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United States secretary of state
Colin L. Powell has proven to be one of the most perennially
popular figures on the American political landscape. Ever since
the 64-year-old retired army general rose to national prominence
as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Persian Gulf
War, in 1991, when he helped to guide the U.S. military to victory
over Iraqi forces, he has been compared favorably to such generals
as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ulysses S. Grant--figures who
successfully entered politics after overseeing military triumphs.
Indeed, for a time in the mid-1990s, there was intense speculation
as to whether Powell would, like those men, seek the presidency.
(He announced in the fall of 1995 that he would not.)
When news broke in December 2000 that Powell was to serve as
secretary of state under the incoming president, George W.
Bush--and would thus assume the most powerful office ever held by
an African-American in the United States--some likened the general
to George C. Marshall, who, as secretary of state after World War
II, presided over the reconstruction of a war-torn Europe. It was
unlikely that anyone could live up to such inflated expectations,
and indeed, several months into the Bush presidency, Powell's star
appeared to have dimmed somewhat. His political centrism seemed to
be out of step with the conservatism prevailing in the
administration, with the result that Powell often appeared to be
working with his hands tied. Although Powell told Johanna McGeary
for Time (September 10, 2001), "I'm not frustrated. There are
problems to be solved. And my job is to help the President find
the right answer to the problems he faces," close friends
reportedly told journalists that the general was dissatisfied with
his role in the administration.
Powell's role took on new importance in the wake of the terrorist
attacks on the U.S. on September 11, 2001. Immediately after the
attacks Powell, like President Bush, struck a bellicose note in
his official remarks. Referring to Al Qaeda, the terrorist network
of the Saudi Arabian-born Osama bin Laden--who was believed to
have masterminded the deadly assaults and to be hiding in
Afghanistan--he said, "We will go after that group, that
network, and those who have harbored, supported and aided that
network, to rip the network up." "When we're through
with that network," he added, as quoted by R.W. Apple in the
New York Times (September 14, 2001), "we will continue with a
global assault against terrorism in general." But behind the
scenes Powell was thought to be urging restraint--much as he had
done 10 years earlier, during the Persian Gulf War.
In his official capacity as secretary of state, Powell was charged
with building diplomatic support in the Arab world for the
American-led "war on terrorism." In the weeks following
the September 11 attacks, that effort appeared to comprise two
elements: first, Powell (as well as President Bush) manifestly
tried to win the support of moderate Arabs by suggesting that the
United States supported the creation of a Palestinian state. (Bin
Laden and others have justified the terrorists' actions in part on
what they view as the ill treatment of the Palestinians by the
United States and Israel.) Second, the secretary sought to
strengthen American ties to Pakistan, which supported U.S.
military action in neighboring Afghanistan in the wake of the
attacks, by ensuring Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf that the
United States remained committed to promoting Pakistan's interests
in the long term--even if American relations with India,
Pakistan's longstanding adversary, would suffer as a result.
"I made the point to [President Musharraf] that this isn't
just a temporary spike in the relationship," Powell said at a
news conference, as quoted by Reuters (October 16, 2001). "We
believe as a result of the actions taken by Pakistan over the last
five weeks we truly are at the beginning of a strengthened
relationship, a relationship that will grow and thrive."
Colin Luther Powell was born in the Harlem section of New York
City on April 5, 1937 to Luther Powell, a shipping clerk in
Manhattan's garment district, and Maud Ariel (McKoy) Powell, who
worked as a seamstress there. His parents, who had emigrated from
Jamaica more than 20 years earlier, impressed upon Colin and his
older sister, Marilyn, the importance of education and personal
achievement and fully expected their children "to do
something with [their] lives."
In about 1940 the family, which Powell recalls as having been
"strong and close," moved to the Hunts Point area of the
South Bronx, where Powell graduated from Morris High School in
1954. At the City College of New York, he majored in geology and
got his first taste of military life as a cadet in the Reserve
Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). "The discipline, the
structure, the camaraderie, the sense of belonging were what I
craved," he wrote in his autobiography, My American Journey
(1995), as quoted by ABCNews.com. Former classmates remember that
he displayed rare leadership ability on campus, motivating many
other students to succeed. He was appointed commander of the
Pershing Rifles, the ROTC precision drill team, and graduated at
the top of the college's ROTC class of 1958 with the rank of cadet
colonel, the highest rank in the corps.
On graduation, Powell was commissioned a second lieutenant in the
United States Army. His first field assignment involved leading a
platoon in Germany charged with stopping any westward advance of
the Soviet army. A few years later, in 1962, Powell was one of
more than 16,000 military advisers sent to South Vietnam by
President John F. Kennedy. While marching through a rice paddy one
day in 1963--he was assigned to a South Vietnamese infantry
battalion patrolling the border with Laos--Powell stepped into a
Punji-stick trap, impaling his foot on one of the sharpened stakes
concealed just below the water's surface. After that injury, he
was given a Purple Heart, and in that same year he was awarded the
Bronze Star. In 1968-69, during the height of the U.S. war in
Vietnam, Powell returned there for a second tour of duty with the
United States Army infantry as a battalion executive officer and
division operations officer. He was injured a second time in a
helicopter crash landing, during which his rescuing of troops from
the burning helicopter earned him a Soldiers Medal. Altogether he
won 11 medals, including the Legion of Merit in 1972.
By his own admission, Powell's experiences in Vietnam had a
profound effect on his later views regarding the appropriate use
of American military force. "Many of my generation of
Vietnam-era officers," he later wrote in his autobiography,
as quoted by Lawrence F. Kaplan in the New Republic (January 1,
2001), "vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we
would not quietly acquiesce in halfhearted warfare for half-baked
reasons that the American people could not understand."
On his return to the United States, Powell enrolled in the
graduate school of George Washington University, in Washington,
D.C., where he obtained a master's degree in business
administration in 1971. The next year Powell, by then a major,
took his first political position--that of White House fellow, a
coveted internship in which middle managers are groomed for larger
responsibilities. (Other alumni of the program include former San
Antonio mayor and U.S. Housing and Urban Development secretary
Henry Cisneros, former national security adviser Robert McFarlane,
and CNN chairman and CEO Tom Johnson.) Guided by the insight that
"budgets are to organizations what blood is to the
circulatory system," as he later wrote in his autobiography,
Powell obtained a position in the Office of Management and Budget
(OMB), an agency that "had its hand on every department's
jugular." For one year he served as assistant to the deputy
director of the OMB, Frank C. Carlucci, an appointment that proved
to be a career turning point: both Carlucci and Caspar W.
Weinberger, then director of the OMB, were so impressed with his
competence and quiet efficiency in the administration of President
Richard Nixon that each in turn later lured him from a military
command to serve as his deputy in Ronald Reagan's presidential
administration.
In succeeding years Powell moved back and forth between military
command posts and administrative assignments in the
national-security establishment. In 1973 he was assigned as a
battalion commander in Korea; the next year he was rotated home to
a staff job at the Pentagon. In 1975 Powell, who was by then a
colonel, enrolled at the National War College. After completing
seven of the nine scheduled months of study, he was given the
command of the Second Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division at
Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Despite having missed the last two months
of the course, he graduated with distinction in 1976. During
President Jimmy Carter's administration, Powell served as senior
military assistant to the deputy defense secretary and, briefly in
1979, as executive assistant to Secretary of Energy Charles W.
Duncan Jr. By that time Powell had been promoted to major general.
For the first several months of the Reagan administration, he
provided transitional support in the Defense Department under
Carlucci, who had just become deputy secretary of defense under
Weinberger. In the spring of 1981, Powell began two years as
assistant commander of the Fourth Infantry Division at Fort
Carson, Colorado.
In July 1983, while serving as deputy commander at Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas, General Powell was summoned back to
Washington at the request of Defense Secretary Weinberger. As
Weinberger's senior military assistant for the next three years,
Powell acquired a reputation as the ideal number-two man,
carefully screening both information and visitors to ensure a free
flow of ideas without burdening his boss with minor details. He
also played a major role in organizing U.S. military operations,
such as the invasion of Grenada and the bombing of Libya.
During Powell's stint as Weinberger's assistant, the Reagan
administration--and in particular, the National Security Council
under Robert McFarlane and John M. Poindexter--became involved in
an illegal, covert operation to secure the release of American
hostages in Lebanon and to raise funds for the Nicaraguan rebel
forces, the Contras, by selling arms to Iran. The Iran-Contra
affair, as the scandal later became known, led to the appointment
of a special prosecutor, Lawrence E. Walsh. Walsh eventually
charged Secretary Weinberger with withholding information from
Congress about aid to the Contras; however, on December 24, 1992,
a few days before the trial was scheduled to begin, an outgoing
President George Herbert Walker Bush pardoned the former secretary
of defense.
While the pardon put an abrupt end to the proceedings against
Weinberger, the investigation, as detailed in a voluminous report
by Walsh, also raised questions about Powell's role in the affair.
Although Powell was never implicated in any wrongdoing, there was
speculation that he may have suppressed information in an effort
to cover for his boss. In a 1987 sworn deposition quoted by David
Corn for Salon.com (March 20, 2000), Powell told investigators
looking for documentary evidence that "the secretary, to my
knowledge, did not keep a diary." But in a sworn affidavit
submitted to Walsh in 1992, Powell recalled that "during the
period I worked with Secretary Weinberger . . . I observed on his
desk a small pad of white paper, approximately 5" by 7".
He would jot down on this pad in abbreviated form various calls
and events during the day. I viewed it as his personal
diary." (In 1992, the charge against Weinberger was
withholding information; the diary had turned up in 1991.)
In his final report, as quoted by Corn, Walsh wrote that Powell's
1987 deposition statement "hardly constituted full
disclosure," that it had been "designed to protect
Weinberger," and that it was "at least misleading."
However, he also noted that "it would have been difficult to
prove that [Powell's 1987] deposition testimony was intentionally
false." In a 1992 letter to the court overseeing Walsh,
Powell accused the special prosecutor of attempting "to
impugn my honor," as quoted by Corn. He further explained
that "I was asked by congressional staff in 1987 whether Mr.
Weinberger kept any records at all of his daily activities. I
replied truthfully that he took notes, but did not have a diary--a
permanent record summarizing important events. My 1992 affidavit,
on the other hand, focused in depth on the notes I said he took
and my understanding that the notes were personal. . . . I
described his notes [in 1992] as a diary to convey the idea that
they were private and personal, as opposed to an official
record."
Meanwhile, in June 1986 Powell had eagerly accepted another
infantry command, this time as commanding general of the Fifth
Corps, a force of 72,000 troops stationed in Frankfurt, Germany.
Along with the assignment went a temporary promotion to lieutenant
general. Just six months later, however, he received a call from
his former superior, Frank Carlucci, who had just been named to
succeed Admiral Poindexter as national security adviser. Carlucci
asked Powell several times to join him as his deputy in the White
House, but each time Powell declined, explaining that too much of
his career had already been diverted to policy positions and that
he enjoyed his new military duties. Only after President Reagan
himself called to repeat Carlucci's request did the general
reluctantly agree to return to Washington in January 1987,
explaining: "I'm a serviceman, a soldier, and it looked like
my service might be of greater use here."
At Carlucci's urging, Powell reorganized the president's national
security staff along the lines recommended by the Tower
Commission, which President Reagan had created to investigate the
Iran-Contra scandal. Eschewing Poindexter's proclivity for secrecy
and compartmentalized relationships, Powell created clear lines of
authority and broadened the dialogue to include all interested
parties. "I am a great believer that the interagency process
works best," Powell told Don Oberdorfer for the Washington
Post (March 23, 1987), "when everybody has a chance to say
his piece and get his positions out on the table . . . [so] that
when we forward the final decision package to the president or
present it to him orally, everybody who played knows he has been
properly represented and had his day in court."
On November 5, 1987 President Reagan named Carlucci to succeed
Weinberger as secretary of defense and promoted Powell to national
security adviser. As head of the National Security Council, Powell
took a prominent role in the Reagan administration's unsuccessful
efforts--made despite the steady trickle of new information
regarding the Iran-Contra scandal--to win congressional support
for $36 million in military aid for the Contras. He also played an
important part in coordinating the December 1987 summit meeting
between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev,
which resulted in the signing of the intermediate-range nuclear
forces (INF) treaty. (As a result of that treaty, the Soviet Union
for the first time agreed to mutual on-site inspection as a means
of enforcing an arms-control agreement.) Powell opposed heavy
spending on the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star
Wars," program.
At the end of Reagan's second term, in January 1989, Powell
briefly returned to the field as commander in chief of the Forces
Command, headquartered at Fort McPherson, Georgia. In September
1989, however, he returned to Washington after President George H.
W. Bush named him chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At 52,
Powell was the youngest man--as well as the first
African-American--to occupy the American military's top post.
In the months leading up to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Powell's
concern for the safety of his subordinates (and perhaps, to a
lesser extent, his distrust of civilian authorities) led him to
advocate nonintervention, and--after that was rejected as an
option--military restraint. Between the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait,
on August 2, 1990, and the beginning of the allied military
strike, the following January (after Iraq's leader, Saddam
Hussein, had ignored the U.S.-imposed deadline for withdrawing his
troops), Powell argued that economic sanctions and diplomacy ought
to be given more time to work. According to some reports, he even
favored abandoning Kuwait and drawing the proverbial line in the
sand at the Saudi Arabian border. Further, Powell is reported to
have expressed concerns that war with Iraq might trigger an
anti-Western backlash among Arab states, or that it might devolve
into a prolonged war of attrition. His views brought him into
conflict with other administration officials, especially
then-secretary of defense Richard R. Cheney, who argued for a
swift, large-scale military strike. At one point, as John Barry
and Evan Thomas related in Newsweek (March 5, 2001), Cheney grew
so exasperated with Powell's unwillingness to cooperate that he
drew the general aside. "Colin, you're talking policy and
that's not your job," the secretary reportedly said. "I
want you to give me military advice. Stop talking policy."
The decision to conduct a large-scale military operation carried
the day, and on January 17, 1991, the United States led Operation
Desert Storm, the allied attack against Iraq. That same evening,
Powell appeared on national television and announced the American
strategy for fighting the Iraqi army: "First we're going to
cut it off, and then we're going to kill it." Despite that
blustery declaration, Powell continued behind the scenes to
advocate restraint. Only two days after American troops began the
brief, successful ground invasion of Kuwait and Iraq, Powell urged
President Bush to declare a ceasefire--against the wishes of
military leaders including General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the
commander in chief of the United States Central Command, who
wanted more time to pursue Hussein's elite Republican Guard units
and to advance toward Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. On this point,
Powell prevailed--with deleterious results, according to some of
his critics, since shortly after the ceasefire Republican Guard
units helped secure Hussein's hold on power by brutally
suppressing civilian uprisings that had been encouraged by the
United States. In an article published in Foreign Affairs (Winter
1992/1993) two years after the war, however, Powell defended his
position. "Even if Hussein had waited for us to enter
Baghdad," he wrote, "and even if we had been able to
capture him, what purpose would it have served? And would serving
that purpose have been worth the many more casualties that would
have occurred? Would it have been worth the inevitable follow-up:
major occupation forces in Iraq for years to come and a very
expensive and complex American proconsulship in Baghdad?
Fortunately for America, reasonable people at the time thought
not. They still do."
Meanwhile, as allied warplanes trapped and destroyed retreating
Iraqi forces on the highway joining Kuwait City and Baghdad,
Powell expressed concern that the resulting carnage would tarnish
the military's reputation. "We don't want to be seen as
killing for the sake of killing," Powell advised Bush, as
quoted by Barry and Thomas. (While some human-rights groups have
said the attack on the so-called "highway of death"
constituted a war crime in violation of a Geneva Convention ban on
attacking defenseless soldiers, the Pentagon stated that the
retreating Iraqis were planning to regroup and attack.)
In 1992 and 1993 Powell once again demonstrated his reluctance to
commit armed forces abroad by opposing U.S. intervention in
Bosnia, a region then suffering a brutal war and an "ethnic
cleansing" campaign carried out by nationalist extremists in
the wake of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. In fact, Powell
opposed intervention so strongly that he was against even airdrops
of food, fearing that such action would inevitably lead to deeper
involvement in a protracted conflict. When confronted by Madeleine
Albright, then ambassador to the United Nations (and later
secretary of state), Powell responded that American troops were
"not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global
game board," as quoted by Barry and Thomas. "In 1991, I
was asked why the U.S. could not assume a 'limited' role in
Bosnia," he later wrote in his autobiography. "I had
been engaged in limited military involvements before, in Vietnam
for starters. I said, 'As soon as they tell me it's limited, it
means they do not care whether you achieve a result or not. As
soon as they tell me "surgical," I head for the bunker.'
I criticized the pseudo-policy of establishing a U.S. 'presence'
without a defined mission in trouble spots. This approach had cost
the lives of 241 Marines in Lebanon."
Powell notably abandoned his opposition to military intervention
in late 1992 and early 1993, when he endorsed the deployment of
U.S. troops to Somalia. (The East African country was then
suffering a famine caused largely by an ongoing civil war.) Some
suggested that Powell may have been moved to reevaluate his
noninterventionist views by political pressure at home, or by
humanitarian motives. Others, however, have alleged that the
general changed his mind in an attempt to preempt orders from a
newly inaugurated President Bill Clinton to send troops to Bosnia.
(According to this argument, Powell felt that it would be less
risky to send troops to Somalia and that the president would be
disinclined to intervene in two simultaneous conflicts.) By the
time 18 American special-operations soldiers (and more than 500
Somalis) were killed in the Battle of Mogadishu, in October 1993,
Powell was no longer chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and thus
largely managed to escape blame for that debacle. Still, several
members of the Clinton administration--including the president
himself--have bitterly suggested that Powell did in fact bear some
of the responsibility. (According to Powell's critics, the general
had helped escalate the conflict by urging American forces to
arrest Somali general Mohammed Farrah Aidid but had refused to
authorize the military backup necessary for such an operation.)
Powell articulated his views on the appropriate use of American
military force--informally referred to as the "Powell
doctrine"--in an article published in the winter 1992-93
issue of Foreign Affairs. Simply expressed, the Powell doctrine
states that the U.S. should intervene militarily only as a last
resort; that when it does intervene, it must have clearly defined
political and military goals; and that in such cases,
"decisive means and results are always to be preferred, even
if they are not always possible." (Also in the article,
Powell wrote that the U.S. and its allies had used
"overwhelming force quickly and decisively" in the Gulf
War; many in the media seized on the words "overwhelming
force" to sum up the general's military philosophy.) Before
going to war, Powell wrote, policymakers must be able to answer a
series of questions: "Is the political objective we seek to
achieve important, clearly defined and understood? Have all other
nonviolent policy means failed? Will military force achieve the
objective? At what cost? Have the gains and risks been analyzed?
How might the situation that we seek to alter, once it is altered
by force, develop further and what might be the
consequences?" While Powell's article offered a fairly
elaborate underpinning for his foreign-policy views, many observed
that the general had strayed from that scheme in the past, most
noticeably in his support for military involvement in Somalia.
Powell, for his part, had stressed in the Foreign Policy article
that his views were intended as a set of rough guidelines rather
than as a statement of official policy. "There is . . . no
fixed set of rules for the use of military force," he wrote.
"To set one up is dangerous."
In spite of Powell's behind-the-scenes opposition to the Gulf War,
his public role as chairman of the Joint Chiefs brought him
widespread popularity in the wake of the conclusive American
victory. As a result, both the Democratic and Republican parties
began courting him soon after he retired from the military, on
September 30, 1993. Nevertheless, Powell declined to publicly
affiliate himself with either party; he chose rather to spend the
next two years writing My American Journey, his autobiography,
which was published in September 1995.
The appearance of My American Journey brought to a feverish pitch
the speculation that Powell was considering a run for the
presidency. Although it was unclear whether he would run as a
Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent--if indeed he chose to
run at all--the retired general's charisma and strong independent
streak appealed to a wide range of centrist voters. While Powell's
more liberal social views appealed to many Democrats, moderate
Republicans found his emphasis on limited government, fiscal
responsibility, and individual responsibility attractive. At the
height of his popularity, in late 1995, national polls showed
Powell beating both President Clinton and Senator Bob Dole of
Kansas, the respective frontrunners (and later nominees) of the
Democratic and Republican parties, in one-on-one races in 1996.
The polls further indicated that if Powell were to run as an
Independent in a three-way race against both Dole and Clinton, he
would have tied the president with slightly more than one-third of
the vote. (Dole would have finished third.)
On November 8, 1995 Powell put an end to speculation by announcing
that he would not run for president. He also declared that he
would join the Republican Party. (Up to this point Powell, who had
served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, had been
tight-lipped about his party affiliation.) To enter the race, he
said at a press conference, as quoted by Martin Fletcher in the
London Times (November 9, 1995), would require "a passion to
run the race and win the quest; the kind of passion and commitment
that I felt every day of my 35 years as a soldier; the kind of
passion I do not yet have for political life. For me to pretend
otherwise would not be honest to myself or to other people, and
because such a life requires a calling that I do not yet hear, I
cannot go forward. I will not be a candidate for president or any
other elective office in 1996." Powell further explained that
a presidential race would have required too many sacrifices from
his family. "General Colin Powell ran his presidential
campaign exactly as he would have liked to run the Gulf war,"
David Frum wrote for Commentary (January 1996), "a massive
build-up of force culminating in a strategic withdrawal."
After retreating from the presidential race, Powell took advantage
of his high profile to promote "America's Promise--the
Alliance for Youth," a national campaign to promote
volunteerism and to address such problems as violence, drugs, and
pregnancy among children and adolescents. According to the
organization's official Web site, America's Promise seeks to
fulfill its goals by providing the nation's youth with five
promises: an ongoing relationship with caring adults; safe places,
with structured activities, to go to during nonschool hours; a
"healthy start and future," including adequate health
care and health education; marketable skills developed through
internships, apprenticeships, and a sound education; and
opportunities to "give back" through community service.
"If we can give kids these basics," Powell told Laura B.
Randolph for Ebony (July 1999), "we can transform them from
potential delinquents and dependents into good citizens. It can't
happen overnight, but if we keep at it, it can happen child by
child, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by
city." Much of Powell's work for America's Promise involved
traveling the country to lecture and solicit contributions from
various civic and commercial organizations.
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Although he had never ceased to be
a media presence--even in semiretirement--Powell reappeared on the
national political stage in July 2000, when he spoke at the
Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. In his address,
Powell recommended that policymakers "experiment prudently
with school voucher programs to see if they help." (He was
referring to a system by which parents could apply toward private
school the funds allotted for their children's public-school
education.) He defended the education record of the 2000
Republican presidential nominee, George W. Bush, pointing out that
as governor of Texas, Bush had "ended social promotions. He
increased state funding for education by eight billion dollars. He
put new textbooks in every school. He strengthened standardized
testing in all Texas public schools, he insisted on teacher
competency, and he expanded the charter school movement." At
the same time, Powell went on to voice sharp criticism of those in
the Republican Party who "miss no opportunity to roundly and
loudly condemn affirmative action that helped a few thousand black
kids get an education," but who fail to speak out "over
affirmative action for lobbyists who load our tax codes with
preferences for special interests." He further warned that
"the issue of race still casts a shadow over our society,
despite the impressive progress we have made over the last 40
years to overcome the legacy of our troubled past." In a
post-convention interview with Margaret Carlson for Time (August
14, 2000), Powell explained that he had viewed the address as a
"great opportunity to talk to millions, to tell Republicans
the problem is us, not the kids. I wanted to shake up the way they
see things." Powell stumped for Bush in the final days of the
2000 presidential campaign.
On December 16, 2000 Bush, then president-elect, named Powell as
his secretary of state, praising the retired general as "an
American hero, an American example and a great American
story," according to Alison Mitchell, writing for the New
York Times (December 17, 2000). For his part, Powell sought to
reassure those who feared an isolationist foreign policy from the
new administration; he also expressed his support for Bush's
proposed missile-defense shield. Although some voices questioned
the applicability of the Powell doctrine to the post-Cold War
world, the choice of Powell was generally applauded in the
press--though perhaps more as a conciliatory gesture after a
fiercely contended election than because of the retired general's
diplomatic credentials. (Bush's opponent in the general election,
Vice President Al Gore, had won the popular vote; Bush had
triumphed in the Electoral College following highly controversial
vote recounts in Florida.) Powell was confirmed by the Senate and
sworn in on January 20, 2001 as the 65th U.S. secretary of state.
Although many expected Powell to dominate the Bush administration,
given his charisma, celebrity, and global stature, the secretary
of state seemed a curiously marginalized figure during his first
months in office. Powell did register a number of successes: his
handling of the diplomatic standoff with China, after a Chinese
fighter jet forced a U.S. surveillance plane to make an emergency
landing in Chinese territory following a midair collision,
received kudos, as did his success at raising morale among State
Department staffers. But his setbacks were prominent, too,
suggesting a lack of influence in the administration. His plan to
reinvigorate porous U.N. sanctions against Iraq by making them
"smarter" foundered due to lack of Russian support, and
he was publicly humiliated by the Bush administration on at least
two occasions: first, one day after he announced the
administration's intention to resume Clinton-era negotiations of a
missile-proliferation arrangement with North Korea, the White
House, angry at South Korea's lack of support for a
missile-defense shield, forced him to retract his position. Later,
Bush's rejection of the Kyoto Treaty caught Powell, then on a
diplomatic mission to promote missile defense in Europe, by
surprise. (Powell was delegated to defend the rejection of the
treaty, a move that rankled many Europeans.) "That's one
where, you know, I would have done it differently," Powell
told Johanna McGeary for Time (September 10, 2001).
According to McGeary, the primary source of Powell's early
frustrations was a "fault line" between his attitudes
and those of the rest of the administration. "Powell is a
multilateralist; other Bush advisers are unilateralists. He's
internationalist; they're America first. If you wanted to put a
label on Powell's foreign outlook, you could call it
'compassionate conservatism'; the others share the second notion
but not the first. He is often seen as the Administration's force
of moderation, charged with checking its more extreme
enthusiasms."
It was initially unclear whether Powell would take a more
prominent role in the administration following the September 11,
2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.,
since the Bush administration, in an effort to present a unified
front, was tight-lipped about the specific recommendations of--and
differences of opinion between--individual Cabinet members and
senior advisers. Nevertheless, in the weeks before the
American-led military strike against Afghanistan, which began on
October 7, 2001, Powell appeared to be urging the administration
to exercise restraint. "Well, let's not assume there will be
a large-scale war," he said at a press conference, as quoted
by William Kristol for the Washington Post (September 25, 2001).
"I don't know that we should even consider a large-scale war
of the conventional sort." While some at the Department of
Defense--most notably Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz--pressed
for military action against Iraq (and even Lebanon) in addition to
Afghanistan, Powell reportedly wanted to limit U.S. military
involvement to Afghanistan alone. He further stressed the
importance of coalition building in the Arab world in order to
shore up support for the American campaign.
During a September 23 appearance on Meet the Press, the secretary
was questioned about the applicability of the Powell doctrine to
the crisis--specifically, about what was thought to be the
doctrine's call for "overwhelming force," given
President Bush's much-repeated point that the American campaign
would proceed in a new and unconventional manner. "I've never
talked about overwhelming force," Powell responded, as quoted
by the Washington Post (October 7, 2001). "I've always talked
about decisive force, meaning you go to the point of decision and
that's where you apply decisive force. In the Persian Gulf War 10
years ago, you had an army sitting out there, easily identifiable,
there it was waiting to be attacked, and we applied decisive force
against the Iraqi army. It's different this time, and we shouldn't
see this in the same context as if there is a large enemy out
there that we plan to attack in conventional ways. If the
president decides that this is what we should do and have to do, I
can assure you that our military will have plans that will go
against their weaknesses and not get trapped in ways that previous
armies have gotten trapped in Afghanistan."
Powell is married to the former Alma Vivian Johnson. The couple
have two daughters, Linda and Annmarie; a son, Michael, who
currently serves as chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission, a position to which he was appointed by the Bush
administration in early 2001; and two grandchildren. In his free
time Powell enjoys playing racquetball and restoring old Volvos.
-- P.K.
Works about subject
Suggested Reading: Foreign Affairs
p32+ Winter 1992-93, p102+ Nov./Dec. 1995; (London) Times p1 Nov
9, 1995; Nation (on-line) May 2, 2001; New Republic p17+ Jan. 1,
2001; New Republic (on-line) Apr. 17, 1995; New York Times A p1
Dec 17, 2000; Newsweek p38+ Dec 25, 2001, with photos, p34+ Mar 5,
2001, with photos; Political Science Quarterly p625+ Winter
1995-96; Time p88+ Mar. 13, 1995, with photos, p24+ Sep. 10, 2001,
with photo; Vital Speeches of the Day p651+ Aug. 15, 2000;
Washington Post A p21 Apr. 17, 2001; Powell, Colin L. My American
Journal, 1995
Descriptor
Army Officers; Presidential
Advisers; Generals ; Secretaries of State; Chairmen of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff; National Security Advisors; Powell Colin L
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