To the folks back home, Powell was a commanding presence with a rhetorical gift. He soothed a nation queasy about committing troops by defining a post-Vietnam military doctrine: “Strike suddenly, decisively and in sufficient force to resolve the matter. Do it quickly, and do it with minimum loss of life.” In the first week of war, after is was clear there would be no lightning-quick victory from the air, Powell shook the country out of its manic depression with a line aimed as much at discomfiting Iraqis as reassuring Americans. “First, we’re going to cut it off,” he said of Saddam’s Army, “and then we’re going to kill it.”
He went on to vanquish more than Iraq’s military. Never has a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff so utterly conquered the American imagination. His press conferences were redemptive: powerful infusions of credibility on behalf of Operation Desert Storm and the military. Powell emerged from the war he orchestrated as a hero decorated with the collective hopes of the nation–an image of strength, competence, wit.
His entire life has been the stuff of American dreams: a non-West Pointer who rises to chairman of the JCS, the first black to become national-security adviser. Born in 1937 to Jamaican immigrants in Harlem, Powell’s early love was the military. After graduating from City College of New York he headed straight to Fort Benning, Ga., as an Army second lieutenant. He emerged from two tours of duty in Vietnam with a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and the Soldiers Medal for valor–as well as a philosophical outlook on the uses of military might.
“Colin is shaped by the anger that grew out of our commitment of force without sufficient authority to us it all,” said his former boss John Wickham, onetime chief of staff of the Army. “People fought and died bravely, but the results were a cipher.” Vietnam sensitized Powell to a new political reality: the only way to win a war is to launch a massive, no-quarter attack right away, while you still have the nation’s support.
His political sensibilities were forged early, as he moved in and out of Pentagon and civilian desk assignments. At 35, Powell was named a White House fellow. Assigned to the Office of Management and Budget under Richard Nixon, he became the protege of Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci. It was Carlucci who, 14 years later, urged Ronald Reagan to call Powell and persuade him to give up the coveted command the V Corps in West Germany to become deputy national-security adviser.
The National Security Council he and Carlucci inherited was tainted by the Iran-contra scandal. They rebuilt its reputation, convincing President Reagan to give up on military aid to the contras and putting out feelers to explore summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev. Toward the end of his tenure at the NSC, Powell considered quitting the Army, according to his cousin Bruce Llewellyn, the CEO of the Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling Co. “He said some guy had offered him a package to make 50 speeches at $20,000 a speech.” recalled Llewellyn, who tried to convince Powell it wasn’t such a great deal. “I said, “Colin, look, your real ambition in life is to be the chief of staff of the U.S. Army’.”
Powell became JCS chairman just in time to confront the biggest military challenge of his career. After a failed coup attempt to oust Manuel Noriega caught the Bush administration by surprise, Powell was directed to plan a U.S. invasion of Panama. Operation Just Cause unfolded true to his form chart. “Out of that experience there grew enormous respect for Colin’s judgment,” said a senior White House official.
That judgment wasn’t infallible. In the early days of Desert Shield, Marines were privately dismayed that he hadn’t allowed them to deploy their heavily armored units at the same time the lightly armored 82nd Airborne landed in Saudi Arabia. Later he took heat in the press from William J. Taylor, an old war-college instructor, who complained the military lacked an overall crisis strategy. (Powell replied via one of Taylor’s grad students: “Tell Taylor I want to kick him in the balls.”) But by the end of the war, Powell was remembered for a brilliantly planned air and ground attack, a “unified campaign” which, he kept saying, would shorten the war.
In the wake of his triumph, he met a different enemy: persistent rumors of his replacing Dan Quayle as Bush’s running mate next year. “This is speculation that exists in the minds of people who have to write columns,” he fumed recently, not long after asking for another two-year term as JCS chairman to complete the post-cold-war reorganizing of the armed forces. But no one–least of all politicians–could resist co-opting him. A family man who guards his privacy, Powell would sooner have ducked the public eye and worked at his favorite hobby, overhauling used Volvos. “I don’t control my life anymore,” he complained to a colleague. Nor is he likely to any time soon. Like all American heroes, willing or not, Powell passed into the hands of a public that just wouldn’t let him go.
