For Nominee, Power Lies in Restraint

The stormy confrontation is legendary in Washington. At a crisis session in the windowless White House Situation Room, Gen. Colin L. Powell argued vehemently against U.S. military intervention to end the siege of Sarajevo.

“None of the available options is guaranteed to change Serb behavior,” he warned. “And what’s the political objective? What’s the exit strategy?”

Shot back a visibly frustrated Madeleine Albright, then United Nations ambassador: “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

Powell was so incensed, he recounted later, that “I thought I would have an aneurysm.”

His troops were not “toy soldiers” to be played on “some sort of global chessboard,” the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff replied bluntly.

That 1993 exchange captures the essence of Powell’s philosophy--and the deep differences between the current and future secretaries of State in both style and substance. During 35 years in the military, Powell rose from a young officer who once lost his pistol en route to guarding an atomic weapon to a White House national security advisor dealing with the world’s nuclear powers. And he always has been skeptically selective about when to exercise American power and influence abroad.

“Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most” is a favorite quote from Greek historian Thucydides that Powell kept under the glass on his desk at the Pentagon.

That caution will also be the hallmark of the man who could have been president, perhaps for either party, but who settled Saturday for secretary of State--the highest job for which he feels “a calling” but which also allows his family a modicum of privacy. Yet because his heroic stature and sterling credentials loom so large, Colin Luther Powell is likely to be far more than simply the steward of America’s foreign policy in the administration of George W. Bush.

‘He Picks His Battles’

America’s role in the world is likely to change, Powell’s associates predict.

“As an old infantryman, he’s willing to get into foxholes when there’s a crisis, but he’ll do it only in context of a grand strategy, a moral principle and, most of all, an exit strategy,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, President Reagan’s chief of staff and Powell’s closest political advisor.

“He picks his battles. And he does nothing in halfway measures.”

The so-called Powell doctrine was evident after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Powell favored economic sanctions rather than firepower to force President Saddam Hussein’s withdrawal. He opposed military might unless victory was guaranteed, meaning an unprecedented campaign at unprecedented expense for a regional war.

But as force became the favored option, he crafted Operation Desert Storm and persuaded the Bush administration to deploy half a million troops from 31 nations--producing a rout that, in turn, propelled him to unusual stardom for a military figure.

A decade later, he is a virtual icon, a black American with self-effacing charm who defied the odds of poverty and discrimination to become a four-star Army general. Although Powell has critics from past crises, he has wider popularity than either the president or vice president he will serve. For many, he personifies the American dream.

He Found Direction in ROTC Program

Born in Harlem and reared in the tough South Bronx, Powell is the son of Jamaican immigrants. His father was a clerk in the garment district, his mother a seamstress. Both worked long hours, often making Powell and his older sister, Marilyn, latchkey kids.

A self-described “kid of no early promise” who got Cs and Ds at New York’s City College while majoring in geology--his professors discouraged him from taking engineering--Powell found direction in the Reserve Officer Training Corps.

Joining the Army in 1958 was one of three turning points that shaped Powell’s life. He found a job that was “honorable and useful” and that wrought benefits “beyond my wildest hopes,” Powell recalled in his 1995 autobiography, “My American Journey.”

It wasn’t easy. He won his Army commission a mere decade after President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order to integrate America’s military. And during training at Ft. Benning, he was refused service at Georgia diners and bars because of his race.

The second turning point was a White House fellowship in 1972-73 that connected him with Washington power brokers, including former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and former National Security Advisor Frank C. Carlucci.

“He worked well with the military and civilian sides of the Pentagon and at meetings was better prepared and knew more about the agenda than anyone else,” Weinberger said. “As a result, he always had substantial influence on the outcome.”

The third turning point was his appointment as President Reagan’s deputy national security advisor in 1987, after the Iran-Contra scandal. Within a year, Powell had the top spot. Within two years, at age 52, he became the youngest chairman in history of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The meteoric rise led to unusual adulation, even after he retired in 1993.

During talk of a possible presidential bid, polls by the New York Times/CBS and Time/CNN found Powell winning more votes than Bill Clinton in a two-way contest, and more than both Clinton and Bob Dole in a three-way vote in 1994. He has appeared on the covers of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report more than once and on talk shows from “Nightline” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to a Barbara Walters special.

In many ways, Powell’s biography makes him a logical choice for secretary of State. He already has served in the other top national security jobs. He was the nation’s top military officer. He knows world leaders, from Queen Elizabeth II, who knighted him in 1993, to the Persian Gulf emirs he helped keep in power.

But in other ways, Powell does not fully fit the mold. “I wasn’t hired to be a grand strategist. Nor is that my background,” he told The Times after he became Reagan’s national security advisor.

His Goal Was to ‘Seek Consensus’

He said he had “no pretensions” about being another Henry A. Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski, the big thinkers of the Nixon and Carter administrations. His goal was to “seek consensus” on the basis of policy recommendations put forward by others.

As secretary, “he’ll be more deliberate in his travels, more empowering of his assistant secretaries. He won’t fly off to every petty disturbance to run the resolution,” said Richard L. Armitage, a former Pentagon assistant secretary and a Powell advisor and friend.

For all Powell’s savvy and spit-and-polish precision, his strategy has not always achieved all he would like. Ironically, one of the first challenges he faces is what to do about an old nemesis who helped make him into an American hero: Iraqi dictator Hussein.

“Powell is one of the primary reasons we still have Saddam, not because we didn’t push all the way to Baghdad, which we never had a mandate to do. Powell was one of those who believed we’d destroyed or weakened the Republican Guard enough to eliminate it as a threat. He also calculated that any military so heavily defeated would turn on its leadership,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official involved in the Persian Gulf War who requested anonymity.

“On both counts, he was wrong, very wrong.”

Powell has faced criticism on other issues too. During the Iran-Contra scandal, he was third on a list of 16 people who knew about the secret 1986 sale of TOW missiles to Iran, according to the Tower Commission, which investigated the scandal. In the inquiry, special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh scolded Powell for “misleading” testimony that could have been used “to impeach his credibility,” although it didn’t warrant prosecution.

Later, Powell recommended against aiding Panamanian rebel officers who had asked for help from the U.S. Embassy to oust dictator Manuel A. Noriega in 1989. President Bush repeatedly had called for an uprising, but Powell and others, including then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, decided that the officers’ plot “sounded like amateur hour.” Plus, the rebels’ commander had said nothing about democracy, Powell noted in his autobiography.

In the end, loyalists rescued Noriega, who rapidly rounded up the rebels and executed them. But within three months, critics noted, Powell agreed to use 25,000 American troops as a posse to track down Noriega, who managed to evade them for several days before turning himself in to the Vatican representative in Panama.

Has Taken Heat for Bosnia STand

Powell also has taken heat for his position on Bosnia. Who was right in that stormy 1993 confrontation with Albright will long be debated.

For two years, the United States did not intervene--until the situation deteriorated and ethnic cleansing became so widespread that inaction became politically and strategically unsustainable. And once involved in Bosnia, Washington found it difficult not to get involved in Kosovo, another byproduct of Yugoslavia’s disintegration.

U.S. troops are still in the Balkans. But Europe’s last dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, was forced from power this year and a democratically elected president has been installed in Belgrade.

Since his retirement, Powell has toured the country to promote the work of America’s Promise, a much-heralded group born of the Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future in 1997 to help youth. But it has been criticized for inflating accomplishments and not helping kids most at risk, as advertised.

Yet even critics concede that there are few people with as much foreign policy experience as Powell, who dealt with 28 crises during his four years as a Pentagon leader.

Looking out at the world that the new Bush administration will inherit, Powell acknowledges the enormous changes that have occurred since he worked in the last Bush administration. For the first time, America does not face an enemy that challenges either the U.S. political or economic systems, he said in the keynote address to this summer’s Republican National Convention.

He warned instead of “sick nations” continuing their quest for the “fool’s gold” of tyranny and weapons of mass destruction. They will “soon find themselves left behind in the dustbin of history” because they are “investing in their own demise,” he declared.

Although he is risk-averse and selective about U.S. engagement, Powell has stood up to post-Cold War isolationists. At a National Press Club fete upon his retirement, he said that “history and destiny” had given America a mandate to lead the world.

“We must play that role in whatever form it presents itself. We cannot step back,” he said. “If we can make a difference, we must make that difference.”

Powell’s autobiography provides insight into how he likes to operate. He criticized the Clinton administration for discussions that “meander like graduate school bull sessions or think-tank seminars.” And he expressed shock when a subordinate of then-National Security Advisor Anthony Lake argued with his boss in front of others.

Advised Against Dog Experiments

Powell is also a pragmatist keenly sensitive to public opinion. In 1983, he advised Defense Secretary Weinberger to suspend medical experiments that included killing beagles. “Shooting Snoopy just isn’t going to work,” he reportedly said.

Powell’s heroes include Gen. George C. Marshall, who became Truman’s secretary of State after World War II and crafted the Marshall Plan that salvaged war-ravaged Europe.

Bush compared Powell to Marshall when he introduced him Saturday as his choice for secretary of State. “I would say of Gen. Powell what Harry Truman said of Gen. Marshall: ‘He is a tower of strength and common sense.’

“In directness of speech, his towering integrity, his deep respect for our democracy and his soldier’s sense of duty and honor, Colin Powell demonstrates the qualities that made George Marshall a great secretary of State,” the president-elect said at a news conference in Crawford, Texas.

One downside of Powell’s new job is that it will leave less time for his favorite hobbies: watching movie classics, from “Guys and Dolls” and “Casablanca” to “Moonstruck,” and restoring old cars, particularly Volvos. After retirement, he went to work on a 1966 Volvo wagon painted bile green, although he tools around Washington in a Jaguar.

“Getting grimy under the hood of a car remains my happiest pastime,” he has often said.

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Powell Fact Sheet

Born: April 5, 1937

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Education: Undergraduate degree in geology, City College of New York, 1958; master’s in business administration, George Washington University, 1971

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Career highlights: Founder and chairman, America’s Promise, three-year-old nonprofit organization for youth; 12th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Oct. 1, 1989-Sept. 30, 1993 under the Bush and Clinton administrations; national security advisor to President Reagan, 1987-89; served in the Army for 35 years in command and staff positions; autobiography, “My American Journey,” 1995

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Family: Wife, Alma; three children, Michael, Linda and Anne; two grandsons, Jeffrey and Bryan.

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His Political Pilgrimage

Colin Luther Powell hasn’t always been a Republican. Growing up, a picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt hung in his parent’s home.

Powell was driving through Alabama in 1964 with a bumper sticker reading “All the way with LBJ” on his car when he was stopped by police. Powell later recounted how the patrolman surveyed the young black man, the car with New York plates and the LBJ sticker, and then warned him: “Boy, get out of here. You’re not smart enough to hang around.”

He voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and Jimmy Carter in 1976. He worked in the Defense Department in the Carter administration.

Powell appears to have switched parties mid-life, voting for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George Bush in 1988 and 1992. In his 1995 autobiography, for which he received a $6- million advance, Powell declared that neither party “fits me comfortably in its present state.” Yet by 1994, his new leanings were clear when he called Reagan “a genius” and referred to President Bush as “my beloved friend” in a speech.

Powell only began working closely with Texas Gov. George W. Bush during the campaign. But he already felt close to many in the Bush team, especially Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, who served as Defense secretary in the Bush administration.

“We thought so much alike that, in the Tank [the secure Pentagon conference room] or in the Oval Office, we could finish each other’s sentences,” Powell wrote in his autobiography. “I had developed not only professional respect but genuine affection for this quiet man.”