Security Adviser : Gen. Powell--Quest for Compromise

Maj. Gen. Colin L. Powell awoke at dawn one day in 1983 to news reports that the Defense Department was about to start shooting dogs--beagles, he would soon discover--as part of medical experiments in a military laboratory.

Powell, then an assistant to Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, knew a looming public relations disaster when he saw one. In quickly briefing Weinberger on the steps the secretary should take to defuse the controversy, Powell concluded forcefully: “Shooting Snoopy just isn’t going to work!”

Weinberger nodded in agreement and Powell sent the word rocketing down the chain of command: Halt the experiments.

That fire-dousing exercise was pure Colin Powell: quick, coolly efficient and politically sensitive, with a touch of humor. “He didn’t even want to find out whether the dog-shooting program was right, wrong or indifferent,” said Capt. James Cormack, a Navy officer who was Powell’s aide-de-camp. “He’s a realist, and this just wasn’t going to fly.”

Power Earned by Savvy

Now a lieutenant general, Colin Luther Powell has ridden all the way to the White House on that kind of political savvy, efficiency and loyalty. In January he became the sixth man to serve as assistant to President Reagan for national security affairs--and, incidentally, the first black to hold the national security adviser’s job.

Well before reveille every weekday morning, Powell strides into the same White House office from which Henry A. Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski practiced their high-wire diplomacy and John M. Poindexter pursued a cloak-and-dagger mission to ransom American hostages by selling weapons to Iran.

Unlike these predecessors, however, Powell is neither a global strategist nor a covert activist. In the Reagan Administration’s final months, Colin Powell is the grandfacilitator of foreign policy, not so much an initiator as a compromiser.

“I wasn’t hired to be a grand strategist,” he said in an interview. “I have no pretensions of being a Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski. I was not hired for that. Nor is that my background.”

Powell’s approach, to serve primarily as an honest broker among competing views and to strive for unity and consensus, has brought much-needed order to the White House national security process and on several occasions has clearly served the President well.

At the same time, the approach is not without its drawbacks, as Powell learned to his apparent regret in the Administration’s messy and still-unsuccessful struggle with Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega.

Before he became NSC director, Powell spent a year as deputy to Frank C. Carlucci. “I was hired by Frank Carlucci in the first instance to help reestablish confidence . . . in the NSC system and . . . to fix something which, at that time, was seen to be broken,” he said.

“We had a plan, we executed that plan, and we were rather successful in putting that process back on a firm footing.”

Moreover, Powell’s quest for compromise has helped Reagan avoid some potentially risky policies that were advocated elsewhere in the bureaucracy.

When Iran resumed its mining of the Persian Gulf last April, for example, Powell helped persuade Reagan to order a staccato series of attacks on Iranian oil platforms. He steered the President away from both the more provocative moves favored by some Navy officials and the less assertive alternatives preferred by some U.S. diplomats in the region.

By defining himself as a referee, however, Powell has tended to confine himself to the policy options that percolate up from the bureaucracy, particularly from the State and Defense departments. “I’m sometimes characterized as not being a conceptualizer,” Powell acknowledged recently. “I can conceptualize things, and I do from time to time.”

Yet Powell seems to prefer to seek consensus, and thus compromise, within the parameters defined by the other power centers of the national security apparatus, rather than to tell the President that the correct policy is “none of the above,” that better options are being overlooked.

Regrets on Panama

In the efforts to oust Noriega, Powell helped advance a policy of economic pressure and negotiation that many believe has hurt Panama’s reform-minded middle class without budging Noriega.

“Powell regrets Panama,” said one Administration official who has worked with the general. “He feels it was not handled well, but the problem is how to deal with the Administration when there are powerful differences of views. You can’t have more authority than the President would allow.”

A frustrated member of his National Security Council staff, by contrast, faulted Powell for not seizing the authority that is his. The national security adviser, for example, “is unwilling to stand up for positions against the State Department when it’s clear that doing so would involve the assertion of some independent White House or NSC authority,” he said.

Powell contended that his role is “to put in perspective the advice (the President) receives from other advisers. Where I think my advice is better . . . I provide it to the President, but I always try to let the other advisers know I’m doing that because I like to see a collegial operation.”

Quest for Balance

The choice Powell faces--how much to act as a designer of foreign policy and how much to play the honest broker of other people’s designs--is one that every national security adviser has confronted since the job was created in 1953.

In Poindexter’s case, the activist model proved disastrous. Even Kissinger, the ultimate geopolitical strategist, aroused bitter opposition among many Republicans.

Powell’s approach can have its flaws, too. Historian Samuel F. Wells Jr., deputy director of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, said that the ideal national security adviser combines the two qualities--strong views of his own with an agenda that is the President’s.

“If you happen to have an inattentive President, as we seem to have here, a national security adviser does need to have a somewhat stronger sense of where things should go,” Wells said.

Yet if Powell lacks his own set of clearly defined foreign policy goals, Wells said, his military precision and political skills have still served the Reagan Administration well.

Keeps Military Skepticism

“What a military person like Colin Powell has is a sense of what kind of policies are likely to work,” he said. “In the military, you learn to have a healthy skepticism of grand designs and excessively complicated formulas. Given the winding down of the Administration and the limited requirements for innovation, he’s got a good team there that can work together and do it effectively.”

Whether or not Powell’s approach to the job is ultimately the correct one, he clearly possesses the right personal qualities for it. Loyalty, efficiency and political sensitivity--all are essential in the role of honest broker.

And he is self-effacing to an extreme. So personally accommodating is Powell that when one new aide asked him whether his first name should be pronounced to rhyme with “rollin’ ” or “pollen,” the general replied amiably: “Whichever way you like.” (The former is his preference).

Similarly, Powell’s personal life appears little changed by his increasing official responsibilities. Weekends, he likes to spend his free time fixing up broken-down BMWs and Volvos he has collected over the years. Indeed, that’s what he did on the weekend after the Moscow summit, prompting one of his senior assistants to demand a look at his fingernails--for grease--when he came to work the next Monday.

Shops for Family

On trips to Europe, whatever affairs of state may be on his mind, Powell usually finds time to visit a “duty free” shop at the airport to add to his family’s ceramic miniatures--parts of an English village scene he has been collecting for them for years.

Although a career Army officer, Powell has adopted an informal manner that betrays none of the rigid protocol of the military. He is known to his staff by his first name--regardless of how it is pronounced. He wears business suits, not Army uniforms, and on weekends he pads around the White House in sport shirts, slacks and loafers.

On a particularly tense Saturday morning in February, 1987, when Howard H. Baker Jr. was taking over as chief of the White House staff during the depths of the Iran-Contra affair, Powell was on hand to greet his new colleagues as they filed for the first time into the Roosevelt Room across a corridor from the Oval Office.

“He was in a sweater,” recalled a participant in the meeting. “Very unassuming, but also a presence of himself. You felt reassured that here is a strong hand. It was a steady voice in a room that was filled with tension.”

The general has allayed concerns, raised during the Iran-Contra scandal, that the White House job was no place for a military officer on active duty.

“Powell is not trying to be something he isn’t,” said one member of his NSC staff. “He’s a military officer. He’s going to go up the hill, straightforward, even though he’s going to take some enemy fire. He’s not as subtle as some others might be, but he’s comfortable with it.”

“He’s very goal-oriented,” said Michael Burch, a former Defense Department official and retired Air Force officer who worked closely with Powell at the Pentagon. “He sees where the problem needs to be taken and gets people to go there by force of consensus. He moves both sides along in deliberate steps and keeps both sides talking to each other.”

An admiring subordinate describes him with the military precision that Powell favors:

“He is extremely well-organized. He’s got a neat desk. Problems come up. He takes care of them. If something comes on his desk that is pleasant or unpleasant, he gives it the same attention. He gets to the point quickly. He wants others to get to the point quickly. It’s not a foolproof way of getting to the issue, but it’s a quick way.”

Family Crisis Weathered

And he is self-controlled. Powell and his wife of 25 years were devastated when their son, Michael, an Army officer stationed in West Germany, was seriously injured in a jeep accident in Nuremburg last year. Yet Powell kept up his pace at the White House with little outward sign of his emotional turmoil. Only when an an aide inquired did Powell, who also has two daughters, offer an account that was striking in its depth of feeling.

While Powell may have become the exemplar of the soldier caste, he has traveled a long road to get there. Born in the South Bronx of Jamaican immigrants who worked in the garment industry, he went not to West Point, but to City College of New York. He was an average student who joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps and majored in geology, because, he has said, it was easy.

Powell’s military career began in 1958, when he was commissioned a second lieutenant. Only later did he display academic talent. He finished second in his class of 1,244 at the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., and earned a master’s degree in business from George Washington University in 1971. During two stints in Vietnam, he won a Bronze Star for valor in combat and a Purple Heart--after he fell in a hole in the jungle and a stake went through his foot.

Serves Both Parties

It is in Washington, however, that Powell has drawn his most visible posts, regardless of the party in power. As a White House fellow during the Richard M. Nixon Administration, he worked in the Office of Management and Budget for two future defense secretaries, Weinberger and Carlucci.

Shortly after President Jimmy Carter moved into the White House, Powell became an assistant in the office of Defense Secretary Harold Brown, and he was Brown’s senior military assistant during the final two years of that Administration.

When Reagan was swept into office, Powell stayed on briefly to advise Weinberger and, after a two-year stint commanding troops, he returned in 1983 as Weinberger’s military assistant.

Even after so much time in Washington, Powell still regarded leadership in the field as his calling. “We used to accuse him of stepping in mud puddles during base visits, just to get the feel of being out with the troops,” Burch said. “He couldn’t wait to get out of the Pentagon, back commanding troops.”

Powell got his wish in 1986, when he left the Pentagon to command the Army’s 5th Corps in West Germany. Then, in January, 1987, when Reagan named Carlucci to restore some order to his National Security Council staff, Carlucci offered Powell the job as his deputy. Powell moved into the top job a year later, when Carlucci replaced Weinberger.

Future in Service

When Reagan leaves office next January, Powell will return to the Army, where many of his admirers expect that he will one day become chief of staff and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In those positions, Powell would quietly do again one of the things he has done without fanfare in his current post: He would break the color barrier.

In his January speech to the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, Powell said that he was “humbled” to be the first black national security adviser to the President. “I am very, very mindful of the sacrifices that were made by . . . those . . . who suffered and sacrificed to create the conditions and set the stage for me and many others,” he said.

Yet, while Powell has spoken of “the struggle” to establish equal opportunities for “every American,” friends say that he has worn lightly the burden of being one of the few blacks to reach the heights of power in Washington. His commission in the Army in 1958 came only 10 years after President Harry S. Truman signed the executive order to integrate the military. It was a time when the armed forces increasingly were seen as one of the nation’s great equalizers.

View of Integration

“I was able to capture all of what was done before by men in segregated units, denied the opportunity to advance,” he told a Washington veterans group last November. “It’s different now.

“We still have a long way to go.”