“I need to hear it from you,” Powell said. “We’ve got youngsters coming in here tomorrow morning and I need to know they won’t meet resistance.”
Powell had spent most of the weekend working on the Haitians. He was a fellow Carib, the son of Jamaican immigrants. Many of the Haitian generals – though not Cedras – had been trained, as Powell had, at Forts Bragg and Benning. There were common memories, a common vocabulary. Powell sensed he might be able to save American lives if he could remind the Haitians of the values they’d learned back in training, if he could appeal to their vestigial sense of military honor. “I treated them as soldiers,” he said. And Raoul Cedras responded as a soldier. “He said there would be no resistance, and he said it in such a way, with such confidence, that I knew he meant it. So we were able to go forward.”
And Colin Powell told this story in such a way, with such confidence, that his audience–white, middle class, conservative, many from military families, most doubting the wisdom of the Haiti mission–was not only won over, but inspired. It is difficult to imagine anyone else–certainly, no current American politician–with the moral authority and sheer presence to get away with this: I looked the dictator in the eye and knew he meant it, so it was OK. But Colin Powell is a special case. He stands, at 57, as the most respected figure in American public life. He is an African-American who transcends race; a public man who transcends politics. He seems a distinctly American character, with an easy confidence that inspires trust among even the most skeptical. (“Trust me,” he said, as he refused to divulge information about the air campaign during a famous gulf war press conference … and instead of tearing his head off, a roomful of reporters laughed at his aplomb.) He has been particularly skillful at remaining just slightly above the fray, keeping the door open to a career in politics–someday, maybe even next year, when he finishes his memoirs. “Right now his personal-approval level is somewhere close to Mother Teresa,” says a Republican analyst. “But, of course, that would change the minute he entered the arena. You could knock him down 10 points by asking him a single question: what’s your position on abortion? And that’s just for starters.”
But the very ugliness of the arena, the widespread disgust with Democrats and Republicans, with anyone who rims for public office–make the Colin Powell question all the more compelling: he has jumped every other hurdle; could he handle this one too? The fact that he is so well known, and so little known, only intensifies the yearning. “If he came to speak at the Christian Coalition,” says William Bennett, who is close to Pow-ell, “he’d receive a 20-minute standing ovation and then people would hold their breaths and pray, literally pray, that he’d be right on their issues. He wouldn’t have to be perfect, not even on abortion, if his general outlook were conservative.”
Bennett suspects it would be, and he may be right. Powell has been adamant about the importance of family, of personal responsibility. His strongest remarks in recent speeches have been about the loss of a “sense of shame” in American society. “There is incredible trash on television every afternoon and we’re not ashamed of it.” But Powell hasn’t been forced to think about the intricacies of difficult public-policy questions, and admits privately that he doesn’t know where he’d come out on many of them. And Democrats, especially moderates, have their own fantasies. “The best thing Bill Clinton could do would be to name Colin Powell secretary of state,” says Rep. Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma, “and give him a license to take over foreign policy and restore some credibility.” (Despite a raft of rumors, Powell has never discussed the job with the president.)
“He’s the classic blank canvas,” says Bob Shrum, the Democratic consultant. “Everyone can fantasize what they want about him now. But as soon as he starts defining himself, they may not find him so compelling.” Perhaps. But the question of how Powell might finesse the inevitable has become the political Community’s favorite parlor game: would he be forced immediately into the muck, or is there a strategy that would keep him somehow above it all? None of Powell’s close friends can see him slugging it out in an extended, tawdry primary season. There are those who hope for a Republican version of Mario Cuomo’s eternal fantasy: a splintered party drafting General Powell in a dramatic convention. A moderate Republican Draft Powell movement has been launched by Chuck Kelly, an old Eisenhower stalwart, who believes Powell could show his strength in a few crucial primaries – New Hampshire, Georgia and California for starters–where crossover voting is permitted. “Yeah, and while he’s showing strength there,” says James Carville, “someone else will be wrapping up the nomination by piling up delegates in all the other states.”
The clearest–and most compelling–path to the presidency might also be the most risky: Powell could transcend the current party system entirely and run as an independent, promising a government of national reconciliation, with the support of moderates from both parties. In the current NEWSWEEK Poll, 47 percent believe electing an independent president would be a “good way” to change Washington. But a fragmented field also works to the incumbent’s advantage. Powell–who beats Clinton handily head to head–ties him (at 36 percent) in a race with Dan Quayle as the GOP nominee, and finishes second if the Republican is Bob Dole.
“He is an independent. He’s registered independent,” says former assistant secretary of defense Richard Armitage, who may be Powell’s closest friend (and who insists he doesn’t want the general to run). “I don’t know that he’d feel entirely comfortable in either party.” The most fervent Powell supporters argue that if the next year evolves as they expect, the general may be in a position to write his own ticket: his memoirs, which are said to be quite personal and inspirational (“They’ll bring a tear to your eye,” says one friend), will be published next September. “You might have an enormous reaction,” the friend says, as Powell emerges from his current hibernation and travels the country, selling the book. Powell would then be strong enough to (a) raise the money he’d need for an independent run and (b) dictate the shape and pace of a three-way campaign, as Ross Perot did before he self-destructed in 1992. “Perot showed that you don’t have to do as much rubber-chickening as you used to,” says a friend. “If this were really rolling, Colin could define the campaign any way he wanted.”
The assumption behind all this chat is that he’s running. And there does seem to be a certain inevitability about it. “I don’t think he’s wildly enthusiastic about the prospect of a further public career,” says his friend Richard Perle, “but nobody whose presidential prospects are as good as his can remain indifferent to the question for very long.” Indeed, there are plenty of signs Powell is not indifferent to the question. He talks about it with friends. Clearly, he enjoys the speculation. He is tempted by the chance to make history–although, as his cousin Bruce Llewellyn points out, none of this talk hurts his lecture fees. But Colin Powell is also a very proud man, proud of his accomplishments and the status he now enjoys, and he knows–he says this openly–that his life, his reputation, would change forever if he ran for public office. Implicit in this is the assumption that his reputation would diminish.
And it might. Powell is not perfect; he’s made mistakes. Haiti may prove to be one of them–although he’d argue that his mission was limited to getting American troops on the ground without violence and that it was completed successfully. But another mistake certainly took place in Somalia, where Powell, after arguing against “mission creep,” suddenly changed his mind when four MPs were killed in August 1998. He allowed the Delta Force to try to snatch the warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid–an operation that led to the Mogadishu massacre, where 18 Americans died. Sources close to Powell say he agreed to send the Delta Force because the commander on the ground requested it. But that request was nothing new. Powell had resisted it for months, and the suspicion remains that he changed his mind hastily and unwisely, in the heat of the moment.
There are larger questions about Powell. There are those–even friends like Richard Perle–who say he is too cautious about the use of force. He seems to have initially opposed every American operation proposed on his watch, including the gulf war. He is known for his skepticism about going into Bosnia, immortalized in the line, “We do deserts, not mountains.” (A joke; the general’s irreverent humor is famous.) In response, Powell argues that it was his job to lay out the downside: “I have to keep reminding people: I was just an adviser. I owed my bosses my best insight – and then I owed them my total loyalty for whatever they decided to do.”
A more serious concern has to do with the general’s loyalty and discretion during the Clinton presidency. His relationship with Secretary of Defense Les Aspin was certainly difficult. “You read The Washington Post and you see his fingerprints all over a lot of things,” says one pentagon source, referring to stories about As-pin’s strained relations with the uniformed military. “Most of this carping about Colin comes from Les Aspin and his people because they had such a crappy relationship with him,” says former defense secretary Dick Cheney. But the disrespect seems mutual. A new book by Elizabeth Drew claims that Powell’s last act as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, as he sipped coffee with Bill Clinton on the day he retired, was to tell the president that Aspin didn’t command the respect of the military and that a change should be considered.
Powell’s relationship with Clinton has been curious. At times he has seemed more respectful of Clinton’s presidency than Clinton himself. When an air force general publicly called the president a “gay-loving, pot-smoking, draft-dodging womanizer,” Clinton told Powell it wasn’t necessary to go too hard on the man–a simple apology would suffice. Powell insisted that normal military procedure be followed: the general was summarily retired. Indeed, the Clinton-Powell relationship was strained from the start over the question of allowing homosexuals into the military. Powell, adamantly opposed, insisted on raising the issue in his first meeting with the president-elect, even though Clinton didn’t seem all that eager to discuss it. (The strain was compounded, perhaps, by Clinton’s failure to consider Powell for secretary of state–a job he might have taken then, friends say, but probably not now.) And yet Powell and Clinton have remained in frequent contact in the year since the chairman’s retirement, the president often seeking his advice on defense and foreign policy.
“Look, Colin’s a very talented guy,” says a Pentagon source, “but he’s never going to be president. He’ll never run. He’s just too damned thin-skinned. The operative sin here is pride: he can’t stand people questioning his motives.” Powell does have a temper. “He was out of control, apoplectic, cursing and screaming at me on the phone,” says former air force Gen. Mike Dugan, blamed by Powell–and fired by Cheney–for leaking the gulf war air strategy to The Washington Post. Powell’s temper has also been evident at less critical moments: “He went berserk when The New York Times smacked him around over gays in the military,” says a Pentagon source.
Powell does seem very conscious of his image, and how he’s treated by the media. A look at “Sacred Honor,” a semiofficial biography of the general written by one of his former press aides, is instructive: an entire chapter is devoted to refuting the widely held belief that Powell was a primary source for Bob Woodward’s book about the gulf war, “The Commanders.” Extensive space is also devoted to explaining away the criticisms of Powell–none very serious–in Norman Schwarzkopf’s memoirs. Publicly, Powell is alternately amused and appalled by the news media. He has said the gulf war was “the first in history to be interrupted for Zamphir commercials,” but also expresses concern that CNN can show, within 15 minutes, “the dead body, the grieving mother… and the wife who’s going to sue you.” Much of his criticism is shrewd and subtle–though that won’t fend off the picky and inane coverage that is inevitable in the heat of a campaign.
But if “pride” is the operative sin, it may also be the general’s greatest strength. His stubborn unwillingness to be seen or treated as an inferior–even in the segregated South during his early training–and his native optimism have propelled his remarkable career. He has wielded more official power than any other African-American in history. “He is exalted as a symbol, much as O. J. Simpson was, because he isn’t threatening to whites,” says Jesse Jackson, who often speaks with Powell by phone. “He’s seen [that way] because he’s never been a combatant in America’s race wars. But he hasn’t transcended race. No black can transcend race. That’s ridiculous.”
It is likely that Colin Powell’s race has worked to his advantage along the way – no doubt, the bright, young army major’s skin color didn’t hurt when such Republican sponsors as Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci selected him from the White House fellows list to work in the Nixon budget office in 1972. More to the point, Powell seems never to have allowed his race to be a disadvantage either. He has approached the question in a distinctive, West Indian way: “We tended to see it differently from Southern blacks,” says Powell’s cousin Bruce Llewellyn. “They saw the glass as mostly empty. We saw it half full, and we were coming to fill up the rest.”
Powell understands that Caribbean blacks had advantages–the legacy of the British educational and civil-service systems–that native-born blacks did not. He was born in Harlem and raised in the South Bronx, the son of a strict seamstress–“she could cut me down with a single glance”–and a sweet-tempered shipping clerk. But he also saw, firsthand, the struggles American blacks had to endure to achieve equality in law: he courted his wife, Alma, in Birmingham, Ala., during the fire-hose and church-bombing years. Still, Powell has refused to countenance the bitterness and pessimism–the overwhelming sense of aggrievement–that has paralyzed much of the African-American community. He counsels young blacks not to let racism be their problem: “Let it be a problem to someone else. You can’t change it. Don’t have a chip on your shoulder, and don’t think everyone is staring at you because you’re black … Let it drag them down. Don’t use it as an excuse for your own shortcomings.”
If Powell benefited from affirmative action, he certainly made the most of his opportunities. “Anyone with any sense could see it,” says Caspar Weinberger, “the extraordinary ability, the intelligence.” But that was in 1972, after 14 years of army training, after two tours–and a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart–in Vietnam. By his own account, Powell was a mediocre student who might have flunked out of college if he hadn’t found a home in ROTC. “I am where I am today because the army takes care of its own,” Powell said in his emotional farewell address as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “I was allowed to rise based on performance.”
The rise was spectacular, not just in the army, but in political Washington as well. Weinberger and Carlucci insisted on bringing Powell along with them–first as Weinberger’s military aide when he became secretary of defense, then as Carlucci’s deputy national-security adviser, then as Carlucci’s successor: national-security adviser to Ronald Reagan–and finally as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George Bush. Powell’s first day on the job as chairman was remembered vividly by Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams in Woodward’s book about the gulf war: “The new Chairman was utterly confident. He absolutely filled the room. There was a quality about him that announced, ‘Hi, get the hell out of the way, I’m chairman’.”
That quality–the poise, the confidence, the sense of authority–is Powell’s primary credential for the presidency. Much of the fascination inherent in a Powell candidacy is a result of all the rest, the things we do not know about him: is he, for example, a Republican or Democrat? He hangs out with Republicans; his best friends are people like Rich Armitage and Ken Duberstein, people he served with in the Reagan-Bush years. He’s not gotten along so well with Democrats, by and large; he seems to find their lack of discipline annoying. At the same time, according to Powell’s semiofficial biography: “The emergence of a strong, vocal right wing was repulsive to Powell … Pat Buchanan and the sociologically exclusivist appearance of mostly … white delegates [at the 1992 GOP convention] signalled something unsettling.” Friends say the general is pro choice but–more important–anti-polarization; the tone of the convention was more objectionable than the content.
The real trick of a Powell candidacy would be to avoid, or finesse, the trap of polarizing issues–like abortion, racial quotas, the intricacies of health care–and concentrate on broad reassuring themes: strength abroad and a return to order at home. Powell’s vision of America, which he can deliver with great emotional power, is the army writ large. He loves talking about the troops who fought Operation Desert Storm, especially about the young black private who, when asked by Sam Donaldson if he was afraid, nodded to his squad mates, a classically American mix of colors and accents: “We’re family. We take care of each other. We’ll be OK.”
Stories like that will take Colin Powell only so far. At some point, if he chooses to run, he will have to offer a convincing analysis of what has gone wrong–why the most powerful and prosperous country in the world seems so unhappy with itself these days–and how he proposes to fix it. The Washington line is, he won’t be able to: “His strongest day as a candidate will be his first,” says a skeptic who worked with him. And it is possible that the political climate has become so poisoned and cynical that even so imposing a talent as Colin Powell’s will prove ephemeral, disposable, unable to carry the burdens imposed by a needy, dissolute nation.
But, if Powell is who he says he is –he won’t believe that. And he won’t be able to resist the ultimate challenge. Certainly, he is constantly reminded of it. several weeks ago, driving on the New Jersey turnpike, Powell noticed a car pass him on the left, then drop back and linger on hi s right, then drop back farther. He was a bit concerned now: was this going to be a drive-by something or other? The car approached again, on the right, this time with a hand-lettered sign: COLIN POWELL FOR PRESIDENT. When you think about it, the most interesting thing about the story is that Powell tells it to friends, and friends tell it to other friends–and the word spreads. It may be another year before the most intriguing question in American politics is answered, but Colin Powell’s moment of decision is surely coming.
If there were two candidates for president–Bill Clinton, the Democrat, and Colin Powell, the Republican–whom would you choose?
39% Clinton 54% Powell
From all you know about Colin Powell, do you think he is a:
6% Democrat 21% Republican 37% Independent DO you think he is a: 8% Liberal 37% Moderate 32% Conservative THE NEWSWEEK POLL, SEPT. 29-30, 1994
Could a black candidate like Colin Powell get enough support from white voters to be elected, or would he not get enough white support because he is black?
63% Could get enough support 22% Would not get enough support THE NEWSWEEK POLL, SEPT. 29-30, 1994
