Colin Powell is living the American dream.
His vantage point of the world around him encompasses from his early beginnings in Harlem
to the lofty heights of advising presidents.
In a time when Americans have become disenchanted with politicians and broken campaign promises,
Colin Powell signifies a possible new beginning in the political arena.
He has become the American home.
To understand Powell's strong feelings of honor and commitment, we must acknowledge
Thomas Jefferson when he wrote, there is a debt of service due from every man to his
country, proportion to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.
In his autobiography, My American Journey, Powell refers to this quote as an explanation
as to why he has lived a life of public service.
As one who has received so much from his country, I feel that debt heavily and I can never be
entirely free of it.
My responsibility, our responsibility as lucky Americans is to try to give back to
this country as much as it has given to us as we continue our American journey together.
Colin Luther Powell was born on April 5, 1937 in Harlem.
His parents Luther and Maude Ariel, who was known as Ariel, had emigrated from Jamaica
before Colin's birth.
They had already a daughter, Marilyn, who was five and a half years older than Colin.
Luther Powell was definitely the patriarch of the Powell family.
Colin described his parents as somewhat opposite in nature.
Luther Powell, maybe small, maybe unimposing in appearance, maybe somewhat comical, was
nevertheless the ringmaster of this family circle.
His father was the eternal optimist and his mother was the perennial worrier.
His father worked his way up in the garment district in New York and became a foreman
in the shipping department of a woman's clothing manufacturer.
His mother also worked in the garment district as a seamstress.
The family eventually left Harlem and they moved to a tenement in South Bronx in 1943
when Colin was six.
They lived on Kenley Street, which was an ethnically mixed community of Jews, Italians,
Poles, Greeks, Puerto Ricans, and blacks.
Colin displayed no clear talents as a youngster.
His academic career lacked in luster.
In 1950, I entered Morris High School.
Instead of turning left when I went out of the house, I turned right for a few blocks.
Marilyn had gone to the elite Walton High School and, at my parents' prompting, I tried
to get into Stuyvesant High, another prestigious school.
I still have the report card with the guidance counselor's decision.
We advise against it.
Morris High, on the other hand, was like Robert Frost's definition of home, the place where
when you show up, they have to let you in.
Powell described himself as directionless.
I had a very happy childhood and I was encompassed by this warm family, but by the time I got
into high school, and as I ended my high school period and started into college, I still wasn't
heading anywhere.
I hadn't proven to be a terribly good athlete.
I wasn't one of the leaders on the block.
I wasn't quite sure what I was going to college for, other than it was expected of me.
And my first several months in college made it even less clear why I was there.
And so I was still drifting.
I had not really excelled at anything, even though I had all this advantage of family.
And then suddenly I saw these young men in uniform.
I found ROTC, I joined ROTC, and the uniform lifted me out of that sort of bland existence
that I had, even with the nurturing family, and I discovered I was good at it.
And so that became my route up.
It wasn't until his first semester at the City College of New York that he finally found
his calling.
He enrolled in ROTC and joined the Pershing Rifles, a military society which was similar
to a fraternity.
He was an average student, but earned A's in his ROTC classes.
When he graduated from college in 1958, Powell went to Fort Benning in Georgia for basic
training.
He was one of his first direct experiences with racism.
Racism was still relatively new to me, and I had to find a way to cope psychologically.
I began by identifying my priorities.
I wanted, above all, to succeed at my Army career.
I did not intend to give way to self-destructive rage, no matter how provoked.
If people in the South insisted on living by crazy rules, then I would play the hand
dealt for now.
If I was to be confined to one end of the playing field, then I was going to be a star
on that part of the field.
Nothing that happened off-post, none of the indignities, none of the injustices, was going
to inhibit my performance.
I was not going to let myself become emotionally crippled, because I could not play on the
whole field.
I did not feel inferior, and I was not going to let anybody make me feel I was.
I was not going to allow someone else's feelings about me become my feelings about myself.
Racism was not just a black problem.
It was America's problem.
And until the country solved it, I was not going to let bigotry make me a victim instead
of a full human being.
I occasionally felt hurt.
I felt anger.
But most of all, I felt challenged.
I'll show you.
Powell attended Ranger School, where he received airborne training.
He parachuted out of planes and rappelled off sides of mountains.
His first assignment was with the 3rd Armored Division in West Germany.
He arrived at Gellenhausen, a town 25 miles east of Frankfurt.
As second lieutenant, he was assigned as a platoon leader to Company B, 2nd Armored
Rifle Battalion, 48th Infantry.
During the summer of 1961, Powell made the decision to make a career out of the military.
He realized that he didn't have many options outside of the military.
Powell had left Germany by this time and was stationed in Massachusetts.
He saw first-hand the difficulties of his friends and family who were trying to make
a living, struggling with an economy which was in the midst of a recession.
In November of 1961, Colin Powell went on his one and only blind date.
He had been asked to double date with his military roommate, Michael Henningberg.
His girlfriend's roommate was Alma Johnson.
She was the daughter of a high school principal from Birmingham, Alabama.
Alma had a degree in audiology and worked with the hearing impaired.
In August of 1962, Powell received his orders to go to Vietnam.
By this time, Alma and Colin had been dating 18 months, and Alma was less than enthusiastic
about their forthcoming separation.
Later that night, Colin realized that he had to make a decision before he left for the
war.
He had already experienced the breakup of another relationship because it was too difficult
to weather the separation when he was in Germany.
In his memoirs, he recalls, �That night, I lay in my bunk taking emotional inventory
of the relationship.� Alma Johnson was beautiful, intelligent, refined, and fun to be with,
and all too rare in a romance.
She was my friend.
She came from a fine family, got along with my circle of friends, and was even a great
cook.
I knew that she loved me, and I loved her.
My folks loved her, too.
What was I waiting for?
Alma had everything I would ever want in a wife.
I was a jerk for not acting before she got away.
This nonsense that if the Army wanted you to have a wife, it would have issued you one
that had to go.
I could barely wait to drive back to Boston the next day and ask her to marry me.
Thank God she said yes.
They were married two weeks later on August 25, 1962, in Birmingham, Alabama.
A month after they were married, the couple traveled to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where
he was enrolled as a military assistance training advisor.
Soon Alma was pregnant with their first child, and on December 23, Colin Powell left to begin
his tour of duty in Vietnam and arrived in Saigon on Christmas morning.
Colin Powell would serve two tours of duty in Vietnam.
Powell had been promoted to captain and served as advisor to the 400-man 2nd Battalion, 3rd
Infantry Regiment, 1st Division.
His battalion served in conjunction with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.
On February 7, they began their march.
The physical demands on the men went beyond anything they had been prepared for.
We moved in clouds of insects.
The trails we followed had been sown by the VC.
With snares and punchy spikes, bamboo stakes concealed in a hole, the tip poisoned with
buffalo dung.
The first casualty I witnessed was a soldier who stepped onto a punchy spike.
For all the hardship, I was still excited to be on the trail, testing my endurance,
feeling especially alive as strength and fatigue flowed alternately through my limbs.
Powell was in a Shaw Valley when he received the news that his son Michael was born.
While on patrol close to the Laotian border, he was wading through a rice paddy when he
stepped on a booby trap which had a sharpened punchy stick in the middle of it.
Powell was sent to a hospital at headquarters in Hue.
He returned to the front a few weeks later.
Powell received the Purple Heart.
After his injury, he was reassigned as commander of the Hue Citadel Airfield.
Although Powell did not have experience as a pilot, he was responsible for the logistical
handling of small aircraft.
On November 1, he returned to Saigon.
He had completed his tour of duty and he was headed back home.
Vietnam had not yet captured the attention of Americans at home.
Compared to the 252,000 troops stationed in Europe, Vietnam only had approximately 16,300.
What had the states polarized was the civil rights movement.
Alma Powell had decided to stay in Birmingham while Colin was overseas.
Martin Luther King had referred to Birmingham as the most thoroughly segregated city in
the United States.
While leading a protest march in Birmingham, Martin Luther King was arrested.
President Kennedy was forced to call in the Alabama National Guard to make sure the public
schools became integrated.
Although Powell was not there to witness the events firsthand, he later told the Washington
Post, �I was in Vietnam while my father-in-law was guarding the house with a shotgun.�
Powell followed closely the growing momentum of the movement.
He saw the news accounts of Dr. King�s march on Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963, where
250,000 people demanded equal treatment.
When Powell returned to the United States, he was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia
for the next three and a half years.
It was during this time that their second child, a daughter named Linda, was born.
In an interview with Ebony Magazine, Powell told of his experience of attempting to be
served in a restaurant.
The waitress, a nice lady, asked him if he was an African student.
�No,� Powell answered, �a Puerto Rican.� �No, you�re Negro,� she said.
�That�s right.� �Well, I can�t bring out a hamburger.
You�ll have to go to the back door, where blacks traditionally came in to place their
orders.� �I wasn�t even trying to do a sit-in,� Powell said.
�All I wanted was a hamburger.� Five months later, after the Civil Rights Bill of 1964
had been enacted, forbidding, among other things, segregation in places of public accommodation,
I went back to the restaurant and got my hamburger.
While at Fort Benning, he became a test officer with the U.S. Army Infantry Board.
The board was responsible for testing any weapons and supplies used by the infantry.
Powell served from November of 1963 to June of 1964 and from May of 1965 until February
of 1966.
In between his assignments, he enrolled in the infantry officer�s advance course, which
was necessary if Powell were to continue to be promoted.
His classmates would later become prestigious military men in their own right.
Powell would later become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
General Howard Graves would become commandant at West Point, and Thomas Griffin would become
chief of staff of the Allied Forces of Southern Europe.
He continued his training in August of 1967 at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff
College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Powell had clearly made a name for himself as a soldier with a tremendous amount of potential.
Out of a class of 1,244, he graduated second.
After completing the training, he was back in Vietnam.
By the time Powell returned to Vietnam, there were half a million American troops stationed
there.
Over 50,000 of them were African American.
They accounted for 23% of all combat deaths.
Colin Powell reached his assignment at Duck Foe on July 1968.
His new home was with the 23rd Infantry Division, which was referred to as the American.
He was an executive officer of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade.
Their headquarters was in Chu Line, located on the Northern Coastal Plain.
Duck Foe was a short distance away.
Powell and his memoirs described Duck Foe in the following way.
Life at Duck Foe took crazy pendulum swings from the trite to the heart-breaking.
One afternoon, I was getting Coke and beer helicoptered out to the fire bases, a daily
priority the executive dared not miss.
When Colonel Louder sent word that he had run into a stiff fight at Fire Base Liz and
needed help, I ordered up a slick, a bare bones UH-1 helicopter, no seats, just space
and a couple of door guns, had it loaded with a 5.56mm rifle and 7.62mm machine gun ammo
and headed out over the treetops.
We landed at Liz near dusk and quickly unloaded.
A grim face Louder told me to take back nine of our casualties.
The vulnerability of a helicopter on the ground left little time for niceties.
The nine KHAs killed by hostile action, the Army's replacement term for KIA killed in
action, were rolled into ponchos and loaded onto the slick.
As we took off in the half light, I slumped to the floor, facing nine recently healthy
young American boys, now stacked like cordwood.
Things changed dramatically after Powell was written about in the Army Times.
The article told of his training and academic successes.
The story was read by Major General Charles M. Geddes, commander of the American Division.
He immediately told his staff, I've got the number two Leavenworth graduate in my division
and he's stuck out in the boonies as a battalion exec.
Bring him up here, I want him as my plans officer.
Powell was transferred to Chu Lai and little did the commander know that this man would
end up saving his life.
Powell, Commander Geddes and members of his staff were on a helicopter mission in the
jungle when the pilot attempted to land in a small clearing.
The helicopter's rotor blade struck a tree and the helicopter crashed.
Powell recalled, since I was sitting out born, I could see how little clearance we had, about
two feet at each end of the blade.
I began to shout, pull out, but it was too late.
I watched the pilot struggling against a treacherous back draft created by the trees and then whack.
At a height of about three stories, the blade struck a tree trunk.
One minute we were flying and the next we were dead weight as the main rotor blades
went instantly from 324 RPM to zero.
Powell evacuated the aircraft and quickly realized that except for the helicopter's
gunner everyone had remained on board.
Once inside the smoke-filled helicopter, he located General Geddes.
He pulled him from the wreckage and dragged him to safety.
Powell assisted in pulling out the rest of the crew.
Powell suffered a broken ankle while the general had a broken shoulder.
Powell was recognized with the soldier's medal, which is earned for heroic action.
By 1969, Powell was halfway through his tour of duty.
The ranks of enlisted men had inflated to 543,400 men and the United States was still
not making any real gains in ending the war.
Atrocities like the one at Mai Lai, where over 300 people were killed, widened the chasm
between the hawks who supported the war and the doves who opposed it.
Demonstrators had taken to the streets and great pressure was placed on the Nixon administration
to end the war.
Powell summed up the war in Vietnam eloquently.
War should not be the politics of last resort.
And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.
We should mobilize the country's resources to fulfill that mission and then go in to
win.
In Vietnam, we entered into a half-hearted half-war, with much of the nation opposed
or indifferent, while a small fraction carried the burden.
Powell applied to the Army's graduate school program.
He placed well on the entrance exams and was accepted to George Washington University in
Washington D.C.
Colin entered the School of Government and Business Administration and would earn an
MBA upon completion of the coursework.
He left Vietnam on July 20, 1969.
He would enter graduate school two months later.
It had been a long year fighting the Viet Cong.
He would spend practically the next five years in Washington.
He completed his graduate work in July 1971 and had been promoted to lieutenant colonel.
He became an operations research analyst in the office of the assistant vice chief of
staff of the Army.
At the age of 35 in 1972, Powell had been selected as one of the 17 military personnel
to serve as a White House fellow for one year.
He was assigned to the Office of Management and Budget, which was headed by Casper Weinberger.
Powell described the OMB as it was referred to as one of the least understood, yet most
powerful federal agencies in Washington.
In the early part of 1973, Powell had been approached on whether or not he was interested
to be a White House fellow for a second year.
The Watergate hearings had begun and Powell decided that he wanted to return to active
Army life.
It was during this time that Alma and Colin's family grew to five with the arrival of their
second daughter Anna Marie.
It was the first time that Colin had enough free time to spend with his wife and three
children.
Powell was sent to Korea where he became the commander of the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry,
2nd Infantry Division of the 8th Army.
The unit had many internal problems.
There was a great deal of racial tension between blacks and whites and there was significant
drug usage among the soldiers.
The commanding officer was Major General Henry E. The Gunfighter Emerson.
He arrived a few months before Powell.
Emerson was very fond of me, Powell recalled, and he was forever using me for one purpose
or another.
I wasn't anywhere near as good as he claims I was, but we were always great friends and
we hit it off and I was always doing things in Korea that he loved.
We destroyed his club one night in a great fight.
Powell attributed the lessening of racial tensions and a general improvement in morale
to Emerson.
When they first arrived, Emerson and Powell had to deal with what they referred to as
the Army Misfits, those who could not be successful soldiers.
Once the weeding out process was completed, Emerson began a program that according to
Powell was extremely successful.
You take disadvantaged people, black, Hispanic, it doesn't matter, and you try to bring them
up by the bootstraps and give them self-confidence.
We tried to give these people the best leg up we can.
We had disciplined troops, we cared about their welfare, and we took care of them.
Powell's year in Korea deeply affected him.
He became much more aware about the drug problem that faced the nation.
I came home from Korea having served the happiest year of my military career, in many ways because
of what was and can never be again.
Powell had been selected to attend the National War College for advanced military schooling.
He was definitely being groomed for a position with a great deal of authority.
He was the youngest in his class to make full colonel.
He was appointed commander of Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
Powell was in charge of 2,500 men and was leading three battalions.
Colin Powell and his family were about to experience an exciting new future.
He had begun to intermingle with many of the nation's most powerful men while the White
House fell low, but now the grooming was complete and Colin Powell was forging ahead, taking
his own place among the fraternity of power brokers.
In February of 1977, Powell was contacted to return to Washington.
President Carter's national security advisor, Zignu Brzezinski, interviewed him.
It had been decided that a military officer would be best suited to run the National Security
Council's defense program staff.
Initially, Powell declined, he was quite happy with his current assignment and had no expertise
in that area.
He returned to the base, but Brzezinski was persistent and Powell turned down another
position.
This time he received a third offer to be the special assistant to the secretary of
the deputy secretary of defense.
Powell accepted and the family moved back to Virginia.
He worked directly under John Kester.
Powell got an insider's view of the complexities of international diplomacy.
Iran was in the midst of great turmoil.
The Shah was struggling to maintain his power.
Powell, part of an American delegation, flew to Tehran in October of 1978.
Within a short time after their trip, the Shah was overthrown on January 16, 1979.
The military host that had given Powell and his party an extensive briefing had all been
murdered.
The United States had lost their vast financial investment in Iran.
The United States embassy in the city of Tehran was captured.
American embassy staff were taken as hostages.
Ayatollah Khomeini and his revolutionary council took control of the government.
To say the least, their position was definitely anti-American.
The crisis in Iran would end up causing President Carter to lose the election.
Once back in the United States, Powell received the news that he had been promoted to brigadier
general.
Secretary of Defense Harold Brown presided over the promotion ceremony.
Colin Powell was presented with a framed quotation by Abraham Lincoln.
In his memoirs, Powell recalls the event.
It seems a telegraph operator at the war department had informed the president one day that the
Confederates had captured a bunch of horses and a union brigadier general.
The operator was surprised when Lincoln expressed more concern over the horses.
Lincoln supposedly explained, I can make a brigadier general in five minutes, but it's
not as easy to replace 110 horses.
The framed utterance by Lincoln has followed me to every office I have occupied since.
The perfect cure for a swollen ego.
Powell's next assignment was working for the Department of Energy.
He had been loaned by the Department of Defense.
This position was not his choice and he didn't feel it was a good match for his training.
It turned out to be a crucial assignment because of the energy shortages in the United States
due to the problems in Iran and by the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island on the Susquehanna
River in Pennsylvania.
This crisis management training was tailor-made for what lay ahead with Desert Storm.
On November 4, 1980, Jimmy Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan.
The new president brought his own entourage.
Casper Weinberger was the new Secretary of Defense.
After five months, General Powell became Assistant Division Commander of the 4th Infantry Division
at Fort Carson, Colorado.
Fourteen months later, he was assigned to Fort Leavenworth after an absence of 15 years.
He was now Deputy Commanding General of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Combat Development
Activity.
It was here that new ideas were generated for weapons and transportation development.
While at Leavenworth, Powell had become extremely interested in finding a way of acknowledging
the participation of African Americans in the military.
In particular, he wanted to pursue the contributions of the 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers.
Once he realized that there was no memorial to commemorate them, Powell became committed
to preserving their memory.
I became curious about the history of the Buffalo Soldiers.
I started reading everything I could lay my hands on.
What I learned filled me with pride at the feats these black men had achieved and with
sadness at the injustices and neglect they had suffered.
Blacks had fought in just about all of America's wars.
They served to prove themselves the equal of white soldiers, which was precisely why
some whites did not want blacks in uniform.
A great source of inspiration for Powell was Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., the first black general
in the United States Army.
Powell believed that it was General Davis who cleared the path for blacks to advance
in the military.
In 1932, while training at West Point, none of the other cadets would speak with him.
His son, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., became a Lieutenant General in the U.S. Air Force
and the highest-ranking black in the military in 1965.
Powell never took lightly their invaluable contributions and was committed to following
the example the two men set.
It took seven years for the groundbreaking ceremony, but on July 28, 1970, the dream
was finally a reality.
Three years later, these brave soldiers finally got the monument they so justly deserved.
In the summer of 1983, Casper Weinberger contacted Powell to begin a term as a military assistant
to the Secretary of Defense.
By this time, Powell definitely was on the road to becoming the first black chief of
staff.
Powell had earned the reputation of not only being extremely competent and dedicated, but
he also had excellent interpersonal skills, which enabled him to gain the respect of all
individuals who worked with him.
Powell's responsibilities revolved around making sure that White House personnel were
informed of all military operations.
Three months after his appointment, two military crises happened just a few days apart.
The killing of 241 Marines and a terrorist attack in Lebanon and the military invasion
of Grenada occurred.
October of 1983 was definitely a difficult time for the U.S. military.
A group of terrorists had bombed a U.S. Marine barrack in Beirut, Lebanon.
American and British hostages were taken.
American troops invaded Grenada to restore order after the coup by Maurice Bishop.
His Marxist orientation aligned him with Cuba and the Soviet Union.
The United States was concerned that Cuba and the Soviet Union were paying to have military
airstrips built in Grenada.
Bishop was assassinated and riots broke out.
More than 1,000 American medical students attended the university at Grenada and there
was obvious concern for their safety.
Although the invasion restored order, Powell felt that the troops needed additional training
and had become very undisciplined.
Powell continued on as the military assistant for two years and ten months when in 1986
he took over the U.S. Army 5th Corps headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany.
This was the culmination of his military career.
He was in charge of 75,000 military personnel.
In his autobiography, Powell recalls beginning his new assignment.
I faced taking over V Corps with confidence tinged with a touch of anxiety.
It was ten years since I had been in command of the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division
at Fort Campbell.
In my previous field assignment, I had been an assistant division commander under Jack
Hudicek, or had not exactly emerged as George Patton, and I still felt uneasy about skipping
a division command and going directly to a corps.
I was determined to prove that I was an able commanding general and a Pentagon-bred political
general.
Colin Powell arrived in Germany in 1986.
His son Michael was already stationed in Germany.
He was a second lieutenant who had followed in his father's footsteps by completing ROTC
and air assault school.
Alma and their daughters Linda and Anne-Marie joined them shortly after Powell's arrival.
It had been 25 years since Powell first went to Germany.
He had completed every assignment since 1958 with the highest level of professionalism.
It was no surprise that Colin had reached the apex of his military career at the age
of 49.
He referred to himself as the happiest general in the world.
Unfortunately it was short-lived.
Powell was contacted by Frank Carlucci, who he had worked with when he was the military
assistant to the Secretary of Defense.
Carlucci had just been appointed National Security Advisor to President Reagan because
of the forced resignation of Admiral Poindexter.
The Reagan administration now was being tarnished for its involvement in secretly selling arms
to Iran.
President Reagan established a commission headed by Texas Senator John Tower to investigate
the allegations that there was a plan in place to sell arms in exchange for releasing the
hostages and that the money received would be channeled to aid the Contras.
Carlucci told Powell he was needed back in the states to help with reorganizing the National
Security Council.
Powell declined, but when he found out that Carlucci was working from direct orders of
the President, he had no choice but to accept the position of Deputy Assistant to the President
for National Security Affairs.
It became official on December 18, 1986.
By the end of the month, Colin and Alma Powell and their daughters were back in the states.
A press conference was called in January, and although Powell was disappointed to give
up the coveted position, he told the press, I'm a serviceman, a soldier, and it looked
like my service might be of greater use here.
On February 26, the Tower Commission released its findings and the role of the National
Security Council was redefined.
Mr. Reagan had to go before the American public and set the record straight.
Unfortunately, the accusations were correct, and the administration was committed to correcting
their mistakes.
Personal tragedy struck the Powell family on June 27, when they were notified that their
son Michael had been seriously injured in a Jeep accident.
He had suffered a broken pelvis and internal injuries.
Michael was transferred to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C.
And after many painstaking operations, Michael recovered.
In his new position, Powell walked the diplomatic tightrope.
He was responsible for briefing Congress on national security matters and kept White House
personnel aware of specific policies that could impact the nation's security.
He was also responsible for participating in the planning of the diplomatic summits
between President Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
Colin Powell continued in this position until the end of the Reagan administration.
He received the Distinguished Service Award in recognition for his work.
In 1989, Powell was promoted to four-star general.
His new assignment was the Forces Command at Fort McPherson, Georgia.
There were a quarter of a million active-duty troops and another quarter of a million reservists.
This was where almost a half a million National Guard soldiers were trained.
Once again, Powell was elated to be back in the active Army, but as before, it was short-lived.
Within a few months, Powell was to serve as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had visited him in Georgia to get a first-hand impression
of Colin Powell.
Four months into his new command, Powell received a phone call from President Bush.
Secretary Cheney had given Powell a glowing recommendation, and Bush offered him the chairmanship.
The Powells were back on the move, returning to the now-familiar nation's capital.
Powell's job description was to command the troops on behalf of the President of the United States.
Three times a week, he met with the Chiefs of Staff of the Army, Air Force, Chief of
Naval Operations, and the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
Within days of beginning his new job, Powell was in the midst of his first military crisis.
On December 20, 1989, over 18,000 American troops invaded the small country of Panama.
One just cause.
The corrupt dictator Manuel Noriega was relieved of his duties.
He was being sought on drug trafficking charges in the United States.
Noriega turned up four days later at the residence of the Papal Nuncio in Panama City.
Noriega underestimated the determination of the United States to remove him.
After ten days, Noriega was transferred to an American jail to wait for his trial.
This was Powell's test under fire.
Little did he know that this would be the prelude to the Persian Gulf War.
Powell knew of the difficulties between Iraq and Kuwait for some time.
Iraq had accumulated massive debts from its war with Iran that ended in 1988.
To make matters worse, Saddam Hussein refused to give up any portion of his million-man army.
Some believed that Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates were also responsible for the lowering
of oil prices by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, known as OPEC, which
meant cutting into Iraq's profits.
On August 1, 1990, Powell was notified that the Iraqi army went across the border of Kuwait.
Norman Schwarzkopf was the commander-in-chief for the Central Command known as CENTCOM for
the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
Our headquarters was at McDill Air Force Base in Florida.
Powell had brought him to Washington to be briefed on Saddam's actions.
In his memoirs, Powell reflected on his initial handling of Saddam.
By now, I regretted our earlier political and military inaction, although it was not
clear that Hussein would be deterred by token moves.
After Schwarzkopf's briefing as Secretary Cheney and I were leaving the building, I
said, Dick, this is serious.
We can't ignore what's going on.
I think the President should get off a tough message to Saddam today, even call him, but
try to scare him off.
Dick was as concerned as I was and began touching bases at the NSC and State to prepare a protest.
It was too late.
Before we could fire a diplomatic warning shot, 80,000 of Saddam's Republic Guards were
across the border rolling toward Kuwait City.
By early September, Schwarzkopf was now headquartered in the Ministry of Defense building in the
country's capital at Riyadh.
Powell went to see firsthand what progress was being made in preparing for war.
Powell, Schwarzkopf, and their advisors kept working on an implementation plan.
Schwarzkopf was emphatic that he needed additional troops.
Powell retold the events.
The next morning, we met again at Schwarzkopf's headquarters to flesh out our ideas from the
night before.
Norm repeated his request for a two-division corps from Europe.
I agreed and said we would add a third division.
I beefed up his request for additional fighter squadrons.
Aircraft carriers, let's send six.
We had paid for this stuff, why not use it?
What were we saving it for?
We had learned a lesson in Panama, go in big and end it quickly.
We could not put the United States through another Vietnam.
We could be so lavish with resources because the world had changed.
We could now afford to pull divisions out of Germany that had been there for the past
40 years to stop a Soviet offensive that was no longer coming.
At last the men and their technology arrived.
They were ready.
Operation Desert Storm was underway.
Powell and Dick Cheney went to Riyadh on December 19th for one last first-hand look to assure
that everything was as planned.
Powell told of the first sleepless night of the war.
I was up most of the night of January 16th and 17th on the phone constantly watching
television out of the corner of my eye as we conducted our first war while it was being
broadcast live from the enemy capital.
Just after 5 a.m. Washington time, Schwarzkopf called me with his first summer report of
the air campaign.
We got off 850 missions, he told me.
We clobbered most of the targets.
Iraq's key biological weapons and nuclear sites had been hit hard.
The Iraqis' western air defense system was knocked out.
Supply dumps were in flames.
Two Scud missiles launching sites had been struck.
The ITT building in downtown Baghdad is glowing, he said, and we've blown down one of Saddam's
palaces.
Should any Iraqi aircraft take off to engage the attacking force?
I'm going to leave that to General Powell.
Secretary, can I ask you one more question, sir?
Is there any possibility that there will at some point during the air war be some kind
of a pause to give Saddam Hussein the opportunity to rethink his commitment to staying in Kuwait,
or is this a nonstop operation as far as the coalition is concerned?
As far as the coalition is concerned and as far as my orders from the President are concerned,
we've been instructed to execute the plan, to carry on these operations until we have
achieved our objective.
Our objective is to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
To follow up on a couple of questions, I only have a report of one other U.S. aircraft damage.
There may be others, but those reports have not come in to me yet.
But, General, are they counter-offensive at all by the Iraqis either on the ground or
the other way?
No, the only Iraqi action I'm aware of was the artillery strike across the border into
Ras al-Khaji, which you've seen on television, which hit one oil petroleum storage facility,
but that's not been followed up and we have silenced that.
How do you account for that?
Does it surprise you?
You'll have to ask them, I'm rather pleased that we appear to have achieved tactical surprise.
We should not, however, rule out the possibility of Iraqi action either in the air or on the
ground, and I can assure you that we are on the lookout for it.
Any damage assessment, sir, of Iraqi aircraft, airfields, can you give us any rough sense
of what you have hit successfully?
Of all of the air sorties that went in, we are rating 80 percent of them as having been
effective, meaning the aircraft got to its target, delivered its ordinance and returned.
For those that are in the 20 percent, that includes those that had mechanical problems,
weather problems, or because of the very tight control we had over the aircraft, they did
not make the kind of positive identification of the target that we required before going
in and launching under the rules of engagement to minimize collateral civilian damage.
So we're very satisfied with that level of performance on the part of our aircraft.
We are pleased with the initial results.
We have damaged the command and control capability of the Iraqi government and the Iraqi Armed
Forces.
We believe we have done reasonably well, as best we know right now, with the preliminary
bomb damage assessment in attacking airfields, it's attacking fixed SCUD facilities around
the countryside, but I once again caution you that this is very preliminary, only 12
hours into the operation.
General Powell, give us some idea of the targets that were struck and the priority given to
those targets and the weapons used against those targets.
The targets that were struck initially dealt with the air defense systems, command and
control installations, and the Iraqi Air Force and their ability to interfere with our air
operations.
B-52s were used, F-117s, F-15s, F-16s, A-10s, F-111s, F-A-18s, A-6s, A-7s, Apache helicopters,
tornadoes from the United Kingdom, tornadoes from Saudi Arabia, Jaguars from the French
and the Kuwaiti Air Force is also involved.
Specific ordnance loads are those ordnance loads commonly associated with these aircraft.
I don't have any specific, any more specific information on that date.
The Secretary said more than 100 cruise missiles, what were they used for?
They were used against a variety of targets where their precision was required for the
target or because of the air defense system.
Around those targets we felt that an unmanned weapon was the best system to use.
It was a very, I've got to say it was an extremely detailed, well thought out plan.
A lot of credit has to go to General Schwarzkopf and especially to General Horner, the commander
of Central Command Air Forces for the integration of this plan, enormously complex and it was
a single plan encompassing all U.S. forces and all allied forces participating in the
operation all responding to the direction of a single command with a single air tasking
order.
General Powell, I'm laying out your initial list of targets.
You didn't mention the Iraqi Republican Guards or ground forces.
What were they in the sequence of the priority of targets?
I really don't want to, I'm deliberately trying not to give prioritization or sequencing
because it is a plan that is unfolding and there is a concept behind it and if I say
too much about it then I'm giving away the total concept and I'm not prepared to do
that.
Were there other Iraqi troop divisions that we targeted and do we have any estimate how
many Iraqi soldiers may have been killed in the bombings?
No I'm not able to answer that at this time.
It is a comprehensive campaign with, as I've said many times, aerial land and sea components
and we have thought it out.
It will unfold over a period of time but I can't answer your question directly except
to underscore what the secretary has said.
Dampen down some of the euphoria, we have just begun a campaign, it will run for some
time.
Along those lines, with all of the optimism about the initial stages of this war, what
right now is your gravest concern?
I don't know if I have any grave concerns, I'm always concerned about the welfare of
our GIs who are participating in the operation but after 12 and almost a half hours of this
campaign I am very pleased that our initial objectives have been achieved and I am satisfied
with the way the campaign is unfolding.
But strategically what are your concerns right now still?
I don't know that I have any particular strategic concerns, my principal concern is to accomplish
the mission and we have to remember the mission isn't to bomb a while and pause and see if
something happens, the mission is to eject the Iraqi army out of Kuwait and to assist
in the restoration of the legitimate government of Kuwait and our entire campaign plan is
focused on those two objectives.
Let me turn now to the Iraqi army in the Kuwaiti theater of operations.
This is a large combined arms army, it has tanks, it has personnel carriers, it has air
defense guns, it has very redundant resilient communications between the different operating
echelons of the army.
It has stockages of food, ammunition and parts with the army in theater and they have a very
elaborate supply system coming down from the interior of the country to sustain that army.
Our strategy to go after this army is very very simple, first we are going to cut it
off and then we are going to kill it.
To cut it off that began last week when we started to go after the nerve center, the
brains of the operation, the command and control of the operation and the lines of communications
that come out of Baghdad and other places in the country flowing down the Tigris and
Euphrates valleys down these lines of communications to try to support somewhere in the neighborhood
of a half a million men down here in the Kuwaiti theater of operations.
All we have been doing to gain control over here and begin severing this and try to deaden
the nerve endings up here all goes back to our original military objective to get rid
of the army that is in Flint.
They are going to dig in their lines of communication, they are going to put an overhead cover.
Those tanks are designed not to be easily destroyed and so going after that kind of
unit is a much more difficult proposition but they are vulnerable, there is no question
about it and we are now turning our attention and selecting munitions and selecting target
packages to go after that army which in effect is sitting out there not doing anything.
It has not moved since the operation began, there has been no major, in fact there have
been no minor shifts of units around, it is for the most part sitting there dug in waiting
to be attacked and attacked it will be.
The Persian Gulf lasted only 45 days but the statistics were staggering, Baghdad was bombed
after midnight on January 17, 1991 and the ceasefire was accepted on February 27.
Newsweek magazine had estimated that between 70,000 to 115,000 Iraqis were killed, approximately
244 Allied troops were killed out of which 146 were American, a staggering number of
Iraqi troops surrendered.
It was estimated over 65,000 soldiers gave themselves up to American forces and the American
forces dropped 88 tons of bombs.
Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf became household names.
This was the first war that was televised on CNN.
Americans saw the tragedy of war unfold in their living rooms, they also understood the
courage and ability of those individuals who were committed to restoring peace.
Victory parades were held across the country and a ticker tape parade up Broadway in New
York allowed Americans to show their gratitude for preserving peace.
Congress issued two gold medals for both Powell and Schwarzkopf, President Bush reappointed
Powell for a second two year term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
President Bush had said, it is most important that the general of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
be a person of breadth, judgment, experience and total integrity.
Colin Powell has all these qualities and more.
During the remainder of President Bush's term, Powell continued dealing with whatever
was on the political agenda such as the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev and the down
scaling of the American military.
After the war, the polls indicated that George Bush would easily be reelected for a second
term.
His opponent was Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas.
As the time grew closer to the election, the Bush campaign lost its momentum and Clinton
was elected President of the United States.
Colin and Alma Powell had developed a close friendship with George and Barbara Bush and
it was a difficult time for a transition as Powell adjusted to a new commander in chief.
Clinton and Powell in many ways represented opposite ends of the spectrum.
Powell had served in Vietnam while Clinton had no military experience.
Secretary of Defense Les Aspen's management style was very different from that of Dick
Cheney.
The Bush executive team was far more structured than Clinton's.
Powell completed the remaining time of his two year term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff.
His military career had spanned 35 years and he made his decision to retire.
General Colin L. Powell was recognized at Fort Meyer on September 30, 1993.
Powell was surrounded by his family and friends who had known him since his childhood, his
days with the Pershing rifles, those who served with him in Germany, Vietnam, Fort Leavenworth
and Carson.
They mingled with President and Mrs. Bush, Vice Presidents Gore and Quayle and Secretaries
Weinberger and Cheney.
Powell recalled his thoughts, �It was now my turn to speak.
As I look out over this spectacle of color and pageantry, I would have had to be soul
dead not to marvel at the trajectory my life had followed.�
From an ROTC Second Lieutenant out of CCNY to the highest ranking office in the U.S.
Armed Forces, from advising a few hundred men in the jungles of Vietnam to responsibility
for over two million soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, from growing up with tough kids
in the South Bronx to associates with leaders from all over the world, from a green officer
who lost his pistol on his way to guard an atomic cannon to a national security advisor
who helped superpower leaders move the world away from nuclear holocaust.
Since his retirement, he has been anything but inactive.
He was paid $6 million for his autobiography.
He has become the most popular speaker on the lecture circuit and has been involved
in diplomatic negotiations in Haiti with former President Jimmy Carter and Senator Sam Nunn.
Colin Powell has risen above every obstacle presented and has done the most possible with
the opportunities given to him.
He has been a source of inspiration for many of us.
It has taken him above racial lines.
In his own words, I have lived in and risen in a white-dominated society and a white-dominated
profession, but not by denying my race, not by seeing it as a chain holding me back or
an obstacle to be overcome.
Others may use my race against me, but I will never use it against myself.
My blackness has been a source of pride, strength, and inspiration, and so has my being an American.
I started out believing in America where anyone given equal opportunity can succeed through
hard work and faith.
I still believe in that America.