrigues and running an enterprise of three million people.

  One promise the new defense team had made was to exercise more civilian control over the Pentagon’s military leaders, especially the guy currently in the chairman’s office. Some of Aspin’s assistants even considered announcing my replacement early to make me a lame duck. They quickly discovered that the civilians and the military in the Pentagon needed each other. Rather than being out of control, the generals and admirals were willing to respond to new direction and show what they could do.

  Aspin’s immediate problem, from the day he took over the department, was the image he projected. In a building full of neatly pressed uniforms, the top man looked out of place in his dated, rumpled tan suits and wrinkled shirts. Although Aspin had a first-class mind, he often sounded inarticulate when he addressed his new subordinates. He resisted seeing the foreign leaders streaming to Washington to meet the new Clinton team. When he did see them, Les would hunch over the table and say, “So, how’s it going in your country?” The burden of conversation fell on his guests, and after forty-five minutes, they would leave, having learned little about the new administration’s foreign and defense intentions. In one meeting with King Hussein of Jordan, I watched as his majesty had to carry on a monologue while Les polished off thirteen hors d’oeuvres from a tray placed between them. Aspin’s health posed a problem. He was hospitalized twice for heart irregularities. A pacemaker brought this condition under control, but not until several wobbly months had gone by. Overall, the image Aspin projected was not likely to inspire confidence in our troops or allies.

  Fortunately, he was backed up by two solid deputies, Bill Perry, who subsequently succeeded him as Secretary of Defense, and John Deutch, a college chum of Aspin’s whom I had met at the Department of Energy during the Carter administration. Deutch eventually became President Clinton’s Director of Central Intelligence. They helped balance the flock of ambassadors and academics that Aspin brought into the department.

  In the days when he was chairing the House Armed Services Committee, Aspin had labeled the Bush-Cheney-Powell Base Force concept a “dumb strategy.” Now, as Secretary of Defense, his primary objective was to conduct a “Bottom Up Review” of the armed forces, fulfilling a Clinton campaign promise. Theoretically, BUR meant starting with a clean slate, as if the current armed forces did not exist, and then building a new force to match current defense missions. This approach had a test-tube reasonableness, except that instead of starting from scratch, the new administration had inherited existing strategies, forces, treaty obligations, commitments, and crises all around the world. And instead of a clean slate, Clinton had already pledged during the campaign to cut forces by 200,000 troops and tens of billions of dollars below the Base Force level. Yet, to win votes, he had also promised to restore several popular but wasteful defense projects that Bush had canceled.

  The Base Force strategy called for armed forces capable of fighting two major regional conflicts “near simultaneously.” The reasoning was simple: if we were fighting in one place, we still wanted to have enough might remaining so that another potential aggressor would not be emboldened to pull a fast one. Aspin floated the idea of a force premised on our fighting one major conflict and a holding action against any other enemy until we could finish the first fight. Our South Korean allies immediately asked if they were the ones who might be left “on hold.” Aspin’s trial balloon popped. It took us nine months to finish the BUR, and we ended up again with a defense based on the need to fight two regional wars, the Bush strategy, but with Clinton campaign cuts. The Base Force disappeared as a term, but, as Aspin acknowledged, it was the lineal ancestor of the BUR force. What is not clear as of this writing is whether the cuts in personnel and budget have taken us below the levels required to support the strategy and structure the Clinton administration have adopted. In short, do we have the strength to accomplish the mission? That mission may well change over the next few years. The collapse of North Korea as a threat or a change for the better in Iraq and Iran will certainly require an adjustment of the two-war scenario. It will not last forty years, as did the strategy of containment, but it is appropriate for the present post-Cold War transition period.

  Les Aspin and I got along well personally. And, over time, his performance became more disciplined. He became more conscious of the need to project an image that reflected the awesome responsibility on his shoulders as day-to-day commander of the armed forces of the United States. Under his leadership, we worked out the compromise on the homosexual issue, completed the Bottom Up Review, and solved several tough procurement problems. Still, in spite of these achievements and his considerable intellect, Les Aspin had been miscast as Secretary of Defense.

  Former President George Bush’s hope for a January 20 exit from Somalia became a faded memory. In April, I spent my fifty-sixth birthday in Mogadishu trying to move the operation off America’s back and onto the UN’s, where it had been in the first place. We had accomplished our mission by ending the civil disorder that had disrupted the production and distribution of food and led to the mass starvation. It was now up to the UN force to maintain that order. But UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali reasoned that since the catastrophe had been provoked by feuding fourteenth-century-style warlords, the solution was a dose of twentieth-century-style democracy. The UN approved a resolution shifting the mission from feeding the hungry to “nation building,” the phrase I had first heard when we went into Vietnam. From what I have observed of history, the will to build a nation originates from within its people, not from the outside. Somalia was not an African version of a Western state. Almost no institutions of law, no credible central government, and no authority existed there apart from clan leaders. Nation building might have an inspirational ring, but it struck me as a way to get bogged down in Somalia, not get out. The Somali factions were ultimately going to solve their political differences their own way.

  That spring I was asked to introduce the President at the Memorial Day ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Some veterans’ groups charged that it dishonored the 58,191 names on that wall to have a “draft dodger” speak at the memorial. Other vets took the position that Bill Clinton was now commander in chief, and he had better show up, if only to earn absolution for his conduct during the war. I believed he should speak because he was the commander in chief. And, as a practical matter, if he did not make an appearance this first year, the issue wou
ld come up next year, and the next. I readily agreed to introduce him.

  Over the past months, the President had become quite active in his role as commander in chief. He had visited the carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt. He had welcomed troops coming home from duty in Somalia. He was still, however, surrounded by young civilians without a shred of military experience or understanding. One day, my assistant, Lieutenant General Barry McCaffrey, went to the White House for a meeting. Walking through the West Wing, McCaffrey passed a young White House staffer and said, “Hello, there,” to which she replied with upturned nose, “We don’t talk to soldiers around here.” McCaffrey was the winner of three Silver Stars and still bore disfiguring arm wounds suffered in Vietnam. He had commanded one of the crack divisions in Desert Storm. The young woman’s comment rocketed back to the Pentagon and whipped through the place like a free electron. Bill Clinton was sufficiently sensitive to the gaffe so that McCaffrey was next seen at the Seattle economic summit jogging alongside the President.

  As soon as word got out that I was going to introduce Bill Clinton at the Vietnam wall, I started taking flak—Powell, of all people, a two-tour veteran who had lost buddies in Vietnam, while Clinton was reading books at Oxford. I received a letter from a woman whom I knew well whose husband had been killed in the war. My participation at the memorial, she wrote, would be “dishonorable, inexcusable, and unforgivable.” That kind of criticism bothered me, but Clinton’s draft record did not. By the will of the American people, he was our commander in chief. My lack of resentment, however, went beyond merely owing him a soldier’s allegiance. I had worked in the Reagan-Bush era with many hard-nosed men—guys ready to get tough with Soviets, Iranians, Iraqis, Nicaraguans, or Panamanians—all of whom were the right age, but most of whom had managed to avoid serving during the Vietnam War. Bill Clinton, in my judgment, had not behaved much differently from these men. The whole system of deferments and angles for escaping the fighting may have been technically legal. But it was class-ridden, undemocratic, and unjust.

  On Memorial Day, the faithful Otis managed to speed me to the White House from the Georgetown University Law Center, where my son, Mike, had just graduated that morning (carrying little Jeffrey as he walked under his own steam across the stage to get his law degree). I joined the President in the Oval Office with about two minutes to spare for the drive to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Over the past months, Bill Clinton had given me several small gifts. Today, he handed me a pair of matching watches, a man’s and a woman’s, of some historical curiosity. The watches had been designed to commemorate the next opening of the East German Parliament, which, with the collapse of the communist bloc, never took place.

  The President seemed relaxed and in good humor as we drove to the ceremony, chatting, sipping ice water from a big tumbler, and editing his speech. But as we neared the wall, where over five thousand people were waiting, I could see the muscles of his face tightening. We got out of the car to scattered applause and the boos of protesters, whom the park police had managed to keep on the fringe.

  Jan Scruggs, who had led the long struggle to build the memorial, served as master of ceremonies. To me, the most poignant moment occurred when Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Derrick Thomas talked about growing up without a father, since his dad, an Air Force captain, had been killed in Vietnam. Finally, it was my turn to introduce the President.

  “I never come here,” I began, “without being touched to the depth of my soul as I run my hand over the name of a friend long departed but never forgotten.” We were here, I noted, to honor the dead of all our wars, but particularly, on this occasion, to heal the injury Vietnam had caused us to inflict on ourselves. I quoted Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle….” As the senior Vietnam veteran on active duty, I concluded, “I want to introduce to you the commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States, President Bill Clinton.”

  The applause exceeded the jeering as the President made what I am sure was one of the most difficult speeches of his life, and it was a graceful effort. Afterward, as we drove away, I watched the tension flow out of him. “You stole my line,” he said, chuckling. He took out one of his cue cards and handed it to me. On it were Lincoln’s words that I had quoted. “It came better from you anyway,” he said. “From me it would have been self-serving.”

  On June 10, 1993, I was to be the commencement speaker at Harvard. One of my aides pointed out that I would be speaking exactly fifty years after Winston Churchill had addressed the Harvard grads, a somewhat humbling thought. I decided to speak about the changes between two historic times, Churchill’s World War II era and our post-Cold War present. However, I had early warnings that I would be walking into a protest from Harvard’s gay and lesbian community, who had something else on their minds.

  That day, on the Harvard campus, among a crowd of 25,000, a few hundred people held balloons aloft bearing the words “Lift the Ban.” When I rose to give my speech, scattered catcalls erupted, but far more cheers, especially from the front rows, which were filled with alums from the Class of ’43, back for their fiftieth reunion. Their presence moved me. These were once young men who had heard Churchill speak, who had donned uniforms, and who had gone off and won a war against fascism.

  I paid tribute to these proud veterans of the last “good war.” I reviewed the revolutionary changes since the end of the Cold War. And then I addressed the immediate controversy. As for the American military’s social record, I began, “We took on racism, we took on drugs. We took on scandals such as Tailhook, and we found answers to them … and we will do the same with the controversial issue of homosexuals in the military.” Some people on the stage and in the audience turned their backs in protest as I spoke. But by the end, a steady chant by the gay-lesbian contingent was drowned out by waves of applause.

  That summer, we started to bring American troops home from Somalia, intending to leave only about 4,200 to support the UN operation. By then, the Somalis were apparently feeling sufficiently well nourished to resume killing each other and any perceived enemies. On June 5, a shoot-out between followers of a major clan leader, Mohammed Farah Aidid, and UN forces left two dozen Pakistani soldiers dead. At U.S. urging, the UN passed a resolution authorizing a hunt for the perpetrators. This action was taken without any serious discussion among senior U.S. policymakers over expanding the Somalia commitment from nation building to hunting down Somali chieftains. The UN special envoy, retired American Admiral Jon Howe, put a $25,000 reward on Aidid’s head. Howe, Turkish Lieutenant General Cevik Bir, the UN commander, and the American commander, Major General Tom Montgomery, asked for U.S. helicopter gunships and AC-130 strike planes to attack Somali strongholds.

  I supported the request, and the President approved. But when the UN command further pressed us to send in our elite counterterrorist Delta Force to capture Aidid, I resisted, as did Aspin and General Joe Hoar, CINC CENTCOM. Finding Aidid in the warrens of Mogadishu was a thousand-to-one shot. Worse, we were personalizing the conflict and getting deeper and deeper into ancient Somali clan rivalries. I tried to get our spreading commitment reviewed, but was unsuccessful. In the meantime, we started to take American casualties. In late August, I reluctantly yielded to the repeated requests from the field and recommended to Aspin that we dispatch the Rangers and the Delta Force. It was a recommendation I would later regret.

  During April 14–16, former President Bush had visited Kuwait, where he was, apparently, the target of an assassination plot engineered by Iraq. Subsequent FBI and CIA investigations produced enough evidence linking the attempt to Saddam Hussein’s regime to warrant retaliation. President Clinton, Vice President Gore, Tony Lake, Les Aspin, Warren Christopher, and I met in the White House residence and I walked the President through a proposed
cruise missile strike against Iraqi intelligence headquarters in Baghdad. I explained what it might achieve, what could go wrong, possible Iraqi reactions, and the decisions the President would have to make at each stage. In effect, I was conducting a graduate-level tutorial for a national security freshman. I was curious to see how our young nonveteran President would handle his baptism of fire. Clinton passed the first test handily; he asked all the right questions. The real test would come as we went into countdown and lives were at stake; or, as we put it in the infantry, when he faced his first sucking chest wound.

  On June 26, twenty-three missiles soared off U.S. Navy vessels in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf headed for Baghdad. The President was scheduled to make a television statement fifteen minutes after H-Hour. However, we ran into a communications glitch. Ordinarily, CNN had a crew in Baghdad that would have broadcast the results almost instantly, and we were counting on this report. The crew, however, had been pulled out, and hours would pass before our satellites could pass over and photograph the attack site. Within fifteen minutes the President was on the phone calling me. Had we hit the target? All I could answer was, “Sir, it’s too soon to know.” White House aides then got in touch with CNN’s president, Tom Johnson, who called Amman, Jordan. The network’s crew there phoned friends in Baghdad, who reported that the intelligence headquarters had indeed been hit.

  This attack also presented the President with the crudest aspect of military operations. Some of the missiles had missed the target and caused civilian casualties. I studied Bill Clinton’s behavior closely throughout this operation, his decision-making and his emotions. He remained cool and resolute.