My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  On December 15, we were in our hotel getting dressed for our audience at Buckingham Palace. The usually cool Alma kept fidgeting over her outfit. I thought she looked regal. On our arrival, we were escorted to a waiting room, where the queen’s equerry explained the procedure. “When you enter,” he instructed us, “Her majesty will come forward and present you with your KCB”—I was to be made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. “You’ll then withdraw, unless she asks you to be seated.” I had heard about this distinction: dismissed meant “B” list, being asked to sit meant “A” list.

  What looked like a wall suddenly opened, and we entered a room filled with ornate gilded furniture. “General and Mrs. Colin Powell,” the equerry announced.

  As Queen Elizabeth came toward us, she passed by a table and casually swept up something. “How nice to see you again, General and Mrs. Powell,” she said, then added, “I’m pleased to give you this,” and handed me a box containing my decoration.

  That was it. Since I was an American, there would be no bending of the knee, no tap on the shoulder with the royal sword. And Alma did not have to master the curtsy.

  “Won’t you sit down,” the queen said. We did and had a stimulating fifteen-minute conversation on topics ranging from the state of the world to the beastly weather. And then we left.

  Had my parents remained British subjects, I would now be “Sir Colin” and Alma “Lady Powell.” On the other hand, if my parents had stayed in Jamaica, I can’t imagine I would ever have been knighted. If Luther and Arie had shipped out for Southampton instead of New York City, I might have made sergeant major in a modest British regiment, but not likely British chief of defense staff. I treasure my family’s British roots, but I love our America, land of opportunity.

  After leaving the palace, Alma and I entered a Bentley driven by a uniformed chauffeur. The driver turned, smiling, and said, “Lady Powell, where would you like to go?” Correct or not, the phrase had a pleasant ring.

  “To Harrods,” Alma said.

  On May 10, 1994, I found myself sitting with dignitaries from all over the world in front of the Union Building on a hill over Pretoria watching the once unimaginable happen. To the cheers of tens of thousands of people filling the hillside, four white senior officers of the South African armed forces formed an honor guard to escort their country’s next president, Nelson Mandela, to the stage. As an African-American, I was proud; as a member of the human race, I was inspired; and as a student of world affairs, I was amazed by this act of reconciliation.

  The week before, President Clinton had invited me to join the U.S. delegation to the inauguration, which was to be led by Vice President and Mrs. Gore and would include Mrs. Clinton, several members of Congress and the cabinet, and prominent African-Americans who had long supported Mandela. It is no secret that the vast majority of American blacks are Democrats and that far more are liberal than conservative. On the flight to South Africa, my fellow passengers included the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, members of Congress Charles Rangel, Ron Dellums, Kweisi Mfume, Louis Stokes, and Maxine Waters, cabinet members Ron Brown and Mike Espy, and former Mayor David Dinkins of New York and Mayor Carl Schmoke of Baltimore. I knew most of them already, and we had always gotten along well. I also knew that African-Americans were proud of the historic firsts my career represented. My fellow passengers, however, would have preferred me to have succeeded under different auspices. In the eyes of this group, I was a product of those trickle-down conservative Republicans Reagan and Bush. As Jesse Jackson put it, I should be judged as a soldier faithfully doing his duty, even if those duties required me to carry out “repressive policies.”

  During this long flight, though, we left rank and politics at the terminal. We had warm, funny, easy conversations. We joked about pretending to be asleep in order to avoid being trapped by Jesse Jackson’s aisle monologues. C. DeLores Tucker, from the National Political Congress of Black Women, told me, “Colin, you should go into politics, and I mean as a Democrat. You’re too nice to be a Republican.”

  On this occasion, partisan politics were secondary. We were Americans first, in Africa to watch something unfold that we had hoped for but never dared imagine. The day was brilliantly choreographed. A chorus sang the old white anthem “The Call of South Africa,” and then “Nkosi Sikelel’i,” “God Bless Africa,” the Black Freedom national anthem. Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Christian clerics (including Bishop Desmond Tutu) delivered invocations. In a nine-minute inaugural address, Mandela sounded the statesman’s themes of racial peace and reconciliation. Four jets flew overhead, releasing different-colored smoke representing the new South African flag, the colors mingling in the planes’ wake like the hopes of this newly free nation. Apartheid was dead, and South Africa had moved from a pariah state to a role model for Africa. It was a breathtaking moment. Mandela the protester, Mandela the prisoner, was now Mandela the president.

  After the inauguration, while we were waiting for the bus to the U.S. embassy, Dellums, Mfume, and I broke into our doo-wop version of “In the Still of the Night,” backed by an integrated South African choir. On the flight home, I played poker with Charlie Rangel, Dave Dinkins, and Mike Espy, who was the big loser. The moral: never play cards with three brothers from New York. I enjoyed the camaraderie. C. Payne Lucas, head of the organization Africare, told me just before we left South Africa, “Know what the brothers and sisters are saying? ‘Hey, Powell’s all right. Forget the Reagan-Bush stuff. He’s just another black kid like you and me.’” Before, we had all been friendly enough. Now they saw me as one of them.

  What I witnessed in Pretoria was much on my mind a few days later when I went to deliver the commencement speech at historically black Howard University. Howard had recently become the eye of a racial hurricane after speakers on the campus connected to the Black Muslim Nation of Islam had publicly denounced Jews. The speeches had caused an uproar in the Jewish community, and Howard was being sharply criticized for providing a platform for race-baiting. One thing that had impressed me in South Africa was that Nelson Mandela had invited to his inauguration three jailers from his twenty-seven-year imprisonment. He had simply refused to let the acid of race hatred destroy his humanity. The previous week, we had witnessed Arabs and Jews put aside their ancient enmity as Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the PLO’s chairman, Yassir Arafat, signed a once unimaginable agreement on Palestinian self-rule. And then they shook hands. I thought about the turmoil at Howard, and I knew the message I had to deliver.

  That Saturday, as I spoke on a lovely summer’s day, I pulled up something from the marrow of my beliefs as a black living in a white-majority society. “African-Americans have come too far and we have too far yet to go,” I said, “to take a detour into the swamp of hatred.” My Howard speech received unusually wide media coverage, not because I was more eloquent than other commencement speakers that spring, but because my denouncing race hatred from any quarter was an apparently welcome message.

  On Thursday, September 15, 1994, former President Jimmy Carter phoned me to ask if I would join him and Senator Sam Nunn on a mission to Haiti to stave off a potentially bloody invasion. The UN had recently authorized the use of force to topple the island’s military dictatorship and to return Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. The whole world knew that the United States was on the verge of invading. I told the former President that I would go if President Clinton wanted us to do it.

  That afternoon, Bill Clinton did call. “Jimmy Carter is sometimes a wild card,” he told me. “But I took a chance on him in North Korea, and that didn’t turn out too badly.” The President’s main concern was that Carter would go to Haiti, “and the next thing you know, I’m expected to call off the invasion because he’s negotiating a deal.” He had no intention of halting the invasion, Clinton told me. But we could go with his blessing, provided we stuck to negotiating only how, not if, our troops would go ashore.

  On Friday night, I returned home late f
rom a speech in Ohio and had just enough time to pack and catch a few winks before joining Carter and Nunn early Saturday morning. Accompanying us were Michael Kozak, the State Department’s special negotiator to Haiti; Larry Rossin, director of inter-American affairs at the NSC; Tom Ross, Secretary Harold Brown’s former public affairs advisor at Defense, now with the NSC; Major General Jerry Bates, deputy operations chief of the Joint Staff; and Robert Pastor, a veteran Latin American hand. We arrived at Port-au-Prince on Saturday at 12:30 P.M. At that point, though neither we nor the Haitians knew it, H-Hour for the invasion was set for one minute after midnight, Monday, September 19, less than thirty-six hours away.

  We were taken to the Haitian military headquarters and led up to a second-floor corner office to meet General Raoul Cedras, leader of the ruling junta, a lean, sallow man with a long, pointed chin and nose. He introduced us to his colleagues, including the chief of the army, Brigadier General Philippe Biamby, another junta leader, and as he did so, I noticed an M-16 assault rifle, loaded with a banana clip, leaning against the wall. The tension in the air made me decide never to be too far away from that M-16. I was also surprised to see hanging on Cedras’s wall photographs of the six U.S. officers who had run Haiti during the 1915–34 occupation. I mentioned them. “We never forget our history,” Cedras said with an enigmatic smile.

  We sat down at a conference table, where Jimmy Carter made clear that the invasion was inevitable. Our hope, he explained, was to make it happen peacefully rather than bloodily. Carter started laying out attractive terms to persuade the junta to give up the fight, including amnesty and an offer that Cedras and the others might not be barred from returning to Haiti at some time in the future. Cedras was offended. “Our constitution does not allow exile,” he said.

  The first meeting broke up inconclusively at about 2:00 P.M. Thirty-four hours to H-Hour. Our party retired to the Hotel Villa Creole in the hills above the city for a courtesy meeting with Haitian parliamentarians. Later, we had dinner with prominent business leaders. What struck me was how sleek, well-fed, and well-dressed these men looked after almost three years of economic embargo had impoverished the rest of their countrymen. So much for sanctions. One useful piece of intelligence did come out of the dinner. A Haitian entrepreneur, Marc Bazin, told me, “If you want to get through to Cedras, his wife is the key.”

  At 11:00 P.M., we met again with Cedras and his circle. Carter had drafted an agreement, which we argued over for hours. The junta resisted having to leave Haiti as the draft required. “We will not go,” Cedras said. “It is not only unconstitutional, it is a stain on our integrity.”

  I thought, as a fellow army officer, that I might be able to reach these men by appealing to soldierly honor. It did not matter if they had any honor, as long as they thought they did. “You have to decide what course is honorable,” I said, looking around the table. “What military code calls for the senseless sacrifice of life? Let me tell you what true honor is. It means having the courage to give up power rather than cause pointless death.” Cedras and the others listened intently, but conceded nothing.

  Senator Nunn registered two key points from his perspective. “You should know,” he said, “that the U.S. Congress will back the President.” And Nunn pointed out that democracy meant more than simply replacing the junta with the elected president. “It also means allowing a functioning parliament.”

  I could not tell if Carter’s terms, Nunn’s arguments, or my psychological gambit made any dent. The meeting ended, again without resolution, but we had an invitation to come to Cedras’s house early on Sunday morning, where we would meet his wife.

  As we began to leave, a Colonel Dorelien, the personnel chief of the Haitian armed forces, started to shake hands with Jimmy Carter, then suddenly pulled back. “Have you shaken hands with Aristide recently?” the colonel asked.

  “No,” Carter said. “Why?”

  “His spirit would still be on you,” Dorelien said, “and I would not like to be touched by it.”

  It was nearly 2:00 A.M. when we parted. Twenty-two hours to H-Hour.

  Early Sunday morning we were at Cedras’s house, a Mediterranean-style villa set amid lush tropical gardens. Yannick Prosper Cedras, the general’s wife, turned out to be a striking woman with glossy black hair and a café au lait complexion. She was the daughter of a general, she told us, and the wife of a general, and to her, honor counted above all else. She described how the night before, she and her husband had climbed into bed with their three children and told them that this could be their last night on earth. They had to be prepared to give up their lives for honor. “We would rather die with American bullets in our chests,” she said, “than as traitors, with Haitian bullets in our backs.”

  “My wife,” I responded, “would understand perfectly your loyalty as a general’s wife, but I tell you, there is no honor in throwing away lives when the outcome is already determined. You and your husband should accept the inevitable and spare Haiti further suffering. Let’s talk about life and not death.” Carter and Nunn pressed the same argument. She remained noncommittal.

  Her husband reminded us that it was time to meet with the Haitian president, Emile Jonassaint (whom the U.S. did not recognize). As we were leaving, Mrs. Cedras said, “My husband will do what is right. And whatever that is, I will support him.” We had shifted her, at least, from opposition to neutrality.

  At the Presidential Palace, we met Jonassaint, an eighty-one-year-old man of serene dignity who spoke elegant French and punctuated his speech with waves of his long, thin, delicately shaped hands. Then it was back to the military headquarters to try yet again to get Cedras to accept Carter’s terms. It was now 9:00 A.M., fifteen hours to H-Hour. And we faced a new time bind. We were in constant touch with President Clinton, who told us we had to be out of Haiti by noon—three hours away. We asked the White House for more time.

  At military headquarters, Cedras presented a completely unacceptable counterproposal. He wanted to negotiate how many American troops, tanks, and guns would be allowed ashore. That, he was told, was out of the question. It was time to lay it on the line. I leaned across the table. “Let me make sure you understand what you’re facing,” I said. I began ticking off on my fingers: two aircraft carriers, two and a half infantry divisions, twenty thousand troops, helicopter gunships, tanks, artillery. I kept it up, watching the Haitians’ spirits sink under the weight of the power I was describing.

  “We used to be the weakest nation in the hemisphere,” Cedras said with a pained smile. “After this, we’ll be the strongest.”

  At 4:00, Biamby burst into the room. “The invasion is coming!” he shouted. He had just been on the phone with a source at Fort Bragg, he told us, and American paratroopers were getting ready to board their aircraft at 5:00 P.M. Not bad intelligence, I thought, for a poor country.

  With the clock running out, we hit an impasse. President Clinton had instructed us that we could not leave Carter’s amnesty offer open-ended. The junta had to step down by October 15, whether the Haitian parliament granted amnesty or not. “We cannot accept,” Cedras said. “This is a matter for our civilian authorities.” Remembering that Jonassaint had behaved like more than a figurehead, we suggested taking up the matter with him. Cedras assented. We raced through the crowds to the cars outside to drive to the Presidential Palace. I rode with Cedras in his car. Hand grenades rolled around on the floor. And in the back was a Haitian soldier clutching an assault rifle.

  We ran up the steps of the palace to Jonassaint’s office, where the old leader was waiting with his ministers of foreign affairs, defense, and information. As Jimmy Carter laid out the terms for stopping the invasion, I got word to call President Clinton. I found a phone in a nearby office and managed to dial straight through to the White House. “Mr. President,” I said, “I think we’ve got some movement here. We just need more time.” Clinton was uneasy. He was not going to change the invasion timetable, he said, but we could keep talking a little longer.r />
  When I got back to Jonassaint’s office, his minister of defense was fuming, “These terms are outrageous. I’ll resign first,” he said.

  “Then resign,” Jonassaint said calmly.

  The minister of information spoke up. Our proposal was “disgraceful,” he charged, and he also threatened to quit. Jonassaint gave him a dismissive wave. “We have too many ministers already,” he said. “I am going to sign this proposal. I will not let my people suffer further tragedy. I choose peace.”

  Cedras and the others yielded to Jonassaint’s decision. I took that moment to tell Cedras, “We expect an ironclad assurance from you that our troops will not be attacked when they come ashore. Remember, we can turn this invasion back on as easily as we can turn it off.”

  “I will obey the orders of my president,” he said, looking to Jonassaint.

  “You have our assurance,” the old man said, nodding.

  English and French translations of the documents were prepared, and Carter and Jonassaint signed them. The storming of Haiti had been averted at H-Hour minus six.

  The next day, American troops, led by Lieutenant General Hugh Shelton, commander of XVIII Airborne Corps, landed peacefully to the cheers of the Haitian people. Three weeks later, Cedras and his cronies were out of the country. And on October 15, President Aristide made his triumphal reentry into Port-au-Prince.

  The agreement we worked out was criticized. The “thugs” supposedly got off too easily. I was attacked for playing on the honor of dishonorable men. The criticism did not bother me. Once Lieutenant General Shelton and his troops set foot in Haiti, for better or worse, we ran the place. What happened to the junta was inconsequential. Because of what we accomplished, young Americans, and probably far more Haitians, who would have died were still alive. That was success enough for me.